In the spring of 1934, the actor Erwin Geschonneck and the graphic designer John Heartfield lived in the same emigrant district in Prague. Heartfield was working on a photo montage for the Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ), in which he juxtaposed a medieval window sculpture of the Tübingen Stiftskirche (showing the martyr George bound to a wheel) with a photograph of a victim of National Socialism (symbolically tied to the arms of a swastika).

Erwin Geschonneck was the model for the photo. "It was very hot when we did the shoot," he later recalled. "We went onto the roof of a small house on which Johnny had had the comrades erect a wooden structure, because he needed a semblance of the body position. This wooden structure was a cross, not a swastika, of course, as in the montage, but a wooden cross - which I was then supposed [...] to lie on. It was about a meter above the ground, and I had to lie naked on it all the time until he had photographed the whole scene several times with his Leica." (Erwin Geschonneck, Meine unruhigen Jahre, 1984, p. 59)

Saint George, auxiliary and patron saint, was a revered figure in cultural history. According to lore, the sculpture on the Tübingen church wall was created in the 15th century in memory of a craft journeyman who was executed in the city after being wrongly convicted. John Heartfield, showed that the National Socialist regime used equally violent methods in the systematic persecution and punishment of dissidents.