PD: Day 97 - WWII Saturday

Today was mellow. We woke up kind of late. J and I had been up watching movies. The first Paul Blart Mall Cop was as you would expect funny but not great. Then we watched Valkyrie, the Tom Cruise epic about the July 20th, 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler. OK, is it just me or is Tom Cruise just not believable as German officer; one who has been blown up in North Africa. There are a few factual errors, such as von Stauffenberg was not the author of the plan. Also they completely ignored Rommel, who has probably the only person in the entire west, who is known for being executed for knowing about the plan. So we were up, had breakfast, I was just being pretty mellow and finished my next book, Silesian Station, the next in a series about a journalist-turned-spy for just about everyone involved in WWII. I also watched a documentary on the Hunt for Hitler. Shortly after the war the fate of Hitler was unknown and the Russians believed (or at least said he escaped) and it wasn't until the mid 1990s when the Russians opened their files to the west that he was confirmed dead. Apparently, they didn't want his remains buried so that it might become a shrine, so they had sent his teeth and a portion of his skull back to Stalin, and then the KGB cremated the rest in the 1970s and threw it in the river. J went out and picked up Defiance, which is a movie worth watching as it about the Bielski brothers, four brothers who protected over 1,ooo Jews from the Nazis in Belarussia for over two years. They never sought recognition for their efforts. I actually liked that one quite a bit. I have no idea why I'm on such a WWII kick lately. I've always been interested in it, as my father fought in the Pacific from 1941 until 1945, but lately it seems to be on TV a lot. Hopefully, someone in Hollywood will actually make a decent film about the American war in the Pacific but until then I guess I'll keep reading about the European theatre.