Nazis Poem by Leo Yankevich

I had first learned about them from the black
& white flicks made back in the 1940s.
They wore strange monocles and spoke kraut English,
broken, guttural with hints of Yiddish.

I watched reruns, astonished at their lack
of kindness, how they killed their enemies.
They clicked their black boots, eager to extinguish
them like rats in a sewer, weak and skittish,

on their way to <i>Night of the Generals, </i>
where they grew faint when viewing decadent art,
where they would murder whores to get their kink,
malignant, always evil, on the throes

of madness; and then on to other roles,
in <i>Battle of the Bulge, The Train, </i> the part
of "I-know-nothing" Schultz, and colonel Klink,
there on the backlot set of <i>Hogan's Heroes.</i>