Does it:
Deal with Rommels involvement?
Consequences of the failure of the plot?
(And indeed Rommel’s ‘suicide’ when he was deemed to be connected)?
The book, by Robert Harris, is far, far better. Nitpicks: Britain was under German domination but not actually part of Germania, IIRC (there’s reference to a Nazi-controlled alternate European Community, with other national flags still flown at its Berlin office), and the Kennedy-Hitler summit was in 1964.
Deighton’s SS-GB is also excellent. Always thought that would make a great movie.
As to the Wehrmacht’s degree of Nazi enthusiasm, it varied. Many in the uppermost ranks were leery and/or contemptuous of Hitler, but they knew which side their bread was buttered on, and were glad to welcome the massive resources Hitler poured into the Germany war machine before 1939. A big historical exhibit in Berlin just a year or two ago explored Wehrmacht complicity in the Holocaust and atrocities on the Russian Front, and opened a lot of Germans’ eyes; the Wehrmacht has long had a (often but not always inaccurate, IMHO) image in postwar Germany as “honorable soldiers in a dishonorable cause.”
The excellent PBS show History Detectives investigated the story of a POW camp in Texas. Some of the prisoners were serious Nazis who organized themselves, printed a pro-Hitler newspaper & beat another prisoner to death for his anti-Nazi opinions. Eventually, US authorities realized what was going on in that camp–& others. So they set up seperate camps for the Nazi prisoners & the others–either anti-Nazis or just, umm, not Nazis.
(Some German POW’s stayed on in Texas after the war. They got along OK with the locals, many of whom had German roots. I doubt any of these were the Nazis–most of the locals had boys overseas.)
Edited to add: I probably won’t go see the film because I don’t see many “live” movies & I know this one doesn’t end happily. But the fact that Tom Cruise is a bit of a fool won’t prevent me from catching it later.
I’m of two minds re. the German resistance; on the one hand, it seems painfully obvious in retrospect that for any assassination intended to prevent or curb much of the destruction of the war would have had to have happened prior to 1943’s activation of the full scope of the concentration camp system – namely, the death camps – and prior to the war’s grinding on to the point where eventual German defeat became apparent (also in ‘43). But there’s the paradox of such plotting; when the war was going well for Germany early on, many of the eventual plotters were less motivated to act and knew they faced much direr prospects in convincing others of the merits of their position. Similarly, any conspiracy motivated by more pragmatic, militarily astute, and nationalistic motivations – to achieve an armistice or separate peace – was doomed to fail after the Allies agreed to settle for no less than unconditional surrender; the longer the war dragged on, the greater was the Allies’ resolve, for both justice and vengeance.
On the other hand, given the penetration of German society with the propaganda and security measures of the regime, it’s amazing to me that there were as many plots and conspirators as there were. This is a climate in which, during the course of the war, some 5000 German citizens were executed for trivial political crimes: not for assassination plots or acts of sabotage, but stuff like uttering “defeatist” statements about the war or critical remarks about The Fuhrer, writing similarly-minded graffiti (one popular graffito in Berlin was a line to the effect of “Enjoy every day of the war, for the peace will certainly be far worse”), and telling Hitler jokes. One cabaret comedian was executed because he’d named his horse “Adolf”.
And speaking of the “5000” figure, that was also the number of Germans arrested following the July 20 plot, although that reflects a more general purge that ensued, as nowhere near all those people were personally involved in the Stauffenberg plot.
…thereby continuing a long tradition, beginning with the nearly 30,000 Hessian mercenaries of the Revolutionary War, of whom approx. one-sixth remained in North America (not all voluntarily so; some of these criminals were rejected on various grounds by their commanders for the free return trip to Europe). I read once that approx. one-third of the nearly 1000 Hessians captured by Gen. Washington in the Battle of Trenton ended up electing to become Americans.
That was a great program, with the unexpectedly comedic story of how a small group of POWs escaped into the vastness of the surrounding desert with a crude inflatable boat and an equally amateurish map sketching the location of a nearby “river,” but the river was no more than a spring-runoff rivulet that was all dried up when they reached it!
On edit: I didn’t mean that all the Hessians were “criminals,” but that some of those were refused return passage on the grounds that they had conducted themselves poorly during the war, were criminals, etc. The error was an artifact of an incomplete rewrite.
I don’t really understand this backlash towards Cruise. I mean, yeah, he’s a Scientologist, but so what? That hasn’t affected his ability to act in the least.
You say that like it’s a good thing 
But he wasn’t. He left the bomb under the table and went to make a phone call. I was never that impressed with his courage.
Like Gregory Peck was a good choice to play Mengele in *The Boys From Brazil *because they looked similar, Cruise makes a pretty good match for Stauffenberg.
