Himmler's Thriller

Last week Chief of German Police Heinrich Himmler was proud as a pouter pigeon. Having proved strangely inept as a cop, he redeemed himself as a superb detective-story author. Serially, from day to day, he released his mystery thriller, The Buergerbraeu Plot:

Chapter 1: The Wireless Set. Late in October 1939, clever Gestapo agents, posing as discontented Germans, managed to make contact with certain naive British intelligence officers in The Hague. The British got to like their "friendly opponents," and soon gave them a transmitting and receiving apparatus containing three American steel tubes; and a secret code. The set was not so good; had to have some German parts put in. The Germans carried it back into Germany, and the Britons at once began sending in the closest secrets of their Government.

Chapter 2: The Dastardly Plot. On the night of November 8, at 9:21 p.m., just eleven minutes after Adolf Hitler left the Buergerbraeu Keller in Munich, a bomb exploded, killing eight, injuring 62, just missing the little man who wasn't there.

Chapter 3: At the Border. Next day a big limousine drew up near a little inn on the German-Dutch border at Venloo. At the wheel was a certain Dutchman named J. Lemmens, posing as a chauffeur. In back was a blond, immaculate Englishman named Sigismund Payne Best, amateur musician, husband of a famous Dutch society painter, Mariettje van Rees, something of a getabout in Dutch circles; owner of a large house mysteriously close to the Royal Palace. With him was dark-haired Captain Richard Henry Stevens, well known as the head of the British Secret Service on the Continent. These two were posing as peace mediators. With them was a certain Dutch Army officer named Lieut. Klop, posing as a friend.

As the car pulled to a stop, a German in civilian clothes stepped out of the cafe and made a mysterious signal. At once a gang of civilians rushed across the border from Germany, firing wild shots (one of which killed Mynheer Klop). The civilians bundled their captives into another car, and drove across the border. Secret Agents Stevens and Best were arrested.

Chapter 4: Swiss Tryst. Hanging around in Switzerland, meanwhile, waiting to greet the Tool of the Plot, was a 42-year-old man, fatter now than he was in the days when he was one of Adolf Hitler's stanchest standbys, a man so severely wounded in 1914-18 that he must still lead an ascetic life--Dr. Otto Strasser, head of the Black Front, sworn to demolish Hitler. He had obviously planned the bombing.

Chapter 5: Another Border Incident. George Elser, 36, posing as a master mechanic from Wuerttemberg, walked up to a point 15 yards from the Swiss border, where, when confronted by Nazi guards, he said he was looking for a Swiss friend. He had about his person a perfectly valid passport, but also 15 sketches and maps of munitions depots and factories, as well as statistics of munitions deliveries, parts of gun mechanisms, and a postcard of Buergerbraeu Keller. He said he wanted to send the postcard to his father. He was arrested.

Chapter 6: Sabotage. In Berlin Captain Stevens got busy making confessions. He admitted 15 cases of sabotage on German, Italian, Japanese ships, most of which were actually pulled off by a certain designer of infernal machines named Waldemar Potzsch, a German-born British spy. When Potzsch was arrested in Denmark, Captain Stevens had the job of persuading the Danes to let him go, even though he was found to possess plans of a large German ship.

Chapter 7: Signing Off. The Gestapo agents sent their British friends a final message on the gift set: Communication for any length of time with conceited and silly people is dull. You will understand therefore that we are giving it up. You are hereby heartily greeted by your affectionate "German opposition." THE GERMAN GESTAPO. The British operators answered: Message received. Cheerio. INMAN and WALSH.

Chapter 8: What Guilt!: Questioning of Elser began. "Examinations of him," reported Deutsche Dienst, "take no end of time. He ponders every word before he replies, and if one can observe him, one forgets what a vile animal he is. What guilt. What a horrible burden his conscience apparently is able to bear so lightly!"

When Gestapo agents searched his sister's home in Stuttgart and found pieces of clocks and two chisels with traces of plaster on them which exactly matched the plaster of the Buergerbraeu Keller, Elser decided to confess everything.

"In a manner unique in criminal history," said the officers who examined him, "he had in weeks of painstaking work built a time explosive charge into a column of the Buergerbraeu cellar whose clockwork mechanism was set at six days, or 144 hours.

"The crime first was planned in September and October 1938. In August 1939, the explosive case was built in. Seven days before the demonstration in the Buergerbraeu cellar he built in an explosive charge. Six days previous to the meeting Elser attempted for the first time to introduce the clockwork mechanism into the explosive chamber. He was unsuccessful.

"The fifth night before the event likewise was unfavorable and again the plan had to be postponed. The night from the fourth to third day before Nov. 8, however, gave Elser an opportunity to fix his timing mechanism in the prepared dynamite chamber."

Then he left for Switzerland, dropping his tools in Stuttgart on the way. Being a worrier, however, he went back to Munich and entered the Buergerbraeu Keller (one of the best protected places in the world) several times in the night of the 7th to listen to the ticking.

Chapter 9: Accomplices. Gestapo Officer

Otto Heydrick announced that he had incontrovertible proof that Secret Agents Stevens and Best had been two cogs in the infernal plot--how, perhaps coming in a later volume.

Chapter 10: Economy in Wartime. Since the entire work of detection was done by the Gestapo, the proffered reward of $360,000 was reported withdrawn.

Chapter 11: Threat. Proud of its solution though it was, the Reich was highly dissatisfied with the threatening role the supposedly neutral Netherlands had played in this horrid affair--allowing an alleged chauffeur to be captured and a Dutch Army officer shot dead while apparently assisting British spies. The End.

This week Author Himmler indicated that there would be an interesting sequel, The Trial of George Elser. There were heaps of evidence, he further indicated, to prove Elser guilty and disprove the preposterous French assertion that George Elser was yanked out of a concentration camp to take a whopping rap.

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