Why do we love movie Nazis?

Only at the movies (and in old “Hogan’s Heroes” reruns) is it ever permissible to enjoy the company of a Nazi. To be sure, the real Nazis were horrifying death merchants responsible for igniting World War II. But at the movies they become complex psychological portraits or loony B-movie villains or, weirder still, comic relief.

You can talk to psychologists all day about that last one and why we need harmless fictional versions of real-life boogeymen in order to cope with a sort of evil that most people can’t wrap their brains around, but for Hollywood the answer is pretty simple: bad guys, the baddest guys, mean movies people will pay good money to see.

“Valkyrie” opens this week, starring Tom Cruise as a heroic German military officer who launches a failed coup to stop Hitler’s reign of terror and mass murder. And he’s doing his best to de-Tom-Cruise-ify himself for this one. But when your best work involves being affable and there’s no way, even if you stretch it, to work a toothy grin into a performance as a soldier of the Third Reich, your options become limited. Lots of hissed urgent line deliveries but not much else. And that shows in Cruise’s performance. Not that it’s a bad film. Director Bryan Singer knows how to keep the action moving. But it’s not going to win Cruise any new fans, probably not even in Germany where they already love to hate him.