Adolf Hitler in popular culture

Adolf Hitler (20 April 1889–30 April 1945) was the leader of the National Socialist German Workers' Party and Führer of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945.

Representations of Hitler during his lifetime

Numerous works in popular music and literature feature Adolf Hitler prominently.

Inside Germany, Hitler was usually depicted as a God-like figure, loved and respected by the German people, as, for example, in Triumph of the Will, which Hitler co-produced. An exception was the German movie Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (The Testament of Dr. Mabuse), (1933), which was banned by the Nazi propaganda ministry. Many critics consider Fritz Lang's depiction of a homicidal maniac masterminding a criminal empire from within the walls of a criminal asylum to be an allegory of the Nazi ascent to power in Germany. Another early example of a cryptic depiction is in Bertolt Brecht's 1941 play, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, in which Hitler, in the persona of the principal character Arturo Ui, a Chicago racketeer in the cauliflower trade, is ruthlessly satirised. Brecht, who was German but left when the Nazis came to power, also expressed his opposition to the National Socialist and Fascist movements in other of his most famous plays.

Outside Germany, Hitler was depicted as a maniac or he was made fun of. There are many notable examples in contemporary Hollywood films. Several Three Stooges shorts, the first being You Nazty Spy (1940), the very first Hollywood work lampooning Hitler and the Nazis in which the boys, with Moe Howard portraying "Moe Hailstone", as the Hitler character, are made dictators of the fictional country Moronica. This short in particular implies that business interests were behind Hitler's rise to power. It was also the first Hollywood production to satirize the Nazis. A sequel was released a year later entitled I'll Never Heil Again. This one illustrated the disagreements between Hitler and the League of Nations. In other Three Stooges shorts, Hitler is referred to as "Schicklgruber" in reference to his father Alois Hitler's birth name. Charlie Chaplin made fun of Hitler as "Adenoid Hynkel," the dictator of Tomainia in his 1940 movie The Great Dictator. This is one of the most recognizable Hitler parodies.

Especially during World War II, Hitler was caricatured in numerous animated shorts, including Der Fuehrer's Face, a 1943 Disney wartime propaganda cartoon featuring Donald Duck, and Herr Meets Hare with Bugs Bunny. However, Hitler's first appearance on a Warner Brothers cartoon was in Bosko's Picture Show in 1932 in a short gag where Hitler is shown chasing after Jimmy Durante with an ax. George Grosz painted Cain, or Hitler in Hell (1944) showing the dead attacking Hitler in Hell. The photomontage artist John Heartfield made frequent use of Hitler's image as a target for his brand of barbed satire during Hitler's lifetime. In Fritz Lang's 1941 movie Man Hunt, which opened in theaters before America's entry into the war, Hitler is seen in the scope of a British hunter's rifle. In Ernst Lubitsch's 1942 movie To Be or Not to Be (as well as in Mel Brooks' remake in 1983), an actor from a Polish stage group imitates Hitler to enable the escape of the troupe to England. In the opening scenes of Citizen Kane (1941), Charles Foster Kane is described and shown as supporting, then denouncing Hitler.

Apart from Hollywood films, Hitler was the subject for several comic book superheroes who battled Hitler directly or indirectly in comics published during World War II. Superheroes that combated Hitler include Superman, Captain America, The Shield, and Namor the Sub-Mariner. Captain America's archenemy, Red Skull, was established as being an apprentice to Hitler himself.

Hitler was mocked in satirical folk songs such as "Stalin Wasn't Stallin'" or when new lyrics were created to old songs such as "Hitler Has Only Got One Ball" (to the tune of the "Colonel Bogey March").

Representations of Hitler after his death

After his death, Hitler continued to be depicted as incompetent or foolish. However, while Hitler's anti-Semitic policies were well known during his lifetime, it was only after his death that the full horrors of the Holocaust became known. This, coupled with Hitler no longer being a threat, has meant that the way he is depicted in popular culture has resulted in Hitler being considered evil personified.

