Ben Cosgrove says: “As Tuesday’s the 70th anniversary of the start of WWII, I decided to put together a gallery of some of the most intense propaganda posters and flyers I could find, just to remind LIFE visitors that, whatever one thinks of the war itself, there’s no denying that some of the graphic art that came out of it was AMAZING.”
In war and in peace — but especially in war — governments everywhere resort to propaganda, which at its simplest and starkest often takes the form of outrageous posters: occasionally beautiful, sometimes racist, and often brutally jarring. This, for example, is how the Nazis wanted occupied Holland to see America and Americans in 1944 — as a Frankenstein’s monster of warmongering racists, jazz-crazed degenerates, and money-mad gangsters.
