Party leader Adolf Hitler in his 1940 film The Great Dictator, playing both a Tramp-like Jewish barber and a parody of Hitler. This was Chaplin's final appearance The toothbrush moustache is a style of moustache in which the sides are vertical (or nearly so), often approximating the width of the nose and visually resembling the bristles on a toothbrush. First becoming popular in the United States in the late 19th century, it later spread to Germany and elsewhere. Comedians such as Charlie Chaplin and Oliver Hardy popularized it, reaching its heyday during t The… There are dubious claims that Adolf Hitler began wearing the toothbrush prior to the early 1920s (when it was first reliably documented). His sister-in-law, Bridget Hitler, tenuously claimed that he spent the winter of 1912–13 at her home in Liverpool, England, during which time the two quarrelled, mostly because she could not stand his Kaiser moustache; she reputedly persuaded him to cut it, resulting in him fashioning a toothbrush. A 1914 photograph by Heinrich Hoffmann purports to show Hitler with a toothbrush, but this was probably doctored to serve as Nazi propaganda. As evidenced by photographs, Hitler wore the Kaiser moustache as a soldier during WWI. Author Alexander Moritz Frey, who served as a medic in the same regiment as Hitler, claimed that the latter donned the toothbrush in the trenches after he was ordered to trim his moustache to facilitate the wearing of a gas mask; although Frey's story is unproven, Hitler indeed had a blinding encounter with poison gas during WWI—causing his hospitalization at the war's very end. Other sources claim Hitler wore it as early as 1919. Hitler is generally thought to have incorporated the toothbrush as a trademark of his appearance during the early meetings of the Nazi Party (formed in 1920). According to cultural historian Ron Rosenbaum, "there is no evidence (though some speculation)" that Hitler modelled his moustache on Charlie Chaplin's. In 1923, Hitler's future publicist Ernst Hanfstaengl advised Hitler to lose the toothbrush, to which he replied, "If it is not the fashion now, it will be later because I wear it." Hanfstaengl subsequently adopted the style. In 1932, Hitler wore the toothbrush narrower on bottom. In 1933 (the year Hitler became chancellor), the Nazis began to lambast Chaplin as "non-Aryan" in anti-Semitic propaganda, though Chaplin was not Jewish. According to Hitler's bodyguard Rochus Misch, Hitler "loved" Chaplin films, a number of which he watched at his teahouse near the Berghof (built c. 1936). By the height of World War II, Hitler's toothbrush moustache was such a defining feature of his appearance that it was assumed he would be unrecognizable without it and that he could use this…