World War II is Hollywood’s
favorite war. Complete with a plethora of extraordinary makeshift heroes, it
also provides our favorite touchstone for absolute evil: the Nazis. We can
safely hate the Nazis.
Except we can’t. While there were,
unquestionably, truly depraved Nazis (just mention the named Oskar Dirlewanger
and I shudder,) there was also a significant German underground resistance. Many
Christians broke from the official Reichskirche
to form their own free church. This opposition extended into the highest
echelons of the government—many military leaders despised and distrusted
Hitler.
But Hollywood’s record hasn’t been
stellar when it comes to recognizing this. Needless to say, when Valkyrie—an account of the German
attempt to assassinate Hitler—was announced there was significant worry from
Germany that this production would slip into the same mistake. It wasn’t helped
when Tom Cruise was cast as the hero, Colonel Claus Philipp Maria Schenk Graf von
Stauffenberg, a German aristocrat with a pedigree even longer than his name.
But this worry was misplaced.
