This fellow worked as a handyman in Germany a century ago. His name was Georg Elser.

Fed up with Hitler, and seeing he was scheduled to speak to senior party officials in the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich, he build an improvised bomb using explosives taken from a quarry where he was working.

He packed the bomb into the pillar directly behind where he thought Hitler’s chair would be. It took him 30 visits to dismantle and repair the wall and surrounding area. As a final act, he attached the bomb to a clock.

The day before Hitler was due to arrive, Elser suffered a crisis of confidence. He went back to the beer hall and — incredibly — discreetly pressed his ear to the wall where the bomb was. He heard it ticking and was satisfied.

Hitler would normally speak for two hours, but unfortunately his travel plans had changed. He started an hour earlier than scheduled and spoke for only 50 minutes. The bomb exploded 13 minutes after Hitler left.

The explosion on 8/11/39 killed eight people and injured 62. A photo taken the following morning shows massive damage.

Hitler commemorated the dead in front of their coffins, telling Goebbels privately: "A man has to be lucky."

Elser was captured, tortured and eventually taken to Dachau Concentration Camp. There he was treated surprisingly well for several years, as the Nazis hoped that after they won the war he could be forced into a show trial and publicly implicate the Allies in the plot.

But when Hitler knew the war was lost, he remembered Esler and ordered he be shot. Aged 42, the carpenter was executed at Dachau and his body immediately burned on 9th April 1945. The war ended a month later.

Despite severe beatings and torture he never implicated another person in the bombing — he also denied being a communist, saying "I had to do it because, for his whole life, Hitler has meant the downfall of Germany."

There was very little commemoration of Esler in Germany until the 1990s. Now there are several buildings with his name on them, an iron outline showing his profile in Berlin, and even a postage stamp to mark his hundredth birthday.

Tweeting this because I'm currently reading this famous book and Elser's story has just been told in a few short paragraphs — so I looked him up to find out more.

(I deleted and rewrote a couple of these tweets because his name is Elser, but we all have the tendency to misspell it "Esler" — apologies for any confusion)