January 8, 1944
Introduction to the content
Curt Bloch addresses the German people with his poem The Great Illusion: Their dreams of world domination, the superiority of their own race, and invincibility have all turned out to be mere illusions. They now stand hopelessly with an exhausted army. “The only thing gained, Is – the world’s hatred.”
After disappointing reports from German submarines, Adolf Hitler orders the battleship “Scharnhorst” to set out. They hoped that this ship – named after Prussian General and military reformer Gerhard von Scharnhorst (1755–1813) – would provide more efficiency at sea. However, this turned out to be a hug setback. The ship was sunk on December 26, 1943, in the North Sea after a fierce battle with two British task forces led by the battleship “Duke of York.” Only 36 crew members were rescued, and the rest of the 1,968 crew perished, including the commander, Captain Fritz Hintze. Now, as Curt Bloch sarcastically notes, the “Scharnhorst” has become a submarine itself …
In the Nazi-controlled press, an image is shown of a captured American fighter pilot with the inscription “Murder Inc.” on his jacket. The newspaper article states that similar designations, “derived from gangster language,” were also used by other crews of American aircraft formations. Curt Bloch does not accept that the Germans want to condemn the outside world and present themselves as innocent through such reports. “the murder association, Those are the Nazi bigwigs.” They have always looked for scapegoats. As an example, Bloch mentions the Dutchman Marinus van der Lubbe, to whom the Nazis attributed the Reichstag fire in February 1933 and sentenced to death after a show trial. Bloch knows: “The Reichstag fire, like the world fire, was ignited by the system.” (It was only on December 6, 2007, that the German Public Prosecutor’s Office determined that “the verdict against Marinus van der Lubbe in the ‘Reichstag’ fire trial has been revoked.”)
