Minions Served Hitler in 1933-1945

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About

Minions Served Hitler in 1933-1945 refers to a humorous conjecture that implies that Minions from Despicable Me movies, who always choose to serve the evilest villains, likely served Nazi Germany's leader Adolf Hitler between 1933 and 1945. The implication, despite being canonically incorrect, has been a subject of memes, which have often been formulated as the question Whom Did the Minions Serve Between 1933 and 1945?

Origin

On July 10th, 2015, the animated comedy film Minions, a spin-off of the Despicable Me franchise, premiered.^[1] In the opening sequence of the film, minions serve various masters such as T-rex, Vlad Dracula and Napoleon Bonaparte. The film reveals that between 1812 and 1968, Minions lived in an icy cave and didn't serve anyone (scene shown below).^[2]

They felt empty inside. Without a master, they had no purpose.

On July 3rd, 2015, an anonymous 4chan^[3] user launched a /tv/ thread about Minions serving Adolf Hitler. In early July, the user shared the post in multiple threads about Minions on the /tv/ board (screenshot shown below).^[4]^[5]^[6]

Spread

On July 20th, 2015, Redditor demonatarms shared a screenshot of a /tv/ post in the /r/MinionHate^[7] subreddit. Later on the same day, an unknown user made a post titled, "Who did the Minions serve between 1939-1945?" in the /r/Showerthoughts^[8] subreddit, where it gained over 20 upvotes. On July 25th, Redditor^[9] npurpura27 made a post on the subject in the /r/FanTheories subreddit, where it gained over 450 upvotes (shown below).

On March 12th, 2021, an unknown Redditor made a post about Minions serving Adolf Hitler during World War II that got over 2,300 upvotes in the /r/movies^[10] subreddit.

The joke didn't see use in memes until September 2021, when a Never Ask a Woman Her Age meme based on it went viral. The earliest found post of the meme was made by Instagram^[11] user hunderbiden on September 4th, 2021, and gained over 300 likes in nine months (shown below).

In September 2021, the image and its remade versions were widely circulated online. For example, a September 18th repost by Instagram^[12] user the_maymays_reloaded gained over 12,700 likes in nine months. A remade version posted by Redditor^[13] BoTamBloCiemno to /r/shitposting on September 26th received over 42,400 upvotes in that period.

On November 2nd, 2021, TikTok^[14] user @simptvwastaken made a video caption meme based on the joke that received over 1.2 million views and 201,000 likes in seven months (shown below).

On February 8th and 25th, YouTubers^[15]^[16] shitbod420 and Peternity both posted memes based on the joke which accumulated over 430,000 views and 1.4 million views in three months, respectively.