Nazi Protagonist

In which "eminently reasonable" men do paperwork, present reports, eat cake, and plan a genocide.

Although Nazi Germany and individuals affiliated with the Nazi regime are typically cast as villains (and for good reason), there are occasional works of fiction where a Nazi, or a person who is associated with the Nazi-era German government or military, is the protagonist, rather than an antagonist. On occasion, the character in question is not a villain protagonist — mostly because they're a Nazi in name only, and react to their more objectionable orders by Bothering by the Book or actively fighting from the inside.

They are generally divided into six types:

• The Mole: Someone who signed on to the Nazi party only to sabotage it from within. This type is most likely to get audience sympathy.
• Punch-Clock Villain: A Nazi who does military work fighting the Allies rather than atrocities associated with the Holocaust. He may be primarily a German patriot rather than a Nazi true believer, or he may idolize the Nazi Party but be unaware of the crimes of the Holocaust. Expect Broken Pedestal to come up once he finds out the truth. This type can easily obtain audience sympathy, especially if he isn't aware of the mass deportations of minorities. However, expect more recent movies that try to pull the "totally unaware" shtick to be criticized by historians as pretty much every German knew something was happening to the Jews who "disappeared", and the Wehrmacht specifically was directly involved.
• Dirty Coward: A Nazi involved in or aware of the atrocities who feels what he is doing is wrong but is simply too afraid of what'll happen to him if he goes against orders. The Dirty Coward may receive a little bit of pity, but he is unlikely to get much audience sympathy.
• Opportunistic Bastard: A Nazi involved in or aware of the atrocities who feels no guilt, but has no particular loyalty to the Nazis or their ideology. For him, working for the Nazis is just how you get ahead, and he'll have no compunction about turning coat if the situation changes. He is thus unlikely at best to get audience sympathy, but if he's an otherwise interesting character, he might get the audience's grudging respect. (If he's not, he gets less respect and less sympathy than the Dirty Coward.)
• Villain Protagonist: This guy does all the worst atrocities associated with the Nazi Party and feels no guilt and buys at least partly into the Nazi ideology. Unsurprisingly, they receive all of the audience's hatred. Expect him to die a Karmic Death at the story's end.
• Rage Within the Machine: Sometimes a character will be a Nazi by the technical definition of the term but turn around once he or she finds out what the Nazis are actually doing. This has happened a few times in real life.

Note that this trope is about characters working under the NSDAP of the Third Reich. Someone being a Nazi sympathiser or neo-Nazi does not qualify for this page. Also, remember not All Germans Are Nazis.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• The first "out-of-body" segment of Tezuka's Apollo's Song features the main character Shogo as a Nazi soldier (with another Nazi questioning why an apparent ethnic German has a Japanese name) doing guard duty on a train full of soon-to-be Holocaust victims. He ends up helping a woman escape from them and later kills and is killed by a bunch of other Nazis, then the main part of the real story begins.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Battle Tendency. Rudolf Von Stroheim is not the protagonist, but one of the main good guys in Part 2. Notably, Stroheim isn't part of La Résistance, or otherwise opposing the system from within. Aside from being slightly less racist than your typical Nazi, he's a proud German soldier through and through. However, as there is a far more dangerous enemy present, he counts as one of the protagonists of Part 2 by nature of being an Enemy Mine.
• In K, Klaudia and Adolf K. Weismann were scientists working on a supernatural experiment for the Nazi regime though it's never said out loud. As young science prodigies in Dresden at that time, they couldn't exactly refuse. Adi seems to not know much about what's going on, and he's horrified at the idea of his experiment being used for war. And, thankfully, it isn't finished in time for that. It makes him immortal during the bombing of Dresden, in which Klaudia dies, and he retreats to live alone in a blimp... until the antagonist body-swaps and memory-wipes him and he crashes to Earth in the body of a high school kid in 2013... as the protagonist, Yashiro Isana.
• Kinnikuman: Brockenman certainly wasn't the most heroic of Nazi characters, but Brocken Jr., while first harboring a grudge against Ramenman for killing his father, ends up becoming a valuable ally to the group of heroes.

