The Valkyrie Legacy: The Plot To Kill Hitler

Nazis.

Germans.

In the minds of many, one and the same.

For more than six decades,

the German people have been haunted by the ghost of Adolf Hitler

and scarred by the horrible crimes committed under Nazi rule.

But in the 12 years that saw the rise and fall of the Third Reich,

there were those who struggled to oppose oppression.

Brave men and women who risked their lives,

suffered unspeakable torture,

and shed their blood in the service of conscience.

The story of their sacrifice continues to generate both curiosity and controversy.

For some it provides inspiration.

But for others it poses a deeply disturbing question.

Why were there only a few brave enough to stand up against an unspeakable evil?

And just what were the real motives

behind the German military plot to kill Adolf Hitler?

Today, Germany is one of the leading nations in a powerful European Union.

Thanks to thriving exports,

which include everything from automobiles to beer,

it boasts the third largest economy in the world.

In the more than six decades since the end of World War I,

there is little evidence of the carnage and devastation

that scarred the German people.

Berlin is a city more eager to move forward than to look back.

And it was here, in Berlin,

that Academy Award winning screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie

was visiting on a business trip.

CHRISTOPHER McQUARRIE: I was in Berlin in early 2002.

And I'd hired a tour guide to take me around the city.

And we spent most of the afternoon

looking at all the monuments and going through the city's history.

The tour guide had lived in Berlin all of his life

and he was 14 years old when World War II ended

and had this remarkable sense of the city's history

over the last 60 years.

And the last place that he took me after having gone all over the city

was to a place called Stauffenbergstrasse.

What was inside was this building in a courtyard called the Bendlerblock.

And if you go inside that courtyard,

there's an iron railing in the cobblestones,

and not far from the iron railing is a plaque with five names on it,

and those five men were the conspirators

who were involved in an attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler.

It's actually where they were executed.

And they are the only soldiers who served in World War II

who are commemorated here in Berlin.

When I was growing up,

they didn't say we were fighting Germany,

we were fighting the German army.

It was always phrased as fighting the Nazis.

And so the assumption became

that anyone wearing that uniform and anyone marching under that flag

was a Nazi.

And that had been presented to us over and over and over again

with all the World War II movies that we grew up on.

Now, when German young people, if they go to other countries,

very often they are received with "Heil, here come the Nazis,"

which is very difficult for a 15 or 16 or 17-year-old boy or girl

to accept because they really had nothing to do with it.

Their parents probably had nothing to do with it.

But it still sticks to the Germans.

Understandably, the Germans have been held responsible

for the actions of their leader,

although most of them really didn't have a chance to do much about it.

And those who did ended up in concentration camps

or on the scaffold.

And I think one ought to understand that what happened in Germany

was the failure of the democratic institutions in 1933.

And this is the great failure in German history.

The great failure that brought the Nazi regime to power

had its beginning on June 28, 1919,

when Germany signaled its defeat in World War |

by signing the Treaty of Versailles.

As part of the terms,

the Allies demanded that Germany surrender more than 13% of its territory

and also limit the size of its army.

Additionally, the country was burdened with a crippling war debt

at a time when many Germans were starving.

Within a decade, the country was thrust into a devastating economic depression.

One that saw the rise of numerous political parties battling for control.

Germany, until 1918, was a monarchy. After 1918, it was a republic.

But it was not a republic loved by the people who lived here in Germany.

By the early 1930s,

competition between the political parties was escalating

and two particularly bitter rivals took center-stage.

The German Communist Party

and the National Socialist Party, led by Adolf Hitler.

(PHILIPP BARON VON BOESELAGER SPEAKING GERMAN)

There was political crisis from the year 1930 to 1933.

Hitler was seen by the people as a savior,

he was seen by the people as a man who could save Germany.

His brilliant strategy was that he always had something for everybody.

He could, for instance, claim that he liked the little man,

but he was also saying to the big industrialists,

I am the only man who will save you from communism.”

