In Eastern Germany one of the more interesting propaganda campaign was the Yankee Beetle campaign put on by the East German Government. This campaign was targeted at the East German civilians and argued that the large infestation of potato beetles (called yankee beetles by the propagandists) were caused by the U.S.A. government trying to destroy east german crops. The government used the fear of the U.S.A. that had been spreading in Eastern Germany as a result of the fire bombing of Dresden and the outrage against the atomic bomb, to try to attribute the plague of potato bugs on the United States. In fact in newspapers they ran stories where farmers talked about how huge amounts of potato bugs seemed to show up after American planes had flown over their fields. In these stories farmers talked about how there was a dramatic increase in populations and how they were all a very similar size which they felt showed evidence of tampering. Pamphlets were also distributed containing similar stories and claims. They even started a country wide petition to get America to stop using this new form of warfare. In fact apparently children were sent to fields after schools to look for the beetles.
Perhaps their most interesting propaganda piece was a radio broadcast that was sent out on June 7 1950. In the broadcast the commentator talks to the public about how the Americans destroyed potato crops with potato beetles. He also makes the claim that this was a plot for the Americans to make their own potatoes more valuable and make more money that way. However most interestingly of all is how he talks about how this is all a warm up to bacteriological warfare and that is the Americans next step. He also talks about how these crimes should be brought before the UN council, and how the U.S.A. has tried similar attacks on German crops before.
This image comes from a pamphlet from the East German government in which it makes the claims that the U.S.A. are distributing these potato beetles from the sky, and they are doing it in order to win the cold war, and can you really expect anything else from these evil capitalists. The cover itself is fascinating. For starters you have the Yankee beetles on the cover or potato beetles with a red white and blue pattern on their back as they slowly crawl towards what the audience can only assume is a potato field ripe for them to eat. However here the word halt is used as a kind of barrier both in a literal sense as it appears to be stopping them, but also in a mental sense as it would conjure in the reader a sense that one needs to stop this plague from ravaging their land, they need to halt the yankee bug and all the evil ideology it stands for.
(It is interesting to point out that A this was all fake as far as the evidence indicates and B a very similar story ran in Czechoslovakia at the same time.)
Burns, Lucy. The Great Cold War Potato Beetle Battle. BBC News. September 3, 2013. Accessed October 30, 2016. http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23929124.
Bytwerk, Randall. STOP Yankee Beetles. Calvin College German Propaganda Archive. 2005. Accessed October 30, 2016. http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/amikafer.htm.