The Third Reich at War

by Richard J. Evans

  Some songs, however, transcended regional boundaries and were a hit with troops and civilians alike. Sentimental numbers like Zarah Leander’s ‘I know one day a miracle will come’ comforted people in hard times and implicitly promised a better future. As we have seen, the troops at Stalingrad huddled around their radios to listen to the popular chanteuse Lale Andersen singing ‘It’ll all soon be over / It’ll end one day’. Like other, similar numbers, this was directed at strengthening the emotional bonds between couples and families separated by the war. Andersen’s 1939 hit song ‘Lili Marleen’ cast a nostalgic glow over its listeners as it described a soldier saying goodbye to his girl-friend underneath a street-lamp outside his barracks. Would they ever meet again? Would she find someone else? Would he survive the war? And if he did not, who would then be standing with Lili underneath the lamppost? The song encapsulated the personal anxieties as well as the lingering hopes of men far away from their loved ones. Further piquancy was added by the fact that, while the words were those of a man, they were sung by an attractive woman. Yet Goebbels disliked its pessimistic and nostalgic tone. At the end of September 1942 he had Andersen arrested for undermining the troops’ morale. Her correspondence with friends in Switzerland, including exiled German Jews, was intercepted, and her refusal to accede to Goebbels’s request to pay a visit for publicity purposes to the Warsaw ghetto was held against her. Goebbels had her banned from making any further public appearances. Eventually, from the middle of 1943 onwards, she was allowed to sing again in public, provided she did not put ‘Lili Marleen’ on the programme. At her first concert after the ban was lifted, the audience yelled for her to sing the song, and when it became clear that she was not going to, they sang it themselves. In August 1944 it was finally banned altogether. Long before this, British and American troops had started listening to the song as it was broadcast from the powerful German forces’ radio transmitter in Belgrade. The Allied military authorities had it translated into English. ‘My Lili of the Lamplight’ was sung by Marlene Dietrich, Vera Lynn and (in French) Edith Piaf, and towards the end of the war the British forces radio broadcast the German version across the enemy lines to the German troops to try to depress them, thus perhaps inadvertently confirming Goebbels’s belief that it was damaging to morale.130

  By this time, it was becoming increasingly difficult for Germans to hear not only ‘Lili Marleen’ but anything at all on the radio. The cheap ‘People’s Receivers’ often broke down, and batteries and spare parts were hard to get. A thriving black market in them soon developed. Bombing raids interrupted electricity supplies in the towns, sometimes for days on end. And as the war began to go badly for Germany, listeners grew increasingly distrustful of German radio’s reports on it.131 As early as January 1942 the Security Service of the SS bemoaned the fact that people were indifferent to political broadcasts. Yet people were also worried about the lack of detailed reports of the progress of the war on the Eastern Front and in Africa. They felt they did not know what was going on. ‘An open statement on these questions, which move and oppress everyone, would get rid of the present feeling of uncertainty.’132 In the search for reliable information, German listeners turned to foreign radio stations, above all the BBC. The popular People’s Receivers, sold cheaply before the war, could only receive short-wave broadcasts, and this made it difficult to listen to foreign stations. However, they accounted for under 40 per cent of radios in Germany in 1943. Most people with a radio could receive the German-language service of the BBC without too much difficulty, and even the People’s Receivers could sometimes succeed in tuning in. By August 1944 the BBC reckoned that up to 15 million Germans were listening in to it on a daily basis.133

  Germans listened to the BBC and other foreign stations at considerable risk to themselves. The moment the war broke out, tuning in to foreign stations was made a criminal offence punishable by death. It was all too easy, in apartment blocks poorly insulated for sound, for listeners to face denunciation to the authorities by fanatical or ill-intentioned neighbours who overhead the sonorous tones of BBC newsreaders coming through the walls. Some 4,000 people were arrested and prosecuted for ‘radio crime’ in the first year of the law’s operation, and the first execution of an offender came in 1941.134 A typical case was that of a Krefeld worker who was sentenced to a year in prison in December 1943 for listening to the BBC and passing on what he heard to his workmates. Like most people punished for this offence, he had formerly been active in left-wing politics. Ordinary offenders were seldom punished very harshly, and prosecutions and sentences from 1941 onwards were relatively uncommon. In 1943, for instance, only eleven death sentences were passed in the whole of the Greater German Reich for ‘radio crime’, or 0.2 per cent of the total.135 Nevertheless, people went to extraordinary lengths to avoid being heard listening to the BBC, locking themselves in the toilet or covering themselves, and the radio, with a blanket, or sending other family members out of the room. Not long after the war began William L. Shirer noted, with a pinch of exaggeration: ‘Many long prison sentences being meted out to Germans who listen to foreign radio stations, and yet many continue to listen to them,’ including a family with whom he had recently spent an afternoon. ‘They were a little apprehensive when they turned on the six p.m. BBC news,’ he recorded. The porter was ‘the official Nazi spy for the apartment house’, and there were others too. ‘They played the radio so low that I could hardly catch the news,’ Shirer wrote, ‘and one of the daughters kept watch by the front door.’136