There are two notable examples of films depicting the early life of Hitler and his rise to power. The 2002 film Max stars Noah Taylor as Hitler during his days as a failed artist in Munich just after World War I. John Cusack plays the title character, Max Rothman, a Jewish art dealer who takes Hitler under his wing out of pity, only to find that the angry young loner is becoming dangerously popular as the rabidly anti-Semitic speaker for the emerging German Worker's Party (which later became the Nazi Party). The 2003 television film Hitler: The Rise of Evil stars Robert Carlyle in the title role and depicts a semi-fictional account of Hitler's life from childhood to the new position of Führer und Reichskanzler, completing his ascension to full totalitarian, dictatorial power in Germany.

Moloch (1999), directed by Alexander Sokurov, starring Leonid Mozgovoy, deals with Hitler's life on his Berghof mountain retreat near Berchtesgaden during the war, drawing heavily from Hitler's Table Talk published after the war.

Hitler's last days have been depicted in several films, first in Der letzte Akt (1955), directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst, starring Albin Skoda as the dictator; next was the fifth and final installment of the Soviet movie series Освобождение ("Liberation", 1969-72), directed by Yuri Ozerov, starring Fritz Diez (an actor who commonly portrayed Hitler in a number of East German films from 1955 onwards). The Death of Adolf Hitler, a British (7 January 1973) made-for-television production, starring Frank Finlay in the title role, and Hitler: The Last Ten Days (1973), directed by Ennio de Concini, starring Sir Alec Guinness were the first Western contributions. The fifth iteration was the U.S. television film The Bunker (1981), directed by George Schaefer, starring Sir Anthony Hopkins. Finally, there was the academy award nominated Downfall (2004), directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel and starring Bruno Ganz as Hitler. Similarly depicting Hitler's final hour in the bunker, the grotesque short film Hundert Jahre Adolf Hitler - Die letzte Stunde im Führerbunker (1989), directed by Christoph Schlingensief, starring Udo Kier, cannot be considered a remake of the above films in the proper sense.

A more recent example of Hitler representations are comedy films such as Mel Brooks' comedy The Producers featured a satirical play-within-a-play called Springtime for Hitler, featuring dancing Nazis and songs about the conquest of Europe. Brooks' later comedy, History of the World, Part I, featured "Hitler on Ice." Hitler was also portrayed in the film Valkyrie by David Bamber, which tells the story of the July 1944 bomb attempt on his life.

Hitler has also been portrayed in experimental films. Hitler: A Film from Germany (1978), a 4-part, 442-minute experimental film on Hitler, directed by Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, starring Heinz Schubert. A similar non-linear approach to Syberberg's, likening Hitler to a movie director as well, was used in the film The Empty Mirror (1996), directed by Barry J. Hershey, starring Norman Rodway, speculating what if Hitler had survived WWII, lives in a secret subterranean bunker, and is today undergoing psychoanalysis conducted by Sigmund Freud.

Hitler in fiction

WorldCat lists 553 published books under this heading [1].

Novels

Ron Hansen's historical fiction novel Hitler's Niece parallels Hitler's rise to power in the 1920s and 30s with his relationship with his niece (and secret mistress) Geli Raubal.

Hitler appears in many alternate history novels such as Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle. In this book Hitler, after being stricken by the later stages of syphilis, was confined to a lunatic asylum shortly after WWII, and his place taken by Martin Bormann and, later, Joseph Goebbels and possibly Reinhard Heydrich. In the Settling Accounts tetralogy of Harry Turtledove's Timeline-191 series of alternate history novels, Hitler is still a sergeant in the German Army due to the German Empire's victory in World War I, but a character named Jake Featherston, the dictatorial President of the Confederate States of America, assumes a role similar to the real-life Hitler's. In the controversial novella The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. by George Steiner Hitler survives the end of the war and escapes to the Amazon jungle -- where he is found and tried by Nazi-hunters thirty years later. Hitler's defence is that since Israel owes its existence to the Holocaust, he is really the benefactor of the Jews. In Irving Wallace's The Seventh Secret (1985), Hitler and Eva Braun survive World War II by having doubles (a comedian named Manfred Müller and his girlfriend) murdered in their place (by Martin Bormann and others) staging the murder to look like suicide. In the Doctor Who Past Doctor Adventures novel The Shadow in the Glass, the Sixth Doctor and Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart discover the existence of a Fourth Reich led by Hitler's son, Eva Braun having been smuggled away to give birth and a double killed in her place. At the conclusion of the novel the Fourth Reich's threat is ended when Hitler's son forces the Doctor to take him back in time to meet his father, only for Hitler to shoot his son in the head in the belief that he is nothing but a madman. The Seventh Doctor also met Hitler in the Virgin New Adventures novel Timewyrm: Exodus, where Hitler was briefly possessed by the powerful being known as the Timewyrm, learning to control its power before the Doctor tricked Hitler into banishing it by claiming that it was doing nothing to help him.

