Hitler assassination attempt retold in gripping film 13 Minutes

A daring bid to kill Hitler in 1939 came within seconds and centimetres of changing the course of history.

Georg Elser (Christian Friedel) plotting his attack in 13 Minutes.

A decade ago German director Oliver Hirschbiegel made the outstanding Downfall, a filmic account of the claustrophobic final 10 days in the life of the bunkered Adolf Hitler, his senior officers and their families. Propelled by a mesmerising performance by Bruno Ganz, it was nominated for an Academy Award (but the Oscar went to Alejandro Amenabar’s also outstanding The Sea Inside) and spawned a thousand Hitler rant parodies on YouTube, quite a few of which are hilarious.

Hirschbiegel then made a couple of English-language films with mixed results: the Nicole Kidman-Daniel Craig science-fiction thriller The Invasion (2007) and the Liam Neeson-James Nesbitt IRA murder drama Five Minutes of Heaven (2009). But his next venture, the Princess Di biopic Diana, with Naomi Watts in the title role, saw him howled out of town, especially by the bellicose British press.

It’s perhaps no surprise then that his new film, 13 Minutes, sees a return to home ground: Germany, the Nazis, the Holocaust. Familiar terrain it may be, but comfortable it is not. And within that, the director seeks to tell a story he says has ceased to be familiar even to German audiences: the bomb attempt on Hitler’s life in Munich on November 9, 1939, planned and almost executed by Georg Elser, a Protestant German carpenter who was 36 at the time.

I did not know Elser’s story. Like most people, I’m aware of the assassination plot of July 20, 1944, which has been the subject of several films, including The Night of the Generals (1967) and Valkyrie (2008), in which, as usual, I thought Tom Cruise, as Claus von Stauffenberg, was much better than everyone else seemed to think.

As the title suggests, 13 Minutes is all about timing. There is the literal 13 minutes between Hitler, his schedule having changed, leaving the Munich Burgerbraukeller that night and Elser’s bomb going off, killing eight people. And, with Hitler not being killed in 1939, there is the terrible chronology we know is to come.

Hirschbiegel therefore is dealing with one of the greatest what-ifs of modern history, so fantastic in its implications as to be unknowable. Yet this is not his primary focus. What we have instead is an absorbing portrait of an ordinary German who tried to kill Hitler, one that, in the director’s version, makes us wish there had been more like him.

I say “in the director’s version” because I don’t know enough about Elser to judge how close this film cleaves to the truth of the man. Hirschbiegel’s Elser (played by Christian Friedel, who readers will remember as the young schoolteacher in Michael Haneke’s Oscar-nominated The White Ribbon) is a natural leftie but not political. He has some hard-left friends, and he sticks with them, but he’s not that engaged. “Violence has never achieved anything,’’ he tells them over beers. He’s a musician, a free spirit and a bit of a playboy, until he finds love with a married woman, Elsa (Katharina Schuttler).

Why would such a man decide to kill his ­nation’s leader, and at this time when the worst of the Nazi atrocities had yet to happen? This is the intriguing question Hirschbiegel asks us to consider.

The film opens with a fine, tense, mostly ­silent sequence in which Elser plants the bomb. He flees the scene, pocket watch in hand, sweating on the detonation. That happens, but Elser does not know that his target has left the building. He heads for the Swiss border but his jittery behaviour raises suspicions and he is arrested. From this point Elser is in the hands of Nazi police chief Artur Nebe (the wonderful Burghart Klaussner, the judge in the The Reader, among other English-language film roles) and Gestapo officer Heinrich Muller (a chilly Johann von Bulow). His interrogation, which is at times hard to watch, is interspersed with flashbacks to his earlier life.

What is fascinating about the latter is that there is no flashpoint, no moment where the viewer can say, “Ah, so that’s why he did it.” Yes, he’s uncomfortable with the excesses of National Socialism, personalised by the Nazi takeover of his Swabian home town, and he was horrified by the German bombing of the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. But there’s no smoking gun moment. We are left to wonder, which I like. This effect is enhanced by Friedel’s nuanced performance: his nervy but brave Elser is full of surprises.

I don’t want to reveal any more of the plot because there will be viewers such as myself who don’t know how it turns out. I was surprised by what happens to Elser. Part of the problem for the Nazis was his insistence that he acted alone, which did not fit the narrative demanded (from afar) by Joseph Goebbels. It had to be a wide-ranging conspiracy involving communists, Jews and other undesirables, or a British plot. I found myself contrasting this with the JFK assassination, where the world sees a conspiracy and the powers that be insist on a single gun theory.

This film, scripted by the father-and-daughter team of Fred and Leonie-Claire Breinersdorfer, has its flaws. Making Elsa’s violent drunk of a husband Erich (Rudiger Klink) a stand-in for the Nazis is a bit obvious. A scene where Elser is injected with sodium pentathol could have been subtler. And the final scenes, which juxtapose the eventual fates of Elser and poor Nebe, are a bit forced.

But 13 Minutes is an important film, and a welcome return to form for its director. How many reminders can we have of the thinness of the veneer between civilisation and barbarity, or that the silence of good people is all that evil needs to flourish? Never too many.

13 Minutes (MA15+)

3 stars

Limited release