# When You Ride Alone, You Ride with Hitler When You Ride Alone, You Ride with Hitler is a 1943 American wartime propaganda poster urging citizens to carpool so gasoline could be saved for the war effort. The over-the-top guilt trip, pairing a commuter with a ghostly Adolf Hitler in the passenger seat, became an internet favorite template for mocking hyperbolic moralizing and Godwin's Law. ## Origin The original lithograph was illustrated by American painter Weimer Pursell and printed by the U.S. Government Printing Office for the Office of Price Administration in 1943[5]. It shows a besuited driver alone in his car with a shadowy silhouette of Adolf Hitler riding shotgun, under the caption "When you ride alone you ride with Hitler! Join a car-sharing club today!" The ad was part of a wartime push to conserve rubber and gasoline for military use. The poster re-entered pop culture in October 2002, when political commentator Bill Maher published the book When You Ride Alone You Ride with bin Laden, whose cover re-illustrated the Pursell poster with Osama bin Laden in Hitler's seat as a comment on post-9/11 oil dependence[1]. - **Platform:** U.S. Government Printing Office (poster) / Reddit, FunnyJunk (parody spread) - **Creator:** Weimer Pursell (original poster) - **Date:** 1943 ## Overview The template works by swapping Hitler for whatever the author considers the modern-day villain, keeping the dramatic poster layout, the ghostly silhouette, and the scolding tone intact. Common parody targets include Osama bin Laden, communism, environmental harm, and romantic loneliness, with the joke usually landing on how absurdly far the moral panic reaches[1][5]. Part of the appeal is how neatly the original art mocks itself once recontextualized. The 1943 slogan was already an extreme example of guilt-based wartime rhetoric, so any edit, whether swapping cars for bicycles or sex for solitude, reads as a sendup of Godwin's Law and alarmist public-service messaging[5]. The poster also circulates straight, often reposted by users who find the earnest original hard to believe is real[2]. ## How It Spread The straight original kept getting rediscovered on Reddit, most visibly on July 19th, 2012, when a user submitted the Pursell poster to r/WTF under the title "Wow, it's that serious?"[2]. The thread treated the artwork as a historical oddity, and the comments drove the "ride with Hitler" phrasing further into meme literacy. Parody edits predated and followed that post. On June 3rd, 2010, FunnyJunk user MrShake uploaded "When you cuddle alone / you cuddle with Hitler!", pairing a sleeping woman with the Hitler silhouette[3]. On October 22nd, 2012, Redditor Danteros posted a mock poster of a young man at a computer beside a communist devil captioned "When you pirate MP3s, you're downloading communism," which hit over 1,400 votes at 87% upvoted before archival[5]. On August 8th, 2013, Redditor mitigateaccomp pushed the template into r/bicycling with a bike-advocacy edit of the original Pursell art, pulling in more than 2,000 votes at 87% upvoted[4]. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is When You Ride Alone, You Ride with Hitler? It is a 1943 American anti-Nazi propaganda poster urging citizens to carpool, which later became a widely parodied image macro template online[5]. ### Where did When You Ride Alone, You Ride with Hitler come from? The artwork was illustrated by Weimer Pursell and distributed by the U.S. Government Printing Office for the Office of Price Administration in 1943[5]. ### What does When You Ride Alone, You Ride with Hitler mean? The original caption framed solo driving as aiding the Nazi war effort by wasting gasoline, pressuring Americans to join car-sharing clubs to conserve fuel[5]. ### How do you use When You Ride Alone, You Ride with Hitler? Parody edits typically keep the poster layout and the ghostly passenger, but swap in a new villain and activity, like communism and MP3 piracy or Hitler and cuddling alone[3][5]. ### Is When You Ride Alone, You Ride with Hitler still popular? The original poster is a classic that gets periodically reposted on sites like Reddit, where users react to its hyperbolic tone, and the parody format inspired edits well into the 2010s[2][4]. ## References 1. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_You_Ride_Alone_You_Ride_with_bin_Laden]() 2. [https://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/wu1wi/wow_its_that_serious/]() 3. [https://www.funnyjunk.com/funny_pictures/487927/Don/]() 4. [https://www.reddit.com/r/bicycling/comments/1jygs9/when_you_drive_you_drive_with_hitler/]() 5. [https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/when-you-ride-alone-you-ride-with-hitler]() --- Source: https://meme.com/memes/when-you-ride-alone-you-ride-with-hitler Published by meme.com — The Internet Meme Library