Hitler relaxed to the music of Jews

New light has been shed on the Nazi leader's musical tastes by the discovery of what purports to be 100 of his gramophone records found in the attic of a former Soviet intelligence officer, Lew Besymenski.

"There were classical recordings, performed by the best orchestras of Europe and Germany with the best soloists of the age," Mr Besymenski said in a document explaining how the records came into his possession.

The 86-year-old, who helped to interrogate captured Nazi generals, died earlier this summer. The document and the record collection have now been made available to Der Spiegel magazine. "I was astonished that Russian musicians were among the collection," Mr Besymenski wrote.

Hitler dismissed Russians as untermenschen, subhumans, and was contemptuous of their contribution to world culture.

"Yet the records included works by Tchaikovsky, Borodin and Rachmaninov - scratched from frequent playing and all clearly labelled 'Fuhrerhauptquartier', the Fuhrer's headquarters."

The Soviet intelligence officer had found them in Hitler's chancellery in Berlin in May 1945, still packed in crates.

Hitler's staff were counting on an evacuation to the Nazi leader's alpine hideaway on the Obersalzberg and it was known that he could only relax with his music.

Mr Besymenski, then a captain in military intelligence, kept quiet about the records during his lifetime for fear that he would be accused of looting. The most astonishing fact about the records - essentially Hitler's "Best of ..." collections - is the presence of Jewish performers.

Among the recordings is a Tchaikovsky concerto performed by the virtuoso Polish Jewish violinist Bronislaw Huberman.

Hitler would have been aware, while listening to Huberman's playing, that he had founded the Palestine Orchestra in 1936 (which went on to be the foundation of today's Israel Philharmonic Orchestra) and that he was living in enforced exile.

The Austrian Jewish pianist Artur Schnabel, whose mother was killed by the Nazis, also had his work in Hitler's collection.

It is not known which records in the collection were listened to most frequently, nor have they been formally catalogued.

From what is known so far about the Besymenski loot, the records confirm that Hitler had rather obvious, cautious tastes.

The perverse element comes not in his rejection of modernism, say musicologists, but rather in his exclusion of great music because it was "racially unacceptable".

Frederic Spotts, author of Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, argues that the remarkable feature of Hitler's musical taste was that he could impose it on a whole nation.

"Hitler's problem - in a way his tragedy - was that he confused aesthetic drive with aesthetic talent," Mr Spotts said.

Hitler claimed that there was no independent Jewish culture. "There was never a Jewish art," he wrote in Mein Kampf, "and there is none today".

Richard Wagner was Hitler's main musical passion, but he was furious with the Wagner family when the Jewish baritone Friedrich Schorr was allowed to sing the role of Wotan.

The Times, London, in The Australian