A secret stash of music belonging to Hitler has been discovered in a former Nazi officer’s attic.
By Pamela Mortimer
Adolf Hitler, the Fuhrer who promoted the master race and was the driving force behind the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust, was also very vocal about his musical tastes. In accordance with some of his convoluted policies, Hitler vigorously promoted the works of Wagner and "racially pure" German music. All Jewish and Russian musicians were banned from performing in the Third Reich concert halls. A recent discovery revealed that Hitler didn’t always practice what he preached when it came to "purity". While ordering his followers to fully embrace anti-Semitism, Hitler was often holed up listening to the very artists he shunned.
Proof of Hitler’s love for music still exists in the form of approximately 100 gramophone records that had been stashed in a former Soviet intelligence officer’s attic until his recent death. Der Spiegel, Europe’s largest selling news magazine, has been given access to the collection along with a letter of explanation from Lev Besymenski, the now-deceased officer who helped to interrogate captured Nazi generals.
"There were classical recordings, performed by the best orchestras of Europe and Germany with the best soloists of the age," 86 year-old Besymenski stated in the document explaining how he came to possess the records.
Besymenski came across the records in May 1945 at Hitler’s Chancellery in Berlin, where they were packed in crates. Hitler’s staff was planning an evacuation to the Fuhrer’s Alpine hideaway on the Obersalzberg and it was imperative for him to have his music to help him relax.
Besymenski, then a captain in military intelligence, never spoke about his find until just before his death for fear that he would be accused of looting.
It is not a secret that Hitler was a person who appreciated art and music, even if he had no visible musical talent of his own. The astonishing fact about the records is the presence of Jewish performers. Among the recordings is a Tchaikovsky concerto performed by the virtuoso Polish Jewish violinist Bronislaw Huberman. Hitler surely would have known that Huberman had founded the Palestine Orchestra in 1936 (the foundation of today’s Israel Philharmonic Orchestra) and that the man was living in enforced exile.
In a gruesome twist of irony, the collection also contained work by Austrian Jewish pianist Artur Schnabel, whose mother was killed by the Nazis. There is no documentation as to which records in the collection were listened to most frequently.
"I’m not terribly surprised by Hitler’s record choices," said Dr. James Kennaway, of Stanford University. "Nazi music policy was pretty incoherent. Stravinsky was played in the Third Reich because he was known to have right-wing views, Bartok because Hungary was a German ally. The only real point of consistency in Nazi policy was anti-Semitism, so the Schnabel and Huberman recordings do stand out."
Hitler had made his views crystal clear on the Jewish culture in Mein Kampf. "There was never a Jewish art and there is none today," he wrote, adding that the "two queens of the arts, architecture and music, gained nothing original from the Jews".
Roger Moorhouse, author of Killing Hitler, said that the record collection, if authentic, suggests a direct contradiction between the Fuhrer's aesthetic and political values. "It is interesting that being Russian or Jewish did not disqualify a musician from a place in Hitler’s record collection," Moorhouse said. "There was probably a separation in his world view between the political and the artistic."
Adolf Hitler, the Fuhrer who promoted the master race and was the driving force behind the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust, was also very vocal about his musical tastes. In accordance with some of his convoluted policies, Hitler vigorously promoted the works of Wagner and "racially pure" German music. All Jewish and Russian musicians were banned from performing in the Third Reich concert halls. A recent discovery revealed that Hitler didn’t always practice what he preached when it came to "purity". While ordering his followers to fully embrace anti-Semitism, Hitler was often holed up listening to the very artists he shunned.
Proof of Hitler’s love for music still exists in the form of approximately 100 gramophone records that had been stashed in a former Soviet intelligence officer’s attic until his recent death. Der Spiegel, Europe’s largest selling news magazine, has been given access to the collection along with a letter of explanation from Lev Besymenski, the now-deceased officer who helped to interrogate captured Nazi generals.
"There were classical recordings, performed by the best orchestras of Europe and Germany with the best soloists of the age," 86 year-old Besymenski stated in the document explaining how he came to possess the records.
Besymenski came across the records in May 1945 at Hitler’s Chancellery in Berlin, where they were packed in crates. Hitler’s staff was planning an evacuation to the Fuhrer’s Alpine hideaway on the Obersalzberg and it was imperative for him to have his music to help him relax.
Besymenski, then a captain in military intelligence, never spoke about his find until just before his death for fear that he would be accused of looting.
It is not a secret that Hitler was a person who appreciated art and music, even if he had no visible musical talent of his own. The astonishing fact about the records is the presence of Jewish performers. Among the recordings is a Tchaikovsky concerto performed by the virtuoso Polish Jewish violinist Bronislaw Huberman. Hitler surely would have known that Huberman had founded the Palestine Orchestra in 1936 (the foundation of today’s Israel Philharmonic Orchestra) and that the man was living in enforced exile.
In a gruesome twist of irony, the collection also contained work by Austrian Jewish pianist Artur Schnabel, whose mother was killed by the Nazis. There is no documentation as to which records in the collection were listened to most frequently.
"I’m not terribly surprised by Hitler’s record choices," said Dr. James Kennaway, of Stanford University. "Nazi music policy was pretty incoherent. Stravinsky was played in the Third Reich because he was known to have right-wing views, Bartok because Hungary was a German ally. The only real point of consistency in Nazi policy was anti-Semitism, so the Schnabel and Huberman recordings do stand out."
Hitler had made his views crystal clear on the Jewish culture in Mein Kampf. "There was never a Jewish art and there is none today," he wrote, adding that the "two queens of the arts, architecture and music, gained nothing original from the Jews".
Roger Moorhouse, author of Killing Hitler, said that the record collection, if authentic, suggests a direct contradiction between the Fuhrer's aesthetic and political values. "It is interesting that being Russian or Jewish did not disqualify a musician from a place in Hitler’s record collection," Moorhouse said. "There was probably a separation in his world view between the political and the artistic."
Adolf Hitler is likely to have had Jewish and African roots, DNA tests have shown.
