Charlie Chaplin he later wrote, "for Hitler must be laughed at." Chaplin replaced the Tramp (while wearing similar attire) with "A Jewish Barber", a reference to the Nazi party's belief that he was Jewish. In a dual performance, he also played the dictator "Adenoid Hynkel", who parodied Hitler. "The Great Dictator" spent a year in production and was released in October 1940. The film generated a vast amount of publicity, with a critic for "The New York Times" calling it "the most eagerly awaited picture of the year", and it was one of the biggest money-makers of the era. The ending was
Hitler: A Film from Germany is given to the film by Syberberg's narration and fictitious characters. Syberberg's offstage narration partly philosophizes on pre-war and post-war German fascination with Hitler and Nazism, while in the beginning he tells a mythologized tale about the shortcomings of the Weimar Republic and its downfall giving rise to the Third Reich. Later, the narration focuses on comparing Nazism to basically "inhumane" pornography, Stalinism and socialist East Germany. In order to draw parallels between Nazism and pornography, Syberberg also arranges quite graphic scenes, involving a realistic, life-sized reproduction of Joseph Goebbels's carbonized, dead body covered in his burned and melted flesh