Back­ground

Downfallparodies.com fea­tures user-generated con­tent and videos regard­ing Hitler par­o­dies. These clips have been taken from the Ger­man movie, Der Unter­gang (2004), also known in eng­lish as Down­fall by direc­tor Oliver Hirsch­biegel and Con­stan­tin Film Pro­duk­tion. If it isn’t obvi­ous by now from hav­ing watched some of the meme clips on this web­site, you’ll have noticed that the eng­lish sub­ti­tles have been added and mod­i­fied by view­ers like you and I to fit other, humor­ous pur­poses. As the pop­u­lar­ity rose with these user-edited clips, the movie became a viral video sen­sa­tion amongst english-speaking countries.

Down­fall fea­tures actor Bruno Ganz as Hitler in per­haps one of the angri­est per­for­mances of an indi­vid­ual have ever graced the big screen. It is the per­fect recipe for mak­ing jokes about every day sort of topics.

Humor aside, Down­fall is writ­ten from a his­tor­i­cal per­spec­tive. It has come under fire for “human­iz­ing” Hitler in some crit­ics’ words, but many of the facts sur­round­ing the end of the Nazi regime are in fact cor­rect accord­ing to sev­eral eye-witness accounts and his­tor­i­cal records. If you have a chance, I highly rec­om­mend watch­ing Down­fall in its entirety. The act­ing is absolutely bril­liant. As evil as Adolf Hitler was, we can­not escape the fact that his rep­re­hen­si­ble actions impacted and shaped a large part of the 20th cen­tury. The movie is a les­son in our his­tory and a reminder that we should never let this sort of atroc­ity from ever hap­pen­ing again.

You can read more about this film in the Down­fall Wikipedia arti­cle here.

Down­fall can also be pur­chased through the iTunes store, and can also be found on DVD at other places such as Amazon.com.

Direc­tors Comments

The Direc­tor, Oliver Hirsch­biegel was inter­viewed by Emma Rosen­blum for the New York Times Vul­ture mag­a­zine. In it, he said the following:

“Some­one sends me the links every time there’s a new one,” says the direc­tor, on the phone from Vienna. “I think I’ve seen about 145 of them! Of course, I have to put the sound down when I watch. Many times the lines are so funny, I laugh out loud, and I’m laugh­ing about the scene that I staged myself! You couldn’t get a bet­ter com­pli­ment as a director.”

The point of the film was to kick these ter­ri­ble peo­ple off the throne that made them demons, mak­ing them real and their actions into real­ity,” he says. “I think it’s only fair if now it’s taken as part of our his­tory, and used for what­ever pur­poses peo­ple like.” He adds, “If only I got roy­al­ties for it, then I’d be even happier.”

Other Related Articles

A few other really good arti­cles sur­round­ing the topic of these par­o­dies can be found below:
The Hitler Meme by Vir­gina Hef­fer­nan for the New York Times.
Hitler’s down­fall, par­o­died by Philip Moscov­itch for The Globe and Mail.
Just How Many Hitler videos does the world need? by Mer­cedes Bunz for the Guardian UK.

Dis­claimer

This site does not con­done nor endorse the beliefs and actions of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party. The Down­fall Par­o­dies web­site is only meant to be taken as a pop­u­lar spoof or a joke. So please refrain from send­ing me hate mail because I don’t find that very funny.
Sec­ondly, all videos shown on this site are streamed directly from the YouTube web­site. If there are any issues regard­ing copy­right, dis­crim­i­na­tion, or other mate­ri­als deemed inap­pro­pri­ate, please con­tact the YouTube team directly to take up issues with them. Don’t shoot the messenger.