Destroy This Mad Brute (1917 poster)

Harry R. Hopps's Army recruiting poster turns Germany into a giant ape in a spiked helmet marked "Militarism," wading ashore with a half-dressed woman who stands for America and a bloodied club labeled "Kultur." The message is that the war will come to American soil unless men enlist now. It is atrocity propaganda at its bluntest, and the place to start a conversation about dehumanization. The enemy is no longer a nation of soldiers but a beast threatening women and home, so fighting it feels like self-defense rather than policy, and the image leans on racial stereotypes as well. The same primate shorthand for Germany returned in posters during the Second World War.