Historical fiction goes back to the time of Shakespeare, and even The Bible. Historical fiction allows the artist to fill in the unrecorded pieces, add conversations that were previously left to speculation, or in some cases, simply invent new scenes or alternate realities to the events that occurred. As escapism, historical fiction is a way for people to experience the event through a different perspective, or ground an unrelated story in something that’s relatable, or provide a different context. In other cases, it may be to simply be a way to flesh out a different version of what really happened. With The Holocaust and events of World War 2 being such a horrible part of recent history, fiction in those settings presents a challenge, unlike other events. I’m going to review several examples of how this did and didn’t work with comic books, movies, and TV shows.
One of the earliest examples of WW2 fiction was presented in comic books. Jewish comic book writer and artist team Joe Simon and Jack Kirby created Captain America back in 1940. The first issue, published March 1941, featured the iconic image of the title character punching Hitler in the jaw! The issue sold more than a million copies, but the attack on Hitler exists only on the cover, and the Fuhrer is nowhere present in the book, which features silly stories about Germany infiltrating the US Army to blow up our munitions dumps. The Punching Hitler cover was copied on numerous other comics books (which you can see on this blog entry I wrote). With Hitler being knocked out so many times, you’d think just one of these heroes would have taken the time to put him in jail or even kill him in order to prevent him from committing further atrocities. As far as preventing The Holocaust goes, superheroes were rather ineffective.
Hitler helped sell comic books deep into the ‘80s, with this issue of Fantastic Four #292 by John Byrne, which featured the time tested going back in time to kill Hitler motif (since Captain America never got around to doing it). In this issue, Nick Fury (originally in the Jack Kirby co-created Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos) is thrown back to 1936 and despite warnings of changing the future beyond repair, he kills him. If you prevent Hitler from starting The Holocaust in fiction, how do you reconcile that with the reality that it did happen? The simple answer is, you can’t. At the end of this comic, we see that the whole incident was the reality-warping vision of a man in a coma.
The Twilight Zone episode “The Cradle of Darkness” from 2002
This problem was later explored in an episode of The Twilight Zone that was rebooted in 2002 called “The Cradle of Darkness.” The protagonist is sent back in time to kill Hitler as a baby. She actually accomplishes this, but the nanny ends up buying a baby from a homeless woman (who ironically happens to be Jewish) and he grows up to be Adolf Hitler, anyway, showing you that his horribly racist father was going to turn his kid into a monster no matter who it was. Forrest Whittaker’s narration (now serving in the Rod Serling role) closes out the episode with, “A moment of silence for Andrea Collins. She sacrificed her life for the good of mankind, but she also created the very monster she sought to destroy. History can never be changed, not even in The Twilight Zone.”
Sacramento comedian Chazz Hawkins has a great joke where he says the problem with going back in time to kill Hitler is that you come back and say, “Hey, I just killed Hitler!” then everybody would just say, “Who?”
With films like Inglorious Basterds and series like The Man In The High Tower and the Amazon series Hunters, we see stories that are based on actual events, but highly fictionalized. Quentin Tarantino’s Basterds ends with Hitler getting point-blank shot in the face with automatic rifles. It’s interesting to compare this to comic book characters punching Hitler during the actual time of the war. Hitler was being attacked in comic books while still alive, so you could never really kill him off while he lived on in reality killing more people. Inglourious Basterds, filmed nearly 50 years after Hitler died, lets the protagonists steal his cowardly suicide and give him a more gruesome and deserving end. Paul Hockenos wrote in a piece for Public Radio International back in 2009 suggesting that Hitler’s grisly demise was not only a revenge fantasy for Jewish people but a cleansing for Germans that were ashamed of their past.
“Hurray! They’re torched!” wrote one reviewer from the weekly Die Zeit about the final scene, when Hitler, Goebbels, & Co. are incinerated in a Paris cinema. This writer saw the film not as one solely of Jewish retribution but as a revenge fantasy for Germans born since the war who have been made to feel guilty for a war and crimes that they had no part in. No wonder everyone clapped, concluded one reviewer: “For postwar Germans the story is an orgy of self-righteousness.” One of Germany’s foremost critics, Georg Seesslen in the magazine Der Spiegel, noted that “Inglourious Basterds” was the first film to actually show Hitler die. Why, he asks, had no one ever thought of killing off Hitler on the silver screen? By the end of “Inglourious Basterds,” he wrote, Hitler is “more than dead. He is kaputt — all shot up, burned and chopped to pieces.” All other films symbolically left the book open, thus turning Hitler’s evil itself into a spectre that never perished. By implication, Germany could never be “normal” because Hitler lived on, at least on film.” (https://www.pri.org/stories/2009-09-04/germans-surprising-reaction-inglourious-basterds)
Some works of fiction that portray Nazis often ignore The Holocaust completely. The Nazis in the TV Show “Hogan’s Heroes” were portrayed as laughable, and the living condition of Hogan and his jovial crew was better than many people living in poverty. It’s clearly not the type of show that could exist anymore.