Comic Books

• The mid-1970s DC Comics story Blitzkrieg follows three German soldiers throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. While they're not explicitly shown to be members of the Nazi party, they're not simply the "just fighting for my country" type either, engaging in various atrocities such as the Malmédy massacre of Allied prisoners of war and the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto. They also hold much of the same racial viewpoints, showing marked disdain for Poles and Jews.
• Caballistics, Inc.: Solomon Ravne is one of the main characters, and an ex-Nazi Mad Scientist. He's even older than that, though...
• Le Voyage de Marcel Grob^TranslationThe Journey of Marcel Grob is a 2019 French graphic novel based on real events, telling the story of the titular Marcel Grob, a seventen years-old Alsacian Malgré-nous who has been forcibly drafted in the Waffen SS in mid-1944, and his tour of duty in Italy a few months later. The Marzabotto massacre plays an important role in the story, Grob took part in it. Another major character is Grob's superior, Untersturmführer Matthias Brehme, who turns out to be a cultured, apolitical, and affable man instead of a brainless fanatic like how Waffen SS are often depicted. The story is told through the Framing Device of an elderly Marcel Grob telling his story to an examining magistrate contributing to an Italian effort to hunt the last nazi war criminals. The author, Philippe Collin, is the grand-nephew of the real Marcel Grob.
• "Master Race", a very famous Bernard Krigstein EC Comics, had, in a Twist Ending, a Nazi war criminal protagonist. Up until that point, you would misidentify him as a Holocaust survivor.
• Garth Ennis' run on Enemy Ace has the titular ace Hans von Hammer, now older, back in the cockpit to fight a losing war against the Soviets as they invade Germany. One day, he's shot down over German-held territory but manages to eject, his parachute landing him in a big compound called Dachau... After he gets back to his squadron, he surrenders to Sgt. Rock.
• Preacher had an escaped Nazi spy living in hiding in the Deep South, extolling the virtues of the American Dream. In a subversion, he was an actual war criminal before coming over. But his desire for atonement is genuine.
• Heinrich Augsberg of Requiem Vampire Knight, who in life was a Nazi soldier who committed many atrocities, but who in the Crapsack World of Resurrection has been reborn as one of the few vampires who still retain some kind of conscience.
• The POV character in the two-page Sin City short story "Rats" is an escaped Nazi war criminal who served in an extermination camp. "Rats" is what he called the Jews he murdered there. At the end, he is killed by a Nazi Hunter.
• work occasionally features Nazi protagonists, in varying shades of moral complexity.
• Thor: Vikings has an Ace Pilot who resents that he's working for a madman, and that his plane has a swastika on it.
• One of Garth Ennis' War Stories, "Condors", had an idealistic German pilot participating in the Spanish Civil War, and told by a Spaniard in no uncertain terms that this is a test run for a later conflict. Another, "Johann's Tiger", features a tank commander desperately fleeing west in order that his tank crew, whom he regards as innocents, can be captured by Americans and not Russians. Then he plans on getting himself killed to atone for his crimes. He gets a Cruel Twist Ending.

Fan Works

• The stories in the Uplifted series are primarily told from the point of view of Joachim Hoch, an officer in the Waffen SS, who is assigned to conduct a charm campaign for the stranded Quarians. An ardent nationalist and anti-Semite, his views gradually soften through the course of the series, ultimately falling in love with one of the Quarians. Erwin Rommel could fit the same category in the sequel, where he plays a major role alongside Hoch. Hoch would qualify as a true protagonist, not a villain protagonist. Admittedly the stories take place in the context of an Alternate History where the Quarians decide to uplift humanity in a desperate bid to end the exile.

