War Primer. Bertolt Brecht
10 December Hitler gave one of his big speeches in an arms factory near Berlin. Our picture shows the chancellor and supreme commander of the armed forces on the podium, to his left the leader of the Labour Front, Dr Robert Ley, and Propaganda Minister Dr Goebbels.
Promising Socialism, there he stands.
Listen: a New Age will be proclaimed.
Behind him, see the work of your own hands:
Great cannon, silent. And at you they’re aimed.
The saddler I, who helped the Junker scum
To get back in their seat. I’d no excuse
But let them buy me for a princely sum
From paupers’ savings. And escaped the noose.
I am the butcher-clown in this concern.
The Iron Hermann, every time a winner
A Reich Marshal, policeman and thief in turn:
Give me your hand. But, first, best count your fingers.
I am ‘the doctor’, I doctor what gets printed.
It may be your world, but I have my say.
So what? Its history gets reinvented.
Even my club foot seems a fake today.
‘Joseph, I’m told you’re saying it’s a fact
I loot things.’ – ‘Hermann, looting’s not for you.
Who’d grudge you what you want? They’d have more tact.
And if I said it, who’d believe it’s true?’
O swan song! ‘Never seek to question me!’
O pilgrims’ choir! O fiery magic trick!
Song of the Rhine gold on an empty belly!
That’s what I’d call the Bayreuth Republic.
Here’s this stone horse outside the Chancellery
Who gazes glumly at the gloomy future.
‘What’s wrong then, horse?’ ‘My Leader had me try
His eight-year treatment, and I feel no better.’
German Churches on Wheels.The Catholic Church has 38.
Berlin, Wednesday.
According to reports from Catholic circles, the Catholic Church now has 38 churches on wheels. These consist of little altars mounted on motor vehicles so that mass can be offered to isolated and inaccessible villages. A further dozen of these mobile churches are on order, to reach – among others – remote army barracks. In general, the padre himself drives his own mobile church.
A happy headline: God is on the move!
Hitler pushed on, and God could not keep up.
Well, such is war, let’s hope God doesn’t lose
Should he too find his oil’s about to stop.
Ten countries lie prostrate beneath my tread
My own among them. And the bloody trace
Left by my boot has turned the country red
From Mülheim an der Ruhr to Kirkenaes.
O brothers, see the distant Caucasus.
A Swabian peasant’s son, I lie below
Killed when a Russian peasant fired on us.
I met defeat in Swabia years ago.
‘What brought you two to North Cape?’ – ‘A command.’
‘Don’t you feel cold?’ ‘Chilled to the bone are we.’
‘When will you two go home?’ ‘When this snow ends.’
‘And how long will it snow?’ ‘Eternally’.
But when we sighted the red walls of Moscow
People appeared from farm and factory
And they repelled us in the name of every people
Even the people back in Germany.
Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, 61 and a Prussian, helped conquer Poland, Paris and the North Caucasus.
Field Marshal Hugo Sperrle, 57, Bavarian brewer’s son, commanded air corps in Spain, Poland, Lowlands, France, Battle of Britain.
Field Marshal Karl von Rundstedt, 66, planned and carried through famous break at Sedan, now has headquarters there.
Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, 50, is slashing, hard-hitting commander of the German Afrika Corps in Battle of Egypt.
General Heinz Guderian, 56, a Prussian, had brilliant tank successes in Poland and France, commanded Panzer division from a plane.
Field Marshal Siegmund List, 62, steely Bavarian master of mobility, knifed through Poland and France.
Here are six murderers. Now don’t turn away
And don’t just nod and murmur ‘That’s the truth.’
Showing them up has cost us to this day
Fifty great cities and most of our youth.
Look at the helmets of the vanquished! Yet
Surely the moment when we came undone
Was not when they were smitten from our heads
But when we first agreed to put them on.
When the “Fox of the Desert,” German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel (left) drank this premature toast, his Afrika Korps was still “unbeatable.”
Here’s to the Fatherland with all its Junkers!
The German sabre, plus its dividends!
The German People, armed and in its bunkers!
The great Misleader – Cheers! – of foes and friends!
But in his recent flight across Libya, Rommel left behind many of his battered forces. From Allied attack this German vainly dived for cover.
O