It has taken many years and considerable courage for the mainstream German film industry to make a comedy about Hitler. The fact that Swiss-born writer-director Dani Levy is Jewish helped to protect My Fuhrer against some criticism, but it didn’t prevent certain Jewish groups from questioning the film’s suitability. Despite a mixed response overall, Levi’s film was a hit at the German box-office.

Part no-holds-barred farce and part comedy-drama with a message, My Fuhrer tells the fictional story of a Jewish acting coach named Adolf Grunbaum (the late, great Ulrich Muhe of The Lives of Others) who is plucked from a Sachsenhausen concentration camp to coach the ailing Hitler (comedian Helge Scheider) for an important speech just before the end of WWII. In what starts out as a kind of Teutonic Carry on Adolf, Grunbaum is brought to Nazi headquarters in a heavily bombed area, where he’s given a ham-and-cheese sandwich and told not to take the Final Solution personally.