Capitalism in Decay

As we can see, the Third Reich’s misportrayal of Black people closely resembled that in Imperial America: Axis artists usually bestowed Black humans with cartoonishly thick and bright lips, and a common theme was that Black men were hypersexual and eager to rape White women. (Kladderadatsch, #13/1943, in particular, is basically a rape joke.) Both Axis artists and Imperial America’s artists also depicted Black people as unwise, yet Axis artists differed in that they portrayed these people as gullible for serving countries that hated them anyway. Exceptions to these loathsome trends were the propaganda pieces intended strictly for the Allies’ Black soldiers.

This comes from an HJ film promoting euthanasia. It was not enough that German tax dollars were paying for a mental patient; paying for a Black mental patient made things even worse.

Here we have a crude depiction from 1938 of a Black jazz musician. The musician’s ridiculous face is supposed to drive White viewers away from jazz, but just to seal the deal, the artist bestowed the musician with a Star of David button, implying that he is working for Jews (if not Jewish himself). This perception that Jews and Black people are ‘partners in crime’, and particularly when it comes to music, is a trope that White neofascists exploit quite heavily today.

This poster from June 1940 criticises the French for using Black soldiers, whom the Third Reich demonized as ‘beasts’.

A rare example of a positive depiction, it being intended for France’s Black soldiers. Here, the Black characters lack cartoony features and we see them suffering unjustly at the French’s hands.

This comes from the NSDAP’s magazine and seems to be blaming France for losing to the Third Reich, presumably because France employed Black soldiers and had some upper-class Jews. I speak uncertainly here only because such an explanation would make no sense from our point of view.

This propaganda, probably from 1944, presents the Allies’ Black soldiers as having screwed up priorities: life in war-torn Eurasia is not better simply because no Yankees are lynching them.

Another rare example of a positive depiction, the Greater German Reich aimed this propaganda directly at the Allies’ Black soldiers in 1944, wearing down their enthusiasm to fight and comfort them with the possibility of capture. For a similar poster, see here.

Another positive depiction intended for the Allies’ Black soldiers. This encouraged them to surrender to the Greater German Reich, in whose POW camps they’d presumably be safer.

Further reading: ‘How Nazi Germany weaponized the race card against the US Army’