Emma Wilkins | University of Bristol
‘What a creature is the Jew.
Not even his own women he likes.
To share himself a German wife.
He thinks just cute. You bet your life!
Look at Jew and girl right here:
‘Tis sure he can’t be thought her peer!’
In this cartoon, the Jewish man is represented as so non-normative, so obviously out of place. Dressed all in black with a grotesque grin, he spoils and pollutes the otherwise idyllic scene of a children’s book.
It is well-established that Nazi propaganda was rife with anti-Jewish racism. Propagandists projected racial differences onto the Jewish male – he was portrayed as a conspirer plotting against Germany, a greedy banker aiming to seize the German economy, and a puppet master controlling the world. What has been overlooked in academia, however, is the portrayal, as shown above, of the Jewish male as a seducer, seeking to corrupt the Aryan maiden.
Miscegenation between Jews and Aryans posed the most fundamental threat to the racial boundaries of the Volksgemeinschaft (people’s community). Sexuality was wrested from the private sphere and shaped into a critical arena for the deployment of Nazi racial ideology. It was in this arena that racial difference was most threatened, and the ideas behind it most pronounced.
The Jewish male’s Otherness was amplified when he was positioned next to the Aryan female. Propagandists used oppositional visual codes to demarcate the racial boundaries between German and Jew. At the same time, the close proximity between the two figures exposes anxieties surrounding the Jewish racial-sexual threat.
All of the cartoons in this article were produced by Julius Streicher’s notoriously vicious Stürmer publications. Each piece of propaganda depicts the Jewish man’s supposed attempt at Rassenschande (race defilement). The Nazis defined Rassenschande as the Jewish male’s seduction of the Aryan woman, and the subsequent irreversible contamination of her blood. Francesco Buscemi argues that Nazi propaganda served the purpose of visually splitting the world into two parts, and of avoiding any communication between them. In the above poster, visual codes, such as the contrast between black and white and the use of a side-view to expose the Jewish man’s large nose, serve to split ‘the world in two parts’ However, the blurring of colours in the background and the intimate closeness of the two faces challenges the absolute division that Buscemi proposes. The close proximity between the two figures illustrates the threat Rassenschande posed to the stability of the Nazi racial order.
The racialisation process relies not only on defining the Other, but also on defining the Self. Nazi propaganda was designed to heighten German citizens’ awareness of their ‘Aryan’ origins. The Aryan woman is represented as everything the Jewish man is not. She is dressed in lighter colours, he is dressed in black; she is young and attractive, he is old and grotesque. In fact, as Patricia Szobar points out, the Nazi legal definition of an Aryan was largely a negative one, characterised only by the absence of ‘Jewish blood’. The construction of the Aryan race was entirely reliant on the racialisation of the Jew.
In this cartoon, the Aryan maiden is depicted as helpless against the Jewish male’s attempts to defile her. The Jewish kidnapper’s attempt to conceal himself under a bandana is presented as futile. His large nose, bulging eyes and abnormally big hands immediately expose his Jewishness to the viewer. Cartoons were an indispensable medium through which Jews could be racialised, as they could express ideas which photographs could not – namely those that did not exist. The unmistakable recognisability of Jews in propaganda contrasted with the reality that most German Jews had long since assimilated in dress, speech, and lifestyle to German society. In fact, Nazi leaders were so paranoid about the ability of Jews to ‘camouflage’ themselves, that they imposed the compulsory yellow Star of David badge. In the face of anxieties over racial difference, propagandists attempted to construct an alternative visual narrative which would become more real than reality itself.
The choice to represent the relationship between a Jewish man and a German woman as a ‘kidnapping’ presents the Aryan female as a total victim, and the Jew as her criminal predator. This reflects Jeffrey Herf’s definition of Nazi propaganda as an assertion of Aryan innocence and victimhood – a reversal of actual power relations between German and Jew. The vulnerable Aryan female symbolises the perceived threat Jews posed to the racial purity of the German Volk’s spirit and body.
However, the figure of the pure and innocent maiden remained ever twinned to her negative counterpart – the naïve modern woman, lured into promiscuity and corruption by the Jewish man.
