Everyone Wants To Know Whether the Minions Worked for Hitler

"Minions & Monsters," the seventh movie of the "Despicable Me" franchise, reopens the debate of whether or not these goofy yellow henchmen should stand trial at Nuremberg.

Siri, how do you say “I’ll see you in Nuremberg” in Minionese?

In 2015, the “Minions” movie first established the titular goofy, yellow henchman from “Despicable Me” as creatures in perpetual pursuit of the evil masters. Before Gru, the Minions served historical and fictional villains from Dracula to France’s Napoleon Bonaparte. So, as many “Despicable Me” fans have pointed out, it’s not unreasonable to believe that the Minions might have served Adolf Hitler and the Nazis during the Third Reich — had they not canonically camped out in a cave from 1812 to 1968 (after hitting Napoleon with a cannonball).

However, the recently released “Minions & Monsters” re-opens this previously settled question. Gasp!

Filmmakers Pierre Coffin and Bryan Lynch expand upon Minions lore in the new movie, sharing that multiple tribes of Minions exist beyond the one belonging to Kevin, Stuart and Bob. So… there actually could have been Minion Nazis, right? That’s the main thing everyone’s taking away from this movie, correct?

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In a recent interview with Polygon, Coffin weighed in. “So the Minions that we know from ‘Minions 1’ were stuck in the cave,” he said, after attempting to sidestep the question. “These ones, I don’t know where they were, but they were not part of the Big History.” Per the International Big History Association, “Big History seeks to understand the integrated history of the Cosmos, Earth, Life, and Humanity, using the best available empirical evidence and scholarly methods.” It also “is an evidence-based account of emergent complexity, with simpler components combining into new units with new properties and greater energy flows.”

So there you have it: None of the Minions from the “Minions” franchise (thus far) were working for Hitler, but there is the possibility that a previously undocumented tribe of Minions served the Führer.

Given that Minions famously tend to (accidentally) kill their masters, there’s no telling what actually happened in Hitler’s bunker in the Minion-verse on April 30, 1945…

Evelyn Frick

Evelyn Frick (she/they) is a writer and associate editor at Hey Alma. She graduated from Vassar College in 2019 with a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature. In her spare time, she's a comedian and contributor for Reductress and The Onion.

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