Throughout the Second World War, the Nazis issued a barrage of propaganda to vilify the Allied Powers. Press Chief Otto Dietrich, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, and Adolf Hitler repeatedly insisted that “international Jewry” was responsible for both starting the war and waging it. Such bombastic lies were illustrated in propaganda posters such as this one, in which “the Jew” is depicted as the menace behind the Allies, pulling the strings of war in Washington DC, Moscow, and London. The Jew’s physical appearance draws on antisemitic stereotypes that predated the Nazis but were popularized, and even normalized, during the Third Reich. Moreover, the Jew’s expensive clothing alludes to Jewry’s supposed connections to money and corruption.

Many Germans came to accept the Nazis’ account of the causes of the war, and some even believed that the Holocaust was the appropriate revenge against the Jews. Others, however, came to regard the bombing raids on German cities as retaliation for Germany’s persecution and mass murder of Europe’s Jewish population during the course of the war.