The Nazis Fight Back
By April 1940, Nazi propagandists were denouncing Jerry Siegel for sowing “hate, dissension, injustice, laziness and crime” among the youth of America. “It is pitiful that American children who must live in this atmosphere of the west don’t even recognize the poison they daily swallow,” the propagandists lamented.
The Nazis hadn’t seen anything yet. Once the U.S. entered the war, Superman expanded his fight to include the Japanese and, on occasion, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Still, he and his fellow superheroes seemed to reserve a particular fury for the Nazis, who remained their most consistent—and symbolically potent—adversaries.
“Although U.S. entry was prompted by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor,” Harry Brod writes in his 2012 book Superman Is Jewish?: How Comic Book Superheroes Came to Serve Truth, Justice, and the Jewish-American Way, “superheroes fought against the Germans much more often than against the Japanese, reflecting the comics’ Jewish creators’ preoccupations with Europe and the Holocaust.”
Why Superman Stayed Home
Superman’s invulnerability to everything but kryptonite presented an unusual challenge for his creators. As Larry Tye observes in his 2012 book Superman: The High-Flying History of America’s Most Enduring Hero, “Every kid in America knew that Superman could win any war he fought in five minutes.”
So, aside from the occasional cover illustration, comic books kept him away from the front lines and confined him to the home front, where he could thwart Axis spies and saboteurs. “His creators back then understood they’d be in an awkward spot if they put Superman into intricate plots taking on Hitler and Hirohito, with readers rightfully expecting him to smash the Axis in seconds,” Tye says. “His doing that, when our troops couldn’t at that point, would seem disrespectful, and his not doing it would raise questions about Superman’s powers.”
Believing that fans would want to know why Superman was still flying around in leotards when so many Americans donned military uniforms, the writers devised an explanation. In a February 1942 newspaper strip—barely two months after Pearl Harbor—Clark Kent tries to enlist but is rejected for poor vision. He had, absentmindedly, read the eye chart in the next room using his X-ray vision.
Still, he had plenty of work to keep him busy. In one memorable 1942 newspaper strip, Superman is called on to rescue none other than Santa Claus, who has been kidnapped from the North Pole and imprisoned in Berlin by the Nazis. After real-life propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels announces that there will be no Christmas that year, Superman not only saves Santa but fills in for his reindeer, ensuring that everybody’s presents make it under the tree in time.
After the war, Superman moved on to new adventures, faced fresh villains and maintained a lasting popularity that eluded many of his superhero peers. “With Superman, Siegel and Shuster hit on a perfect combination of action-adventure and human interest for their times, and in the process created a character who is endlessly adaptable to different eras,” Danny Fingeroth, author of Superman on the Couch: What Superheroes Really Tell Us About Ourselves and Our Society, says.
But his service in his country’s greatest hour of need would remain a high point. “From comics to the USO shows for the troops, both military and civilian morale needed to be kept up through entertainment,” Brod writes. “World War II was not won by bullets alone.”