Paper Bullets: Two Artists Who Risked Their Lives to Defy the Nazis

In the midst of World War II, an audacious anti-Nazi campaign was undertaken by an unlikely pair: two French women, Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe. Better remembered today by their artist names, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, the couple’s actions were even more courageous because of who they were: lesbian partners known for cross-dressing and creating the kind of gender-bending work that the Nazis would come to call “degenerate art.”

They drew on their skills as avant-garde artists to write and distribute “paper bullets” — wicked insults against Hitler, calls to rebel, and subversive fictional dialogues designed to demoralize Nazi troops occupying their adopted home on the British Channel Island of Jersey. Devising their own PSYOPS campaign, they slipped their notes into soldier’s pockets or tucked them inside newsstand magazines.

Hunted by the secret field police, Lucy and Suzanne were finally betrayed in 1944, when the Germans imprisoned them, and tried them in a court martial, sentencing them to death for their actions. Ultimately they survived, but even in jail, they continued to fight the Nazis by reaching out to other prisoners and spreading a message of hope. Their compelling story is one that celebrates the galvanizing power of art, and of resistance.