A recent German postage stamp honored a man who just missed changing 20th-century history.

The stamp remembers Johann Georg Elser, whose plot against Adolf Hitler on the eve of World War II nearly succeeded.

Elser was a carpenter unhappy at the direction Germany was headed. He noted that Hitler annually made a speech in the Munich beer hall where his Nazi party had attempted a putsch in 1923.

The carpenter easily slipped into the hall and loaded explosives into a load-bearing column. The device was successfully detonated, but Hitler had left the building just minutes before.

A fleeing Elser was seized at the Swiss border. He was shot at the Dachau concentration camp on April 9, 1945, just a few weeks before the war ended.

The main feature in the stamp's design is a portrait of Elser on a document similar to one of the countless Nazi bureaucratic papers Germans encountered.

Germany started the new year off with a rash a new stamps, also issued on Jan. 16.

One of the stamps in the Sights definitive series shows scenes around the birth site of composer Ludwig van Beethoven in Bonn - the house where he was born.

Also in the Sights series is a monument to poet and writer Theodor Fontane in Neuruppin, Germany.

Another stamp in the Women in German History series honors Marie Juchacz, a rising Social Democratic member of the Reichstag until the Nazis took over.

Kronach, Germany, celebrates its 1,000th anniversary this year, and a stamp for the occasion shows a view of the town.

Other stamps recognize the 40th anniversary of the Treaty on German-French Cooperation, the Year of the Bible and the Cultural Foundation of the Federal States.