"Meeting over Berlin" – British poster from the Second World War (1941) showing British and Soviet pilots shaking hands while dropping bombs over Berlin.
The poster was one of the earliest – and most reproduced – pieces of wartime propaganda celebrating the wartime alliance between the UK and USSR.
The design is by Kukryniksy, the famous artist-trio that produced some of the most memorable visual propaganda of the war. It was apparently first published in an August 1941 TASS newsprint (TASS was Kukryniksy's main employer): archive.artic.edu
The lines at the bottom of the poster are credited to the Soviet poet and writer Samuil Marshak. The Chicago Art Institute translates them:
The fraternal nations made an appointment
Over the enemy city.
From this handshake
Germany will suffer!
The fraternal nations made an appointment
Over the enemy city.
From this handshake
Germany will suffer!
The @AWMemorial website gives an interesting backstory to this poster: Stalin apparently presented the newsprint to Lord Beaverbrook, Minister of Supply, during the 1941 Moscow Conference. Beaverbrook presumably then urged the British poster's production awm.gov.au
The "Meeting over Berlin" poster was among the first in a long series of collaborative propaganda pieces that would continue to be published until the end of the war.
"The Red Army's fight is YOUR fight", 1941
"All help for Russia NOW", 1941
The poster has also enjoyed a bit of an afterlife
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