This image originates as a 1945 World War II propaganda poster produced in America. As such, it has a fairly particular audience consisting of the civilians and potential soldiers in America at the time. During this period there was an incredibly active propaganda culture that produced thousands of artifacts promoting everything from enlisting to growing your own vegetables to help win the war. The audience would have been inundated with these images and accustomed to more typical depictions of the enemy. This poster seems to take this demonization and increase it several degrees.
The artwork here is designed to evoke a variety of intensely negative emotions. It is heavily loaded with imagery to an extent that it almost takes one's breath away. Fitting for a propaganda poster, the most vivid emotions that the poster produces are hate and fear. Our eyes are drawn to the leering face of Hitler, darkly shaded and wrinkled as he gazes past a scene of destruction. Wreathed in the flames of a burning city, he stares at us dispassionately, inhumanly. Not caring about the destruction he has caused, and instead looking towards the viewer, coming to destroy their lives and everything they hold dear. He is a figure of imminent threat and doom which makes him all the more frightening, and his direct gaze gives an uneasiness as he looks to his next target to destroy. Around him is a tragedy that anyone in the target audience would find despicable. To the side, a church burns. The flame and smoke contributes to Hitler's fiery aura as the Christian morality so dear to most of 1945 America goes up in flames. In the very foreground, a wounded child is crying as a woman, presumably his mother, lies stabbed in the heart. The child is sitting in a pool of blood, gripping the dead woman's hand futilely. A sign saying “God Bless Our Home” lies discarded on a pile of rubble next to the woman's corpse. The message is clear: God no longer has a place here, this is now the land of Hitler.To the side, a man with a noose around his neck lies dead. If the man is the child's father, which is left up to interpretation, then this is the scene of a whole family utterly destroyed by Hitler. All of these elements are assembled to cause the viewer to hate the one responsible for committing these atrocities, and at the same time fear that they will happen to themselves. At the same time, the crying child elicits from us a sense of pity for his loss and abject horror toward what is happening around him.We feel compassion for him, and worry about whether he will survive and live on in such a hellish environment butchered by war with no parents left to care for him.
“THIS IS THE ENEMY” is emblazoned at the top of the poster, further labeling Hitler as the target of the negative emotions produced by the imagery below. The hate and fear produced ties into a clear line of reasoning. This is the enemy, he is responsible for these horrors. We must take revenge on him for doing such horrible things and to prevent them from happening to ourselves. How do we do that? The other pieces of propaganda that would have been very familiar to the audience provides the answer: join the army and fight, conserve resources for the war effort, buy war bonds, grow your own food. Contribute everything that you can contribute to defeat this monstrous villain.
The poster asks you to believe that these atrocities really are happening. That religion and good values are being put to flame, families are being destroyed, children are crying and cities are being ravaged. It then tells you to connect these occurrences with a face, that of Hitler, branding him as the one responsible for them. If you accept this interpretation of the poster, there is then little alternative but to hate and fear Hitler as a monstrous criminal and do everything that you can to defeat him as soon as possible.
The image has several aspects that would appeal to different groups on different levels. For example, those that are religious would be heavily effected by the sight of the burning church in the background. Another group that would be particularly interested in this poster would be those who value the family and the home due to the three figures that could possibly compose a family and the “God Bless Our Home” sign that is lying to the side. This imagery of a broken, butchered family would be particularly vivid to them. On a similar note, those with children would be particularly struck by the crying child as they might connect him with their own child being placed in such a situation. On a broader scale, the vast injustices and evil presented here would appeal to the quick temper of youths who could be easily stirred up to do something rash after seeing scenes of destruction, death and American values being crushed, such as joining the military. The elderly, who fear to lose what they have for lack of time to regain it, might also be moved by the scene of destruction if they accepted the threat as urgent enough to effect them, or out of fear for their children.
If anything can be said about this poster, it is that it is an intense piece of visual rhetoric almost on an overbearing scale. The vividness and graphic depictions serve almost as a blunt object that the artist uses to beat the audience into feeling the emotions he intends, but the weight of that object alone makes this piece particularly remarkable.
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