Louis Raemaekers (1)

Louis Raemaekers was born on April 6th, 1869 in Roermond, the Netherlands, the son of a Dutch country editor and a German mother. Although his first drawings appeared weekly in the newspaper "Algemeen Handelsblad" from 1906 to 1909, Raemaekers was primarily known as a modestly successful painter rather than a cartoonist. By 1916 he was to become known worldwide as the greatest chronicler of German brutality and militarism.
In the midst of the early fighting following the German invasion of neutral Belgium in August 1914, Raemaekers slipped across the border from the safety of neutral Holland. Early refugees who had streamed into Holland had brought with them tales of German brutality that were frankly disbelieved by the public, including Raemaekers. His experience in Belgium, repeated late under full German occupation, was to transform this hitherto painter of pastoral countrysides into the most famous anti-German propagandist of the Great War.


Am I not yet sufficiently civilised?	Whoever does not like us is bought by the other side.	The aerial attacks.	The latin sisters.	He who is not against us is with us.


The Belgian comittee and the secret of Blue Beard.	The sacrifice which is not agreeable to the Lord.	After all, I must get something for my trouble.	War in the XXth century.	Slow asphyxiation.

As J. Murray Allison wrote in the "Forward" of the 1919 publication of "Raemaekers Cartoon History of the War", " ........ the pencil in his hands becomes an avenging sword, because by it millions of people have been aroused to a clear-cut realization of the fact that the issue of this war is no less than Slavery and Autocracy versus Freedom and Democracy."
His first wartime drawings appeared in the Amsterdam "Telegraaf", and the response of the German Imperial Government was swift. They offered a reward of 12,000 Dutch guilders for Raemaekers' body, dead or alive. Not content with this, they pressured the Dutch government into prosecuting him for endangering Holland's neutrality, and he was actually tried for this offense but acquitted by a jury. At the end of December 1915 he took his wife and family to England in the face of threatened assassination by German agents. An exhibition of 150 of his drawings was arranged, the "London Times" publicized it, and for 20 straight weeks the gallery was crowded to capacity. The exhibition was carried from London to the principal cities of England ans Scotland and then on to Paris. In Liverpool alone 5,000 people visited the exhibition in one afternoon.


Peace reigns at Dinant.	Ho! I will set you free in spite of yourselves.	Everything in good order! Women to the left.	Zeppelins triumphs.	"Kultur" again.

They'll whitewash me somehow.	Black barbarians? Good Samaritans!	It's my little Toinette, Shot as a "franc-tireur"	The massacre of the innocents.	We, Germans, fear nothing except God.