MUMBAI: Hollywood star Tom Cruise is facing flak from the family of a historical character he will be portraying in a forthcoming film, according to www.Hollywood.tv founder Sheeraz Hasan.
Relatives of Count Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, who led the Operation Valkyrie assassination plot to kill Adolf Hitler, are unhappy with Cruise who is playing the famed Nazi resister in an upcoming film, say reports.
“I have nothing against him [Cruise] and can even separate his work from his beliefs in Scientology,” Count Caspar Schenk von Stauffenberg, the soldier’s grandson has been quoted as saying. “But I and other family members are worried that the picture will be financed by the sect and be used to get across its propaganda. “Unfortunately the family Stauffenberg can do nothing about this. My grandfather is a figure from history.”
Stauffenberg joined a group of conspirators in 1944 who wanted to assassinate Hitler because they felt he was destroying Germany’s legacy. According to published reports, Stauffenberg wrote to his wife, Nina, that Poland had “many Jews, many people of mixed blood … who are only happy when they are dominated.”
Stauffenberg succeeded in planting a bomb hidden in a briefcase near Hitler during a military meeting on 20 July 1944. Although several officers were killed when it exploded, a large oak table in the room saved Hitler. Stauffenberg was later caught and executed that night. Another 7,000 other sympathisers were said to have been strangled with piano wire. The executions were documented on film, which Hitler later watched in a screening room, reports say.
If Cruise plays the character correctly, he will lose his left eye, his right hand and the fourth and fifth fingers of his left hand by the end of the film, at which point Hitler will have him executed.
