The new Tom Cruise film "Valkyrie", now being shot in Berlin, reportedly deals with the attempted Hitler assassination of 1944. It's a story often told, reported and written about. The plotters were a group of unhappy German generals and colonels, as well as several civilians.The actual bomb-placer was Count von Stauffenberg - a badly wounded Nazi combat veteran. He's played in the new movie by Cruise.
Because Colonel von Stauffenberg's bomb ended up behind a big table post, Hitler was not seriously injured by the blast. But many of the attending military people were badly hurt and killed.
The would-be assassins, in Berlin - several hundred miles away - assumed wrongly that the blast had killed Hitler, and started to take over the Berlin government. The Hitlerites immediately started counter-action and all the plotters - as well as most of their families - were eventually executed - mostly in the most painful manner, via slow strangulation.
As we all know, Hitler eventually killed himself in the Berlin bunker, together with his mistress, in 1945 - a few days before the European part of the war ended. According to the voluminous publicity, that's what this latest Hitler film is all about.
There are some theories regarding "Valkyrie" - that are not generally reported ... and I suggest that the film-makers quickly take these theories into consideration.
There are - and were - some theories, that the Hitler assassination attempt was not so much motivated by anti-Naziism (if at all !), nor by the daeth camps in which millions were painfully executed (including a good chunk of my family) .... but by fear of the revenge-seeking and approaching Russians, millions of whom had been murdered by the Germans.
The suspicioun exists, that the Hitler assassination attempt was motivated by the hope that, with the obnoxious Hitler out of the way, the Germans could make separate peace with the western allies - America, Britain, France - creating a new alliance which might then march, together with the changed Germans, against Russia.
Remember, at this stage America and Britain were close to exploding their first A-bomb and it's quite possible - though so far, never proven - that Germany was also enroute to atomic blasting.
Is it possible, that with "Valkyrie" a success - and one has to wonder if, possibly, the allies were in on the plot -the western allies would have immediately ended their European campaigns, with the Germans cheering lustily (as they often did), as the western allies marched into their bombed-out cities.
Had those new allies now marched together against Stalin's Russia, one of two things might have happened:
1. The exhausted Russians would have been defeated and a new order would have been created, with America and Germany the guiding forces ... or:
2. The Russians would have been able to complete work on their A-bombs,and a nuclear war would have erupted, which would have made Hiroshima and Nagasaki minor event ... the globe facing possible nuclear extinction.
Thus, I might advise the makers of "Valkyrie", now at work in Berlin, to consider this historic facts, possibilities and theories ... before again turning the unsuccessful German anti-Hitler plotters into great heroes.
(Incidentally, one of those plotters, the former Mayor of Leipzig - Goerdeler [sp.?] - was one of my physician/father's acquaitances, in connection with veneral disease control work in that city, during the '30's).
Cheers,
gary franklin