Heil Honey, I’m Home was an ill-conceived sitcom that never made it past the broadcast pilot episode when the British TV station Galaxy aired it in 1990. Despite the attempt by the show’s creator to make Hitler the butt of the joke as satire, critics agreed it simply wasn’t clever enough or well made to pull it off. David Hawkes wrote in Comedy: A Geographic and Historical Guide (2005) that it “disastrously exceeded” the limits of its irony. Simply having Hitler act like a buffoon around his Jewish neighbors doesn’t mean you can easily ignore the fact that he killed millions. (https://definition.org/hitler-inspired-1990-sitcom-heil-honey-im-home-cancelled-one-episode/)
Jerry Lewis was aware of this when he wrote, directed, and starred in The Day The Clown Cried in 1972. The film featured a clown named Helmut Doork who was put into a concentration camp and decides to entertain the doomed children that are there. Legal and financial disputes kept the movie from being finished and released, but Lewis was able to give a copy to The Library of Congress with the stipulation that it can’t be screened prior to 2024. Lewis told Entertainment Weekly in a 2013 interview, “For it to become what it has become seems unfair—unfair to the project and unfair to my good intentions.” Clown’s infamy has grown so large, he added, that it now has to be either “better than Citizen Kane or the worst piece of shit that anyone ever loaded on the projector.”
It’s interesting that the eerily similar themed Life is Beautiful by Roberto Begnini was released in 1997 with little controversy and an Academy Award to show for it. 13 years later, we see Taiki Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit get nominated for 5 Oscars. While both of these films were grounded in reality, Jojo evades the trouble of a fictional version of Hitler by making him the imaginary friend of the title character. There’s a climactic scene where Jojo shouts “Fuck off, Hitler” before cartoonishly kicking him through a window. it’s the first issue of Captain America all over again.
It’s fascinating to me to think about how Jewish film director Stephen Spielberg has covered events of World War 2 in such a wide range of movies. While the acclaimed historical biopic Schindler’s List largely sticks to accurate actual events, his Indiana Jones films uses the Nazis as the cartoonish bad guys in both Raiders of The Lost Ark, and Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade. Raiders takes place in 1936 alongside the actual time that Jews in Germany were beginning to be expelled from public life. It’s weird to think about how Dr. Jones had to get The Ark of The Covenant to keep the Nazis from destroying humanity, while they were already doing it with non-magical means. In the third film, Jones even confronts Hitler at a book burning in an almost Forrest Gump right place/right time moment. He could have blown Hitler’s brains out then and there. So what’s worse? Indiana Jones existing in a cinematic world with Hitler where he’s allowed to thrive and continue to commit atrocities, or the fantasy of Inglorious Basterds taking care of business. Jones can’t kill Hitler, of course, because The Holocaust hadn’t even occurred yet in that timeline, and doing so could be considered erasing actual tragedy.
Amazon’s Hunters featuring Italian Al Pacino as a grizzled Holocaust survivor gets around this by having it set in ‘70s New York City. Pacino leads a cartoonish team of assassins that are loosely based on actual Nazi Hunters of the time, but it’s also set in an alternate reality where Nazis have infiltrated every level of government and are in positions of power. It is odd to see the different characters have flashbacks of horrible experiences in the camps at the hands of the Nazis. It, of course, serves as the reason you can cheer for their gruesome deaths once the assassins find them, but their fictional backstories are interesting to consider when thousands of real ones are there to be told as well.
Of course, nearly all historical events have a nearly countless array of fictional variants, but few have the dread of something like The Holocaust. Is it OK if a work doesn’t discount the subject matter it fictionalizes? Is the creation of Jewish superheroes just a cathartic way to fictionally destroy an enemy that the real-life world took too long to eliminate? I think there’s room for both fiction and reality, as long as it doesn’t distort the evil side in a way to make you disbelieve what really happened.
Let’s keep punching Hitler, shall we?