Illustrations in science fiction books may have served as inspiration for these two drawings by Johan Briedé, who had vast experience as a book illustrator. A gigantic tank sows death and destruction in the battle for the Russian city of Kharkiv, which as Briedé noted at the lower left, raged in February 1943. The other drawing features a landscape strewn with skulls in which ‘human trees’ with faces and arms as branches have freakishly come into bloom.