Apocalypse Hitler

"Mr. Vollmer, I was making speeches before you could read them. I was fighting battles when your only struggle was to climb out of a womb. I was taking over the world when your universe was a crib! And as for being in darkness, Mr. Vollmer, I INVENTED darkness!"

—Adolf Hitler, The Twilight Zone

Think of evil. Not Saturday Morning Cartoon evil, or Hollywood Blockbuster evil, but festering, seething, irredeemable evil. Take the concept of Complete Monster and turn it Up to Eleven. Who do you think of?

Why, Adolf Hitler, of course!

Orchestrator of genocide, enemy of the free world, and a really, really bad artist to boot. The man's resume reads like a long, uninterrupted list of Moral Event Horizon crossings. Thank goodness he killed himself in that bunker back in 1945, right? Right?

...Because if he somehow came back, we'd all be screwed.

Maybe there's some nutjob who hasn't given up on the idea of the Third Reich, the Aryan Nation, the Thule Society or any one of the other things Hitler had a hand in, or maybe they're just doing it For the Evulz, but bringing back Hitler for the express purpose of having him take over the world is a recurring villainous plot in fiction, and is often treated as synonymous with opening the gates of Hell and letting Satan and his minions run free or summoning down one of H.P. Lovecraft's many Eldritch Abominations to destroy the minds of all mankind - that is, The End of the World as We Know It.

Of course, in reality, Hitler was a mere mortal rather than the very spirit of evil given human form, and bringing him back from the dead would in all likelihood not make The Legions of Hell Take Over the World. As a matter of fact, the reason why an Inglourious Basterds-type situation didn't happen in reality is because the Allies realized that Hitler's incompetent leadership was practically winning the war for them.

On a practical level, cloning Hitler (a favorite method) would likely result in a completely different person who just so happened to look like Hitler. And in fact, a man who looked like Hitler would probably have less of a chance to end up in a position of power in today's world than just about anyone else. We Didn't Start the Fuhrer, meanwhile, is a better way to justify this trope.

Examples of Apocalypse Hitler include:

Anime and Manga

Averted by the Hitler clone in Afterschool Charisma, a cute little boy who is terrified of turning out like his predecessor.
Glemmy Toto of Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ is a clone of Gihren Zabi, himself a Captain Ersatz of Hitler. His manipulations ultimately cause a civil war within Neo-Zeon and escalated the rest of the conflict, causing countless additional deaths. Justified by his having been given power by the people who cloned him, and using it as a stepping stone to greater things.

Comic Books

Superman: At Earth's End pits a far-future Man of Steel against the DNA Diktators, a pair of Hitler clones who Superman declares to be responsible for all the Earth's ills just before unloading on them with the most ridiculously huge BFG imaginable. (The story then ends on an anti-gun Aesop.)
Marvel has had multiple Hitler Clones running around, the most famous dressing up in a purple KKK outfit and calling himself the Hate-Monger.
In a multi-issue storyline in the Fantomas comic book in the late 70s (likely inspired by The Boys From Brazil) a young Son of Hitler shows up, starts the Fourth Reich, takes over France, restarts the Holocaust(!!), and captures and tortures Fantomas (something no other villain in the series had ever managed to do.) His downfall only came when he became obsessed with Fantomas' follower, agent Taurus... a Black woman!
Subverted in an issue of DC Comics Outsiders', where a clone of Hitler is decanted, shown films the "accomplishments" of his predecessor -- and then shoots himself out of horror.
In Hellboy and Savage Dragon Hitler lived until 1952, when Hellboy killed him. And then his brain was transplanted into a gorilla.
- Hitler surviving was also brought up in the Hellboy movie.

Film

They Saved Hitlers Brain, of course.
Given a subtle nod in Hellboy, where Professor Bruttenholm casually gives a date for Hitler's death much later than 1945 - and, more concretely, establishes that Hitler had indeed used the power of legendary artifacts such as the Spear of Longinus to cement his power base.
The Movie of The Boys from Brazil (in Litterature below), of course.
Flesh Feast, the last film of poor Veronica Lake, is about a Mad Scientist who creates a breed of man-eating maggots (under the pretense of using them for "regeneration research") and helps the bad guys resurrect Hitler just so she can kill him personally with her maggots by throwing them in his face, as revenge for her political prisoner parents' deaths in the Holocaust. And that's about it, really.