Films — Live-Action

• In Powell and Pressburger's 1941 propaganda film 49th Parallel, seven survivors from a U-boat sunk in Hudson's Bay attempt to escape Canada across the titular line of longitude to the safety of the then-neutral United States. Their leader Lt. Hirth (Eric Portman) is a fanatical Nazi willing to do anything (including execute one of his own men) to achieve his goal.
• Kurt Gerstein from Amen is in the SS, and a member of the Nazi Party. He was expelled from the party in 1936, before the events of the film, due to protesting its anti-Christian rhetoric, and had even been arrested multiple times, but then readmitted in 1939. In a letter to his wife, Gerstein said he did so it as an agent of the Confessing Church (the dissident Lutheran movement) and hoped that their crimes could be exposed. He joined the SS for the same reasons. It has also been said that the murder of his sister-in-law during the Aktion T4 "euthanasia" program motivated him (while the movie makes her his niece). The movie portrays him as turning on the SS and Nazi Party after learning about their crimes, contrary to this.
• The protagonists of Before the Fall are all teenage Nazis in training.
• All the main characters in Conspiracy (2001) are German officials of the Nazi regime.
• In Downfall (2004), the events are told from the point of view of the Germans during the last days of the Third Reich. Hitler's secretary Traudl Junge, SS medical officer Ernst-Gunther Schenk, and Peter, a young German boy inducted into the Hitler Youth to defend Berlin, are the three main protagonists, though Junge was not herself a member of the Nazi Party. The movie shows an interview with the actual Junge (dead by the time of the movie's release) where she says that she found out Sophie Scholl, who was executed for her resistance to the Nazis, was born the same year she was and — in her words — "Having been young is no excuse".
• The Eagle Has Landed: The protagonists are a group of German commandos trying to assassinate Winston Churchill under orders from Heinrich Himmler. The film does establish that the commandos themselves are honorable men concerned only with their mission and are disgusted by the war crimes they witness, even if their bosses might be mass murderers.
• The Empty Mirror is a surreal psychological drama with Hitler himself as the protagonist, as he interacts with shadows from his past in a Purgatory-like location. His mind slowly unravels over the course of the film as he tries to justify his warmongering legacy.
• Played with in the opening sequence of Frostbite.
• The 1962 film Hitler may be the ultimate example of a Nazi Protagonist, being a Biopic of Adolf Hitler himself.
• Hornets' Nest gives a lot of screentime and character development to the character of Captain von Hecht, although this is a huge aversion as he's only a Nazi in the sense that he serves in the Wehrmacht — he has nothing but disdain for the SS and their way of thinking. What's interesting is that although he does some morally questionable things, not only is he better than the SS — he's arguably better than the American soldier who is nominally the hero!
• Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS features a sadistic Nordic Baroness as one of the protagonists. At times, she's actually a sympathetic character.
• The plot of Inglorious Basterds is about a Jewish woman and an Allied Commando squad trying separately to kill all of the Nazi high command at a film premiere. However, SS Colonel Hans Landa aka "the Jew hunter" is the character with the most screentime. The film is better for it, as Landa's smooth professionalism, uncanny competence, and shameless opportunism make him a fascinating (if repulsive) character.
• Joseph Goebbels in Jew Suss: Rise and Fall.
• Jojo Rabbit focuses on a Hitler Youth who has been brainwashed into following the Third Reich without question, but is still ostracized and bullied by his peers, leading him to creating an Imaginary Friend in Adolf Hitler himself. However, his entire character arc revolves around him coming to realize just how evil the Nazi party is.
• The Man with the Iron Heart has a good portion showing the life of Reinhard Heydrich and his rise From Nobody to Nightmare, from the day he was fired from the German navy in 1929 because of a sex scandal to the infamous Wannsee conference where he participated in the planning of The Holocaust and his death in a Czechoslovak resistance attack.
• The Night of the Generals is about an Abwehr Major named Grau investigating the murder of a prostitute in German-occupied Warsaw in 1942. The three major suspects turn out to be three German general officers.
• The Night Porter centers around the sadomasochistic, romantic relationship between a former, initially unrepetant Nazi and a Holocaust survivor. After he resumes his relationship with Lucia, Max starts regretting being a Nazi and tries to softly challenge his fellow former Nazis on what they did. This results in one of them proudly declaring that he's proud of his service to the Reich, and would do it again. Max salutes with the rest of them, but this scene begins the rift which leads to the rest of the plot.
• North Face is the true story of two Bavarians and two Austrians scaling a mountain. All four men are shown to support the Nazi regime, the Austrians looking forward to the Anschluss. Throughout the movie, Nazis are shown as just regular people, not expressively good or bad.
• Schindler's List. Oskar Schindler is a member of the Nazi party, and at the end of the movie, tells the Jewish workers he has saved that he'll have to go into hiding while they are rescued due to that fact, and profiting from slave labor. It's made pretty clear that he joined for the perks, as did many ordinary Germans, and is not a true believer, and he turns against them once he witnesses the horrors more devoted Nazis like Amon Goeth are capable of. The real Schindler was not charged because the people he saved sworn in an affidavit to how he had saved them.
• Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will stars Adolf Hitler, Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels, and many other Nazis in what's sometimes called the greatest propaganda film ever made — the Nazis certainly wanted you to think of that movie when you thought of them and it worked on a lot of people.
• Valkyrie is Based on a True Story of an attempted assassination of Hitler by a group of military officers. The reason for their conspiracy is that Hitler was a bad leader and his actions would lead them to lose the war. Although they failed, they were right about Hitler.

