Helft uns siegen! (1917 poster)

Germany's answer to the war loan appeal points no finger and promises no glory. Fritz Erler's soldier for the sixth war loan of 1917 wears the new steel helmet, a gas mask and grenades, barbed wire around him, and simply looks past the viewer. "Help us win!" is asked on his behalf. Set beside the French and British posters, it shows a different emotional lever: endurance and obligation rather than excitement. The helmet makes him modern and anonymous at once, a figure any family could read as its own man at the front. The image became so familiar that a modified version later wrapped the 1929 English edition of All Quiet on the Western Front, a strange afterlife for a fundraising poster.