A nun's letter from Russia, reprinted as a poster in the Philippines

This English-language poster, held in the State Department and USIA Asia poster file and dated about 1950 to 1955, reprints a letter said to come from a German nun in a Russian labor camp. It credits a Brooklyn paper, The Crusader, and the Catholic Youth Organization of the Philippines, and names no U.S. agency (NAID 5730152).

What the poster prints

The poster is mostly text, in purple and yellow, framed by drawings: guards whipping and beating women in habits, and a bridge across the Dnieper. The text is a long letter addressed "Dear Parents," followed by a note on how it reached the West.

"WE ARE NO LONGER HUMAN BEINGS!"

(A LETTER FROM A NUN IN RUSSIA)

[…]

"It is positively frightful what we 1,500 Sisters have to suffer here. We are treated like animals, driven and beaten to work. […]

[…]

"At present we are working in a mine -- all day under ground in a suffocating atmosphere -- many of us are already dead.

[…]

(Reprinted from THE CRUSADER, Brooklyn N.Y.)

Distributed by the Catholic Youth Organization of the Philippines

What can be checked

Very little. The letter has no signature, no camp name, no date, and no place more exact than "Russia" and a bridge over a river. The poster's own note says one of the nuns, a German, smuggled it to her parents, that it was widely published in Europe, that the Christian Brothers in Beltsville, Maryland, received it, and that The Crusader of Brooklyn printed it. Each link in that chain vouches for the one before it, and none of them can be checked from the sheet. The archive tags the poster as testimonial for that reason.

This page does not say the letter is false. The point is narrower: this sheet gives a reader no way to tell whether this letter is genuine, and asks for belief and prayer all the same.

Whose poster

The sheet credits a Catholic youth group as distributor and a Brooklyn paper as source. It sits in the U.S. government's file of "Propaganda Posters Distributed in Asia," Record Group 306. The archive classes the source as blurred. A reader in the Philippines saw a church voice on the sheet. The archive file shows that a U.S. government information program held it too; the record does not say how much of the printing or distribution it paid for. Where a state does put its message behind a private name, readers lose the ability to judge who is speaking, and that is a cost to free debate even when the cause is sound.

The archive holds several other language editions, including Tagalog and Vietnamese. For documented cases of a private front for state-backed anti-communist work, see the archive's studies of the Crusade for Freedom and the Congress for Cultural Freedom.