Intrigue

In November 1939, Georg Elser's attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler fails, and he is arrested. During his confinement, he recalls the events leading up to his plot and his reasons for deciding to take such drastic action.

The breath-taking story of a man who nearly would have changed the world. 1939, when Hitler convinced millions of people at the height of his power, one said a radical No: Georg Elser, disparaged as an assassin, is one of the greatest resistance fighters.—Andrei

Georg Elser was a man who could have changed world history and saved millions of human lives, if only he had had 13 more minutes. With 13 more minutes, the bomb he had personally assembled would have torn apart Adolf Hitler and his henchmen. But this was not to be, and on 8 November 1939, Hitler left the scene of the attempted assassination earlier than expected - leaving Elser to fail catastrophically. Who was this man who recognized the danger emanating from Hitler sooner than many others, who took action when everybody else, including the German generals, meekly followed orders or kept silent? What did he see, which our parents or grandparents did not see or want to see? The man who told his torturers to their faces that he wanted to prevent the bloodshed of the imminent world war? 13 MINUTES relates the background of the failed attack in the Bürgerbräukeller and paints a suspenseful, emotional portrait of the resistance fighter who was called "Georgie" in his hometown. A story that takes us from his early years in the Swabian Alps - when National Socialism arrived in his hometown - to his last days at the Dachau concentration camp, where he was killed shortly before the end of the war, at the command of the one man whom he himself had wanted to kill, Adolf Hitler.—StudioCanal

Georg Elser, a master carpenter in Konstanz from the Swabian town Königsbronn, is frustrated because of his home town fiance's constant abuse by his lush father Ludwig and despises the brutish Nazi regime. On 8 November 1939 he flees from the Münich Bürgerbräukeller, which was evacuated 13 minutes before the home-made bomb he managed to plant there near the podium Hitler was to speech on, only to be arrested at the Swiss Lake Konstanz border with suspicious contraband -map and detonator- and hear it only killed eight spectators. Arthur Nebe, chef of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt police, can barely curb Gestapo chef Heinrich Müller's zeal to question the sole suspect violently, for days demanding his accomplices, but he practically manages to prove he needed none, yet threatening his loved ones yields a confession and conviction. In concentration camps Sachsenhausen and Dachau, Georg Elser awaits his fate until 9 April 1945.—KGF Vissers