August 26, 1944
Introduction to the content
To give the air of “objectivity,” the Nazi press quotes the Spanish fascist press, to stoke fear of The Bolshevik Atrocities to come if Russia succeeds in defeating Italy. Communist resistance grows stronger daily and has used churches as gathering places, subverting congregations sympathetic to the Nazis. Bloch takes the fear mongering to absurd extremes: that the end of Naziism means the end of Christianity itself! St. Peter’s Basilica is to become a grand cinema, the Vatican transforms into a brothel. Those who still believe in God will be left to starve. Bloch makes reference to the many clergymen of the resistance who have been murdered in the name of the Third Reich. The sensationalistic scenarios now being spread by the Nazi press distract attention from Nazi crimes. Bloch shames the National Socialists, who have made faith an abomination: teaching their children to worship Hitler and the swastika, rather than Christ. How can the Bolsheviks crimes be worse?
Their New Admirers refers to the piece in the Nazi press. Having once described Domela Nieuwenhuis (1846–1919) and Pieter Jelles Troelstra (1860–1930) as “scum” they offer a “think piece,” in which claim these early adopters of Marxism as proto-Nazis. The hope is to attract other “working class heroes” into the Nazi cause. These two are dead, and Bloch is incredulous because if these famously “red” thinkers were still alive, the Nazis would have shipped them right off to concentration camps to be murdered.
In the cover story, A Tommy Speaks, a battle-worn British soldier (pictured on the cover) addresses the soldiers of the Germans Wehrmacht, taunting them with the repetition of the word “almost” to drive home that they’ve had no lasting victory. London was almost completely destroyed, and England was almost theirs, they almost won the battles of Moskow and Leningrad, they almost conquered the world. Now the war is almost over. It’s a story of “shoulda woulda coulda,” in which Nazi success was exaggerated and – at the end of the day – there is great distress as the German army retreats; they are “in flight, and the homeland is burning.”
In The Advice of Driekruis, Curt Bloch calls out the faulty analysis of his nemesis, Maarten van Nierop (1912–1979), a Dutch journalist, NSB member, the editor-in-chief of the Twentsch Nieuwsblad the “Nazi rag” newspaper. Bloch nicknames him “Friend Driekruis” because he signs his work XXX (three crosses). Driekruis has advised his readers to use pins instead of ink to mark the shifting bounds on their maps of the war’s Eastern Front. Driekruis tells the reader that using ink will ruin their map as the German troops withdraw and will then consolidate and later fight their way back to the East. Bloch. Bloch is confident the Wehrmacht will never cross those lines again, and a German defeat is coming ever closer. When it happens, Driekruis will mourn, “but we – we will dance.”
In England is no better off …, the propaganda war rages on: The Nazi weekly magazine “Illustrierter Beobachter” reprints a British ad to prove the British enemy is also suffering from food shortages and luxury goods, Bloch trumpets the Nazi claim that “smaller, poorer, and deceptively packaged cigarettes” are also a problem in Britain. This should comfort German smokers who can now light up “dirt with a cheerful face.” This will cheer up “every German nicotinist”– whether from Cologne or Vienna, whether Christian or Jew. (here, Bloch quickly corrects himself: “The Jew was a mistake, as the Jews have disappeared”.) Still: don’t forget! The enemy has it worse.
