The Venlo Incident by Nigel Jones

Author:Nigel Jones
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473819726
Publisher: Frontline Books
Published: 2017-05-14T04:00:00+00:00

Self portrait by Marie ‘May’ Payne Best, the author's wife.

Pages from one of the author’s diaries, showing part of an account of his capture written about a month later.

He was born in Munich and when he was quite small his mother died in giving birth to a dead sister, and his father was killed in action shortly afterwards. An uncle, the only relative of whom he had ever heard, a railway guard and a childless widower, had taken charge of him and brought him up in a rough and ready fashion. Young Elser must have run pretty wild for he had one or two clashes with the police which nearly ended in his being sent to the German equivalent of a Borstal establishment. He seems though, to have given evidence at school of having brains above the average and one of the masters, the only person of whom he wrote with any affection, helped him to escape punishment. This man seems to have been the teacher of handicrafts and endeavoured to induce Elser to continue his studies after he left school at a technical college.

When he was fifteen or sixteen his uncle died leaving him only a small sum, quite insufficient to pay for further schooling, and he was placed in charge of the Munich municipal children’s officer. He was apprenticed to a joiner who took him to five in his house and generally acted as his guardian. Here too, his insubordination was a frequent cause of trouble but his intelligence and aptitude for his work soon made him a valuable assistant and after the end of his apprenticeship his master tried to induce him to remain in his service. As soon though as young Elser was free, nothing would hold him and with his tools and other few possessions in a bag on his back he set off on the traditional wanderings of the German journeyman.

His travels took him through most of south Germany and even into Switzerland and at first he had little trouble in finding work. For a time he said, he had a responsible job as model maker at one of the biggest Bavarian engineering firms, the manufacturers of the B.M.W. cars, but from what he wrote, all his jobs seemed to end with a row with his immediate superiors and in the autumn of 1937 he found himself back in Munich without a penny in his pocket, his tools sold or pawned, and with but faint hope of finding further employment. By that time the Nazis had such a firm grip on all matters connected with labour organization that it was practically impossible for a man who would not at least pay lip service to the party to obtain employment; above all things, Elser hated the Nazis. As was natural under the circumstances he drifted into the society of other out-of-works like himself and got mixed up with a band of Communists. Somehow or other these men were always able to get hold of funds

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