Photo Credit: Wikipedia

My younger readers will probably be shocked to learn that Donald Duck was once depicted as a Hitler-saluting Nazi in the 1942 Disney propaganda cartoon Der Fuehrer's Face.

Released as an anti-Nazi propaganda movie for the American war effort, the film won the 1943 Academy Award for Animated Short Film, and was the only Donald Duck cartoon to ever win an Oscar (1).

A German oom-pah band composed of Axis leaders Hirohito on sousaphone, Göring on piccolo, Goebbels on trombone, Mussolini on bass drum, and an unnamed man on snare drum marches through a small German town, where everything, even the clouds and trees, are decorated with the swastika, singing the virtues of the Nazi doctrine (2).

Passing by Donald's house (the features of which depict Hitler), they poke him out of bed with a bayonet to get ready for work. Because of wartime rationing, his breakfast consists of wooden bread, causing hiccups, coffee brewed from a single hoarded coffee bean, and a spray that tastes like bacon and eggs. The band shoves a copy of Mein Kampf in front of him for a moment of reading, then marches into his house, carrying the bass drum, and escorts him to a factory... Read the rest of the plot at Wikipedia.

The cartoon is available as a YouTube video.

Hollywood began to bitterly satirize Nazism and Adolf Hitler even before America declared war on Germany. After the war, Hollywood continued to depict Nazis and German soldiers as either buffoons (Sgt. Schultz in Hogan's Heroes), ruthless (almost all WWII films), or psychopaths (SS Captain Amon Göth in Schindler's List ). Despite the fact that Germany is now one of the most peaceful countries in the world, Hollywood has not let go of some of these stereotypes.

I have been alive for 65 years. I have seen hundreds and hundreds of films about Nazis and WWII. Despite being exposed to Nazi and German stereotypes, I know the difference between present-day Germans and Nazis.

How Germans are portrayed in the 1998 film Saving Private Ryan, is no different than how Arabs are portrayed in the 1960 film Exodus.

No German is asking Hollywood to stop their stereotypical portrayal of Nazis, yet we have many Arabs and Muslims who want Hollywood to stop portraying Arabs and Muslims as they really are - see my 13 part series of articles on Muslim Stereotypes.