Four executions.
As reported by Kölnische Zeitung, on October 5, in Berlin, the civil servant Frintz Pahnke (64), the office clerk Johann Dombrowski (54), the employee Fritz Großpietsch (56), and the typist Dorothea Fonden (41), who had been sentenced to death by the People’s Court, were executed. These four individuals had spread a politically inflammatory poem at their office, the Wohlfahrtsamt Horst Wessel in Berlin, which, in its unparalleled deceitfulness and malice, was intended to sow hatred and discord and shake the belief in the German final victory. With this contemptible conduct, they attacked from the rear the German people, who are engaged in a fierce struggle for their freedom. Their meanness, attitude and behaviour deserve only one punishment: death. – October 19, 1943
They’re looking for a new escape
To sate your tastes, observer,
I read it, and when it takes shape
My laughs are loud with fervor.
But no, I should not do all that
I’ve got to keep myself low
And so I must renounce thereat
To shun the Nazi death row.
For surely I would not be well,
As I just read in the news
there was some blood here spilled, not quelled,
All that just due to their views
With just one poem they report
four people had to perish,
The judgement of this “people’s” court
Is something I can’t cherish.
Four lives just for some paltry lines,
And now I’ve always wondered,
What will be of my vital signs,
Well, I’ve got near four hundred!
And they’re all pretty explosive,
And quite anti-fascistic
So yeah, if push then comes to shove,
I’ll be quite pessimistic.
My poetry is dynamite,
It’s nitroglycerinic,
It sets the Führer’s den alight,
Sardonic, mocking, cynic.
But I can leave the bombing zone
to the now present British,
they’ll pounce on giving Hitler’s throne
that final blow to finish.
And if you feel some blows hit too
in that infrequent instance,
Sometimes I will feel bad for you
But well, you were too listless.
The penance hits you from the air,
Your dreams are now all done for,
When Adolf’s power’s gone, beware,
You’ll have to scrub the ground floor.
The rubble heaps have got to go
The streets need to be cleared out,
The Führer’s death has zilch to show
There’s not much left to cheer loud.
And so your heads must now be free
from those evil delusions,
Since Hitler, Göring, Goebbels, Ley
led y’all to those conclusions.
There’s purpose to my poetry:
For laxating your brain flow,
Flush Goebbels’ propaganda sea
Completely down with Dran-O.
Well, with a mental Glauber’s salt
That Nazi faith will not hold
What’s left will go, all of those faults
The reasons for your deep fold.
Sir Goebbels has for many years
Kept poisoning all your thoughts
Now you get, thank the heavens dear,
Your brains aired out, with no clots.
In poetry I always yearn
For your minds to be scrubbed down,
You believe these nonsense concerns,
I’m surprised you’re still around.
My poems function in your brain
To cleanse, wait, clean, the latter,
No, really, oh for god’s damn sake,
This is no laughing matter.
It’s all a mental enema
You’ll be purged soon enough here,
There’s no longer a dilemma,
you’ll fix your errors, no fear.
I wish for you and for this earth,
that from this wool-blind sheep’s mob
the German folk, all roughness worth,
a people’s nation become.
Literary translation: Samuel Haecker