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Cruise Set to Play Nazi 
There are bad ideas in Hollywood, and then there are bad ideas. Kevin Costner as a futuristic water avenger with gills? Terrible. Demi Moore as a stripper? Yikes. Tom Cruise as a samurai? Even worse.
But no one says no in Hollywood when a star says yes. So Cruise, unable to stop his career suicide, has picked one more impossible mission: He is set to play a Nazi who tried but failed with a group of other resistors to assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1944.
The character, if depicted correctly, will have a heavy German accent. He will also have lost his left eye, his right hand and the fourth and fifth fingers of his left hand by the time of the film's climax. He will then be murdered by Hitler.
You had me at "Auf Wiedersehen."
Cruise's desire to play this hotsie-totsie Nazi — to quote a Mel Brooks line from "The Producers" — is questionable at best. Germany, which doesn't acknowledge Scientology as a religion, gives him a tough time whenever he goes there to promote a film.
(Story continues below)
It can't be too far from Cruise's calculating mind to think that by playing a man who some Germans consider a hero, he'll win over the country.
But the family of the man he wants to play feel very much otherwise.
Relatives of Count Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg — who led the Operation Valkyrie assassination plot — recently told the Scotsman newspaper that they weren't so excited about Cruise playing someone so famous that a street is even named for him and a museum commemorates the resistors.
Cruise, many feel, has selected the material as a way of reversing his and Scientology's negative standing in the country.
"I have nothing against him [Cruise] and can even separate his work from his beliefs in Scientology," the soldier's grandson, Count Caspar Schenk von Stauffenberg, told the paper. "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," he continued. "My grandfather is a figure from history."
The Stauffenbergs are also staunch Catholics, which doesn't help matters. Cruise has renounced Catholicism for Scientology, pulling with him all the members of his family, including his mother.
"You can be Catholic and a Scientologist," Cruise told one interviewer in 2005. "We are just Scientologists."
Unlike in America, where Scientology is considered a religion, in Germany it's a different story. The country does not acknowledge what they call a "fake religion." Germans believe Scientology is on a financial, rather than spiritual, mission.
Stauffenberg joined a group of conspirators in 1944 who participated in Operation Valkyrie. They wanted to take down Hitler not because of the Holocaust or any other horror in particular, just because they felt he was destroying Germany's legacy.
According to many published reports, Stauffenberg wrote to his wife, Nina, that Poland contained "many Jews, many people of mixed blood ... who are only happy when they are dominated."
Nevertheless, Stauffenberg managed to plant a bomb in a briefcase near Hitler during a military meeting on July 20, 1944. It exploded, killing several officers. But a large oak table in the room saved Hitler.
Stauffenberg was caught and executed that night, as were 7,000 other sympathizers. Some were said to have been strangled with piano wire. Hitler had the whole thing filmed and watched it later in a screening room.
That would be the final scene in a movie neither you, nor I, want to see.
Editor's note: An earlier version of this story said the Church of Scientology is banned in Germany. This was incorrect. Germany simply doesn’t acknowledge Scientology as a religion.
There are bad ideas in Hollywood, and then there are bad ideas. Kevin Costner as a futuristic water avenger with gills? Terrible. Demi Moore as a stripper? Yikes. Tom Cruise as a samurai? Even worse.
But no one says no in Hollywood when a star says yes. So Cruise, unable to stop his career suicide, has picked one more impossible mission: He is set to play a Nazi who tried but failed with a group of other resistors to assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1944.
The character, if depicted correctly, will have a heavy German accent. He will also have lost his left eye, his right hand and the fourth and fifth fingers of his left hand by the time of the film's climax. He will then be murdered by Hitler.
You had me at "Auf Wiedersehen."
Cruise's desire to play this hotsie-totsie Nazi — to quote a Mel Brooks line from "The Producers" — is questionable at best. Germany, which doesn't acknowledge Scientology as a religion, gives him a tough time whenever he goes there to promote a film.
(Story continues below)
It can't be too far from Cruise's calculating mind to think that by playing a man who some Germans consider a hero, he'll win over the country.
But the family of the man he wants to play feel very much otherwise.
Relatives of Count Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg — who led the Operation Valkyrie assassination plot — recently told the Scotsman newspaper that they weren't so excited about Cruise playing someone so famous that a street is even named for him and a museum commemorates the resistors.
Cruise, many feel, has selected the material as a way of reversing his and Scientology's negative standing in the country.
"I have nothing against him [Cruise] and can even separate his work from his beliefs in Scientology," the soldier's grandson, Count Caspar Schenk von Stauffenberg, told the paper. "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," he continued. "My grandfather is a figure from history."
The Stauffenbergs are also staunch Catholics, which doesn't help matters. Cruise has renounced Catholicism for Scientology, pulling with him all the members of his family, including his mother.
"You can be Catholic and a Scientologist," Cruise told one interviewer in 2005. "We are just Scientologists."
Unlike in America, where Scientology is considered a religion, in Germany it's a different story. The country does not acknowledge what they call a "fake religion." Germans believe Scientology is on a financial, rather than spiritual, mission.
Stauffenberg joined a group of conspirators in 1944 who participated in Operation Valkyrie. They wanted to take down Hitler not because of the Holocaust or any other horror in particular, just because they felt he was destroying Germany's legacy.
According to many published reports, Stauffenberg wrote to his wife, Nina, that Poland contained "many Jews, many people of mixed blood ... who are only happy when they are dominated."
Nevertheless, Stauffenberg managed to plant a bomb in a briefcase near Hitler during a military meeting on July 20, 1944. It exploded, killing several officers. But a large oak table in the room saved Hitler.
Stauffenberg was caught and executed that night, as were 7,000 other sympathizers. Some were said to have been strangled with piano wire. Hitler had the whole thing filmed and watched it later in a screening room.
That would be the final scene in a movie neither you, nor I, want to see.
Editor's note: An earlier version of this story said the Church of Scientology is banned in Germany. This was incorrect. Germany simply doesn’t acknowledge Scientology as a religion.
