TORONTO - It's the final days of the Second World War and Adolf Hitler, bespectacled and weary-looking, sits at his desk, a map of Germany before him.

One of his generals points at the map, tracing the enemy's progress towards Berlin. With a curt wave, Hitler dismisses the suggestion the city is in danger. Another unit, he calmly predicts, will take care of the advancing soldiers.

Then the revelation: there aren't enough Nazi troops left to mobilize. Berlin, in all likelihood, will fall. Hitler removes his glasses with a trembling hand, dismisses almost everyone from the room, and promptly blows his top.

The scene is from 2004's "Downfall," the Oscar-nominated German film that initially courted controversy by portraying Hitler as a three-dimensional character but has proven popular, frequently ranking among the Top 100 films on the Internet Movie Database.

Yet if people are familiar with the clip, it's likely because they've seen it on YouTube, not in a movie theatre.

That's because over the past two years, the scene has been remixed more than 100 times by people who've replaced the original subtitles with their own.

In the remixes, Hitler - played in the film by Swiss actor Bruno Ganz - loses his cool not at the impending end of the Third Reich, but at less politically significant topics.

In July, videos were posted in which he rants at the death of Michael Jackson ("I never even got the chance to go to Neverland," Hitler despairs) and the sudden resignation of former Alaska governor Sarah Palin.

Some of the most popular videos have been viewed nearly two million times. In one clip, Hitler even rages that he's been reduced to nothing more than a viral Internet phenomenon.

When Warner Bros. Entertainment announced last year they would be delaying "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" until this summer, Greg Gershman and his wife decided to air their grievances with their own "Downfall" clip.

"I think we'd just seen one recently (and) we thought this was a good way to, in a fun and joking way, express our discontent," says Gershman, who runs a Baltimore-based podcast on the Harry Potter novels.

Since being uploaded in August 2008, their clip has been watched more than 160,000 times. The response has mostly been positive, but Gershman says they've received a few emails from people calling them "sick" for using Hitler as a source of humour.

He's tried not to let those opinions bother him.

"I'm Jewish, so I know that for certain people it hits a little bit closer to home than for other people," he says.

"From our perspective, it's kind of making a joke out of Hitler, so that's okay, I guess - not to trivialize the Holocaust or anything."

In part, the online popularity of the "Downfall" clip can be attributed to the fact it plays into a well-established caricature of Hitler as an outright madman, says Tim Blackmore, a media studies professor at the University of Western Ontario.

"When we're worried about complex things, the easiest thing to do is to jump for something which is simple, find a hero and find a villain," says Blackmore.

"For the western world, Hitler is our easy target."

Hitler has long been an inspiration for humour, from the films of Charlie Chaplin and Mel Brooks to more recent references in Sacha Baron Cohen's "Bruno."

Blackmore says that when he's shown the "Downfall" clips to his students, they tend to have mixed reactions, finding them amusing yet also - because of their knowledge of Nazi Germany - vaguely unsettling.

Seen out of context, the four-minute clip does seem to show Hitler as a one-dimensional stereotype, which goes against what the filmmakers were trying to accomplish, says Blackmore.

His concern is the constant remixes will strip "Downfall" - a film he praises as a serious exploration of how young Germans responded to Nazi authority - of its moral gravity.

"For me, morally, this isn't something that is right," Blackmore says, adding the phenomenon will probably peter out over the next few months.

"It's amusing, but it's . . . thoughtless. But I can see, at the same time, the attraction."

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On the Net:

The Harry Potter/Hitler remix: http://bit.ly/dvkV6