Anti-Japanese propaganda of the the Chinese Nationalist Party.
"Swear to defend the nation to the death"

To the Death

David Low's perceptive reaction to the Hitler-Stalin Pact.  Not sure about the date - but Low was producing such images even before Britain and Germany went to war; 1938-'39 is likely.  Hitler and Stalin, bound at leg,  lead each other down the Primrose Path towards the Eastern frontier, in the direction of the oilfields of the Caucuses. Each holds a pistol behind his back, indicating the level of trust between the two.  The message, clearly, is that while Stalin may not trust Hitler, he is the more likely to suffer from inevitable betrayal.  Best regards, JR.

The Primrose Path.

Poster image produced to promote the Reichparteitag, at Nuremburg, 1934.  The image is unusual, showing the Nazi's "sacred" relic, the "Blood Banner", dipped before an "eternal flame" honoring the movement's "glorious dead" of the "Beer Hall Putch" and elsewhere.  The "Blutfahne" was (supposedly) carried during the Putch, and was stained with the blood of at least one of the Nazis killed when the Bavarian Police opened fire on the putchists.  It was thus a "first degree relic"  (in terms Hitler and Himmler would have recognized from their Roman Catholic upbringing) and was used to "consecrate" a multitude of Nazi organization flags and banners as "second degree relics", through the 1930s in particular.

The figure carrying the flag is, recognizably, Nazi "old fighter" and original member of the nascent SS, Jakob Grimminger, who held the rank of SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer at this date.  Grimminger was an improbably "spare" man for a WW1 veteran and veteran Nazi "fighter"; he would appear to have been somewhat "idealized" (or at least fleshed out) in this image.  Best regards, JR.