Here we can see the appeal of this story, fable, fabrication, or whatever you want to call it: It wasn’t the Western democracies who failed to save the world from Hitler with their fatal appeasing weakness. It was Johan Jambor who could have spared us. Hitler wasn’t the fault of the German people; he was the fault of this one German, Johan Jambor—and the one missing ball. If only Jambor hadn’t “saved Hitler,” all the millions of “good Germans” who, for some inexplicable reason, followed Hitler slavishly wouldn’t have to find excuses.

This has always been my problem with films like the German-made Downfall, which while initially being taken seriously by many, many film critics has found its true level as a YouTube camp joke. Downfall purports to offer the “inside story” of the last days of Hitler in his Berlin bunker and implicitly makes the case that the Holocaust wasn’t the fault of the German people—no, they were victims, too!—but rather of one man, Hitler, and the small coterie of madmen and evil women surrounding him. Nothing to do with Germany’s eager reception of exterminationist anti-Semitism.