In popular culture, perhaps the most enduring image of the German aristocracy in the Third Reich is embodied by Tom Cruise in
Valkyrie, the Hollywood version of the plot that failed to kill Adolf Hitler in July 1944. At the end of the film, the man who planted the bomb, Count Claus von Stauffenberg, played by Cruise, stands, his head held high in front of an SS firing squad, and declares ‘Long live Secret Germany!’ Exhibiting aristocratic
Haltung (‘bearing’), Stauffenberg paid tribute, so it is said, to the self-proclaimed aristocrat Stefan George, who preached of a secret realm accessible only to a privileged few. As Stauffenberg fell dead, a cabal of conspirators was being ruthlessly hunted down by the ‘new nobility’ of the SS.