Background: This page includes pages from a 48-page special edition of the Illustrierter Beobachter, the Nazi Party’s weekly illustrated newspaper. It is titled “England’s Guilt,” and attempts to make England responsible for the war. The issue is not dated, but is from the early months of the war, probably late fall of 1939.
England’s Guilt
This is the issue’s cover, which folded out to reveal a large map of England on the reverse.
This is the interior cover. In large letters, the phrase is “A new Europe!” A fat Englishman is sitting on a pile of skulls.
p. 4-5: This and the next illustration go together. The caption in the center reads: “1914 — Two Encirclements — 1939.” The map to the upper right shows how Germany and its allies were surrounded in 1914. The middle map shows the situation in 1939. The map to the left on the page below shows the results after the conquests of Czechoslovakia and Poland.
The pictures below the main caption discuss various English figures. The most interesting is the one at the bottom right of this page, a description of Winston Churchill: “He twice attempted encirclement. Churchill and Lord Grey incited England into war in 1914. He played the same role in 1939, in part to satisfy his own drive for power. His lack of honesty and dirty dealings got on the nerves of many of his current “colleagues.” One of his first official acts was the unscrupulous sinking of the Athenia.[This was a liner the Germans sank, but they blamed the British for it.]
pp. 16-17 show the extent of the British Empire. The cartoon at the top of this picture, from the well-known cartoonist Low, shows prosperous Englishmen protected by barbed wire from the world’s less fortunate. There follows a list of England’s colonial possessions.
This page notes that 1/4 of the world is in British hands.
p. 46: This page claims that England wants to destroy Germany. The map shows a dismembered Germany, with the white remnant occupied territory. The quotations are from British newspapers. A typical one runs: “Germany must be dismembered. The Rhine should be its western border, the Oder its eastern border.” The English ambassador to France is cited as saying: “England’s goal must be to destroy Germany’s military strength once and for all!”