Literature

• Apt Pupil, by Stephen King. The two main characters are an ex-Nazi and a young boy who wants to learn everything about his time in Germany, and eventually becomes a murderous Neo-Nazi himself.
• The Big Time by Fritz Leiber has a sympathetic Nazi, though in a completely alien context. (It takes place in a background of Time Travel and changed timelines, in a recreation station between dimensions.)
• One of the main point of view characters in Bitter Seeds, book one in the The Milkweed Triptych, is one by default, as he and a bunch of others are the result of twisted scientific Nazi experiments in an alternate WWII setting. Their opinions on whom they serve vary, though Klaus is more on the just-trying-to-survive end of the scale.
• In Lothar Günther Buchheim's novel The Boat, on which the movie Das Boot was based, all of the protagonists are in the Kreigsmarine. Like in the movie, however, their degree of devotion to the Nazi ideology itself varies— it is made quite clear that the narrator himself is simply a Punch-Clock Villain Protagonist. For what it's worth the one 110% committed Nazi is shown as easily the most unsympathetic character in the entire narrative.
• Caging Skies, the book Jojo Rabbit is based on, has Johannes Beltzer, who gains a Yandere crush on the Jewish woman his parents are hiding in the attic, Elsa Korr. Slowly, but surely, he abandons his Nazi worldview, but he doesn't abandon his Manipulative Bastard tendencies, his toxic masculinity and his general bigotry towards people who are different, which leaves him abandoned and all alone at the end of the novel.
• The Conformist by Alberto Moravia has Marcello Clerci living in Fascist Italy and conforming to its new rule.
• The French novel Dolfi et Marilyn^note Dolfi and Marilyn features a clone of Adolf Hitler as the title character, but not as the protagonist. Averted for the first half of the book because he doesn't actually know much about the real Hitler and Nazi ideology, though he gets used as Puppet King for neo-nazis at first and for a facist reenactment of the Third Reich later.
• The Draka series of novels by S.M. Stirling, in which the Nazis are fighting against the eponymous Draka (which is even worse than the Nazis).
• Er Ist Wieder Da: The premise of the book and its film adaptation is Adolf Hitler being plucked from 1945 and awakening in modern day (2011) Berlin.
• The police detective Xavier March in Robert Harris's Fatherland, despite the novel being set in an Alternate History where the Nazis won World War II, isn't a Nazi himself — it's mentioned that his career has suffered because he refuses to join the Party. He is, however, a member of the SS, albeit a version of the SS that has been transformed into what is pretty much a civilian police force.
• Maximilien Aue from The Kindly Ones.
• Howard Campbell of Mother Night is one of "The Mole" variety. He is hired by an American agent to become a propagandist for the Nazi Party, running a radio show which contains encoded intel for the US. Unfortunately for him, the pro-Nazi messages he makes up end up being just as effective as real propaganda, and he ends up influencing many racists. The fact that his work was really for the US government has been lost, and he turns himself in to stand trial for war crimes. He's full of self-loathing as a result of his propaganda inspiring neo-Nazis, and thus plans to hang himself when the information to exonerate him is uncovered.
• A Pearl for My Mistress features a downplayed example; Lady Lucy Fitzmartin is more of a "moderate Nazi sympathizer protagonist".
• J Robert Janes's St Cyr and Kohler detective novels, set in World War II France. Hermann Kohler is a policeman in the Third Reich, and hence by default a Nazi. He isn't by any means an ideological enthusiast for Nazism, though, and does his best to protect innocent people from both the ideological Nazis and the straightforward crooks and psychos who prosper under the regime.
• Watch on the Rhine and the sequels co-written by Tom Kratman features rejuvenated Waffen SS troops brought back from senescence to fight off the Posleen invasion of Germany, as much of the Bundeswehr off fighting on other worlds and what remains isn't up to the task. With a few rare exceptions, however, the revived SS troops have no particular love for Nazi ideology, and those exceptions for the most part wound up dead by the time of The Tuloriad.
• Harry Turtledove's World War series depicted an invasion of Earth by space aliens in the middle of World War II. The series focused on the response by the five main human powers (the United States, Great Britain, the USSR, Nazi Germany, and Imperial Japan) to this attack. Among the human protagonists were Jaeger, a Wehrmacht tank officer, and Otto Skorzeny. Yes, that Otto Skorzeny.

