The grease you save... will burn the pants off Hermann! is a 1943 U.S. government fat-salvage poster signed Archer. A skillet pours a stream of grease onto a running cartoon German officer in a white uniform with a swastika badge (NAID 514839).
What the sheet prints
A skillet tips, and its stream of grease lands on a cartoon German officer in a white uniform with a swastika badge. He runs with his mouth open inside a white burst. The headline and the base line make one sentence, and the stream of grease covers part of it.
The GREASE
you save...
WILL BURN T[obscured by the grease stream] OFF HERMANN!
[signature: ARCHER]
[imprint: U. S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE : 1943--O--546993]
The words hidden by the grease are not in the transcription. The full line in this page's heading follows the archive's catalog title.
No agency named
The sheet carries a Government Printing Office job number from 1943 and the signature Archer. No agency is named on it; the archive gives the issuer as the U.S. government, for a fat-salvage campaign, and lists its audience as the domestic public. The record gives no first name for the artist and no print run. It also does not say who "Hermann" is meant to be, and this page does not supply a name.
Slapstick against a uniform
The archive tags name-calling and transfer. The enemy is made ridiculous, a uniformed man running from a stream of grease, and the household chore of saving fat is tied to harm done to him. The joke is slapstick: burned trousers, not a battlefield.
Compared with the racial caricature on some salvage sheets, this one aims at a uniform and a regime badge, not a people. That distinction is the one the period's better posters kept. The sheet still trades on a premise it does not explain, that kitchen grease becomes a weapon, and leaves the reader to take the chain of events on trust. It asks for a voluntary act and offers a laugh as the reward.
The OWI's own fat poster, Save Waste Fats for Explosives, spells out the chain and tells the reader where to take the fat. The 1942 Save Your Scraps to Bomb the Japs shows the racial alternative. Caricatures of the German leadership, such as the Treasury's Right in Der Fuehrer's Face, are gathered on the anti-Nazi hub.
Sources
- FRAME object record, The grease you save... will burn the pants off Hermann!, 1943. U.S. government fat salvage campaign (issuer not named); artist Archer.
- U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 44, World War II Posters, NAID 514839, local id 44-PA-1233, catalog record, retrieved by the archive 4 October 2026. Rights as recorded: public domain (U.S. government work).
