April 8 was the first night of Passover, the annual Jewish celebration of the flight from slavery in Egypt. One hopes it was in ignorance that the University of Kentucky felt this an appropriate time to show the film “Valkyrie,” a Hollywood glorification of Nazi general Claus von Stauffenberg.

The film is an alarming example of revisionist history. As a general in the Wehrmacht, Stauffenberg was directly complicit in the Shoah (the mass murder of Jews by the Nazi regime, a historical fact ignored by the movie to escape difficult questions about this very complicity) and only soured toward the Nazi cause after being injured in 1943 and realizing that Germany was losing the war. The assassination plot he participated in against Hitler was not an act of resistance against tyranny but an attempt to restore aristocratic rule. He remained a German nationalist until his death.

Stauffenberg is remembered as a hero by those who believe the revisionist myth of a “clean” Wehrmach. This myth can be given no quarter by those who want to seriously take up the categorical imperative expressed by Adorno: to arrange our thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen again.

Don Antenen