Page "The Great Dictator" Paragraph 31

In his 1964 autobiography, Chaplin stated that he would not have been able to make such jokes about the Nazi regime had the extent of the Nazi horrors been known, particularly the death camps and the Holocaust.

While Ernst Lubitsch's 1942 To Be or Not To Be dealt with similar themes ( even including another mistaken-identity Hitler figure ), after the scope of Nazi atrocities became apparent it took nearly twenty years before any other films dared to satirize the era.