In this piece of propaganda, the woman succumbs to the Jewish man’s seduction. The urban setting, cloche hat, and high heels depict this Aryan female as a ‘New Woman’. Due to her sexual transgression and subversion of expectations of motherhood and domesticity, the New Woman was a source of significant cultural anxiety in 1930s Germany. ‘The end’, in this cartoon, symbolises more than the woman’s dishevelment and humiliation. It also marks ‘the end’ of her racial purity and womanhood. Julius Streicher himself proclaimed: ‘Every German girl who even once gives herself to a Jew is lost forever to the German people’. According to the Nazis’ essentialist conception of race, interracial sex permanently polluted Aryan blood with the poison of Jewishness. Even if she married an Aryan man, the German woman could no longer bear pure Aryan children. The link between the modern woman and the degeneration of the Aryan race shifts responsibility away from solely the Jewish Other and exposes gendered anxieties about the Self. The German population absorbed ideas of racial difference through the prism of cultural assumptions about gender and sexuality.
A similar narrative of disgrace is portrayed in the cartoon above, ‘The Legion of Shame’. The propagandist’s choice to depict the racial defilement of multiple Aryan women reveals the assumed pervasiveness of the threat in Nazi Germany. The body language of the women reveals their humiliation – the nude female at the forefront stoops her head low, while others cover their faces in shame. The caption accuses the women of being ‘ignorant’ for succumbing to the Jewish man’s lure of gold. Randall Bytwerk highlights that the symbol of gold perpetuated the narrative that having robbed Germans of their wealth, Jews used it to seduce German women.
At the same time, the cartoon points to anxieties over the perceived shameful superficiality of the modern German woman. This complicated Herf’s argument that Nazi propaganda promoted absolute Aryan innocence. While the Jewish male is always the predator, these women are complicit in his crimes. Through subverting Nazi gender expectations, modern women were blamed for the degeneration of the German Volk. These visual narratives are emblematic of the Nazis’ struggle for control over female sexuality.
Even across the same publication, there are contradictory representations of the German woman. The idealised image of the pure Aryan maiden was inherently unstable, symptomatic of contemporary gendered anxieties.
Nazi propagandists’ choice to represent interracial intimacy solely through the figures of the Jewish male and Aryan female is significant. The limited visibility of the Jewish woman is an implicit signifier of her worthlessness. She is implied to be sexually unappealing, even in the eyes of the Jewish man, who is more interested in seducing the Aryan maiden. In the cartoon referenced at the very start of the article, the Jewish female is absent from the illustration. However, she is referred to in its caption: ‘What a creature is the Jew. Not even his own women he likes’. The unnaturalness of the Jewish ‘creature’ is associated with his inability to find his own women attractive. Together, the sexual perverseness of the Jewish male and the inferred undesirability of the Jewish female allude to the weakness and abnormality of the Jewish ‘race’.
The absence of the Jewish woman can also be understood as a reluctance to accept that she could act as a seducer. Vilifying Jewish women for sexual transgression would have suggested that Aryan men, who were depicted in the media as the valiant protectors of the Aryan family and nation, could also fall victim to Jewish seduction. While the Nazi regime was prepared to condemn the Aryan woman for her promiscuity and complicity in the degeneration of the German Volk, the Aryan man was protected by the hegemony of chauvinistic thought. In propaganda, he was consistently portrayed as hard-working and impressively strong. Anxieties of the Self manifested themselves in distinctly gendered ways. Through their absence, the Aryan male and Jewish female make visible the intersections between Nazi racism and sexism.
The Nazi propaganda regime aimed to fabricate a world defined by the racial difference between Germans and Jews. ‘Germanness’ was constructed in tandem with the othering of ‘Jewishness’. Ideas of racial difference were intrinsically connected to and expressed through the prism of sex and intimacy. Interracial sexuality embodied an unparalleled threat to the racial boundaries the Nazis were so desperately trying to impose. Through positioning the Jewish male as ‘race defiler’, propagandists entrenched the Jew’s otherness but also exposed anxieties surrounding the Jewish racial-sexual threat. The instability of the Aryan woman’s visual representation – as either the biological key to racial purity or as responsible for the degeneration of the Aryan race – reflects the Nazis’ struggle for control over female sexuality. In its attempt to rigidify racial difference, Nazi propaganda reveals as much about anxieties of the Self, as it does about anxieties of the Other.
Further Reading:
Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006)
Sebastian Huebel, Fighter, Worker and Family Man: German-Jewish Men and their Gendered Experiences in Nazi Germany, 1933 – 1941, (Canada, University of Toronto Press, 2021)
Marion A. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
David Welch, ed., Nazi Propaganda: The Power and the Limitations, (New Jersey: Barnes & Noble Books, 1983)
Emma Wilkins is a recent graduate in History BA from the University of Bristol. She is the recipient of the George Hare Leonard Prize. Her research primarily focuses on the themes of gender and identity, which she has explored in the context of Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa.
LinkedIn: Emma Wilkins