All the examples previously listed as Documentary of Lies are based on a very literal reading of the cartoon, and I have therefore replaced Documentary of Lies with Artistic License. The reasons more in detail:
The viewer is not expected to take everything that is happening in the short as literal fact. The cartoon makes sufficiently clear that Hans is not a real person, and that his career in the Nazi system is meant to exemplify the experiences of millions of boys growing up in Germany. The intro also explicitly says that the story is an adaptation of a non-fiction book. It's also not implying that Hans entire life takes place between 1933 and 1945 (the short was realeased early in 1943), but that this is what the Nazi system has in store for him.
Exaggeration and simplification are stylistic devices inherent in cartoons. When soldiers come to Hans' parents to complain about Hans being sick then what the viewer is expected to take home from this is not that you get a visit from the armed forces when your child is sick, but that Nazi ideology was obsessed with physical strength and health.
That the Nazis did not rewrite "Sleeping Beauty" to be about a choleric parody Hitler waking an overweight, beer-swilling princess Germany is kind of obvious. The real point of the "Sleeping Beauty" segment is 1) it is a parody of Richard Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung and by extension, a ridiculing of German nationalist pathos; 2) it is a clever and ironic visualization of common tropes of Nazi propaganda (which were taught in German schools at the time); specifically, the image of Hitler as a savior who had liberated Germany from a paralyzing democratic system and wakened the German nation from its slumber. "Deutschland erwache!" ("Germany, awaken!") was one of the chief slogans of the NSDAP (originally the refrain from "Sturmlied"
, also appeared on propaganda leaflets or the song "Deutschland erwache!"). Hitler appearing as a knight in shining armor is a deliberate reference to the propaganda painting "Der Bannerträger". "Sleeping Beauty" provides only the template for a parody of Nazi propaganda. The narration informs us that "Little Hans hears the fairy tales of the New Order", which is also the title of the storybook seen at the beginning of the segment ("Märchen der Neuen Ordnung"), which of course has a see-through double sense.
Complaining that the story presented in the short is not literally true shows a lack of understanding of its style. Whoever wrote "Education for Death" was actually quite well-informed. The cartoon simplifies, condenses and exaggerates, but it is not arbitrarily making up falsehoods. This is well covered by Artistic License.
Let's just say and leave it at that.
Cut this entry for being a Zero Context Example:
- Kids Are Cruel: But only because adults are just as cruel, if not worse. At worst, the grown-ups would actively brainwash their kids into acting like this trope.
This needs to tell us which cruel acts are done by what kids. Anything else is optional. Let's just say and leave it at that.