In the novel The Berkut, Hitler is revealed to have faked his own death after staging an elaborate deception, making it appear as if he had Parkinson's disease, and then having a double apparently commit suicide in his place. Hitler escapes from Berlin with the aid of an SS-colonel and is eventually tracked down by a Russian squad of secret agents. He is captured alive, taken to Moscow, and kept in a cage beneath the Kremlin for Stalin's amusement. Shortly after Stalin's death, Hitler is executed. A similar approach is taken by Ira Levin in The Boys from Brazil, where it's revealed that Hitler conspired with Josef Mengele to clone himself prior to his death. Using Hitler's blood, Mengele begins a project in the 1960s to clone several Hitlers and distribute the Hitler infants to families similar to that of th original. Mengele later attempts to recreate the sociological environment of Hitler's youth, beginning with killing the fathers of all the Hitler clones. Mengele's plan is to eventually create a second Hitler who will come of age in the 21st century and establish the Fourth Reich.

Forged journals of Hitler, known as the Hitler Diaries, were published in Germany by the magazine Stern in 1983.

Theatre

Hitler made it on the stage through Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima. He wrote a play called My Friend Hitler (Tonari no Hitora), retelling the Night of the Long Knives in 1934. Moreover, the Hungarian writer George Tabori wrote a comedy called Mein Kampf which portrayed Hitler as a poor young man who enters Vienna, wanting to become an artist. Hitler appears as a minor character in Stanley Eveling's The Dead of Night, set above the Führerbunker as the Russians are entering Berlin.

Film

Many popular films deal with Hitler. In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) is disguised as a German officer while trying to retrieve his father's Grail diary. Pushed backwards by the crowd, he bumps into Hitler (played by Michael Sheard), who, not recognizing the significance of the diary, signs his name in it, thinking the "officer" wanted his autograph. The thriller The Boys from Brazil (1978), starring Laurence Olivier and Gregory Peck centres around a plot by Nazi fugitives to clone Hitler. Molokh is a film from 1999 by Alexander Sokourov depicting 24 hours in Hitler's personal life. It won the Best Screenplay award that year at Cannes. A science fiction film entitled They Saved Hitler's Brain deals with the titular brain, encased in a tank to continue the Nazi regime after the end of World War II. In Dragon Ball Z: Fusion Reborn Hitler escapes from Hell and attempts to take over a city; he is quickly subdued by Gotenks. He is referred to as "The Dictator" in the English dub. Hitler also appears in Fullmetal Alchemist the Movie: Conqueror of Shamballa preparing for his first attempt to rise the Nazi movement to power. Little Nicky, starring Adam Sandler, receiving punishment in hell for his crimes on Earth. The first punishment- featuring him dressed in a maid's uniform- was having a pineapple shoved up his rectum. The second is along the same lines, but involves two of the main characters being trapped in a bottle which is used instead of the pineapple. Also, in the movie Inglourious Basterds, Hitler is shown to be assassinated by two members of the "Basterds" while in the opera box of a theater in Nazi-occupied France.

Television

Comedy

Some South Park episodes deal with the subject such as "The Passion of the Jew". It revolves around Eric Cartman pretending to be Hitler (as he sees him as his idol, quoting in "Make Love, Not Warcraft"; "If you could go back in time and stop Hitler, you would right? I personally wouldn't because I think he was awesome but...") and also dressing like Hitler for Halloween in the episode "Pinkeye". Cartman has a picture of Hitler in his attic in the episode "Major Boobage". A fictional version of Hitler sings a Christmas song in "Mr. Hankey's Christmas Classics".