You had a very astute, very shrewd organizer

who knew what he wanted,

explained it in great detail to the German public,

financed his party largely

by charging admission for people to hear him speak.

And eventually, with the support of people around the President,

was able to get into power.

On January 30, 1933, under the influence of his advisors,

On January 30, 1933, under the influence of his advisors,

a frail 85-year-old President Hindenburg gave the oath of office to Adolf Hitler

and named him Chancellor of the German Reich.

One month later, a fire broke out at the Reichstag,

home to Germany's parliament.

Hitler pointed his finger at the Communists.

It was the beginning of the end.

He said, "Okay, everyone who is not for us is against us."

So, they decided that all these people who fought against Hitler

were thrown out of the German society.

And about a hundred thousand were arrested,

put into torture centers, makeshift concentration camps.

It's often forgotten that the legal system,

the courts and the police,

were the main way in which resistance was dealt with.

They were simply beaten, intimidated, arrested into silence.

After Hindenburg's death in 1934,

the German cabinet, now firmly under Hitler's control,

passed a law abolishing the presidency.

Hitler became the supreme commander of the military

and gave himself the additional title of Führer, or leader.

Hitler used the occasion to have the entire armed forces,

army, navy, as well as the air force,

swear a personal oath

of obedience and loyalty to him as a person,

not to the nation, not to the constitution.

Adolf Hitler!

-Adolf Hitler! -Adolf Hitler!

So, if anyone acted in any way against Hitler,

then he would be committing treason.

Now the supreme leader of the German nation,

Adolf Hitler was free to pursue his goals of nationalism,

territorial expansion,

and cleansing the country of anything he viewed as non-German,

most particularly the Jews.

In 1933,

he'd established the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda,

under Joseph Goebbels.

Using the pseudo-science of eugenics,

an 18th-century philosophy which advocated selective breeding

as a means of strengthening the human species,

Goebbels and the Nazis launched an extensive and elaborate assault

in the public media and in medical journals,

arguing that Jews, homosexuals and other "non-Aryans”

were not only politically and socially undesirable

but genetically and biologically dangerous.

Hour after hour,

day after day,

year after year,

the German public was force fed a steady diet of lies, intolerance, and paranoia.

Now racism and even genocide seemed scientifically justified,

and even necessary.

And if anyone dared to question or object it would be considered an act of treason

and they were likely never heard from again.

So great was Nazi propaganda against the Jews

in schoolbooks, school lessons, cinema, radio, media, newspapers,

pouring it out all the time,

that people came to believe there was a "Jewish problem," if you like.

And to think that the influence of the Jews,

which the Nazis vastly exaggerated, should be curbed in some way.

The Jews in Germany were concentrated

in the law, in banking and finance,

and so they were an easily identifiable group.

But what really brings out anti-Semitism

is the defeat of the First World War.

Hitler and people on the far right, the nationalist right,

came to believe that the Jews had conspired in Germany

to undermine the war effort. That's what drives anti-Semitism.

It's the desire of Hitler and the leading Nazis

to stop this happening again, as they see it,

this conspiracy theory they believe in.

At our house where I lived, | saw these torchlight processions,

and there was a force there that was frightening.

And they had these choruses, "Perish, Jude.”

The Jew was the scapegoat for all evil.

On September 15, 1935,

the Reichstag passed the Nuremburg Race Laws,

which deprived German Jews of their civil rights.

Already in the mid-1930s when I was a kid,

you would see signs at restaurants and movie houses and so on,

"Jews not admitted."

And unless people are accustomed

to think of constitutionally protected rights,

and most Germans weren't

the fact that others, people you think of as "others,"

are persecuted, are beaten, are killed,

have their property stolen,

doesn't alarm that many people.

The Jews weren't the only group threatened with persecution.

Hitler also targeted the powerful Catholic Church.

The Catholic Church agreed to a treaty

with the National Socialist government,

but it was trampled upon by the National Socialists.