The World’s Dumbest Hitler Documentary

N ormally you’d have to go to an idiots’ roost such as an undergraduate politics seminar, or CNN, to find a series of thoughts as hyperbolic and inane as those presented in The Meaning of Hitler, the new Donald Trump documentary.

After six years of outlandish Hitler–Trump comparisons, I was looking forward to a film that might recenter us all on the actual Nazi horror show, to which nothing can be compared except other gargantuan acts of mass murder carried out by Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. Instead, I had scarcely settled in my chair before I heard Martin Amis telling me, “We might as well get on with [Hitler’s] similarities with Trump.” Amis is a towering intellectual who has studied Hitlerism and Stalinism extensively and written books on each, and he has absolutely no excuse for trivializing the Shoah like this. Amis goes on to cite these two Hitler–Trump similarities: “fanatical cleanliness . . . and of course lying is another.”

No. What made Hitler Hitler was not his fanatical cleanliness, nor even his lying: It was ferocious anti-Semitism, perpetration of genocide, and causing the worst war in history. If germophobia were the most salient fact about Hitler, then Gwyneth Paltrow is much like Hitler. You might as well say George Bernard Shaw was much like Hitler because they were both vegetarians, or Charlie Chaplin was much like Hitler in upper-lip accessories.

As for the lying, well. The single most consequential piece of legislation passed in the U.S. this century was passed on the basis of a lie. Joe Biden is a prolific liar. Lying is common among politicians. Hitler is not common. Why is it so hard for otherwise intelligent people to understand that Hitler is not to be compared with almost anyone?

Throughout this incandescently stupid film, which nearly qualifies as an unintended mockumentary given its Voxian flair for drawing inferences only a juicebox pundit would make, interviews with serious historians are followed up with clips of Trump speeches from an entirely different moral universe. You would think that this utterly fatuous and offensive comparison would have expired now that Trump has come and gone without liquidating any peoples or launching any wars. Yet the film reveals a narcissistically juvenile tendency to make everything that has ever happened about ourselves. As though we who are living through the third decade of the 21st century have any business whatsoever measuring our complaints against those of Europe in the 1930s and ’40s.

Near the start of this moronic inferno, blunderingly directed by Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker from a book by Sebastian Haffner, we are treated to a clip of Sarah Silverman, dressed as Hitler and showering compliments on Trump: “90 percent of what he says, I’m like, this guy gets it!” We are told that Hitler was, like Trump, a “radical loser” (oh, also like Hillary Clinton?) and that his project was, like Trump’s, to radicalize his and his followers’ perceived victimhood. Could that not be said also of Stacey Abrams, who still won’t concede defeat in an election she lost by 55,000 votes?

If there’s one thing that’s the opposite of unique in our political discussions today, it’s that absolutely everyone feels like a victim, from the coal miner to Kamala. Having a victim complex is not what made Hitler unique either. To make such claims is to trivialize Hitler and a disgrace to the usage of history. Even when the film has something interesting to note, as when an expert explains how then-nascent microphone technology allowed Hitler to move around and gesture as he made speeches without loss of sound, it then steers directly into a narrative wall, cutting to Trump bragging about his use of Twitter. Hitler’s radio = Trump’s Twitter. Sure. And Treblinka was much like that nine-day period when Jim Acosta had his White House press pass yanked.

Occasionally the documentary stumbles close to the truth without realizing it, as when a historian notes the many psychiatric diagnoses that have been applied to der Führer: The filmmakers seem not to know that the same thing has happened to Trump, which casts doubt on the usefulness of such exercises. The movie also notes that when Hitler first became chancellor, he enjoyed broad support from the elites, notably the doctors, lawyers, and engineers. It is left to the viewer to say, “Hey, wait a minute, that’s exactly the opposite of what happened with Trump.”

In one of many strange asides, the movie asks with a sense of wounded outrage why Hitler is “always allowed to die on his own terms” in Hollywood movies. Well, perhaps that is because Hitler did, in fact, die on his own terms, and only a fantasy (such as Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds) can show him getting machine-gunned to death by American troops. Another aside suggests, absurdly, that rightist movements in Poland and Hungary are indicators that Nazism is coming back, though there is simply no comparison between Europe today and Europe under the Third Reich.

Another segment is a dire warning centered on attention-seeking kids doing neo-Nazi shtick in video clips that exist only to elicit outrage. Several minutes are wasted on the crackpot historian David Irving, who became a celebrity when Kurt Vonnegut, in the 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five, promoted his false analysis of the bombing of Dresden but who for many years has not been taken seriously by anyone except neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers. Irving continues to spew vile lies about the Holocaust. Why give him a platform?

Wrapping things up as nonsensically as they began, the filmmakers pivot to eerie footage taken last year during the pandemic in New York City, where they sent a crew to cruise around a deserted Times Square because . . . huh? Why toss in this compelling but entirely irrelevant imagery? What does it have to do with Hitler? A narrator says, “It took a catastrophe to see the obvious. Never has age and experience felt so precious.” So the point is, I guess, that we never appreciated old people such as the historians interviewed in the film before. Speak for yourself, filmmakers. All the people I know already love their grandma and grandpa.