This painting haunts me. I find it beautiful and fascinating. And yet the subject matter – German Stuka dive bombers returning to Greece after a mission over Crete – is, to say the least, disturbing. I have always felt that the Nazis were the gold standard for evil, no matter how glamorously portrayed.
The painting was one of many created by Hans Liska (1907-1983), an Austrian commercial artist and painter who had the misfortune to be working in Berlin at the beginning of World War II. In 1940, at the age of 33, he was drafted to serve as a war artist in the Propaganda-Kompanie (PK) of the Wehrmacht, the army’s propaganda section.
It was not necessarily a soft assignment. Men of the PK were killed or lost in action at the same rate as German infantry. But Liska cheated the reaper at the front lines in France, Greece, Russia, Norway, North Africa and the English Channel.
Liska’s work appeared regularly in Signal, a propaganda magazine aimed at civilians in German-occupied countries. Signal portrayed the German military as invincible and Liska was tasked with providing dramatic visual proof. Which he did from 1940 to 1945. But, neither a supporter nor member of the Nazi party, he did his best to avoid putting swastikas in any of his works. And such was his talent that he got away with it.
The Wehrmacht even published a sketchbook of his art, in full color and on high quality paper, at a time when the war had reduced most of the German publishing industry to badly printed books on cheap paper. (Immediately after the war, the book, Skizzenbuch aus dem Kriege,was placed on the “proscription list of rejected literature.”)
In 1945, after watching an Allied air raid from the Berlin Radio Tower, Liska painted this work showing the parachutes of RAF pilots being lifted in updrafts from the burning city.
In March of 1945, with the Red Army advancing just 37 miles east of Berlin, Signal’s editor organized a special train to evacuate the magazine’s staff members and their families. This was an amazing feat, considering the conditions of the time. The train took them out of Berlin, west and south to a village in the district of Bamberg, where Liska spent the last month of the war. There, on April 13, 1945, Signal‘s personnel were able to surrender to American forces.
After the war, the city of Schesslitz,in Bamberg, became Liska’s new home. He was cleared of all allegations of complicity. He worked in advertising, especially for the automobile company Daimler-Benz. Also, a porcelain company produced plates of German cities with more than 200 of Liska’s paintings.
As for his war art, one is reminded of the adage, “The worst sin is to do well that which should not be done at all.” But on the other hand, I recall being faced with the draft in 1968 and ending up in uniform. Hence, I cannot judge.
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Sources
“Signal: A Study in German propaganda of the Second World War” (1978) by Jeffrey Alan Hanson
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