Bombardeios Nazistas (c. 1943), a Portuguese-language photo poster from Washington

Bombardeios Nazistas is a Portuguese-language photo poster published around 1943 by the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs in Washington. An elderly woman holds a crying child before a roofless, shelled building, and the caption blames German artillery (NAID 44268145).

What the sheet prints

The sheet is built on a color photograph. An elderly woman holds a crying child in front of a shelled building that has lost its roof. The text is in Portuguese, with a headline, a subhead, two sentences of caption, and a publisher's line.

BOMBARDEIOS NAZISTAS

O QUE OS NAZISTAS DEIXARAM

Os nazistas destroem o que não podem defender. Estes civís italianos observam consternadamente enquanto a artilharia alemã converte seus lares em escombros.

Publicado pelo Coordenador de Assuntos Interamericanos, Commerce Department Building, Washington, D. C.

The archive gives an English translation, which it labels a machine translation not verified by a fluent reader: "NAZI BOMBARDMENTS / WHAT THE NAZIS LEFT BEHIND / The Nazis destroy what they cannot defend. These Italian civilians look on in dismay while German artillery turns their homes into rubble." Treat that wording as unverified.

Who published it, and for whom

The publisher's line names the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, with an address in the Commerce Department Building in Washington. The archive records the issuer as the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, dates the sheet to about 1943, and lists its audience as the foreign public. It is held in the National Archives' World War II Foreign Posters series in Record Group 44. The record does not say which country the sheet was sent to, how many were printed, or who took the photograph.

Speaking abroad under its own name

The archive's one technique tag is fear appeal. The picture puts civilian suffering in front of a distant reader, and the caption assigns the blame in one line: the Nazis destroy what they cannot defend. The victims are named as Italians, and the blame falls on German guns.

This is the government speaking openly to a foreign audience under its own name. The publisher is printed on the sheet, and a reader in another country could see who was making the argument. That is the honest form of wartime persuasion abroad, whatever one makes of the argument. The caption's claim about who shelled these homes rests on the photograph and the publisher's word; the archive's record offers no other source for it.

Washington's later overseas poster work, under the U.S. Information Agency, is covered on the USIA overseas posters hub. English-language U.S. sheets about German conduct, such as This Is Nazi Brutality, are gathered on the anti-Nazi hub.