ValKyrie

Possessing a passion for history, I don’t remember when I first became aware of Claus Philipp Maria Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg. I remember him for who he was for what he attempted to accomplish. A German officer during World War II, he was central in German resistance to Nazi rule. He was also Catholic. I write this one day after release of the movie Val Kyrie, Hollywood’s version of events.

Although I haven’t’ seen the movie yet, it appears propagandists still exist. Take Roger Friedman’s review for example. It seems , as if on cue, Friedman has reacted to the movie from a parochial viewpoint. He believes the movie “opens the door to a dangerous new thought: that the Holocaust and all the other atrocities could be of secondary important to the cause of German patriotism.” He is concerned that the movie’s’ characters, “heroes” he calls them, tongue-in-cheek, were aware of what was going around them. Curious reaction from Friedman given the topic of the movie.

Also forgotten in the movie is another central theme of the war, Germany’s attempt to crush the Communist Party government of Moscow’s Joseph Stalin. Like Germany’s Nazi Party, communists killed millions of their own citizens to further their end cause.

Freidman is upset because not once in “Val Kyrie” do any of the movie” “heroes” mention what’s happening around them, “that any of them is appalled by or against what they know is happening or has happened: Hitler has systemically killed millions in the most barbaric ways possible to imagine.”

Val Kyrie is an attempt to bring Von Stauffenberg and his co-conspirators into the light of history. We all know of Nazi atrocities to Jews. However, among those of the Holocaust were others, such as Catholics like Von Stauffenberg. What occurred in Nazi Germany was not solely put upon Jewish people.

If anything, this movie does not appear to be an attempt to de-Nazify Germany. Rather, it is an attempt to cast Germany into proper historic light. Germans have had enough guilt imposed on them. Many theorize World War II would not have occurred if Germany had not suffered the huge remuneration penalties that burdened them after World War I.

Most German soldiers, like German civilians, had been dragged into events they had no power over, the web the Nazi Party was casting. Val Kyrie is, through this writer’s eye, a long-overdue postscript to World War Two and those who sought to change things.


Sullivan, an avid military historian, is an internationally-published writer residing in northeastern Ohio.