But these were the allegorical twists injected into classic fairy tales re-fashioned by Nazi propaganda chiefs to recruit German children to support the Third Reich.
In the Nazi film version of "Little Red Riding Hood", the child wears a swastika-emblazoned cloak as she skips through the woods and is saved from the Big Bad Wolf by a man wearing an SS uniform in a style favoured by the Führer.
Snow White's father, a minor character in the Brothers Grimm tale, is portrayed in the Nazi film as the leader of a mighty army advancing on the "eastern" enemy. The film's premier, in October 1939, came one month after Germany launched its attack on Poland.
Josef Goebbels, the propaganda genius of the regime, was quick to seize on the potential to promote Hitler to a hero and plant the seeds of racial superiority in the minds of German children, according to a new study "Red Riding Hood in the Third Reich: German fairy tale movies between 1933 and 1945".
"Every fairy tale is politically alignable without raping the poetry within," Hubert Schonger, a Nazi film producer, said in an interview in the 1930s.
But his boss, Goebbels, warned Mr Schonger and his colleagues not be too heavy handed. "Children will see through propaganda quicker than their parents ever could," he said.
One of the earliest Nazi fairy tales offered in cinemas across Germany was the adored "Puss in Boots". The talking cat who lives like a lord after saving his master morphs into a Hitler figure at the end of the 1935 film, and is greeted by throngs who scream, in a parody of the Nuremberg rallies, "Heil Puss in Boots! He is our saviour! We will live again!"
Daemonising Jews as the "race-enemy" was a popular theme in the Nazi corruption of fairy tales. In the Grimm story "The Wishing Table, the Golden Ass and the Cudgel in a Sack", the three tailor sons of the story threaten a farmer with the punishment of a "yellow stain" on his trousers.
Translated in German as "gelber fleck", it was the street slang for the yellow Star of David that Hitler forced all Jews to wear.
When the tide of war began to turn, the mood of the stories adapted themselves accordingly.
Hans Christian Andersen's "The Brave Tin Soldier", shows the agony of the loyal soldier as he is burned alive.
"The perfidious message is that Germany must resist its aggressors at all costs, even in the children's rooms, because this is the fate that awaits us all," said Ron Schlesinger, the author who is leading the study. His research, the most complete examination of Nazi manipulation of fairy tales, will be published in a book, which is backed by the German Film Studios of the former East Germany, a foundation which commissions studies and research on all German movies.