Georg Elser working group
The Georg Elser Working Group is committed to ensuring that Georg Elser is accorded the outstanding status in the culture of remembrance of the German resistance against the National Socialist dictatorship that the working group believes he deserves. The working group was founded in Heidenheim in 1988 .
history
In the 1980s, Georg Elser was only seen as a marginal figure in the history of the resistance . Specific literature was not available in bookshops. In the Heidenheim district, the Georg Elser working group caused a sensation with a wide-ranging program for the 50th anniversary of Georg Elser's unsuccessful assassination attempt on Hitler in the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich on November 8, 1939.
Georg Elser was discovered by political education in the mid-1990s. Veit Günzler from the Georg Elser working group in Heidenheim set the starting point with his lecture in October 1994 at the Stuttgart symposium "Resistance in the Southwest". In the period that followed, the State Center for Political Education in Baden-Württemberg organized numerous events and seminars, e.g. Partly in cooperation with the Georg Elser working group and the Königsbronn community , where Georg Elser grew up.
The final breakthrough came with the collaboration with Peter Steinbach and Johannes Tuchel from the German Resistance Memorial Center in Berlin . At the Berlin memorial in the Bendler Block , where the center of the coup d'état was on July 20, 1944 and Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg and other conspirators were shot, there was the 1997 exhibition “I wanted to prevent the war. Georg Elser and the assassination attempt on November 8, 1939 ”.
The Berlin exhibition was designed from the outset to later remain in Königsbronn. After an effort by the mayor, local council and well-known sponsors, the Georg Elser memorial in Königsbronn was officially inaugurated in 1998, with which the "rejected son" finally returned to his home town.
The highlight of the recognition for Georg Elser's lonely act was the issue of a special stamp on his 100th birthday in January 2003. The Georg Elser Prize was awarded to Dr. Winfried Maier awarded.
In 2005 the website www.georg-elser-arbeitskreis.de was created . In addition to numerous image, audio and video documents, the most important source about Georg Elser, the 203-page Gestapo protocol of the interrogation of Georg Elser, discovered in 1964 by the historian Lothar Gruchmann , is fully published there.
On April 10, 2005 Manfred Maier received the citizen medal of the city of Heidenheim “for his work, which has led to the today undisputed appreciation of the person and deed of Georg Elser”, which he accepted on behalf of the Georg Elser working group.
On April 11, 2010, the Elser memorial commissioned by the working group was inaugurated in Königsbronn .