Sous la faucille el le marteau (“Under the Hammer and Sickle”). (No indication of place of publication, or publisher, or date of publication, though I would guess around 1942.) 18”x 28”. One separation along 10” of a fold repaired with archival Japan tape; otherwise VG. Provenance: Library of Congress, with their rubber stamp on the front cover. WorldCat locates 10 copies—none in the U.S. (Also they estimate the publication date to be 1945, which I think is too late in the war; I would guess 1942.)
$250
This “pamphlet” is uncut from the original sheet, meaning that in order to read it you unfold/open the object three times: one panel to start, then two, then four are revealed, and then eight. This is an effective technique, as the images become progressively more grim; when you arrive at the “poster” portion of this pamphlet, the images are very bad.
This is a searing and bitter piece of German anti-Soviet propaganda printed for French readers somewhere near 1942—it seems to me to be a product of the Nazi thought engineers that was made before the turning point of Operation Barbarossa, before things started to go very badly for the Germans in mid/late 1941 and advancing into 1942 (the campaign and the VI army ending in January 1943). This is something that goes far beyond a general strafing of the Soviet Union, and on into a condemnation of the system/soldiers/people as barbaric and “deviant”.
The opening page leads with an indicting quote from Lenin and then introduces the rest of the imagery saying, in effect, “what the domination of international communism means in reality” and reporting the first-hand accounts of what “the German troops and their allies and saw...everywhere with their own eyes” which is established as the “practice, the aspect of Bolshevism that menaces Europe”.
Then comes the hard stuff, the pamphlet opening into a poster, with grainy pictures depicting terrible things: menacing-looking portraits of men said to be the 'deviant” USSR soldiers; depictions of hardscrabble and dilapidated villages in the “worker's paradise”; a common sight of a sign in a park prohibiting the burial of cadavers on park grounds; profanities committed against the church, including imprisoning priests in barrels as cells, and then advancing to the terrible depiction of the “children's paradise”, showing “the youth, neglected and abandoned, starving”, with photos of piles of small bodies.
On the other side of the “poster” is another dire set of images, again depicting the supposed hell-hole of Bolshevism, the “Soviet paradise” nothing but misery, accompanied by the “annihilation” of intelligence/intellect. Very tough stuff, especially writ large like this.
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