June 10, 1944
Introduction to the content
Bloch jubilantly announces The Crimea is free again, posting two newspaper articles tracing the a historical arc from the Crimean War (1853) to the occupation of the peninsula by the Wehrmacht (1941), in which Germany again defeated Russia. Now the German-Romanian troops have withdrawn and Bloch taunts the foiled German plan to seize the oilfields in the Caucasus beyond Ukraine, calling it an “idle fantasy.” The Nazis “bled and fought” for these visions of victory, but now they are falling “like stalks before the scythe.”
Bloch lampoons a press release praising the SA (Sturmabteilung of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party) for their service in clearing bombed cities by adapting the Horst Wessel song a hate-filled call to political violence. The original lyric boasts trumpet of “flags high, the ranks tightly closed!” Bloch’s adaptation describes stragglers carrying “shovels like drenched poodles.”
A Nazi press release spins the Wehrmacht’s hasty retreat from San Angelo as “a very unpleasant surprise” for the allies. Bloch ridicules this perspective, sarcastically describing The Surprise of San Angelo, as an amazing feat of strategy. The bloodthirsty British “foaming with anger” realize the Germans have fled. Bloch is confident that this sophisticated German “war tactic” – and the propaganda’s attempt to sell the withdrawal as a glorious victory – has been greeted with chuckles in Washington and London.
In an item dated May 1944, Arthur Seyß-Inquart, the National Socialist Reich Commissioner for the Netherlands is states that in the event of a German defeat the world would no longer be livable for him. For Curt Bloch, these words were a mere pose. The end of the Third Reich was inevitable, and with its end, so too would end the life of the Reich Commissioner. Seyß-Inquart did not die from weariness; he entered a plea of not guilty but lost his trial and was sentenced to death at the Nuremberg. He was executed on October 1, 1946.
The Horst Wessel Song – Updated for the Present, lampoons a press release praising the SA (Sturmabteilung of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party) for their service clearing bombed cities. Bloch adapts the Horst Wessel song, a Nazi battle hymn a call to answer resistance by overpowering it with unwaivering brutal violence. The original lyric boasts of “flags high, the ranks tightly closed!” Bloch’s adaptation describes a straggling crew of garbagemen in the bombed rubble holding their high “shovels like drenched poodles.”
As the end of the war comes into focus, the Nazi calls to persevere grow louder. The final poem in this edition of the OWC begins with the full-page Nietzsche quote “What does not destroy us makes us stronger.” Without irony, another newspaper clipping states that the people must counteract the “fetishism of objectivity” with hatred and fanaticism, because there is “no third option besides victory and death.” Unlike 1918, the Germans will not capitulate. Bloch is bewildered that the country can fall for the same swindle twice.
