New film highlights resistance to Hitler within Germany

BERLIN: More than 60 years after a group of German officers tried to assassinate Adolf Hitler, international recognition that has eluded them for years may soon be on its way — despite resistance from within Germany.

As the country marks the anniversary of the July 20, 1944 plot, historians say a new film starring Tom Cruise about the doomed attempt to blow up Hitler would bring the subject to a global audience. But it may trivialise the story too, they warn.

The film’s production has been dogged by opposition from German government ministries, both due to Cruise’s adherence to Scientology — which Berlin considers a cult and not a church — and because of the conspiracy’s significance regarding the post-war rebirth and international rehabilitation of Germany.

Ian Kershaw, a leading British authority on the Third Reich, told the news agency on Friday that the film “will doubtless help to raise awareness of the resistance to Hitler within Germany”.

“However, Hollywood’s record in dealing with historical subjects does not inspire confidence in its potential for dealing with this issue,” he added.

Even at the risk of appearing intolerant, Germany has been anxious to stop anyone from misrepresenting the conspiracy, as its legacy is inextricably linked to the country’s efforts to atone for crimes that still haunt it on a daily basis.

“The plot was a chink of light in a very dark episode,” said British historian Roger Moorhouse. “Something which modern Germany can hark back to and say: ‘Look, we weren’t all bad’.

It’s a part of the moral make-up of post-war Germany.”

The plotters’ renown rests not only on their opposition to Hitler, but also the fact many acted out of a sense of outrage about the Holocaust, and the stain it left on Germany’s name.

“So anyone that might treat the subject in a cavalier fashion is viewed with suspicion. And I think that’s the fundamental problem with Cruise in Germany,” said Moorhouse.

German Defence Minister Franz Josef Jung said on Friday he did not want Cruise shooting at the memorial site where several plotters were executed “because of the dignity of the place.”

Part of the site, known as the Bendlerblock, is inside the Defence Ministry complex in Berlin.

TROUBLED LEGACY: Codenamed “Operation Valkyrie”, the officers’ plan to topple the Nazi leadership and take control hinged on killing Hitler in his “Wolf’s Lair” bunker in what is now modern Poland.

A briefcase bomb planted by Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg — due to be played by Cruise in the film — killed four, but Hitler escaped largely unhurt. Scores, including Stauffenberg, were executed, and thousands interned in the following purge.

After the war the plotters were first seen as traitors by much of German society, while to later generations their legacy was tainted by its close links to the Nazi military machine.

According to historian Peter Hoffmann, a leading authority on the German resistance movement from Canada’s McGill University, many Germans are still divided about the plot.

“It is a challenge...and retrospective provocation if they or their parents were not among those who resisted,” he said.

The image of the conspirators outside Germany is still influenced by prejudices dating back to the war, said Kershaw.

“The plotters, according to such views, were willing cogs in the Nazi machine as long as Germany was engaging in foreign expansion then victorious campaigns in the war, and only tried to remove Hitler once it was obvious the war was lost,” he said.

But in fact the plotters “offer a model of courageous defiance of brutal dictatorship arising from profound moral principles of combating gross inhumanity,” Kershaw said.

“In this sense, the relevance of their example is neither time-bound nor geographically limited.”

When asked to compare the aristocratic plot leaders like Stauffenberg and Major General Henning von Tresckow to other figures in world history, Hoffmann cited Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King as potential candidates.

RECOGNITION: Given such tributes, some commentators have struggled to grasp why a German ministry denied the film producers access to historical sites because of Cruise’s links to Scientology, inviting accusations the country has not learned from its past.

“Are the filmmakers breaking any laws? If they produce a film that is true to the history it proposes to represent, their beliefs seem to me irrelevant,” said Hoffmann at McGill.

A serious risk was that lesser-known figures in the plot such as Tresckow — the architect of a number of plots to kill Hitler — would not get the recognition they deserved due to the focus on “the poster-boy” Stauffenberg, said Moorhouse.

“Tresckow has generally been forgotten, but without what he did, Stauffenberg would not have functioned at all,” he said.

“The big problem Tresckow had was getting access to Hitler. That’s what Stauffenberg brought to the party.”

Yet if well made, the film could help break down casual anti-German prejudices in the West, Moorhouse said.

“It could even provide a good service to Anglo-German relations, because there is still this stereotypical view of Germans as goose-stepping, helmeted Nazis,” he added. “And this could to some degree provide an antidote to that.”—Reuters