GERMANY/FILE: Filming begins in Berlin of Tom Cruise's latest movie "Valkyrie," the story of would-be Hitler assassin count von Stauffenberg

Record ID: 791065

  • Title: GERMANY/FILE: Filming begins in Berlin of Tom Cruise's latest movie "Valkyrie," the story of would-be Hitler assassin count von Stauffenberg
  • Date: 27th September 2007
  • Summary: ALTENAHR, GERMANY (SEPTEMBER 20, 2007) (REUTERS) EXTERIOR OF KREUZBERG CASTLE, RESIDENCE OF THE VON BOESELAGER FAMILY PHILIPP BARON VON BOESELAGER, THE LAST SURVIVING WOULD-BE HITLER ASSASSIN, ENTERING ROOM AND SITTING DOWN
  • Embargoed: 12th October 2007 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Topics: Entertainment,History
  • Reuters ID: LVA9WU80W3C4MZUMGVV3BZRESBE9
  • Story Text: Filming begins in Berlin of Tom Cruise's latest movie "Valkyrie," the story of would-be Hitler assassin count von Stauffenberg.
    Hollywood actor Tom Cruise was expected to show up on the set at the German defence ministry later on Friday (September 21), the site where in 1944 Claus count von Stauffenberg was executed for his role in attempting to kill Nazi dictator adolf Hitler.
    In his latest movie "valkyrie," Cruise will play Stauffenberg in a film on the circumstances leading up to the failed assassiantion attempt on Hitler.
    Stauffenberg had been deeply opposed to the Nazis' treatment of Jews and planted a briefcase bomb under a table near Hitler in his "Wolf's Lair" headquarters on July 20, 1944.
    The bomb went off but only wounded the Fuehrer. Stauffenberg was executed on the same day in Berlin, a site which today houses the defence minstry and a memorial site dedicated to the resistance fighters.
    The last surviving member of Stauffenberg's inner resistance circle, Philipp baron von Boeselager, told Reuters Television in an interview he was "more than confident that Tom Cruise can portray Stauffenberg."
    "This entire atmosphere, this unhealthy atmosphere of a dictatorship is very difficult to portray and I don't know whether he (Tom Cruise) will succeed," Boeselager said at his home south of Bonn.
    "But other than that, I am more than confident -- he is after all a famous actor -- that he will be able to portray Stauffenberg. I do believe so," Boeselager said.
    He recalled how he saw "Stauffenberg on several occasions and I knew that he was going to carry out the assassination attempt."
    "I admired him because he was handicapped," Boeselager said of Stauffenberg who was missing an eye and a hand.
    "I admired his guts. We nodded at each other and he knew of me and I knew of him that we were in the resistance."
    "You never knew who would denounce you and who would watch you," Boeselager said.
    Only through happy circumstances did he escape arrest and execution.
    Army officer Boeselager was only 25 when he was asked to join a secret team of officers who planned to kill the dictator -- and who were ready to sacrifice their own lives.
    "We were convinced that even if July 20 had been successful, we would have been hanged because the mass of Germans believed Hitler. They would have said: 'If Hitler was still alive, we would have won the war'," he said.
    Boeselager, an elegant man dressed in a dark suit who wears his hair carefully combed back, said the wish to halt the Nazis mattered more to the men than the danger of death.
    "Each day Hitler ruled, thousands died unnecessarily -- soldiers, because of his stupid leadership decisions. And later, I learned of concentration camps, where Jews, Poles, Russians -- human beings -- were being killed.
    "It was clear that these orders came from the top: I realised I lived in a criminal state. It was horrible. We wanted to end the war and free the concentration camps."
    Boeselager and his brother Georg belonged to a group of plotters around Colonel Henning von Tresckow on the Eastern Front, who used his access to senior officers to try to recruit them for his idea. Several planned attacks failed before 1944.
    Boeselager, who worked in an explosives team, was charged with organising a bomb for July 20: "One day, my brother called and said: 'They want explosives' -- I knew exactly what for."
    In his brown leather suitcase, Boeselager smuggled several British bombs -- "I realised English ones were the best" -- to General Hellmuth Stieff at Army High Command.
    "Getting out of the plane, I was limping, because I had been injured in the leg. Several young soldiers came up to me, offering to carry my suitcase. But I refused. I thought they would notice at once that the suitcase was far too heavy."
    As Stieff was in a meeting when Boeselager arrived, he went to a cinema to wait: "They were showing a comedy but I didn't pay attention. I was worried someone would trip over my suitcase."
    On July 20, 1944, Hitler met officials at his so-called Wolf's Lair headquarters in today's Poland, a secluded area in the woods, tightly watched and protected by thousands of mines, but to which one leading conspirator had access.
    Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, a tall German aristocrat who deeply opposed the Nazis' treatment of Jews, planted one of Boeselager's bombs in a briefcase under a table close to Hitler.
    The bomb exploded after Stauffenberg had left the room, killing four men -- but Hitler survived almost unscathed.
    "Stauffenberg was the wrong man for this, but no one else had the guts," Boeselager said, noting that previous injuries including the loss of an eye, a hand and two more fingers would have handicapped Stauffenberg in the assassination bid.
    Lacking time, Stauffenberg had only used one bomb instead of two as originally planned. An open window or a heavy table shielding Hitler could also have saved the dictator's life.
    Hitler immediately launched a merciless hunt for the plotters.
    In the days after the attack, the Nazis killed Stieff, Stauffenberg and many accomplices. Relatives of the plotters were arrested and Tresckow, like many others, committed suicide.
    Historians say thousands were killed or sent to concentration camps in the purge. Though the Nazis brutally tortured the conspirators, no one revealed Boeselager's name.
    The plotters had planned that Boeselager should lead a troop of some 1,000 horsemen from the eastern front to Berlin after Hitler's assassination, where they would seize key Nazi bodies.
    Having ridden 200 kilometres (125 miles) towards the airport they were to leave from, Boeselager got a message from his brother: 'All back to the old holes' -- code meaning the attack had failed.
    Boeselager ordered the soldiers, who were not aware of the plot, to make an immediate about face, riding back eastwards to the front before anyone could find out their secret movement.
    "I was sure we would be noticed. Some 1,000 riders make up a huge caravan stretching over a few kilometres," Boeselager said.
    "And the soldiers must have been suspicious: First, they are asked to ride westwards at one hell of a speed. And then, the command is to ride back eastwards as quickly as possible."
    Boeselager returned to the front after the failed attack but he said he carried cyanide on him every single day until the war ended -- convinced the Nazis would eventually find him out. His brother Georg also eluded capture, but died in battle.
    After the war, the officer studied economics and became a forestry expert. Over the front door of his house in Kreuzberg near the western city of Bonn, a sign reads "Et si omnes ego non -- Even if all, not me".
    The film starring Tom Cruise, slated for a 2008 release and directed by Bryan Singer and co-starring Kenneth Branagh, is called "Valkyrie"
    after Operation Valkyrie, the plot's codename.
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