Name/Title
“Wartime Propaganda Postcard: Benito, Hirohita and Me (1945)”Entry/Object ID
984.20.180Scope and Content
While this postcard is historically significant as an example of wartime propaganda and popular satire, it also contains racially offensive and xenophobic imagery and language typical of its era.
The caricature of Emperor Hirohito relies on anti-Asian stereotypes, distorting his features to dehumanize both him and, by extension, Japanese people as a group.
The caption’s reference to Mussolini as “that wop Benito” employs a racial slur directed at Italians, reflecting the casual racism embedded in much Allied popular culture during and immediately after the war.
Such imagery was meant to demean the enemy through ridicule, but in doing so, it perpetuated racist and dehumanizing attitudes that extended far beyond the wartime context.
Factual background — what Hess actually did
Rudolf Hess was Hitler’s Deputy Führer and a long-standing senior Nazi official. In the early hours of 10 May 1941 (some accounts mark it overnight into 11 May), Hess flew alone from Augsburg to Scotland, ostensibly to open direct peace talks with elements in Britain. He parachuted into the Scottish Borders and was promptly detained by British authorities.
He was held prisoner in Britain and tried at Nuremberg, sentenced to life in prison and eventually died by suicide at Spandau Prison in West Berlin in August 1987.Archive Items Details
Description
This World War II–era postcard, produced by the Photogelatine Engraving Co. of Ottawa, features a crude cartoon of the Axis leaders Emperor Hirohito (left), Benito Mussolini (centre left), and Adolf Hitler (centre right), who looks toward a fourth pot decorated with swastikas that represents Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s disgraced deputy.
The verse printed below the image mocks Hess for his 1941 flight to Britain—a mission undertaken without Hitler’s knowledge and widely regarded as a betrayal. In the final line, the dictators refer to themselves as “Thunder Mugs,” a slang term for chamber pots, reducing the group to receptacles for waste and implying that even among these figures, Hess is beneath contempt.
The postcard reflects both the triumphant tone of late-war Allied propaganda and the racist stereotypes common in popular media of the period. Hirohito is rendered with demeaning, exaggerated Asian features, and Mussolini is referred to using an ethnic slur.