Hilter (sic) is featured in a Monty Python sketch as staying with his friends Ron (Ribbentrop) and Reg (Himmler) at a boarding house in Somerset and being introduced to other guests by the landlady as they plot the reunification of Taunton and Minehead.

The Simpsons deal with the subject in a couple of episodes. In The Curse of the Flying Hellfish, Sergeant Abraham Simpson attempts to assassinate Hitler, but is thwarted when a tennis ball flying off a racket spoils his aim, resulting only in Hitler's hat being set spinning. In the episode Bart vs. Australia, it is suggested that Hitler is still alive and living in Chile when Bart randomly makes a collect call to his car phone. Hitler, heading to his car, tries to get to his phone but doesn't answer it in time, then exclaims, "Ach! Das Wagen-phone ist ein... Nuisancephone!" A German officer riding past on a bike acknowledges him with "buenos noches, mein Führer."In "Viva Ned Flanders Homer states that Hitler and Barney Gumble share the same birthdate (April 20)

Futurama contains several references. In the episode A Clone of My Own, the Professor regards the public as being hypocritical for being in favor of saving Hitler's brain, but transplanting it into the body of a great white shark is "suddenly going too far". In the episode The Honking, Calculon claims Project Satan was built with the most evil parts of the most evil people's cars, including Hitler's steering wheel. In the episode I Dated a Robot, an in-universe episode of The Scary Door features a man who suddenly becomes Hitler, parodying the episode The Man in the Bottle of The Twilight Zone.

In the Australian sitcom DAAS Kapital, the Doug Anthony All Stars perform their song Mexican Hitler as one character hallucinates that he is a Mexican version of the Führer.

In the BBC comedy Bottom one of the main characters was named "Edward Elizabeth Hitler". When asked if he was any relation to Adolf Hitler, Eddie replied on one occasion that Adolf Hitler had been his mother.

Heil Honey I'm Home! was a controversial 50s-styled British sitcom about Hitler and Eva Braun living in suburbia, with Jewish next door neighbors. Eight episodes were produced, but only one, the pilot, was ever broadcast (in 1990), as both television executives and the viewers alike thought the show in deplorably bad taste.

Hitler was prominently featured in various other episodes and sketches such as Histeria!, Family Guy, Red Dwarf, Hey Arnold! or the Mexican TV superhero comedy El Chapulin Colorado.

Twilight Zone

The Twilight Zone included Hitler on several occasions.

In the episode "He's Alive," the ghost of Hitler tutors a neo-Nazi (Dennis Hopper) in rabble-rousing techniques. In "The Man in the Bottle," a man (Luther Adler) who has been granted four wishes by a genie attempts to find a way to wish himself into a position of wealth and power as a head of state who cannot be voted out of office, only to find he is Hitler and it is the end of World War II, with an SS officer handing him a bottle of cyanide "for you and Miss Braun." Shaking in horror, the man quickly uses his final wish to be restored to normal. A time traveller (Dana Andrews) tries to alter the past in several ways in "No Time Like the Past," including an attempt to assassinate Hitler in 1939. He is thwarted when a suspicious maid brings the authorities to his hotel room. The episode features newsreel footage of the real Hitler.

In a similar fashion, an episode of the 2002 Twilight Zone entitled "Cradle of Darkness" features a time traveller (Katherine Heigl) going back in time to kill Hitler as an infant. The time traveller kidnaps the infant Hitler and leaps from a bridge, killing herself and the baby. A horrified housekeeper, who has been following her and had witnessed the murder, does not tell Hitler's parents because of fear of death as punishment, but rather bribes a homeless woman to sell her baby. The baby is then returned to the Hitler household where he takes the place of the murdered infant, growing up to become the Hitler that the world knew.

