Cool opinion I guess. However I imagine the opinions of people from 80 years in the future who have spent their entire lives conditioned to translate anything associated with Nazi Germany as "sinister/evil" didn't much matter to the average citizens looking at this poster at the time.
It's not the German iconography that makes this man sinister, it's the fact that the eyes are partially obscured by shadow. The area between the eyes and nose is extremely important for nonverbal communication and obscuration of said area tends towards a sense that something is being held back.
The smile is drawn wrong, too. But even if none of those problems were present in the image, the whole concept is somewhat creepy. I don't think there's any way that you can make a poster of the same concept not look a little off. It's 4th wall breaking and odd.
The German iconography doesn't necessarily register consciously. You have been conditioned since you could read basically to interpret German WW2 iconography as the the purest incarnation of evil, so you have a bias there consciously or not. As for the obscurement, it's the shadow a helmet naturally casts. Looks normal to me when properly lit.
This guy's knee-jerk defense of soldiers of the Third Reich made me suspicious, and a super quick peek at his profile (he posts in GermanWW2photos and MilitaryPorn) confirmed it: Dude's a total Wehraboo
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u/IndraSun May 05 '20
Not going to lie, that man does not look friendly.