Nineteen-fucking-forty release year. About a year earlier (mind, production leads release by quite a bit) we had, infamously, turned away almost a thousand Jews on the St Louis seeking asylum—of whom, about a quarter would ultimately die in the holocaust, after re-settling in countries that Nazi Germany eventually conquered.

It's hard not to see the relevance of Communism to the speech, too, that being the one of a couple things that loomed (much) larger in the average German mind than the "Jewish question", in the rise of Nazism. No accident that Chaplin would find himself on the wrong side of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), I guess.

It's maybe the great pre-war (from the American perspective, of course—'39 was the start for Europe, and earlier still for China and other places like Ethiopia) WWII movie.

I took the comment as ironic. A-fucking-men to Chaplin's sentiment, anyway.

"did then die" is understating it. The Great Dictator was filmed in 1939, long before most of the world knew the true horrors that had and would take place. Chaplin wasn't alone in calling out the dangers, but he was in the minority.