Other

Hitler appears in the three-parter episode of Justice League entitled "The Savage Time," where he is overthrown and cryogenically frozen by Vandal Savage, Savage having learned of how to win the war from his future self. After Savage is defeated by the Justice League, Hitler is thawed and reinstated as Germany's dictator. In the animated series Code Monkeys, Hitler is also cryogenically frozen and is kept secret by the Hitler Family, and the Gamevision crew is invited there because of the game that Dave makes. Dave and Black Steve accidentally unfreeze Hitler, and they torture him by urinating on him. Hitler is then killed. In The Critic episode Dial 'M' for Mother, title character Jay Sherman is rated "worse than Hitler" by a test audience complete with members wondering if Hitler were "in a band." In an episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force called Der Inflatable Fuhrer, Frylock makes a virus that Hitler, turned into a living balloon, wishes to use to kill the Jews. When the Aqua Teens reveal to him that some of his favorite actors are Jewish, he renounces his hatred for them and chooses to destroy the Gays instead. In episode 26 of the Japanese Tokusatsu show, Kamen Rider X, the titular hero battles a Kaijin named Starfish Hitler. The monster is literally a humanoid starfish with features resembling Adolf Hitler, including an imitation of Hitler's moustache, an army hat and a Swastika in its chest. The monster's name is a pun with the Japanese word for starfish, "Hitode": The monster's japanese name is "Hitode Hittora".

Video games

In many different video games Hitler appears, but with varying significance and roles.

The point and click adaptation of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade features an interactive meeting between the player and Adolf Hitler. The player can ask Hitler to give him an autograph on a book or a free pass, or can punch Hitler (which results in Indiana's death). Wolfenstein 3D features Hitler as the third boss. He battles first wearing a mechanical battlesuit, then later carries two miniguns after the suit is heavily damaged. In the Japanese version of the NES game Bionic Commando, the main character has to fight futuristic Nazis. The last boss of the game is Hitler, who is resurrected by evil scientists. In the US version of the game, the name of the boss was changed to Master-D, although he still resembles Hitler. In the modern remake Bionic Commando: Rearmed, the same character appears and though still clearly resembling Hitler, is never named. Hitler is the main antagonist in Operation Darkness as well as the PlayStation game Persona 2 as a major antagonist.

Small roles for Hitler are in Snoopy vs. the Red Baron (Hitler as a sidekick for Paul von Hindenburg), the game series Medal of Honor (Hitler in the opening sequence of Medal of Honor: Frontline) and in the Famicom Disk System game Time Twist: Rekishi no Katasumi de....

The idea of alternate reality is picked up for example in the PC video game series Command & Conquer: Red Alert. Here the world-renowned physicist Albert Einstein had traveled back in time and chronoshifted (or "deleted from time") Hitler before his rise to power. The resulting power vacuum led to the Soviet Union invading Europe with Joseph Stalin assuming a role very similar to Hitler's. Ironically the General who gives the player's orders in the FMA is a German general. In the PC video game War Front: Turning Point, Hitler is killed in the early days of World War II. A new chancellor comes to power and under his rule, Operation Sealion succeeds and Nazi Germany successfully conquers Britain.

Hitler is represented, along with other historial WW2 characters in the Heart of Iron PC trilogy

Players can create and use "Hitler-like" Miis on the Nintendo Wii in certain games such as Wii Sports. However, Nintendo banned Hitler-like Miis, or Miis that are even named "Hitler", from playing online in Mario Kart Wii. The recent update on the Xbox 360 can have players create avatars that also can resemble Hitler. So far, Microsoft has not banned anyone from using Hitler-like avatars.

Comics and cartoons

DC Comics feature Hitler on a couple of occasions. The character known as Unknown Soldier kills Hitler, impersonates him for a short time, then pretends his death was a suicide. In Adventures of the Outsiders #33-35, a clone of Hitler is created by Baron Bedlam. Planning to give the clone the same persona as the original, Bedlam gives him a mentally retarded Jewish maid, several films of the Holocaust, and a handgun, Bedlam's intention being for the clone to embrace Nazism and ultimately murder the maid to "prove himself" as Hitler. However, the clone, realizing his connection to the atrocities he views, instead commits suicide. In DC Comics' Elseworlds imprint, The Golden Age, Hitler's brain is successfully transplanted into the brain pan of Dyna-Mite. Now pretending to be a superhero called Dynaman, he plots in resurrecting Nazi ideals with the aid of the Ultra Humanite.

