At the end of World War II, a large part of the inhabitants of Lithuania fled to Germany. Several dozen thousand children also left for Germany together with their parents. Settled in DP (displaced persons) camps, parents together with teachers and all humanitarian intellectuals focused their attention on children's education. Despite the meagre living conditions, kindergartens and schools were established, new textbooks and readers were written, and old ones were reprinted. In all educational institutions the continuity of the teaching process was sought, and teachers worked according to the school programmes and curricula approved in the Republic of Lithuania in 1939. When children began to be assembled into schools, the lack of readers for children of all age groups became obvious. They were necessary not only for the teaching process, general and ethical education, but also to keep the children busy. In the period when DP camps were established in the spring and summer of 1945, this problem was solved by copying excerpts from some publications that had been brought from Lithuania by hand, or by multiplying these publications with a typewriter. The newly emerging Lithuanian periodical press helped solve the urgent problem of children's literature by including columns for children or by publishing separate supplements from the very first issues. The publication of children's books, among books of general nature, was partly supported by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), and many Lithuanian public organizations that operated in exile. The Book Publishing Committee was founded under the Education Board of the Lithuanian émigré community specifically for that purpose. In the period under discussion children's books and textbooks were published by private and cooperative publishers and publishing houses of public organizations. The largest Lithuanian publishing houses Patria, Sudavija, Venta, Gabija, Giedra and Sūduva established in Germany produced the largest number of children's books of various kinds. DP camps themselves, the schools that operated there or their parents' committees, as well as private persons also acted as publishers of children's literature. More than fifty illustrated Lithuanian books for children were published in post-war Germany from 1945 to 1951. The relatively small amount of illustrated publications was determined by the poor living conditions in exile, the production facilities of publishing houses and, above all, printing houses devastated by the war, as well as the lack of paper and funds. The appearance of almost all children's books published in Germany is plain and comparatively poor in all aspects. This concerns the format, paper, binding, the choice of fonts and the means of printing. The majority of the booklets were printed on thin and fragile mainly brownish paper of very low quality, and the booklets themselves were thin, light, with soft covers and seamless binding. There were no children's books printed on high-quality art paper. The appearance of children's books was spoiled by the equipment of printing houses affected by the war, the lack of high-quality typographic paint and the narrow range of colours. The majority of them are characterized by excessive or insufficient richness of the printing type. Sometimes even different pages of the same book vary in the degree of richness, and quite often the text and the illustrations of three or four colours are printed indistinctly. Children's illustrated books are also very different with regard to their artistic quality. It was determined by several factors. Beside professional artists (Adolfas Vaičaitis, Liudas Vilimas, Ona Dokalskaitė-Paškevičienė, Jonas Firinauskas, Juzė Katiliūtė, Zenonas Kolba, Vlada Stančikaitė-Abraitienė, Jonas Steponavičius), quite many artists who did not have the necessary qualifications and lacked theoretical knowledge in the book art and particularly the experience of layout design worked in the field of children's book design. These were mainly the attendees of the Kaunas Art School who did not finish their studies, Eduardas Krasauskas, Halina NaruševičiūtėŽmuidzinienė, Juozas Penčyla, Aleksandras Šepetys, as well as former students of the Vilnius Academy of Arts and the Kaunas Institute of Applied Art, Vytautas Leonas Adamkevičius, Emilija Drochnerytė, Povilas Osmolskis, Antanas Petrikonis and Viktoras Simankevičius. In comparison with children's books of the interwar period, new stylistic tendencies of design or illustration, and innovative forms of expression that could have been influenced by the new post-war environment of Western culture and its incredibly intense artistic life did not manifest themselves. Very generally speaking, traditionalist aesthetics and realistic expression were predominant. Besides, it cannot be seen from the poor context if one or another publishing house had a clear conception of an illustrated children's book and obvious artistic and aesthetic design criteria. However, all children's books published in post-war Germany have one thing in common - their ideological contents, which was partly determined by the emphasis on the knowledge of one's homeland given in the four-year primary school curriculum of the Republic of Lithuania as a very important part of developing national self-consciousness, teaching the universal and intrinsic values, and building a moral and aesthetic basis. The strengthening of the perception of identity of small kids who found themselves in an unfamiliar environment, the formation of their historical and civic self-consciousness became as urgent as never before. There were constant discussions on this topic in the periodical press of Lithuanians in exile. These views were followed by the majority of writers and artists: Lithuanian themes, images of the Lithuanian village and, specifically, national attributes are predominant both in the contents of books and the accompanying illustrations; traditional motifs of village life, as well as symbolic motifs of crosses, the musical instrument kanklės, and a heroic warrior are widely used. On the other hand, other important functions of children's books were not forgotten either. The aim was to awaken the feelings of the love for homeland and, no less importantly, the respect for one's parents, kindness, honesty, and other moral feelings, to develop imagination and aesthetic experience. Both the text and accompanying illustrations served this purpose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]