FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - Valkyrie

Rant Number 337 29 January 2009

The Valkyries were Odin’s daughters. Twelve awesome females who hovered over battlefields and carried fallen warriors to Valhalla. The brave Germans who tried to kill Hitler in 1944 chose ‘Valkyrie’ as a code name for their plot. Hoping, no doubt, the awesome maidens would speed the raving Fuhrer on his way to hell. His demons protected the tyrant, alas. Instead, it was for the doomed conspirators that the Valkyries metaphorically came.

The hero of Bryan Singer’s movie, Valkyrie, is Count Claus Schenk Von Stauffenberg. The officer who carried the bomb aimed at the tyrant. OK, on first hearing Tom Cruise was going to play him, I groaned. ‘A second death.’ (That Cruise is a Scientologist, a thing that worried Germans, is irrelevant.) I was wrong. The star is surprisingly good. In battle the real Stauffenberg had lost one eye, his right hand, half his left hand and part of his leg. Not a glamorous man to play. Yet Cruise does it. I used to think him insipid but here he is engrossing. A taut, steely and charismatic performance. Three cheers for Tom!

The characters of Valkyrie do not dwell the morality of tyrannicide. It is taken for granted. Quite right. Anyone who was not convinced that the Fuhrer was a manic dictator who had invaded other countries, killed millions and was bent on destroying his own people, and hence deserved death, would be morally warped. Nonetheless, anti-Nazi officers had to wrestle with the dilemmas posed by their having sworn an oath of allegiance to Hitler. All the more to their honour that their conscience saw through that. But Bryan Singer has eschewed verbose debate. Instead he has concentrated on the visual dramatics, as well as terse dialogue. The result is gripping. I enjoyed it.

Valkyrie has annoyed Germanophobes. ‘The 1944 plotters did not try to kill Hitler to save the Jews’, smug historian Andrew Roberts blabbed on TV. True. But neither did Britain or America go to war to save the Jews from extermination, so put that in your pipe and smoke it, Andy!

Further, Stauffenberg and fellow anti-Nazis are blamed for being old-fashioned, aristocratic fuddy-duddies: ‘reactionaries’. Actually, Stauffenberg, though from a monarchist and Catholic background, later sympathised with socialism. He was close to the Kreisau Circle, another focus of opposition to Hitler since 1933. They wanted post-war Germany to follow the principles of Christian ethics but also looked to the East with sympathy for the Russian people. Yes, most were fiercely anti-Bolshevik. Well, wasn’t Churchill, too? As to the monarchy, what on earth is Britain?

Truth is, there is a distinct vein of racism about Germans in the British media, as well as in certain quarters. A film depicting ‘another Germany’, as opposed to that of the tiresome clichés regurgitated by the popular media, is bound to upset them. The movie shows to the international audiences some upright, better Germans than the usual panoply of barking, murderous SS Hollywood has accustomed them to. Almost unbearable, I imagine, for those whose tiny minds are fed by the endless stream of WWII movies and programmes on TV. Not that there isn’t a reason for that but… a buon intenditor, poche parole, as we Italians like to say.

Odd prejudice, in a way, for what used to be termed an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ nation, aka ‘Germanic’. Come to think of it, the world is still largely dominated by Germans. Aren’t America’s roots and basic stock Anglo-Saxon, too? (‘But dad, they are pretty mongrelised Germans’, my son Linus interjects, as I write this. Cheek! That silly boy worries me. He is getting increasingly right-wing. I wonder why.) And France also (Frankreich) – the Franks were a German tribe. Italians…Well, we no longer count for a bloody anything but in the Middle Ages we rejoiced in our German emperors. The Visigoths ruled Spain, Scandinavians, Russia…verily, Deutschland uber alles! Germanophobia reveals itself for a form of self-hatred for anyone of European stock, methinks. The decline of the West is also the decline of German ascendancy over the rest of the world. A sobering thought.

Had the July conspirators succeeded in assassinating Hitler, what then? They hoped for a separate peace with the Western Allies and a turning of the tables on the Soviet Union. I fear it was a vain hope. Because at the

Casablanca Conference in 1943 Roosevelt and Churchill had insisted on the unconditional surrender of both the Third Reich and Japan. Roosevelt hypocritically claimed it meant the destruction of Nazism but of course the policy hindered internal opposition, while helping Hitler a lot. He used ‘unconditional surrender’ to convince his people that they could expect no mercy and must therefore fight to the end. Given that the Allies ruthlessly went on to reduce German cities to rubble, murdering large parts of the civilian population into the bargain, you could be forgiven for admitting the evil Fuhrer had a point. Moreover, Casablanca in the end resulted in the handing over of East Europe to Stalin’s tender care – including the Poland Britain had gone to war to save! For East Europeans it meant nearly fifty years of slavery, oppression and torture. Churchill, unlike Roosevelt, saw that but it was too late. ‘Uncle Joe’ Stalin was the real victor of Casablanca.

At a recent Muslim meeting discussing Middle East conundrums a voice from the back startled me. ‘What about assassination?’ someone asked. God knows what the chap meant – I safely chose not to delve. Of course, as my friend Helen opines, killing anyone, never mind how bad, is wrong. She has a point. Maybe old Socrates, that brave champion of reason, got it right. The tyrant, qua tyrant, and hence a bad person, is a most unhappy man. His true punishment consists in his being what he is, an unrighteous, irrational human being. Any further chastisement he may suffer is incidental. The evil a dictator does is really a form of self-destruction. Admittedly, a high, lofty view but still one for which there is much to be said.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli

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