The Art of War

Arthur Szyk's Bold and Brilliant Anti-Nazi Illustrations

“The Map Maker” (1942) - Click to enlarge

“The Map Maker” is a satire attacking the Axis by the artist Arthur Szyk, published in Esquire Magazine in 1942. It shows Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo as grotesque caricatures, with Hitler painting a swastika over a map of South and Latin America, while Goebbels welcomes Tojo to the Axis. “ Now that. you’ve joined us, the Führer will make a special map for you.” In lower right are plans for Nazi domination of the world.

Arthur Szyk (pronounced “Shick”) 1894-1951 was a Polish-Jewish artist who used his talent to fight for human rights and social justice. He fled to the UK in 1937, then to the US in 1940, where he permanently settled and eventually became a citizen.

The Nibelungen Series, Valhalla (1942) - Click to enlarge

Szyk caricatures Wotan's palace, Valhalla, as a German beer hall, where the one-eyed divinity drinks with "heroes" of Germany's imperial past, while Hitler, Mussolini, Goering, and Goebbels bring in food and libations. In the background, opposite bodies hanging from the gallows in a cemetery, is the aged French collaborator Petain preparing a meal for the guests. On the wall is a quote often cited by Szyk and attributed to Hitler: Conscience is a Jewish invention.

To emphasize the antisemitic tradition in German history, the god Wotan sits with one foot on the body of a Jew and the other on a volume of poetry by nineteenth-century German Jewish author Heinrich Heine. Each of the "heroes" wears a swastika to suggest a continuity of German antisemitism throughout the ages.

The firsthand horrors he’d escaped in Europe, the invasion of his Polish homeland in 1939 — the precipitating event of World War II — and the arrest and relocation to death camps of his mother Eugenia and brother Bernard back in Łódź gave his mission a personal sense of urgency.

With all that in mind, he turned his hand away from the fine arts and toward provocation and propaganda. Indeed, he began producing some of the most startling anti-Axis cartoons on the planet.

These images seemed to appear everywhere at once: on covers of popular magazines like Collier’s and Time, in The New York Times, New York Post and PM newspapers, in ads for U.S. Steel, reprinted in publications sent to Allied troops, and on the walls of 500 USO-run recreational centers around the country.

Szyk’s grotesque depictions of Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohito were so spot-on that the thin-skinned Fuhrer had reportedly put a bounty on his head. It’s a measure of his skill that these ferocious images are still capable of sending chills down the spine. ~ Connecticut Magazine

Satan Leads the Ball (1942) - Click to enlarge

“Satan Leads the Ball” ridicules leaders of the WWII Axis Powers (including Adolf Hitler), among whom are interspersed other key historical figures as well as symbolic and allegorical figures including Death and Satan, lavishly uniformed with swastikas and other exaggerated insignia.

Starting at left:

• Valkyrie-like Germania, the personification of Germany.

• Benito Mussolini, Italian fascist leader, without pants,

• Philippe Petain, French head of state,

• Pierre Laval, prime minister of France,

• Death wearing Stahlhelm helmet,

• Hermann Göring, Reich Marshal of Nazi Germany

• Adolf Hitler,

• Obese capitalist representing the German heavy industry (Schwerindustrie), with Bavarian Tyrolean hat, the slogan Wir sind das Herrenvolk, Nazi party pin, etc.

• Joseph Goebbels, propaganda minister of Nazi Germany, with a Jewish stereotype Jack-in-the-box (with communist red star and hammer and sickle, Phrygian freedom cap),

• Wilhelm Keitel, German WWII Field Marshal,

• Erich Ludendorff, German World War I general and nationalist.

• Joachim von Ribbentrop (?), German Foreign Minister, in black SS uniform,

• Hideki Tojo, general and prime minister of Japan, with Mitsubishi sword,

• Satan with Der Ring des Nibelungen

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- A few more laughs about Hitler

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Image Sources: “The Map Maker” | “The Nibelungen Series, Valhalla” | “Satan Leads the Ball”

More Art by Arthur Szyk