Raemakers, Louis (1869-1956)

A Dutch cartoonist whose anti-German images became a staple of British propaganda in the United States during World War I, Louis Raemakers was already well established as a cartoonist at the outbreak of war. His work frequently appeared in the Amsterdam newspaper Telegraaf. His wartime images caricatured Germans as bloated, half-human militaristic monsters and dramatized their alleged atrocities on the western front. The value of these images to British propagandists lay not only in their inherent persuasive power but also in the fact that their creator was from a neutral country. In 1916 John Buchan (1875-1940), director of Wellington House, Britain’s propaganda office with responsibility for the United States, began to promote Raemakers’s work there. By the end of the year a significant number of American newspapers had begun to carry the cartoons. Interest in Raemakers’s work increased considerably with the U.S. entry into the war. By November 1917 over two thousand newspapers carried his images. After the war Rae-makers was attacked as an anti-German hate-monger. In 1940 he moved to the United States, a refugee as a result of the Nazi invasion of Holland.