Live-Action TV

• The Man in the High Castle features several among the main cast:
  • Obergruppenführer John Smith is responsible for crushing the resistance in the Nazi-Occupied United States and has done some pretty grisly things in the past to achieve the goals of the Nazi Party. Despite that, he manages to come off somewhat sympathetic due to being an impeccable (though strict) family man and his utter belief that he is doing the right thing.
  • Joe Blake is initially introduced as a passionate young man who wants to join the anti-Nazi resistance, before being revealed to be a Double Agent working for Smith. Joe is indicated to be disturbed by the more brutal side of the Nazi regime, even rejecting his German father when the man sends word to him for a rendezvous. However, after becoming friends with Nicole, he actively starts to embrace his family legacy. After his father's death for treason and undergoing months of torture, Joe ultimately becomes a ranting and raving fanatic for the Nazi cause until Juliana finally kills him.
• The Orville: In "Sympathy For The Devil" Otto spends most of the story as one, having grown up into an enthusiastic Nazi and loyal SS member after German parents had adopted him as a baby. He ends up commandant of a concentration camp and participates willing in atrocties against Jews, including personally murdering one older man as an example to the rest. He's completely shocked to learn it was all just a simulation he had been trapped in throughout his life, but eventually his worldview is changed so the Distant Finale shows him as a kindly baker. It helps that nothing he did was real.
• Seventeen Moments of Spring: While the protagonist is a Deep Cover Agent and a Colonel Badass of Soviet State Sec, he is an SS-Standartenführer in RSHA's 6th department (Foreign Intelligence) and spends the bulk of the time surrounded by other SS/SD members. Who, in a change from earlier Soviet movies, are people.
• Speer Und Er: Whether or not he genuinely repented after the war, Speer was Nazi Germany's Minister of Armaments and a close friend of Hitler.
• The Twilight Zone (1959):
  • "Judgement Night" reveals in its twist ending that the protagonist, Karl Lanser, was a German U-boat captain who torpedoed a civilian ship against the advice of his men. As Hell's punishment, Lanser is forced to live through the moment as an amnesiac passenger, and then be killed himself by his own past self. Oddly, amnesiac Lanser is shown to be hurt by the passengers' deaths, perhaps due to the change in perspective showing them as people rather than targets.
  • "Death's Head Revisited" centers around a former concentration camp officer at Dachau who revisits the camp to relive his memories of the many atrocities he committed during the war. He eventually receives karmic justice from the souls of his victims.
• Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter: Several of the main characters are Wehrmacht soldiers and engage in war crimes. However, none are members of the Nazi Party, and one of them is a Jew who is eventually forced to hide from the regime.

Music

• David Bowie's persona on the album Station to Station was a sinister Nazi Nobleman called the Thin White Duke, who proved to be Bowie's last foray into Alter-Ego Acting.

