A broad comedy that pokes fun at Adolph Hitler is set to debut at German cinemas next week.

Entitled Mein Fuehrer: The Truly Truest Truth about Adolf Hitler, the film is by Swiss-born Jewish filmmaker Dani Levy, who is based in Berlin.

Dani Levy, shown holding two German film awards in 2005, directed Mein Fuehrer: The Truly Truest Truth about Adolf Hitler. The film is set in December 1944 and portrays a drug-addled Hitler who plays with toy ships in the bathtub while Berlin lies in ruins.
(Jan Bauer/Associated Press)

Levy's last film, 2004's acclaimed Alles auf Zucker!, was an ironic comedy that poked fun at divisions between secular and orthodox Jews living in modern Germany as well as between those who grew up on different sides of the Berlin Wall.

The filmmaker said in a recent interview that with Mein Fuehrer, his wish was to portray how it was possible for Germans to follow Hitler, but by being able "to exaggerate through comedy."

Set in December 1944, Mein Fuehrer shows a drug-addled Hitler who plays with toy ships in the bathtub while Berlin lies in ruins. He is portrayed as too demoralized to give a speech to rally his troops.

His officials round up a Jewish actor who had coached Hilter at the beginning of his career and pull the man out of a concentration camp to once again act as his acting coach.

The fictional man, named Adolf Gruenbaum, proceeds to put Hitler through a series of humiliating performance exercises, including imitating a dog.

Later, when Hitler becomes hoarse from yelling, he is forced to lip-synch a speech delivered by Gruenbaum, who — of course — deviates from the script.

Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator and Mel Brooks's The Producers have previously used Hitler for comedy, while other recent film adaptations of his life include Max, about a Jewish art teacher's relationship with his young art student Adolf Hitler, and the television movie Hitler: The Rise of Evil.

However,  Mein Fuehrer is one of just a few recent German-made films that offer a somewhat more human face to the dictator.

"I think it is important that we create new pictures of our own," Levy said, "[N]ot always work off the old, realistic pictures, because I think that just makes us lazy and tired and we don't learn anything from it."

In 2004, the Oscar-nominated German film Downfall offered an intimate portrait of the final days of Hitler and divided critics, some of whom questioned whether any film should show Hitler in a sympathetic light.

Mein Fuehrer: The Truly Truest Truth about Adolf Hitler opens in Germany Jan. 11.

With files from the Associated Press