Stanisław Toegel

Toegel has no need to fear any comparison with other international caricaturists. Because his sketches are part of a completed cycle, they are more elaborate in their design, more polished in their portraiture, and more ambitious in their colouring than the Hitler caricatures drawn by professional cartoonists in Germany before 1933 and in the international press during the existence of the Third Reich. In Germany caricatures of Hitler and the Nazi movement could be found in the Munich satirical magazine Simplicissimus from 1923 onwards. They included works by Thomas Theodor Heine, Karl Arnold, Erich Schilling and Olaf Gulbransson. In 1929 Schilling (1885-1945) drew the first caricature of the complete figure of Hitler in the form of a swastika: it was entitled “Adolf, a Thwarted Dictator”. From 1929 caricatures of Hitler and the Nazis began to appear in the Munich literary and artistic periodical Jugend , including those by Erich Wilke (“Swastika Crusade in the Holy Land”, 1929), and Josef Geis (“The Duce Adolf up in Court”, 1930), not forgetting a huge number of caricatures by Herbert Marxen (1900-1954, “Legal High Treason”, 1930; “Posted in front of the Brown House”, 1931). The Social Democratic satirical paper Der wahre Jakob contained the most biting Hitler caricatures by far. In the edition published on 27th February 1930 the were no less than eight large-format caricatures of National Socialists, including the cartoon on the title page “Butcher Hitler” by Karl Holtz (1899-1978, ill. 9/14) and, on the back page, a distorted portrait of Hitler by the Russian painter, Jacobus Belsen (1870-1937, ill. 9/15). Between 1929 and 1933 Erich Ohser (1903-1944), drew a huge number of caricatures of Hitler and gangs of Nazi thugs for the Social-Democratic paper Vorwärts.

After the Nazis seized power and the German press was forced into conformity (“Gleichschaltung”) Simplicissimus and Jugend only published realistic and exaggeratedly heroic portraits of Hitler. Thomas Theodor Heine escaped from Munich and emigrated, Arnold and Gulbransson came to terms with the power elite and Schilling even began producing pro Nazi propaganda. As early as the end of 1931 Jugend stopped its attacks on the Nazis because it was afraid of losing advertising revenue. The caricaturist Herbert Marxen was subsequently sacked in August 1932. In 1933 Der wahre Jakob and Vorwärts were banned. At the same time the Nazis cultivated their own particular relationship to caricature: In 1933 the head of the NSDAP foreign press, Ernst Hanfstaengl, published a 174-page book “approved by the Führer” entitled “Hitler in World Caricatures. Deeds against Ink”, in which caricatures from the German and international press were reprinted alongside a pro-Hitler commentary. One of the caricatures in the book was originally published in 1933 in the Amsterdam Jewish paper Waak!. It showed, Hitler’s pact with the devil (ill. 9/16), a theme later reinterpreted by Toegel (ill. 9/5). In 1937, when he realised he was likely to be liquidated on account of his critical comments, Hanfstaengl fled to Great Britain. Other caricatures by Toegel also had their precursors. One of these was that of Hitler as an angel of peace (ill. 9/7). The angel can be found in the Asian part of the globe in a caricature by Vaughn Shoemaker (1902-1991), that appeared in the Chicago Daily News on the 6th November 1937 on the occasion of the Second Japanese-Chinese War (ill. 9/17). In June 1945, at the end of the war, Bruce Russell (1903-1963) – like Shoemaker, one of many Pulitzer prize-winners who drew caricatures of Hitler – published a cartoon in the Los Angeles Times, showing an aging, exhausted Hitler astride a member of the enslaved German people. (ill. 9/18). In 1941 the British artists Robert and Philip Spence published a book of Hitler parodies based on the well-known “Struwwelpeter” character, entitled “Struwwelhitler. A Nazi Story Book by Dr. Schrecklichkeit”. The book also contained caricatures of Goebbels, Göring, Stalin and Mussolini.

In Toegel’s next book, “Hitleriada macabre”, only the first sheet (ill. 10/2) can be regarded as a caricature in the strict sense of the word. It depicts Heinrich Himmler who, in his position as SS Reichsführer, controlled the concentration camps with his SS Death’s-Head Units. Here Toegel shows him as an “executioner” – the English and French translations call him a “butcher” – with blood-soaked trousers, an axe and a chopping block against the background of a concentration camp with piled-up skulls and victims who have been hanged. In front of his face hangs a noose through which he will shortly put his own head. On the right stands a pillar with the title “H. Himmler oprawca” (Engl. “torturer”) and a list of concentration camps. Caricatures are usually defined as working with simplification and exaggeration, i.e. satire, to display human weaknesses. In doing so, they turn their victims into a laughing stock. Toegel’s sheets use satirical drawings to portray Nazi tactics of torture, murder and robbery. The viewer realises immediately that these drawings are not at all satirical, but an unvarnished description of Nazi crimes. Interrogations with rifles and threats with truncheons, (ill. 10/3), scenes of beatings, shootings and torture are there, alongside medical experiments on a prisoner. Where there are satirical elements, these appear in the accompanying captions, for example when Toegel entitles a confession beaten out of a victim by his Gestapo torturers “Strength through Joy“ (the title of the official Nazi leisure organisation) (ill. 10/4); or when he satirises a firing squad as “marksmen“ (ill. 10/5), and members of the SS as “knights and the pride of the German people” (ill. 10/8); or when he insinuates to the “SS sadists” that torture makes him want to laugh (ill. 10/6). By contrast Ukrainian soldiers on the wall of the Warsaw ghetto, whom he describes as “accomplices of the Germans”, are caricatured (ill. 10/7); as is the scholar making a medical experiment who is exposed as a “torturer” (ill. 10/10) and the “conqueror of Warsaw” being presented with “trophies” that are in reality stolen works of art (ill. 10/11).