"Guess what, Hitler? You're being played by a Jew right now. And it's the loudest, most annoying Jew we could possibly find!"
World War II and The Holocaust are incredibly touchy topics for media. This is especially true for Jewish communities, many of whom are aware of family and friends who perished during it—or in some cases, lived through it themselves. Many Jewish creators have written, produced, or starred in works about the war, oftentimes focusing on the harrowing experiences of Jews during that time. And then there's the matter of casting the actors who'll play the Nazis.
The reasons for why a Jewish actor would be cast as a Nazi vary. Historically, it was because many of the German-born actors in Hollywood were themselves Jewish, and often went there precisely because the Nazis forced them out of the German film industry. Other motivations include satirizing the Nazis by casting actors of the race they despised most or making sure that there's no possible room for their depiction of Nazis to be glorified by present-day anti-Semites. There's also a certain degree of N-Word Privileges to it, with Jews being able to push the envelope further with depictions of Nazism due to their history of being victimized by them.
Another reason is more pragmatic: Especially soon after World War II, many Jewish people spoke native German or its close relative, Yiddish. This allowed for a believable German accent on screen, without the risk of employing actual former Nazis.
A subtrope of Irony as She Is Cast. Compare British Nazis, Casting Gag, Fake Nationality, and Those Wacky Nazis; see also Works Set in World War II and The Holocaust in Media. Contrast Actor-Shared Background. Not to be confused with characters who are both Jewish and Nazis or anti-Semites, which would fall under Boomerang Bigot.
Examples:
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Film — Animated
- Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio: Ron Perlman voices the Podestà, a government official who runs a fascist training camp.
Film — Live-Action
- The Believer: Carla, Danny's girlfriend, is played by Summer Phoenix, who's Jewish (as her mother was born to Jewish parents), though has never practiced Judaism. Her character starts out as a Neo-Nazi, while she's involved with Danny (a secret self-hating Jew), gets drawn to Judaism and starts practicing the religion, so it gets interesting considering Phoenix's own background.
- BlacKkKlansman:
- Topher Grace, who's of partial Jewish descent, plays KKK Grand Wizard David Duke.
- An In-Universe example: Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver), Ron Stallworth's Jewish coworker in the Colorado Springs Police Department, works with Ron to pose as a white supremacist and infiltrate the local KKK chapter.
- In Blade II, though not explicit in the final film, Reinhardt was originally written as a Neo-Nazi vampire. He's played by Jewish actor Ron Perlman.
- Borat: The eponymous Borat Sagdiyev, a virulent antisemite from Kazakhstan, is played by Sacha Baron Cohen.
- Casablanca:
- Conrad Veidt, who plays Major Strasser, fled Nazi Germany because his wife was Jewish, and would list himself as Jewish on identification documents in a show of solidarity with her. Veidt noted the irony of being praised "for portraying the kind of character who had forced him to leave his homeland."
- Most of the Nazis were played by Jews for practical reasons, as they made up a good chunk of the German actors available in Hollywood during World War II.
- Peter Lorre plays the Nazi Sergeant Berger in the wartime film The Cross of Lorraine.
- The Desert Fox casts Luther Adler, a Russian-American Jew, as Adolf Hitler.
- The Dictator: Sacha Baron Cohen plays Admiral-General Aladeen, who (like many other Muslim dictators) despises Israel and Jews as a whole.
- Dr. Strangelove: Peter Sellers, who was Jewish on his mother's side, plays the eponymous Dr. Strangelove, an eccentric Doctor von Turncoat (and parody of real ex-Nazis like Wernher von Braun) who now works for the United States government.
- Glass Onion: Birdie Jay, an influencer and model who's been banned from social media for using an anti-Semitic slur, is played by Jewish actress Kate Hudson.
- The Grey Zone: Harvey Keitel plays Erich Mußfeldt, the SS officer who oversaw the Sonderkommando (Jewish slave laborers who manned the crematoria) in Auschwitz.
- Jojo Rabbit: Jojo's imaginary friend Adolf Hitler is played by director Taika Waititi, who is half-Maori and half-Jewish.
- Judgment at Nuremberg: Werner Klemperer plays Emil Hahn, a Nazi official on trial for war crimes at Nuremberg who remains unrepentant throughout the trial.
- Lords of Chaos: Jewish actor Emory Cohen plays Varg Vikernes, who in real life is an outspoken neo-Nazi and white supremacist. Needless to say, the real Varg was not amused, both by the choice of actor and how the film portrays him as the villain.
- In An Officer and a Spy, Mathieu Amalric (who's of Jewish descent) played Alphonse Bertillon, an antisemitic graphology "expert" who uses some Insane Troll Logic to accuse Alfred Dreyfus.
