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.

Blutfahne.

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

To the Death

David Low's comment on Britain's "Black Market", 1943.  Low's cartoon places all three participants in the "traditional model" of the Black Market - Speculators, Middlemen and Purchasers, all crawling with rats - before a firing squad.  

The Speculator/Middleman/Purchaser model did, no doubt, have some validity at the higher end of economic activity; the level at which plutocratic war profiteers were at the top.  However, this cartoon is clearly aimed at the "common or garden" Black Market, in which Corporal/local butcher Jones sets aside a small cut of beef for a favoured customer, or a local farmer sells butter to his neighbours outside the ration system.  This sort of activity was, no doubt, antithetic to the "fair share" objective of the rationing system.  However, it is hard to blame ordinary people for taking advantage of opportunities to benefit from such transactions.  After all, their primary responsibility was to their own families.  Mind you, the low-level "spivs" (low-level "middlemen") who facilitated such transactions hardly represent a worthy class of people ... Best regards, JR.