BERLIN has cemented itself together  with museums, malls, cycle lanes and autobahns. The past is memorialised and the traffic flows past. The Jews get a city block, the Gypsies get a grove and the gays get a drab bouquet.
 
Members of the Nazi high command who disagreed with Hitler’s war strategy get a naked bronze, bigger than life, of the Good Aryan. He stands as the victim of Nazism, at a comforting remove from the crimes he committed against humanity. What?

This is the so-called “Monument to German Resistance,” set in the courtyard of the Bendlerblock, the Nazi-era military HQ in Berlin that is still the military HQ in Berlin. It commemorates the spot where colonel Claus von Stauffenberg (who failed to kill Adolf Hitler on July 20 1944) was executed. Tom Cruise shot Valkyrie here and even though the world has yet to see the naked Tom Cruise, the resemblance is uncanny.

The bronze was created in 1953 by Richard Scheibe, one of 378 artists who were exempted from participation in the total war of 1944 because Hitler deemed them indispensible exponents of nazi ideology and placed them on the list of the “Divinely Gifted.”