Video Games

• Many Japanese strategy games, such as the Advanced Daisenryaku series, puts you as a Nazi commander. You can still play as the Allies, though.
• Battlefield V has Peter Muller from "The Last Tiger", who is the commander of a German Tiger I Heavy Tank. Downplayed in that, while he is part of the Wehrmacht, he isn't part of the Nazi Party.
• Bugs vs. Tanks asks the player to use their own name as commander of a Nazi Panzer in charge of entirely sympathetic German officers Joachim and Ernst.
• Technically, every Nazi leader in Hearts of Iron is one, but especially the Nazi leaders in its mod The New Order Last Days Of Europe, due to the mod's heavy focus on story and it being set in the Nazi victory timeline. Particularly notable are:
  • Hans Hüttig, Wolfgang Schenck, Siegfried Müller, Reichskommissars of German-controlled Africa. Hüttig is the Villain Protagonist, an unrepentant genocidal fanatic who seeks to drown Africa in blood and will even turn against his fellow Reichskommissars to do so (before inevitably failing because his reign of terror is unsustainable in the long run). Schenck is the Rage Within the Machine type, ending up sympathizing with the native Africans which he oppresses and joining forces with them against Hüttig. And Müller is the Opportunistic Bastard, who mostly sees his position as an excuse to have fun and go on safaris.
  • Hitler's successors - Albert Speer, Martin Bormann, Hermann Göring and Reinhard Heydrich - are all absolute bastards to varying extent, but in different ways.
    • Bormann is probably the least sympathetic of them all, maintaining Nazi Germany as it was while using his position to live a decadent lifestyle and abuse women with no consequences for himself.
    • Göring would be as vile, if not more so with his warmongering, were it not for the fact that he's ultimately pathetic, a puppet of his own army forced to conquer and conquer until he either fails and is betrayed by his own generals, or wins and ends up antagonising other world powers - causing a nuclear apocalypse.
    • Speer seems to be the most sympathetic of the four, and even stops some of the more more horrific policies of the Reich, but is ultimately still motivated by hate and lust for power - his goal is ultimately to create an efficient, sustainable method of subjugating the "subhumans".
    • Finally, while initially the least sympathetic of the four, being a brutal SS tyrant, Heydrich proves to be the only Hitler successor who actually recognises just how needlessly destructive and miserable Nazism truly is, as after stopping his puppet-master Himmler from causing a nuclear war, he realizes how vile and, more importantly, wrong his ideology was, and finally kills himself out of shame and despair.
  • The Gang of Four are The Mole: genuinely pro-democratic politicians who only joined the Nazi Party in this timeline to destroy Nazism from within. They may very well get their wishes, if they play their cards right.
  • While not part of Nazi Germany anymore, Russian warlord Sergey Taboritsky is still technically a member of the Nazi Party and remains a Nazi at heart. He's easily the most despicable of all Russian leaders, though his evil is balanced by the fact of him being absolutely insane and ultimately driven by self-loathing.
• Very narrowly averted with Call of Duty: Zombies: Richtofen is a German Mad Scientist with a Nazi uniform and an overall lack of morality... but he was merely a member of Group 935, an international scientist organization that ended up allying themselves with the Nazi party in return for funding. Richtofen himself is very opposed to the Nazis, and made sure the Nazis never got most of the superweapons he was originally commissioned to make (like the Wunderwaffe).
• Gran Turismo series allows the players to drive Auto Union Streamline, Volkswagen Kubelwagen and Schwimmwagen, which were made in Nazi-era Germany.
• Nimdok from I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream is a former Nazi doctor who worked alongside Joesph Mengele. AM's simulation puts him in a concentration camp and tasks him with bringing a golem to life to exterminate the "Lost Tribe," and he can either go through with it or redeem himself by relinquishing control of the golem to the Lost Tribe. Who, as he is fully aware, will promptly kill him for his crimes.
• Luftrausers: Narrowly averted: Your side is Putting on the Reich to a major extent, but they represent generic antagonism rather than the actual Nazis.
• Panzer Front bis.
• Redcon - The player controls a Commander who serves an empire that resembles Nazi Germany in many ways.

Visual Novels

• While the main plot of Dies Irae has the Japanese high-school student Ren Fujii as its protagonist, some of the side-stories take place from the viewpoint of the Nazi antagonists. One story focused on the naive Beatrice working to wreck things from the inside, partly to save her friend and partly for revenge, while another standalone one focuses on the Blood Knight Wilhelm. One thing to note, however, is that they are part of a group that formed from the Gestapo and are generally Nazis in-name-only. A big reason for that is that the group is mostly made up of a ragtag bunch of people that never really held the Nazi ideologies as well as the group being formed a short while prior to the start of the Holocaust.

Web Original

• One Creepypasta entry features a Nazi medic as the protagonist. He and his group are sent out in true We Have Reserves fashion, and he goes insane trying to keep them alive on the Russian front with no resources, eventually dying after using his own blood to give a blood transfusion to his patients. The kicker is he's just a rudimentary doctor from a small farming community, and is completely uninvested in Nazi ideals, making this a rare case of a Nazi protagonist being the hero. This is also Truth in Television as, by that point in the war, all capable German men who were physically capable were being put on the frontlines as Germany ran out of the aforementioned reserves.

Web Videos

• The Hitler Rants, being a direct spoof of Downfall (2004), naturally uses this trope as well. Not all of them, though; only when the focus is specifically on Hitler and his staff.

Western Animation

• Donald Duck is this in "Der Fuehrer's Face". However, it turns out to be a bad dream in the end.

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