YMMV / Der Fuehrer's Face

• Accidental Aesop: As many critics have pointed out: due to the cartoon being very much a product of its time, it never really depicts any of the atrocities that made the Nazi Party's reign uniquely horrific, and instead depicts Donald wrestling with daily struggles and indignities that were fairly common in nearly all countries involved in World War II (e.g. meager rations, a dangerous and stressful job at a munitions factory, constant exposure to government propaganda, etc.). As a result, its message can come across as more anti-war than anti-Nazi.
• Alternative Joke Interpretation: Sources can't agree on the absurdly hard loaf of bread Donald needs a saw to cut. There are some that say it's incredibly stale and others that say it's made of wood.
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: Donald's bread being so wooden he has to cut it with a handsaw is Played for Laughs, but due to wartime rationing in World War II, sawdust actually was put into bread to save on flour, due to limited resources.
• Anvilicious: It's a Wartime Cartoon so this trope is to be expected.
• Common Knowledge: Thanks to the internet, a lot of people have heard that there's a Disney cartoon where Donald Duck is a Nazi. Very few of them, apparently, know that it's a scathing satire of Nazi Germany and instead assume that it's pro-Nazi propaganda (that is, of course, when they aren't also falsely interpreting it as "proof" of Walt Disney's supposed antisemitism). Hence, the cartoon is often accompanied with a "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: The Hermann Göring clone is popular enough to warrant becoming a minor meme in YouTube Poop, presumably due to his swishy, flamboyant, body language and campy way of speaking setting him apart from the other caricatures of Fascist Leaders.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The third chorus mentions people "working into their graves". Two years later, the world would discover that hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Jews, prisoners of war, and other 'undesirables' were used as slave laborers by the Nazis, many suffering that very fate, to say nothing of the millions simply killed outright.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Donald's nightmare has bullet shells with faces and arms.
  • One of the lines in the song is "Ist ve not der Supermen?" Superman later on fights the Nazis.
    • Especially funny if you remember that Millenium in Hellsing were Nazi vampires (i.e. "supermen").
  • While Donald is assembling the small bullet-like shells, we hear this line in the song: "If one little shell should blow him [Hitler] right to *CLANG!*" Two years later, Hitler commits suicide by shooting himself.
  • The cartoon has Mussolini saying, "And-a we would-a leave it if-a we could!" Less than a year after the film was released, Mussolini would be under German protection, with the rump Italian Social Republic being effectively under German control.
• Less Disturbing in Context: The picture of Donald Duck in full Nazi uniform saluting Hitler can be pretty jarring when it appears without context, especially for those who are more familiar with Disney cartoons being family-friendly. In the cartoon, Donald is a citizen of Nutzi Land, but the aesop of the story is that he is being oppressed by the regime and forced to show his support even when he doesn't want to (so he must salute portraits of Hitler whenever they appear on his assembly line, or be threatened with bayonets). In the end, it turns out it's All Just a Dream, and he's thankful to actually be a citizen of Eagleland. Even so, these days Disney themselves doesn't circulate the cartoon without a detailed description of the context, delivered by Leonard Maltin no less.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The image of Donald Duck performing the Nazi salute with a swastika armband was very popular on Image Boards due to the sheer Flat "What"-ness that it induced if you are unfamiliar with the cartoon.
  • The Hermann-Göring clone and his line of "Super-Duper Super Men!" have inexplicably become a meme in YouTube Poop.
  • It's also common to see people make their own lyrics to the title song.
• Nightmare Fuel: The Disney Acid Sequence when Donald goes crazy from being overworked.
• Unintentional Period Piece: Much like Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator and the Three Stooges' You Nazty Spy! (which were made around the same time), the film is an irreverent anti-Nazi film made before the full extent of the Nazis' crimes against humanity had become common knowledge, which can make its depiction of Nazi Germany look oddly tame in hindsight. This pretty clearly dates it to the early 1940s.
• Values Dissonance: The racist Japanese stereotyping, and the Goering caricature being portrayed as Camp, possibly Camp Gay. That being said...
• Values Resonance:
  • Its message still stands clear to this the day: Nazis are bad. There's no other way to put it, quite frankly.
  • It also stands as a surprisingly detailed and accurate deconstruction of the Nazis, who are here portrayed as so obsessed with hyping themselves as the "master race" and glorifying Hitler at the expense of everything else. As a result, they run an inefficient and incompetent war effort that impoverishes their citizens, which was very much Truth in Television with the Third Reich.
  • The visual and aural permeation of Hitler and the swastika into virtually every aspect of Nutziland life echoes many Real Life dictatorships in the decades since, requiring their dictators' names, words, and images be on everything from clocks, books, television stations, and even months and days of the week, the latter infamously imposed in Turkmenistan by Saparmurat Niyazov, who was better known by his mononym of Turkmenbashy.

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