For the painter Georg Netzband, life in Nazi Germany meant living with state repression. The indignities included surveillance and interrogations, house searches, defamation as a “degenerate” artist and bans on exhibiting his work and on foreign travel. Plans for escape into exile were thus thwarted. In response, he escaped into the private world of inner exile.

Among his works from the period is the anti-war painting Der Sieger, which he painted four months before the beginning of the Second World War in the tool shed on his allotment garden plot. It is a vision of the coming war and the destroyed capital of the Reich in which the only victor is death. It is a critical painting with which the painter renders judgement on contemporary events. On 1 January 1944, he wrote about his self-conception as an artist: “Unfortunately I am not 'pure of conscience' [...] but am compelled by events, the eye-witnessings and the like to make drawings which are pamphlets, i.e. manifestos against the destructive spirit of our time [...]” (Netzband, Maltagebuch, estate). That same year, he was called up to the eastern front. Rolled-up in tin boxes, he buried many works in the garden – an important precautionary measure, particularly for the socially critical paintings. This allowed them to survive the Nazis and the war. Even today his works continue to shed light on the questions of inner exile.