Not Historical - Stauffenberg was no hero

Rating: Null/10 (3 February 2009)

Below is a selection of comments on this film from the World Socialist Web Site, written by one of its German correspondents:
Regarding Stauffenberg:
"This depiction has little to do with the real Stauffenbergan opponent of democracy, an anti-Semite and an initial supporter of the war. Stauffenberg's political and ideological conceptions would fit badly into an epic about a hero, and are therefore excluded.
"In an article for the Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin, historian Richard J. Evans, a specialist on the Third Reich, described the convictions of the Hitler assassin as follows: "Stauffenberg's moral outlook was a multi-layered assortment of Catholic teachings, an aristocratic code of ethics, the ethos of old Greece and German romantic poetry." Under the influence of the poet Stefan George, Stauffenberg aspired to "an idealized medieval empire" through which "Europe, under the leadership of Germany, would acquire a new measure of culture and civilization." "These conceptions were compatible with the goals of the Nazis. Although Stauffenberg never joined Hitler's party, whose plebeian character contradicted his own elitist proclivities, he supported Hitler in the 1932 elections for Reich president and celebrated his appointment as Reich chancellor in 1933. He saw in the Nazis a "movement of national renewal that would put an end to the shabby parliamentary compromises of Weimar." And he "believed that a policy of cleansing the German race and of eliminating Jewish influences from it had to form a crucial part of this renewal," writes Evans."
So much for the "historical accuracy" of the film!