There are more links between Hitler and Holmes than you might first think. They were both, for example, cocaine addicts. Famously, Sherlock favoured a seven-per-cent solution taken intraveinously. Hitler began his addiction with cocaine eyedrops prescribed by his quack-doctor Dr Theodore Morell. Soon he began to crave the drug and was snorting it too. He claimed it helped clear his sinuses. Unlike Holmes, though, Hitler's addictions did not stop there; by the time he was overseeing the Russian invasion, he was being injected with around 80 different drugs including testosterone, opiates, laxatives, barbituates, amphetemines and morphine. Perhaps one of the stangest injections he took, though, was a drug based in bull semen to increase his sex drive. Not something Holmes would ever have dabbled with, although it does suggest the antics of Professor Pressbury in The Creeping Man.
Another similarity is their reluctance to marry. Sherlock frequently swore he would never marry; "... love is an emotional thing, and whatever is emotional is opposed to that true cold reason which I place above all things. I should never marry myself, lest I bias my judgement." he declared at the end of The Sign Of Four. Hitler, too, seemed averse to marriage. He believed that women found him attractive and that by remaining single, he would keep their support. Unlike Sherlock, he did eventually marry. He wed Eva Braun on April 29th 1945. Marriage seems not to have agreed with Adolf, though, as the following day he committed suicide.
Then there are the film links. Hitler was a big Disney fan, his favourite being Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Surely then, he would have loved Basil the Great Mouse Detective, a Disney film about a mouse living beneath 221b Baker Street who idolises and emulates Sherlock Holmes. He was probably less enamoured, though, with the Basil Rathbone films which often placed Sherlock Holmes in the midst of World War Two, battling the Nazi menace. Not that Hitler objected to Sherlock films in general; when the Allieds reached his bunker in 1945 they found two films inside; The Man Who Was Sherlock Holmes (1937) and the 1937 German version of The Hound of the Baskervilles starring Bruno Güttner.
When Doyle decided to build a family home in Hindhead, he turned to his old money spinner; Sherlock Holmes. Unfortunately he had killed off Sherlock Holmes in The Final Problem in 1893. So, instead of a story, he penned a five-act play about the detective, hoping it would serve as a quick money spinner. His literary agent, aware that the play needed much work, forwarded it on to theatrical producer Charles Frohman. Frohman suggested letting William Gilette (an American actor, director and playwright) rework the script, to which Conan Doyle agreed. The resulting play was a massive success and ran with Gilette as Holmes from 1899 through to 1932 in various productions and tours.
The play was incredibly influential to the way the public envisaged Sherlock. Gillettes's performance cemented the idea of the Holmes' costume; the cape and deerstalker. He also introduced the long curled calabash pipe. Conan Doyle loved the Gillette interpretation and was influenced by it himself. For example, it was Gillette who created Sherlock's page boy; Billy, but Doyle went on to include him in other Sherlock stories.
When this play came to the UK stage in 1903, Charlie Chaplin made an appearance as the page-boy Billy when he was just 14 years of age.
Like Doyle, Chaplin's father was an alcoholic who was not around for much of his formative years. He eventually died of cirrhosis of the liver when Chaplin was just 11 years old. Perhaps it was to escape his unhappy home life that Charlie began performing and touring music halls at an early age. In 1914 he signed with the Keystone film studio (of Keystone Cop fame) and in four years became one of the day's most famous figures. In 1919 he co-founded United Artists and took his character of "The Tramp" into feature length films.
Later in life, Chaplin became increasingly political. In the 1940s he was accused of communist sympathies, left America and by 1953 he has moved to Switzerland (where, incidently, in 1893, Arthur Conan Doyle had introduced the new sport of skiing).
This political side to Chaplin can be seen in his 1940 film The Great Dictator. This satirical comedy-drama was the first film in which Chaplin spoke, finishing with a rousing condemnation of dictatorship, bigotry and greed and praise for tolerance, democracy and reason.
He plays two roles in the film. One of these is The Barber; a Jew suffering in a ghetto. The other character played by Chaplin was a dictator named Adenoid Hynkel who attacks the Jews of his fictitious homeland, Tomainia. The film was a very successful parody of Nazi Germany and Adenoid Hynkel was very obviously a satire of Adolf Hitler. Chaplin, then, is a wonderful link from the page-boy of Holmes through to Adolf Hitler himself.