Ladislaus Kmoch

For its first years, the eponymous character was depicted as a slogan-susceptible nationalist drunkard and his dog, Struppi, a voice of reason. First, Seicherel sympathized with the Heimwehr Movement and later with Hitler. Kmoch joined the then-illegal NSDAP in 1935^[1] In 1934, competing political parties were banned by the new Dolfuss government and the newspaper was nationalized. The strip became mostly apolitical due to the change in political climate, until the Anschluss of 1938, when it became nationalist and pro-Nazi. ^[2]

One of Kmoch's antisemitic political cartoons in 1939 depicted dozens of Jewish rats being expelled from Germany and refused by other countries.^[3] Similar imagery was later used in the infamous propaganda film, Der Ewige Jude, released the next year.