For generations, Adolf Hitler remains the 20th century’s ultimate face of human evil. The Meaning of Hitler, a documentary that shares its title with Sebastian Haffner’s 1978 book that deconstructed the Nazi leader’s legacy, knows this. Yet the mythology surrounding Hitler perversely persists. Rather than deconstruct Hitler yet again, the film instead delves into how that myth was cultivated in the Nazi Party’s infancy and whether any ongoing analyses unwittingly keep it alive.

As historian Saul Friedlander points out, the issue isn’t so much understanding Hitler’s actions but rather our ongoing attraction to Hitler and Nazi iconography. His statement is followed by a montage of pop culture scenes designed to either defang Hitler or turn him into a monstrous caricature, from The Producers to Downfall to Inglorious Basterds. Co-directors Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker provide a cheeky word for this führer proliferation: the “Nazi cinematic universe.”

Comparisons to Donald Trump are established from the start. Essayist Martin Amis notes plenty of parallels between the former president and Hitler: both were a “radical loser” whose reputation meandered for decades in the public eye before they discovered their prowess as political leaders, turning the masses that worshiped them into a cult.

New technology helped. Hitler used valve microphones to amplified his voice during rally speeches while he stood back, allowing his rhetoric to resonate more strongly. For Trump, Twitter let him spread unchecked misinformation in 140–280 characters to millions of subscribers daily. Their rhetoric treated a conspiracy theory as fact, or at least a truth that followers and yes-men associates embraced to act upon racist, nationalist sentiments.

To understand Hitler is ultimately to confront the artifice of his rhetoric. As noted by famed historian Deborah Lipstadt, anti-Semitism is a conspiracy by design: it tells contradictory statements about Jews as both aggressors and victims, forcing us to semi-rationally debate an irrationality that explicitly denies Jews their humanity. Nowhere is this better exemplified by David Irving, the Holocaust denier who famously sued Lipstadt in the 1990s and, humorously, is waved away at large by Epperlein and Tucker’s other interviewees.

Yet despite his reputation, Irving attracts clients for “real history tours” of Hitler-related sites and concentration camps, during which he simultaneously dismisses the Holocaust’s death total while dropping anti-Semitic jabs at the dead’s expense. As he and a tourist joke, Jews simply died of exhaustion because manual labor was new to them. When asked about Auschwitz, he claims, “it’s unimportant.” Seconds later, the film produces text of Auschwitz’s 1.1 million body count, almost like a middle finger aimed at his distortion of history.

It’s through comparisons with the past that The Meaning of Hitler takes the state of today’s global far-right—domestic and abroad—into account. Both effectively want to invoke Hitler ideas without actually mentioning him. They gladly appropriate 21st century ethno-nationalism as a rallying cry (see Charlottesville) or share them ironically (or not) through Twitch channels.

The Holocaust’s aftermath produced a hallowed rallying cry against Hitler’s evil: “Never again.” What’s uncertain is whether that mantra can hold in an age of retweets. These days, especially following the events of January 6, questions of whether followers will actively commit violence in the name of another figurehead can no longer be dismissed to the realm of the hypothetical.