Horrors of the Nazi era in graphic novels

Dutch historian Kees Ribbens came across the 1944 comic strip "Nazi Death Parade" at a US-based internet shop. The drawings show people in cattle cars, murders in gas chambers disguised as showers and corpses burning in ovens. The drawings are based on eyewitness accounts. According to Ribbens, the comic was part of a campaign pamphlet against the Nazi regime.

Art Spiegelman's world-famous comic about the Nazi era was published in 1991. In it, Jews are depicted as mice and Germans as cats. In the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel, the American author tells the story of his father, an Auschwitz survivor, and does not spare the suicide of his mother and the family's tense relationship.

"When I have nightmares, I tell them to Mom and it's much better afterwards. Do you want to tell me yours?" Elsa asks her grandmother Dounia. Heeding the advice of her granddaughter, Dounia breaks her decades-long silence, telling Elsa what she had to endure as a Jewish girl in France. Loïc Dauvillier's "Hidden: A Child's Story of the Holocaust" (2014) is a touching plea for humanity.

The graphic novel titled "Tante Wussi," or "Aunt Wussi," from 2016 is also semi-autobiographical. Author Katrin Bacher visits her great aunt on the Spanish island of Mallorca and learns the story of her family history. The family moved from Germany but had to leave Spain once the Spanish Civil War broke out. Back in Germany, their Jewish mother and the rest of the family faced persecution.

"Valentin," a 2019 graphic novel by Jens Genehr, is based on the diary entries of a French man, Raymond Portefaix, who as a concentration camp inmate was assigned to the construction of the large-scale armaments project. Commissioned by the Nazis, Valentin was a submarine bunker in Bremen. More than 1,000 forced laborers lost their lives during the vessel's construction.

France's most famous Nazi hunters, the Klarsfelds, were immortalized in a comic by Pascal Bresson and Sylvain Dorange, first published in French in 2020. Beate Klarsfeld met her future husband Serge, whose father was murdered in Auschwitz, in Paris. They began to track down Nazi war criminals after WWII. In 1968, Beate famously slapped German chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger and called him a Nazi.