Battle for Rotterdam – Gustav Kühn after Leo Bothas, 1940

NAZI PROPAGANDA POSTER OF THE BATTLE FOR ROTTERDAM

“Kampf um Rotterdam”. Colour lithograph after a design by Leo Bothas, made around 1940 by the Bilderbogen-Fabrik of Gustav Kühn, as part of the series “Bilderbogen vom Kriege.” Size: 46 × 31 cm.

This illustrated propaganda sheet depicts the German attack on Rotterdam in May 1940 during the German invasion of the Netherlands. In five successive scenes the battle is presented as a heroic victory of the German Wehrmacht. At the top German paratroopers land behind the Dutch lines to secure the bridges. Next we see street fighting around a bridge in the city, after which German tanks advance through a devastated urban district. In the fourth scene Dutch soldiers surrender to German officers. At the bottom a wide panoramic view shows the burning and devastated city, with ships sinking in the harbour and buildings going up in flames.

Beneath the images runs a rhyming German propaganda poem glorifying the German attack. The paratroopers are praised as “bearers of the highest glory.” The Dutch defenders are portrayed as “England’s vassals” offering futile resistance. The poem concludes with the message that anyone who allies himself with England will be destroyed by German weapons. The destruction of Rotterdam is thus presented as a justified consequence of resistance.

The sheet belongs to the series “Bilderbogen vom Kriege” [picture sheets from the war], a series of illustrated prints distributed in Germany during the Second World War. These so-called Bilderbogen continued a nineteenth-century tradition of popular illustrated sheets consisting of sequential images accompanied by explanatory text. In the National Socialist period they were used as a simple and appealing propaganda medium, aimed particularly at younger audiences. The combination of comic-like scenes and rhyming verses was intended to present the military successes of the Wehrmacht in a clear and heroic manner.

The production of such prints was carried out on behalf of the Deutsche Propaganda-Atelier (DPA). In Nazi Germany propaganda formed an essential instrument of warfare and indoctrination. Alongside posters, films and radio broadcasts, popular visual narratives were also used to persuade the population — and especially the youth — of the inevitability of German victory.

The Bilderbogen vom Kriege series appeared mainly during the first years of the war, when German military successes were still numerous. As the war increasingly turned against Germany from 1943 onward, the production of such triumphalist picture sheets declined.

Price: Euro 175,-