Germany’s first comedy about Hitler portrays him as a bed-wetting drug addict with erectile problems who takes baths with a toy battleship and dresses his pet Alsatian, Blondi, in an SS uniform.

Made by the Swiss Jewish director Dani Levy, Mein Führer: The Truly Truest Truth about Adolf Hitler breaks new ground in Germany’s treatment of its Nazi history, using a farcical style to depict Hitler’s final days. It comes after the 2004 film Downfall, which itself broke a taboo by showing Hitler’s human side.

Levy says he wants the film to follow in the tradition of Chaplin’s 1940 comedy The Great Dictator and to take a closer, if tongue-in-cheek, look at Hitler’s psychology.

In the film, set in late 1944, Hitler has lost faith in himself. Joseph Goebbels, his desperate propaganda minister, summons Jewish acting coach Adolf Grünbaum from a concentration camp to coach the Führer for a mass rally to reinvigorate the German people.

Grünbaum gives Hitler acting lessons by making him walk on all fours and bark like a dog. He eventually turns into Hitler’s psychiatrist, discovering that the dictator can’t get over being beaten as a child.

“My father once gave me a catapult,” recalls a troubled Hitler, played by the comedian Helge Schneider. “He looked up and told me, ‘Kill that pigeon!’. I fired and the pigeon landed at his feet, stone dead. ‘That was a fluke’, he said, and walked off.”

Levy said he was inspired by a theory that Hitler was making the world suffer because of his own suffering at the hands of his strict parents. “The ‘analytical journey’ Hitler embarks on with his ‘therapist’ Grünbaum is based on true material. I have been wondering for a long time why nobody made a film about this link, in the form of a drama or a comedy.” Filming made headlines in Berlin in March when the central Lustgarten Square was decked with huge swastika banners for the final rally.

In the final scene, Hitler’s barber accidentally shaves off half his little moustache, sending the dictator into a spitting rage so violent that he loses his voice minutes before he is due to give his speech.

Grünbaum, hidden underneath the stage for the rally, is forced at gunpoint to imitate Hitler’s voice as the Führer mimes the speech.

But the acting coach departs from the text, and an astonished audience of the faithful hear their leader confess: “I’m a bedwetter, I can’t get an erection, I’m a drug addict.”

The film opens in Germany in January. Levy said he sees nothing wrong with a tragicomic approach to the Holocaust. “I don’t want to give this cynical, psychological wreck of a person the honour of a realistic portrayal.”

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