YMMV / The Twilight Zone (1959) S4E4: "He's Alive"

• Anvilicious: It's a story where a troubled young man is literally led by Hitler's ghost down the self-destructive path of right-wing fanaticism until it destroys him, and along the way he willingly kills the one person in the world he loves. Then the episode ends with Rod Serling addressing the audience to say that so long as his toxic ideas are allowed to flourish, Hitler's shade will never truly be gone. But, considering the large amount of vitriolic hate mail Serling and his staff received following the airing of this episode condemning the use of Adolf Hitler as the villain and voicing open and viciously racist sentiments, this was very much justified.
• Captain Obvious Reveal: Was anyone besides Vollmer surprised when his Mysterious Benefactor turned out to be Adolf Hitler? Granted, at the time many suspected many high-ranking Nazis managed to escape (which was then quickly proven true), so it's possible the episode was trying to keep the reveal at least somewhat ambiguous. He also has a German accent, making it more likely this is meant to be Hitler's ghost, or possibly even the spiritual embodiment of Nazism itself.
• Complete Monster: Adolf Hitler himself turns out to be the shadowy benefactor of the troubled neo-Nazi Peter Vollmer, corrupting the young man into a solid mouthpiece through which to kickstart a new, hate-fueled Reich. Hitler cajoles Vollmer into murdering one of his own loyal followers to make a martyr out of him to inspire the crowds Vollmer amasses while stamping out any hints of decency or hesitance in Vollmer, ultimately ordering him to murder the old Jewish man who raised Vollmer practically as his own son. When Vollmer is finally gunned down, Hitler has formed him into his exact image of the perfect Nazi: all steel and no heart, with Hitler himself seeping back into the shadow to feed off the prejudice and hate that authored so many millions of deaths during his reign of terror.
• Fridge Logic: How did Peter, a young man whose surrogate father is a Jewish Holocaust survivor, still become a Neo-Nazi? That seems kind of... odd. There's a whole other story here.
  • Then again, it's actually not all that uncommon for the next generation to rebel or even fully reject the ideals and morality that was supplied to them through their various authority figures while growing up. Especially with someone like Peter, who was clearly both troubled and seeking a sense of community...which is exactly the kind of mentality that makes people (especially young people) susceptible to extremist ideals, even if they come from an otherwise completely stable environment.
• Genius Bonus: The idea of Neo-Nazism requiring a martyr just as the original movement did is a pretty obvious reference to Horst Wessel, a Nazi SA member who was shot in the head by Communists (or, depending on who you ask, by a prostitute he was seeing whom the Nazi party then claimed had socialist ties) and died later of his wounds. The Nazis used his death to help themselves, not only lionizing Wessel personally, but naming a song after him, the "Horst-Wessel-Lied" (it was made into the co-national anthem after they took power). Of course, here it's his comrades who killed him, and it doesn't work how they wanted this to, but the goal was the same.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Peter's devotion to Hitler's ghost as an idol and role model darkly hints at how Hitler would become more of an icon for hate groups and supremacists in the decades following his death, with people claiming he "was right" or "did nothing wrong".
• Moral Event Horizon: Peter comes off as detestable, but there are still glimpses of humanity in him. However, when he decides to murder Ernst, it solidifies him as utterly irredeemable.
• Tear Jerker: Any time Ernst starts talking about how the Nazis took over Germany, have tissues at the ready. The actor, Ludwig Donath, was Jewish and had to leave Germany and later his native Austria ahead of the Nazis, making it even worse. He experienced all this firsthand.
• Values Resonance:
  • The idea that evils such as hatred and extremism can come from everywhere and that people must stand up to prevent them are concepts that can work for every era, especially as the modern world becomes increasingly connected, allowing for those ideas to be more easily spread.
  • A lot of the tactics Peter uses (claiming that everyone who opposes him is a communist, framing his virulent racism as "just a different set of opinions" (without bringing up what those opinions are), presenting the unpopularity of his ideas as simultaneous proof both that they're the real marginalized minority and that the people pushing back against them are the real bigots, etc.) have been used to some degree of success by various bigoted far-right hate groups in The New '10s.
  • Peter being ordered by his "handler" or "recruiter" to kill the one person in the world he loves in the guise of removing softness is not only reminiscent of the recruiting tactic of giving the totally-radicalized organizational member a mission, but of the frequent demand by extremist organizations that their members must burn bridges and cut positive relationships out of their lives (if not usually with outright murder) so as to cement their hold on these recruits and remove places they may go to escape if they do try to get out.

---