Literature

In The Boys from Brazil, not only has Hitler been cloned many times over, but efforts are being made to make the clones' lives more like that of young Adolfs, for example by killing the clones' fathers when the clones are the age that Hitler was when his father died. Also was adapted as a movie.
In the Fundamentalist "End Times" novel The Fourth Reich, Hitler is The Antichrist - and literally Hitler reborn. He's the Russian President, who turns out to be a clone of Hitler, and is indwelt by the soul of the original Hitler, who's been released by Satan from Hell to do his dirty work. This book is one of the more entertaining (for sufficiently twisted values of "entertaining") "End Times" fictions around, and is also notable for a take on eschatology that differs sharply from the Premillennial Dispensationalist viewpoint with which most people will be familiar. There is much fun to be had in watching Hitler scream "Nie wieder! Nie wieder!" as his evil plans are frustrated, and watching him explain each failure to a furious Satan. In other words, the work is "Christian" End Times fiction In Name Only in advertising only.
In the Faction Paradox novel Warlords of Utopia, which involves a war between a parallel universe where Ancient Rome never fell and a parallel universe where the Nazis won WWII, ends with the son of Hitler, raised from birth to be Hitler times a thousand, escaping to our world, planning to wreak havoc. He is hunted down by the protaganist, who finds him in a small villa in Brazil. He is, for all his education and pure distilled evilness, little more than just another pathetic white supremacist. He's squashed like a bug.

Live Action TV

The New Avengers episode "The Eagle's Nest" featured a group of Nazis attempting to revive the cryogenically preserved body of Hitler.
An episode of The Twilight Zone which provides the page quotes sees Hitler's ghost inspire and direct a young American neo-Nazi, eventually driving him to kill a friend to make a martyr for his cause, and later murder an elderly Jewish man. At the end of the episode, Hitler's spectral shadow glides along a wall, seeking a new apprentice, as the narration proceeds to inform the audience that as long as bigotry and racism exist, Hitler will always be alive.

Tabletop RPG

In the Brazilian game Demonios by Marcelo del Debbio, Hitler and his armies are waiting in hell for the beginning of the 4th Reich (one of the modernizations of a hell which is otherwise based more on Dante's Inferno).

Video Games

The villains of Bionic Commando manage to successfully resurrect Hitler (or "Master D", as he's called in the U.S. version). You get to blow his head off with a rocket launcher.
Played with in Persona 2: Innocent Sin, where Hitler is resurrected via the power of rumors and a conspiracy theory suggesting he escaped instead of committing suicide and attempts to take over the world. This Hitler turns out to be fake, though. He also turns out to be none other than Nyarlatothep himself. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Wolfenstein had Hitler in a mecha suit, and several different legions of ghosts, mages, and what have you.
- Arguably justified, since Wolfenstein is supposed to take place during WW 2, so not so much a case of a clone Hitler as an alternate version of the real one.
- The Wolfenstein 3-D Game Mod Spear Resurrection plays it straight, with the Spear of Destiny being used to resurrect Hitler (partially, you get to kill him again before he's fully corporeal).

Web Comics

Bob the Angry Flower has subverted this trope for comic effect in This strip. It's hard to be cloned Hitler when you wish to atone for your sins.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal had a recent comic that addresses this as well. Of course, this being SMBC, it's cynical as all get-out.
Lampshaded in Spinnerette when Dr. Universe is commissioned to create a clone of Hitler that would then be imbued with the soul of the original via German sorcery. After the heroes capture his clients, he points out that the whole idea was doomed to failure from the beginning, since even if the clone chose to be a dictator, the German people know their own history too well to repeat it.

Western Animation

Mentioned by Professor Farnsworth in Futurama:

Professor: Everyone's always in favor of saving Hitler's brain. But when you put it in the body of a great white shark, ooh, suddenly you've gone too far!

In The Venture Brothers, a group of villains who want to resurrect Hitler (through cloning, and a dog reincarnation of him) are featured in the first episode of season four. It's Played for Laughs, of course. Brock kills the dog, then remarks that he can check one more thing off the list of cool stuff he never thought he'd get to do.
- And kinda, Girl Hitler.

Real Life

There's at least one popular myth floating around that Hitler's own grandnephews (through his half-nephew William Patrick Hitler, 1911-1987) supposedly vowed not to have children in order to seal the Hitler bloodline. Alexander, the oldest one (b. 1949) attests that there was no such pact among himself and his three brothers, but doesn't exclude the possibility that one might have been concluded between the others.