Cruise starts filming anti-Hitler drama amid German uproar
Filming started Thursday on a movie starring Tom Cruise as the real-life mastermind behind a plot to kill Adolf Hitler, amid German grumbling about the high-profile Scientologist playing a national hero.
A spokeswoman for Babelsberg Studios outside Berlin told AFP that director Bryan Singer ("The Usual Suspects") had begun shooting "Valkyrie" on location in the region surrounding the German capital.
German officials have baulked at the choice of Cruise to play Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, who was executed by firing squad in 1944 after the failed assassination attempt.
They cite the actor`s ties to the Church of Scientology, which is viewed here as a "totalitarian" group that exploits vulnerable people, as making him unfit to play a German martyr.
"I find that Stauffenberg stood for the most noble motives a person can have," Frank Henkel, the general secretary of the Berlin chapter of Chancellor Angela Merkel`s Christian Democratic Union, told rolling news channel NTV.
"I consider Tom Cruise as a self-proclaimed ambassador of Scientology inappropriate for the role."
The remarks came after sharp criticism from a number of politicians and even Stauffenberg`s eldest son Berthold, 72, who has told the German press that Cruise "should keep his hands off my father."
A spokeswoman for the Church of Scientology centre in Berlin, Sabine Weber, said the furore over Cruise`s religion was discriminatory.
"The whole discussion about the faith or membership in a group of anyone should play no role in decisions of this kind," Weber said.
A spokesman for the finance ministry, which is responsible for granting permission to film at federal buildings, said that Singer had won approval for all the sites on his wish list with just one exception.
He said the Bendler Block, the former army headquarters in Berlin and now a memorial to the German resistance, where Stauffenberg was shot by the Nazis, would remain off-limits.
But he said Scientology had nothing to do with the decision.
"You can assume from the fact that we approved all the film location requests but one -- for reasons that all those involved consider reasonable -- that the beliefs of the actors are completely irrelevant," he said.
The spokesman acknowledged that other film crews had been allowed to use the Bendler Block in the past but said experience had shown that those decisions had been "mistaken."
Stauffenberg occupies a hallowed place in the country`s postwar consciousness as proof that there were Germans willing to give their lives to stop Hitler.
Although he was an ardent Nazi in the early years, he realised by 1944 that Germany was entrenched in a disastrous war that Hitler had no intention of ending.
Stauffenberg and fellow conspirators planted a bomb under a table in Hitler`s headquarters in East Prussia on July 20, 1944.
But the Fuehrer escaped, though he was injured, because an officer had moved the briefcase containing the explosives behind a sturdy leg of the oak table.
Stauffenberg and other officers were rounded up that same night and executed by firing squad.
The filming of "Valkyrie," after the code name for the assassination plot, is scheduled to continue until October 31 with the movie due for release next year.
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