Unique posters with Nazi propaganda in the UB

The vault of the Special Collections department of the University of Groningen Library holds more than 70 posters with propaganda slogans from the Nazi period. These often richly illustrated posters were distributed in the Netherlands during the Nazi occupation under the motto Slogan of the working week.

By request of the Berlin professor Bernd Sösemann, who researches these propaganda posters, lecturer in Modern Histroy Reinbert Krol studied the posters in our collection. Most of them contain quotes from big German names: Frederic the Great, Beethoven, Goethe, Schiller, Bismarck, Wagner, Hitler, Goebbels, Ribbentrop, Göring. For the Dutch versions, quotes were used from politician Groen van Prinsterer, the South African Boer general De Wet, and the NSB leaders Woudenberg and Mussert. Remarkably, also texts by socialist poets Henriette Roland-Holst and Margot Vos were used.

Krol describes his findings on our young weblog Gauronica, on which treasures from our Special Collections are described.

• Recently, a blog was published on Gauronica by master student Karst Schuil on the collection of incunabiula at the University of Groningen Library.