Content note. Propaganda posters include racial and religious caricature, atrocity claims and appeals to hatred, from every side. They are shown here as they were issued, as evidence of what was said to the public at the time. Showing a poster is not endorsing it.
What is a propaganda poster?
A propaganda poster is a printed sheet, usually a single image with a short line of text, issued to move a mass audience toward an action or a belief: enlist, buy a bond, save fuel, report a neighbour, vote, hate an enemy, trust a leader. This archive uses one working definition for every poster, whoever issued it (how FRAME defines propaganda). Under it, a poster that raises money for a war, a public-health poster and a party slogan are all examined with the same questions: who issued it, who it was aimed at, what it asked, and which persuasion technique does the work.
Posters are one kind of propaganda object among several. The collection also holds leaflets, newspaper pages, cartoons, banknotes, stamps, photographs and broadcasts, and each of those has its own page or filter. This page is the entry point for posters: how to read them, how the same few techniques recur across sides and decades, and a browsable set of posters with their sources and rights shown.
Why the same techniques turn up on every side
A reader who looks at enough posters from different countries notices that the designs repeat even when the politics do not. The seven devices named by the Institute for Propaganda Analysis in 1937 (name-calling, glittering generalities, transfer, testimonial, plain folks, card stacking and bandwagon) are a useful starting list, and this archive's technique pages extend it with later ones such as fear appeal, scapegoating and identity fusion. The point of the tags is method, not blame. A technique is tagged the same way on a British recruiting poster, a Soviet mobilisation sheet and a US information poster, and the tag says what the picture is doing, not whether its cause was right or its claims true.
The posters below were chosen because each shows one technique clearly and because, between them, they come from different countries, wars and political systems. They are examples, not a ranking: the collection holds many more from each side, and the archive makes no claim that any side's output is fully covered.
Examples, by technique
Transfer: the national symbol that asks the question
James Montgomery Flagg's 1917 recruiting poster shows Uncle Sam pointing straight at the viewer under the words "I Want You for U.S. Army". It offers no pay, terms of service or argument, only the national emblem addressing "you". That is transfer: the standing of the nation stands in for a case about why this person should enlist. Flagg first drew the image as a 1916 magazine cover under the heading "What Are You Doing for Preparedness?", and the Library of Congress record says more than four million copies were printed in 1917 and 1918. The pointing, direct-address composition follows an earlier British image of Lord Kitchener. Read the technique: transfer.
Glittering generalities and fear: a German war-loan poster
War-bond posters were the main fundraising genre of the First World War on every side. This 1917 German poster, by Fritz Erler, shows a steel-helmeted infantryman beneath the line "Help us win! Subscribe to the war loan." The soldier's exhausted resolve is transferred onto the request to buy bonds, and "winning" is a virtue word the buyer is not asked to weigh against cost or odds. The entry is tagged with the same techniques as the American poster above, for the same reasons. Read the technique: glittering generalities.
Name-calling and scapegoating: a Soviet mobilisation poster
A Soviet poster dated 1928 calls on viewers to strengthen the revolutionary front for the defence of the USSR. Giant red workers march across the upper two-thirds of the sheet. Beneath them, small and pale, a crowd of bloated figures in a bishop's mitre, a priest's hat and top hats scatters at their feet. It belongs to the 1927 to 1928 "war scare" period, when Soviet publications urged defence against foreign powers and internal opponents. The poster names no single enemy; it groups clergy and the well-dressed as one, which is the name-calling and scapegoating tell. It is shown whole, as printed, with its depiction of religious dress as a mark of the enemy. Read the technique: name-calling and scapegoating.
Reassurance by authority: a British poster held back
The best-known British poster of 1939 was never put on general display. It was the third of three Ministry of Information "Home Publicity" posters, designed between 27 June and 6 July 1939 and printed in almost 2.5 million copies, then held back for a crisis such as heavy bombing. Its only image is the royal crown, which lends the instruction the authority of the Crown rather than argument or information. The poster became widely known only after a copy turned up in a Northumberland bookshop in 2000, and later slogan merchandise redraws it. This is a government poster openly attributed to its issuer. Read the technique: transfer.
Bandwagon: unanimity as the argument
A Shanghai poster of 1974 shows citizens in army, worker and cadre dress, and in regional costumes, striding toward the viewer across the forecourt of a state building, many holding small red books. A framed portrait of Mao and the national emblem hang on the facade, and the caption calls for unity for "even greater victories". Every group walks one way under one portrait: unanimity is the picture's argument, which is the bandwagon tell. The copy in this archive is photographed in a museum display case, so there is glare at upper left. Read the technique: bandwagon.
Fear appeal, set against freedom: a US government poster abroad
A Thai-language poster of about 1966, catalogued by the Library of Congress from a transfer of United States Information Agency material, pairs two scenes under the headline "Communism or Freedom". On the left, men carry baskets under the eye of uniformed guards, and the caption says communists force the people to work like slaves. On the right, villagers farm and build a house, and the caption says Thai people are free to choose their work. Neither caption on the sheet cites a source for its claim. The date is the Library's estimate, and the USIA attribution rests on its transfer note rather than a credit line on the poster. Read the technique: fear appeal.
What a propaganda poster is not
Not every striking poster is propaganda under this archive's definition, and not every propaganda poster lies. A poster can be accurate and still be propaganda if it is built to move rather than inform; a poster can be false without being the work of a state. The archive records the issuer, the audience and the stated purpose of each item so a reader can judge. Material issued openly by a named government is treated as open propaganda; material that hides or blurs its sponsor is flagged as such in the same terms for every side. See propaganda, misinformation and disinformation for how these terms differ.
How to analyse a propaganda poster
Five questions cover most posters, and they are the ones this archive asks of every item.
- Who issued it? A named ministry, a party, a commercial printer or an anonymous hand. The source line on each object page says where the scan comes from.
- Who was it for? The home public, an occupied population, soldiers or a foreign audience. The same poster means different things in different hands.
- What does it ask? Enlist, buy, comply, hate, vote, trust. The ask is usually one verb.
- Which technique carries it? Look for a borrowed symbol, an enemy drawn smaller or uglier, a virtue word with no content, a crowd walking one way.
- What does the sheet not say? Costs, terms, evidence, the other side's case.
The techniques index defines each device with examples from several sides, and the Learn section covers why these devices work on audiences.
Browse propaganda posters by era
The collection's posters are grouped by period. Each era page below discusses who made the posters, how the issuing institutions worked, and which techniques recur:
- WW1 propaganda posters: war-bond, recruiting and relief posters from the United States, Britain, Germany, Austria-Hungary, France and Russia.
- WW2 propaganda posters: Allied, Axis and Soviet posters, radio and film.
- Cold War propaganda posters: United States, Soviet and allied posters, radio and leaflets from 1947 to 1991.
For every object, not only posters, use the full collection, which can be filtered by technique, era, country and medium.
Sources and rights
Every poster shown or listed on this page has its own object page with the holding institution, a link to the original record and the rights basis for hosting it. Most of the posters in this archive come from public-domain holdings such as the Library of Congress, the U.S. National Archives and Wikimedia Commons; where a rights statement is limited or borderline, the object page says so. Transcriptions of poster text are verbatim, and translations are labelled as such.
