Adolf Hitler, for years a vessel of frustration in a popular Internet meme, has been quieted.
Since its release in 2004, the German film about Hitler's last days, "Downfall," has been adopted for wildly popular YouTube parodies.
Every spoof is from the same scene: A furious, defeated Hitler unleashes an impassioned, angry speech to his staff huddled in an underground bunker.
The scene takes on widely different meaning when paired with English subtitles. Most any subject could be substituted. It was made even funnier by the scene's intense melodrama, artful staging and timely cutaways.
It was the meme that refused to die — until it did.
On Tuesday, the parodies began disappearing from YouTube. The company that owns rights to the film says it has been fighting copyright infringement for years.
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