By David Rising
Associated Press Writer

Two hot-button issues in Germany — the Nazi era and Scientology — are being pushed simultaneously by a new film in which Tom Cruise plays the country’s most-famous anti-Hitler plotter, sparking controversy in Berlin.

Wed, Jun. 27, 2007 Posted: 17:09:25 PM EST

BERLIN (AP) - Two hot-button issues in Germany — the Nazi era and Scientology — are being pushed simultaneously by a new film in which Tom Cruise plays the country’s most-famous anti-Hitler plotter, sparking controversy in Berlin.Cruise, one of Scientology’s best-known adherents, is to play Col. Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg — the aristocratic army officer executed after a failed attempt to assassinate Hitler in 1944 — in director Bryan Singer’s new film “Valkyrie.”The film’s German co-producers say they were given permission to use the former German general staff headquarters in Berlin, where Stauffenberg worked and where he was executed, and that they plan a detailed, historically accurate treatment.

But word that a Scientologist would play Stauffenberg has rubbed some the wrong way. Germany’s government considers Scientology a commercial enterprise that takes advantage of vulnerable people, and critics maintain that one of its adherents should not be playing one of the Nazi-era’s few heroes.

Stauffenberg “is to be played by an actor whose sect, through dubious methods, attempts to lure people and make them pliable,” Social Democratic lawmaker Klaus Uwe Benneter said on his Web site. “This is a slap in the face to all upstanding democrats, all resistance fighters during the Third Reich, and all victims of the Scientology sect.”

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