13 Minutes (2015 film)
2015 film by Oliver Hirschbiegel

13 Minutes (German: Elser – Er hätte die Welt verändert) is a 2015 German drama film directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel that tells the true story of Georg Elser's failed attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler in November 1939. The title of the film is drawn from the fact that Elser's bomb detonated in a venue that Hitler had left just 13 minutes before.
It was screened out of competition at the 65th Berlin International Film Festival. It was one of eight films shortlisted by Germany to be their submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film at the 88th Academy Awards, but it lost out to Labyrinth of Lies.
Plot
In November 1939, after planting a home-made bomb inside a column of a Munich Bierkeller, Georg Elser attempts to cross into neutral Switzerland but is caught at the border. His bomb detonates but misses killing German leader Adolf Hitler by just 13 minutes.
The German security services find incriminating evidence on Elser and link him to the assassination attempt. They believe Elser must have been working with a group of conspirators and proceed to torture Elser. They also round up members of his family from his home village, including Else Härlen, a married woman Elser has been seeing.
When Else is brought before Elser, he fears for her life and tells Kripo police chief Arthur Nebe and Gestapo head Heinrich Müller that he acted alone, procuring detonators from a steel factory and stealing dynamite from a nearby quarry.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “13 Minutes (2015 film)” as 2015 film by Oliver Hirschbiegel. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the arts & letters register because the source frames it as 2015 film by Oliver Hirschbiegel. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q18977471. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2015 and 1939.
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This entry incorporates text from “13 Minutes (2015 film)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.