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contained speculation as to why, after the initial spate of conflicting opinions, Nazi propaganda was able to prevail so quickly. It came to the following conclusion: “The notion that all are in the same boat is too widespread and the belief in the promises made previously by the antiwar faction too shaken for the proverbial ‘little man’ to wish that the bomb had achieved the desired result. Besides, people reason, such an attack can never get all the ‘Führers’ at the same time and is therefore pointless. In the best-case scenario, it would result only in internal confusion; and the beneficiary would be the enemy, the war would be lost, and the misery would be even greater than after Versailles—all the efforts since 1933 would have been in vain.” The point was devastating: “So it is with complete amazement that one must conclude that, whoever threw the bomb, the Nazis were the beneficiaries.” The English claim that the attack was “a second Reichstag fire,” i.e., carried out by the Nazis, was given no credence in the report.
    However, this line of reasoning continued to flourish under-ground. Once the assassin had acquired a name, a biography, and a profession, this was the very angle used by those carrying out the assault on his integrity. He would come to be regarded as the stooge of the Nazis.
    The SD report closed by asking what, if anything, could change the political situation. Answer: only “the decisive military defeat of the Reich.” This view was also shared by some elements of the military resistance.
    The bloodbath of the years to come might have been averted if the assassination attempt at the Bürgerbräukellerhad been successful.
    For many of the resistance fighters and members of the opposition, the assassination attempt served as a clarion call. The SD report of November 10 announced that in Berlin “at the shop of the Photo-Hoffmann company at Kochstrasse 10, a shop window had been shattered by a stone. The only items on display in the window were pictures of the Führer.” The Czechs, too, could not conceal their satisfaction. “Among the Czech minority in the Sudetenland the Schadenfreude at the Munich attack was universally apparent.”
    The SD reports did not have much to say about statements by those who supported the attack—this was the purview of the Gestapo. There may have been several hundred Gestapo investigations of people who made remarks about the Munich attack that were suspicious or even supportive. But Gestapo records of reactions to the attacks have been preserved only in Düsseldorf (with seventy files), Würzburg (sixteen files), and Speyer (fifty-eight files).
    One of the few cases to become famous was that of Wilhelm Jung, an innkeeper in Neunkirchen and a former member of the SD. When he read the newspaper report about the attempt while sitting in his pub on November 9, he said to a neighbor: “If the Führer and his closest associates had died in the attack, things would already be looking a lot different in Germany.” He went on to say that the assassin, even if he were sitting there in the bar, would not be turned in by anybody. Jung was a little too sure of himself. His views circulated, he was taken into custody, and the witness stuck to her “patriotic” statement in spite of pleas from Mrs. Jung. Jung, a war invalid, was sentenced by a special court to two years in prison, after which he was transferred, at the age of sixty years and in poor health, to the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen and later to Auschwitz, where he died in 1942.
    The effects of the bomb attack even spread as far as the concentration camps. On the one hand, political prisoners gained hope that someone might one day succeed in eliminating Hitler; on the other hand, the SS guards were in such a rage that they took it out on the prisoners. Immediately after the guards in Buchenwald heard about the