Hollywood Wiretap‘s Nancy Vialatte wrote today that “after a series of back-and-forth reports over the past week, it’s finally official: Bryan Singer‘s Valkyrie” — the Tom Cruise World War II flick about the German military plot to kill Adolf Hitler — “will not be allowed to use the Bendlerblock historical site for filming.” Big effin’ deal — it just means Singer will have to find a building somewhere in Europe that looks sufficiently similar to the building-with-a-courtyard pictured below. How hard could that be?

As this Wikipedia page explains, the Bendlerblock is a building in Berlin in which the military resistance to Hitler’s regime was launched. Infantry General Friedrich Olbricht “developed the Valkyrie operation plan into a plan for a coup d’etat against Hitler. In October 1943 Colonel Stauffenberg” — Cruise’s character — “was transferred to the General Army Office as Chief of Staff. His position gave him direct access to situation briefings in Hitler’s Wolf’s Lair headquarters.
“On July 20, 1944 he set the fuse of a bomb there and returned to Berlin, [but] Hitler survived the blast and the conspirators all died for their failure. Following the arrest of the conspirators in the Bendlerblock, General Olbricht, Stauffenberg, Werner von Haeften and Albrecht Ritter Mertz von Quirnheim, all members of the uprising, were executed that same night in the courtyard of the building, by firing squad. A fifth plotter, General Ludwig Beck, chose to shoot himself.”