In the comic book The Savage Dragon by Erik Larsen (published by Image Comics), it is revealed that Hitler did not die in 1945, but after a fight against Hellboy in Romania in 1952. His body ruined, the brain is transplanted to the body of a large gorilla. Suffering amnesia and calling himself Brainiape, the chimera possesses great psionic powers and joins the Chicago, IL criminal organization known as the Vicious Circle, eventually becoming its leader. He remembers his past only in 1996 when he encounters Hellboy again, alongside the Vicious Circle's enemy, the policeman called Dragon. The ape body is killed, and it is revealed that Hitler's brain had mutated and could live unaided by any technology or host body, ambulatory on tiny legs.

Marvel Comics's villain Hate-Monger is revealed to be the consciousness of Hitler transferred to a cloned body. Rather than committing suicide, he is confronted by the Human Torch and his sidekick Toro after Eva Braun commits suicide. The two heroes set Hitler ablaze as he attempts to set off a bomb. As he dies, he commands one of his loyal followers nearby to tell the world he had committed suicide.

From Hell by Alan Moore depicts Klara Hitler as having visions of the Holocaust during Hitler's conception.

In the Spanish comic series Hitler (1978), published in Spain by Mercocomic and in France by Elvifrance, Hitler fakes his death by using a double, escapes Germany along with Martin Bormann (both disguised as Russian soldiers), then suffers from amnesia and, of all things, becomes an agent of the KGB with the mission of hunting down Nazis. Later on in the story, he recovers his memory and ends up in an asylum for the mentally disturbed.

The New Adventures of Hitler by Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell deals with the idea that Hitler stayed in Liverpool, based on rumors that he visited local family members like William Patrick Hitler.

Steve Yeowell's cover to Crisis #48

*There is a well-known German satirical comic book Adolf, die Nazisau (Adolf, the Nazi pig), an absurd interpretation of Adolf Hitler in today's world, by Walter Moers.

Other examples of Hitler in comics includes Osamu Tezuka's manga Adolf (Hitler is one of the three men named Adolf around which the story revolves), the Mexican comic book series Fantômas (in which a multi-part storyline titled "The Son of Hitler" has the son of Hitler and Eva Braun raise a Fourth Reich that conquers France) and Spriggan (Neo-Nazis use clones of Hitler in order to gain access to a hidden stash of ancient artifacts somewhere in Europe by using the Holy Grail in order for his soul to enter the clone and led the Neo-Nazi remnants to its locations).

Warner Bros. produced wartime cartoons which constantly parodied Hitler and his personality traits and quirks. Most (if not all) cartoons with Hitler and the Nazis as the antagonists ended up with the American hero cartoon character (such as Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck) making a mockery out of Hitler and his people.

Hitler in Music

Many songs tell a story about Hitler one way or the other, for example "Gotterdammerung" by Stratovarius directly mentions the history of Hitler and the Nazi regime. "Quicksand" from the LP Hunky Dory by David Bowie is a song about a heart-broken Nazi after Hitler's death. Bowie has also been quoted saying "Hitler was the first rock star" and, at one time, wanted to direct a film based on the life of Heinrich Himmler. "Heads We're Dancing" by Kate Bush tells the story of a woman who dances all night with a charming stranger, only to discover the following morning that he is Adolf Hitler. Texas Groove metal band Pantera wrote and recorded a song called "By Demons Be Driven". It tells the story of how Hitler was plagued by paranoia and began to hate the Jewish people and religion. Australian band TISM's debut single was Defecate on My Face, which was about Adolf Hitler's supposed coprophilia. Australian comedy troupe the Doug Anthony Allstars had a song called Mexican Hitler, which told the story of what Hitler would have been like if he was born Mexican. It made an appearance in their television show, DAAS Kapital. The song "Hitler as Kalki" by apocalyptic folk band Current 93 makes use of Savitri Devi's idea that Hitler was an avatar of the Hindu god Kalki. "Two Little Hitlers" by Elvis Costello, superficially a song about a loveless couple but reportedly a real-life reflection of the relationship between the singer and his producer Nick Lowe (who had previously recorded a song entitled "Little Hitler", the similarities leading to speculations about the origins of the later song) on the album Armed Forces.

Other songs take a more serious approach and deal with Hitler's impact on the world. Thrash metal group Flotsam and Jetsam recorded the song "Der Fuhrer" for their album Doomsday for the Deceiver. The song discusses the devastation Hitler caused in Europe. New York metal band Anthrax recorded the song "The Enemy" for their album Spreading the Disease. The song discusses Hitler's role in the Holocaust.

