Downfall director Oliver Hirschbiegel is to direct a biopic about Georg Elser, a German carpenter involved in a famous plot to kill Adolf Hitler in 1939, reports Variety. The project will see a return to more familiar territory for the film-maker following a trio of English language movies culminating in last year's critically panned royal biopic, Diana.
Elser is known for his elaborate attempt to kill Hitler and his lieutenants on 8 November 1939 at the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich. The Nazi leader was there to give his annual speech on the anniversary of the beer hall putsch of 1923, but he left the building ahead of schedule and shortly before the bomb exploded.
Elser, who had communist sympathies, believed taking out Hitler and his lieutenants Hermann Göring and Joseph Goebbels would save millions of lives of working people across the world. There are a number of conspiracy theories surrounding the bombing, including one that Hitler ordered it himself to foster a siege mentality among the German people and a belief in his own invincibility.
Elser was captured and tortured after the bombing and died in the Dachau concentration camp shortly before the end of the war in 1945. In recent decades Germans have begun to note his heroism, even though the bomber himself said at one point that the had not intended to destroy Nazism. A 17m steel statue of Elser was unveiled in 2011 in Berlin.
Hirschbiegel's 2004 film Downfall is considered one of the finest films about Hitler. It follows the last days of the embattled and increasingly deranged Führer in his Berlin bunker as Allied forces move inexorably towards him. The biopic was nominated for the best foreign language Oscar.
The German film-maker's attempts to immortalise Diana, Princess of Wales on the big screen were less successful. Critics lampooned the film, which covered the princess's final two years and her romance with the surgeon Hasnat Khan. The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw labelled it a "reverential and sentimental biopic … laced with bizarre cardboard dialogue – a tabloid fantasy of how famous and important people speak in private".
Georg Elser will follow Bryan Singer's 2008 film Valkyrie, which starred Tom Cruise as a German army officer who plots with comrades to kill Hitler in 1944, in bringing the stories of German resistance to the Nazis into cinemas. The screenplay has been written by Sophie Scholl's Fred Breinersdorfer.
