Madrid: The "Military" Practice of the Rebels (1937 poster)

This is the hardest poster on the list to look at, and that was the point. The Spanish Republic's Ministry of Propaganda set a photograph of a dead child, morgue tags still attached, against bombers flying in formation, and printed it in English and French rather than Spanish. Two shifts make it revealing. The drawing gives way to the photograph, offered as evidence rather than illustration, and the audience is no longer the government's own citizens but foreign publics whose countries were staying out of the war. Its captions warn that what Europe tolerates will reach its own children, an attempt to make neutral readers feel the bombing of Madrid was already their problem.