There are some examples of parodies involving Hitler. "Der Fuehrer's Face" is an elaborate parody on Nazism created by musical comedian Spike Jones. It is one of his most well-known tunes. A novelty rap song entitled "To Be or Not to Be (The Hitler Rap)" performed by Mel Brooks is on the movie To Be or Not to Be's soundtrack album, but it was not in the movie itself.

Hitler as Internet Meme

Thanks to YouTube and other video sites, parodic clips from the 2004 film Downfall have proliferated internationally. They are subtitled with references to Hitler getting angry about Australian Rules Football, online gaming, gridiron football, X-Box Live, the downfall of Morris Iemma, the Vancouver Canucks signing of Mats Sundin and other events - this meme is current in August 2009. The phenomenon started in English but has spread to other languages including Dutch, Spanish,Portuguese, Malaysian and Bulgarian (It was used to ridicule Bulgarian president Georgi Parvanov for being a State Security agent during the communist dictatorship and for being a poacher). The most frequently used clip is the scene where Hitler receives news of the advancing Red Army vastly outnumbering the forces commanded by Felix Steiner. However, other clips from Downfall are beginning to appear with subtitles. Some of the parodies turn on surrealism and intentional anachronisms to make a comment on present day subjects, especially the everyday prevalance of failures of computer and internet resources, while other parodies centre more on humorously interpreting events in the bunker on April May 1945. A further driver of the jokes would be collective memories of the overall poor standards of subtitling and dubbing internationally in cinema during the mid twentieth century, especially with low budget films such as the sword and sandal genre or eastern martial arts movies, including poor synchonisation and comically inaccurate translations.

Hitler and Art

During Adolf Hitler's childhood, academics were not his strong point. In grade school, Hitler's grades in Mathematics, Science, History, German, and French were adequate at best and this greatly displeased his father, Alois Schickelgruber. However, in the early 1900s Adolf Hitler showed an interest in art and began to excel very quickly. Hitler's average grades were good enough to get him accepted in a university preparatory "gymnasium" or the technical/scientific, Realschule. He chose Realschule because they offered a course in drawing. In 1906, Adolf was permitted to visit Vienna, but he was unable to gain admission to their prestigious art school. None the less, this did not stop him from creating more works of art. Hitler went on to produce many drawings throughout his life. An auction was held on April 23, 2009 for works that Hitler had painted. It was estimated that his paintings would raise $50,000 but to many people's surprise, his paintings generated over $120,000.

One of the more unusual late works of Salvador Dalí was Hitler Masturbating (1973), depicting just that in the center of a desolate landscape. Dali also painted The Enigma of Hitler (1939) and Metamorphosis of the Face of Hitler into a Moonlit Landscape (1958).

Hitler is depicted in a balloon overlooking marching, helmeted troops in the painting “Vision of War” by Indian artist A. Ramachandran. Though most of the imagery of the work (which is in two parts, a sculpture/installation of Ashoka is the other) is from the Mauryan period of Indian history, the painting is one of the rare instances in later 20th century Indian art which references Hitler.

Other

• "Adolph Hitler" was the name of Linda Lovelace's cat.
• A feline version of Hitler appears on posters in the comic strip Maus.
• In a satirical routine on one edition of The Daily Show, Stephen Colbert tells Jon Stewart his name is actually Ted Hitler, and that Adolf Hitler is his grandfather.
• The website Cats That Look Like Hitler features pictures of cats that bear some resemblance to the German leader.
• Godwin's Law states that "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one". From this is derived an additional formulation, also encountered online, which states that "The first person to mention the Third Reich automatically loses the argument".

General References

• Faschismus in der populären Kultur [Fascism in popular culture] by Georg Seesslen Berlin : Edition Tiamat, 1994-1996. ISBN 3923118244, OCLC: 80476144
• The world Hitler never made : alternate history and the memory of Nazism by Gavriel David Rosenfeld. Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2005. ISBN 0521847060 OCLC: 58052431
• Hitler's imagery and German youth by Erik H Erikson; Berkeley, Calif. : Institute of Child Welfare, University of California, 1940-1950? OCLC: 26533155