- Operation Daybreak: Anton Diffring plays SS official Reinhard Heydrich, architect of the Holocaust and target of the film's assassination plot. Differing, being both gay and Jewish, had to flee Nazi Germany to avoid persecution in the 1930s.
- The Producers: Mel Brooks has a voice cameo in Springtime for Hitler as one of the Nazi dancers who says the line "Don't be stupid, be a smarty/Come and join the Nazi Party!"
- Stalag 17: Otto Preminger plays Colonel von Scherbach, the commandant of the eponymous POW Camp.
- The Three Stooges: The Stooges, all of whom were born and raised Jewish, starred in You Nazty Spy! (the first anti-Nazi comedy in Hollywood history) and I'll Never Heil Again, where they play the fascist leaders of Moronika.
- To Be or Not to Be:
- In the 1942 original, Josef Tura (a Polish gentile, though played by Jewish actor Jack Benny), disguises himself as a Nazi official as part of a scheme to help members of the Polish resistance flee the country.
- The 1983 remake features Mel Brooks in the lead role. Instead of disguising himself as a mere Nazi official, his plot involves pretending to be Hitler himself.
Live-Action TV
- 'Allo 'Allo!: The Jewish actor Sam Kelly plays Nazi captain Hans Geering. This led to the rumour that Geering only ever says 'tler!' as opposed to 'Heil Hitler' because Kelly didn't want to give the full salute, but Kelly always stressed that he felt Geering was the sort of person who simply couldn't be bothered to say the whole thing (and that as an actor, he wouldn't get many roles if he refused to say lines that he considered offensive).
- The Boys: Aya Cash plays Stormfront, a Super Supremacist who's later revealed to be a literal Nazi who's over a century old.
- CSI: NY: Ed Asner, who was Jewish, played a Nazi who hid as a Holocaust survivor in the episode "Yahrzeit".
- Netflix's Historical Roasts: In the roast of Anne Frank, Gilbert Gottfried plays Adolf Hitler. At the end, Anne Frank (played by Rachel Feinstein) brags about how Jews survived his attempts to eradicate them and that his actor is "the loudest, most annoying Jew we could find."
- Hogan's Heroes:
- POW camp officer Colonel Klink and his inept lackey Sergeant Schultz were played by Werner Klemperer and John Banner, both Jews who fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Most notably, Klemperer only took the part on the condition that Klink would be perpetually inept and always get outsmarted by the protagonists.
- Two recurring villains are General Burkhalter and Major Hochstetter, who were played by Jewish actors Leon Askin and Howard Caine, respectively. Askin was born in Austria and fled to America in 1940 after persecution by the Nazis.
- Other actors of Jewish descent who appeared in minor roles as Nazis and camp officials include Oscar Beregi Jr. as General Stauffen and Walter Janovitz as Oscar Schnitzer, the camp's guard dog trainer (who's secretly sympathetic to the resistance).
- In the 1973 Soviet miniseries Seventeen Moments of Spring, about a Soviet mole in The Gestapo in 1945, Leonid Bronevoy, a then-famous Jewish comic actor, played Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller as a downright likable and witty guy, when he wasn't threatening to torture people.
- The Twilight Zone:
- "The Man in the Bottle" has Luther Adler, a Russian-American Jew, playing the part of Adolf Hitler due to a wish gone horribly wrong.
- In "Deaths-Head Revisited", former concentration camp commandant Gunter Lütze is put on trial by the ghosts of his victims. Lütze was played by Oscar Beregi Jr., whose father was a Jewish actor from Hungary.
Theatre
- Margin for Error: Otto Preminger played Consul Karl Baumer, a Nazi German diplomat whose murder sets the plot in motion, in both its 1939 Broadway run and its 1943 film adaptation.
- In Spies Are Forever, Jewish actor Brian Rosenthal plays Dr. Baron von Nazi.
Web Animation
- If Disney Cartoons Were Historically Accurate: The princess is anti-Semitic, and is voiced by Jewish actress Rachel Bloom.
Western Animation
- Drawn Together: Downplayed. Princess Clara is a Christian fundamentalist who is known for her anti-Semitic views. Her voice actress Tara Strong is Jewish.
- Looney Tunes: Being the Man of a Thousand Voices he is, during any of the Wartime Cartoons that featured Hitler, he was voiced by Mel Blanc, a born Jew, making an absolute mockery out of him.
- The Nazi villain Red Skull has been voiced by two Jewish voice actors in Marvel Animation series: Steve Blum in The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes and David Warner in Spider-Man: The Animated Series.
