While not adapted from a single text, the motion picture Valkyrie is based on a historical events that have been chronicled in detail by several historians and popular history writers. In History’s Greatest Conspiracies: One Hundred Plots, Real and Suspected, That have Shocked, Fascinated, and Sometimes Changed the World, author H. Paul Jeffers summarizes “The Plot to Kill Hitler”
On July 20, 1944, no one in the German anny laid better claim to the status of war hero than Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg. A career staff officer since 1926, he had served with distinction during the takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1938, the invasion of Poland in 1939, and the 1940 conquest of France. Assigned to the Tenth Panzer Division under Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Corps in early 1943, he suffered the loss of his left eye, right hand, and two fingers of his left hand when Allied planes attacked a convoy and strafed his vehicle during the battle of the Kasserine Pass.
Promoted to Colonel in June 1944, he was appointed Chief of Staff to the Commander of the Home Army (reserves), by General Friederich Fromm.
At this time, when Allied forces were expanding from D-Day beachheads in France and the high command was receiving increasingly disturbing reports about the army’s involvement in mass executions of Jews and others in the countries of eastern Europe, a group of generals and important civilians agreed that the only way to save Germany from complete destruction was to remove Hitler from power, declare a new government, and seek an armistice. The basis for such a scheme was an already-existing plan. Called “Operation Valkyrie,” it had been devised for the purpose of dealing with any anti-Nazi uprising that might occur.
…two attempts to kill Hitler had been made in March 1943. In the first, a bomb planted in Hitler’s plane failed to explode. A second bombing was to be at an exhibition of captured Soviet equipment. The plan fizzled when the show was postponed. On March 11, 1944, a plan to shoot him at his Obsersalzberg mountain retreat had to be called off because the assassin, Hauptmann Ebehard von Breitenbuch, couldn’t get close enough.
Because Stauffenberg was a genuine war hero with a spotless record as a staff officer, and was now in a position that frequently required him to attend Hitler’s military strategy briefings, he was seen by the conspirators as the ideal individual to carry out the first stage of Operation Valkyrie by assassinating Hitler.
How Stauffenberg was approached, and by whom, isn’t certain. General Franz Halder said later that he had “recognized in Claus von Stauffenberg a born leader, one whose outlook on life was rooted in a sense of responsibility toward God, who was not prepared to be satisfied with theoretical explanations and discussions, but who was burning to act.”
Hitler himself may have persuaded Stauffenberg. After observing Hitler during one of his meetings with his generals, Stauffenberg said, “Fate has offered us this opportunity, and I would not refuse it for anything in the world. I have examined myself before God and my conscience. It must be done because this man [Hitler] is evil personified.”
One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest added to Classics directory under Dramas and Documentaries.
“The book was not filmable, and it was not easy. When Lee (Daniels, the director of 