I’m not sure his leaving was simply a question of self-preservation. As Chief of Staff of the Replacement Army, he would have had a possibly pretty violent coup to manage had the assassination worked.
I’m now picturing Pee-Wee Herman in a general’s uniform, slapping a soldier while shouting ‘I know you are, but what am I?!’
According to some ex-Scientologists, part of Cruise’s acting technique is directly from their exercises. That “intense” look is reportedly the “OT VII Death Stare”. That means Operating Thetan, Level VIII where you are supposed to have “M.E.S.T. powers”, that is power over Matter, Energy, Space and Time and can kill with a glance.
No, I’m not making this up. All the stuff mentioned in that episode of South Park? It’s all directly from their teaching.
First, the conspirators came mostly from aristocratic families (von in their names), so they weren’t for full-blown democracy. They had, as the rest of Germany had, seen democracy “fail” in the Weimar republic, and in the beginning, some of them may have believed that one strong man (a decider) would be better than many politicans squabbling over their own power instead of putting the country first.
Second, they were military, NOT SS. As such, they followed orders, and did not know details about concentration camps. The camps were kept secret, because the Nazis were smart enough to figure out that a full-blown, open killing would be met with resistance by the population, but the salami-tactic of slowly and silently taking rights away, then taking people away, then sending death certificates for hearth death, would keep the population lulled.
And there was a sense of it being unwise, because it could lead to trouble, to inquire further into the whole issue. So unless you had contacts and heard stories, it was possible to disregard rumors as enemy propaganda.
Also, the pace of the killing picked up gradually, so the situation in the concentration camps in 1938 was different from 1943/44.
Some of the conspirators (I’ve read von Gersdorff autobiography - he tried to blow Hitler up in 1943 already, and got lucky in escaping the hunt after the 20th of July) only realized the full cruelty of the regime when they were transferred to the Eastern (Russian) front and saw both the mass killings done by the Einsatztruppen (special troops) and the big tactical mistakes that lead to the deaths of thousands of german soldiers.
Also, many of the conspirators had sworn a personal oath to Hitler when he took office, and as religious Christians and career officers, it took some time to work up the courage to go against that oath and all tradition to develop a plan to kill your CiC, and set up an alternative government structure afterwards, while getting rid of the loyal Nazis. And everytime you talk to somebody to recruit them, you risk your neck if the other person is a loyal Nazi who tells your plans of treason to the superiors.
The people of July 20th are still considered decent people in Germany, and an example of officers following their moral code instead of orders, and there was (and is) a lot of resentment that an American, especially Tom Cruise, who belongs to a dangerous cult of Scientology and thus, is against democracy and free will and morals himself, plays von Stauffenberg.
Most people, if they could have decided, would have denied permission to make the movie in historic places because Hollywood would surely mess it up.
It was not only lack of courage, but an astonishing amount of bad luck for conspirators (or good luck for Hitler - he interpreted the various attempts on his life that he survived with only minor injuries as fate smiling on him because he was needed for the big job). About 20 attempts by various groups and people were made on Hitler, and all failed. For example, von Gersdorff tried a suicide bomb in winter of 1943, during an exhibition - he had the bomb in his pocket while guiding Hitler through. But the house was unheated, so the explosive would have needed 30 minutes to detonate, and Hitler ran through in about 10 minutes, to play with a captured tank.
Von Stauffenberg had the problem that he and other high-ranking officers were needed to give orders and lead the Army and the new government after the assassination, so he couldn’t blow himself up.
Right. Sophocles wrote Oedipus Rex for an audience who knew exactly how the story would end; it was one of the best-known legends of Hellas. It was still a successful play. Shakespeare wrote his histories for people who knew the broad outlines of the life stories of Henry V, Julius Caesar, etc. Not every writer has to be O. Henry (or Orson Welles). There is more to a story than its ending.
That’s a point I also wanted to make: it’s true that the conspirators got fully moving only after heavy losses on the Eastern front. But the psychological problem was: if any group had suceeded in killing Hitler earlier, say 1939 or 1940, when the war was going swimmingly well for the Germans, all economic problems had been “solved” (it was no real solution, but a huge debt-run up with the aim of war, without war, the whole thing would have collapsed, but the population didn’t know that) - then Hitler would have become a hero for the general population.
The democrats had already been destroyed by the Dolchstosslegende back stab legend - which falsely placed the blame for the lost WWI at the politicans back home who signed the peace, not on the Kaiser and bad tactics. So an earlier success would have entrenched Nazism deeper in the population.
This looks like the crowd that might enjoy the book “Bodyguard of Lies”. Much of the book deals with this plot and its predecessors. You learn a lot about the planning and the people involved.
The guy on the right is Stauffenberg.
