Despite trembling and shaking hands
And despite the shaking of our heads
They have given us work now
They put us poor wretches to work
Of ‘70 elderly veterans
Our son died in the World War,
They call us again to the banners
With clashing swords and crashing waves
With Heil Hitler and marching music
Let us elderly knit socks.
We say empires come and go
How clumsy are our hands,
For them, it’s actually time to stop
But Goebbels calls it destinies turning
And says it’s refreshing, invigorating,
That even with our foot in the grave
We can still serve Hitler and the Reich
And still have the consciousness
To protect the German fatherland
And in the final moments,
To knit soldiers’ socks.
We saw empires come and go,
The emperors, the social democrats,
But never seen before
What Hitler and the Nazis did,
Almost nine-tenth corpses are put into service
And the last from the bones gets extracted,
The unparalleled desecration of the elderly
Grasps a system, already almost broken
We are to die and suffocate,
And knit socks until the end.
As soon as they sniff laborers
They ruthlessly set them to work
And even if our hands tremble,
Delicacy can no longer be violated.
Soldiers fall, cities smoke
We see the German people perish
They dare to abuse the elderly
But it’s useless, the Reich will die.
In its final moments
It lets the aged knit socks.
Post-Editing: Robert Saunders
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