  No such precautions were needed in Britain or other countries when it came to listening to the propaganda broadcasts emanating from Germany. Goebbels ensured that increased resources were assigned to English-language broadcasts, and employed British and American pro-Germans, often with fascist beliefs, to make them: the most notorious of these was William Joyce, whose plummy accent earned him the nickname of ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ from his British listeners. These propaganda broadcasters found an audience not least because their style was more intimate and relaxed than that of the stiffly formal BBC; but overall their effect on morale was minimal, and as time went on, people began to tire of Joyce’s continual sarcasm and contempt. The most surprising of these broadcasts, perhaps, were put on by Goebbels in defiance of all the Nazis’ cherished beliefs about the racial degeneracy of jazz music, when a German swing band, led by the crooner Karl (‘Charlie’) Schwedler, went on to the air with popular British and American songs, adapting the words into parodies of the original for propaganda purposes. A favourite theme was the unreliability of the BBC (‘talking the wishful talk’, as a parody of the ‘Lambeth Walk’ put it).137

  Jazz and swing were not just used by the regime for its own purposes, they became expressions of opposition to it as well. In Hamburg, the well-off ‘Swing Youth’ of the prewar years were not deterred from holding dances and parties by the mere outbreak of a war. Early in 1940 the Gestapo discovered 500 of them swinging away in a dance-hall in an Altona hotel to the sound of English music, even with English lyrics. The next time this happened, the police were prepared. On 2 March 1940 forty Gestapo agents raided another dance, in the Curio-Haus in the city’s university quarter, locked the doors and fingerprinted 408 participants, all but seventeen of them under the age of twenty-one. Further public dances had to be cancelled, but the gilded youth of Hamburg continued their partying in private. Until December 1941 they gathered in the Waterloo cinema near the Dammtor railway station to watch American films, with the young Axel Springer, a future newspaper publisher, acting as projectionist. As the police became more intrusive, the Swing Youth retreated to the plush suburban villas of their parents, where they celebrated in the cellars in what the Gestapo described disapprovingly as an ‘erotic ambience’. In June 1942 a summer party in one such villa included a cabaret with impersonations of Hitler and Goebbels. The Hitler Youth, who feared the Swing Youth as rivals to their own popularity, such as it was, sent spies to the party, and the cabarettist was arrested.

&
nbsp; The arrogance and insouciance of the Swingers, their provocative dress, such as Hannelore Evers’s grey suit, man’s waistcoat and open jacket with shoulder-pads (‘an absolute knock-out,’ as one veteran of the Swing Youth recalled later), or Kurt-Rudolf Hoffmann’s habit of wearing the American flag on his lapel, combined with their open admiration of British style, were eventually reported to Himmler and Heydrich, who on 26 January 1942 ordered them to be arrested, beaten and put to work. Their parents were to be interrogated and sent to a concentration camp if it was found that they had encouraged the ‘Anglophiliac tendencies’ of their offspring. Within a few weeks, up to seventy Swingers had been arrested and sent to camps including Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen. There they were classified as political prisoners, though many denied they had acted out of political conviction. ‘We were long on hair and short on brains,’ one later confessed, and as for their habit of booing at the newsreel when they went to the cinema, one of them said they did it because ‘we were going to tell these dumb bastards that we were different, that’s all’. Yet the disregard for the regime’s racism that led a number of the Swing boys to carry on sexual relationships with Jewish girls, the hatred of the war some of them showed in their letters (intercepted by the Gestapo) and their open contempt for the Nazi leaders and the Hitler Youth, gave the Gestapo some reason to regard them as political. Many of the younger Swing boys were conscripted into the army after serving their time in a camp for juveniles, but at least three of them, according to their own later accounts, managed to avoid ever shooting at the enemy, and two of them crossed the lines and gave themselves up.138

  IV

  As the popularity of musical films and radio broadcasts suggests, musical life was initially relatively unaffected by the war.139 Escapist operas were popular on the stage as well as on the cinema screen: the most notable written during these years was Richard Strauss’s Capriccio (1942). Hitler himself had recently acquired a passion for the music of Anton Bruckner, whose manuscripts he planned to collect in the magnificent library at the vast Austrian monastery of St Florian, where Bruckner had played the organ and where his body was buried. The monastery was located near Hitler’s favourite town, Linz. Hitler had the monks summarily expelled ready for the building’s conversion to its new function. He paid for the restoration of the organ out of his personal funds and also subsidized the publication of the Haas edition of Bruckner’s collected works. He bought a number of additional items for the library, and had a Bruckner study centre set up at the monastery, also supporting it from his own coffers; it was intended in the long run to be the nucleus of a major music conservatory. Hitler prompted the foundation of a Bruckner Symphony Orchestra, which began playing concerts in the autumn of 1943. His design for a bell-tower in Linz that would play a theme from Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony, the Romantic, was, however, never realized.140

  Despite all this, there was ultimately, in Hitler’s view, still no substitute for Wagner. In 1940, on his way back from his brief visit to Paris, he called in at Bayreuth to attend a performance of Twilight of the Gods.

  It was to be his last. Immersed in the conduct of the war, and increasingly reluctant to appear in public, he went to no more live musical performances after this. Yet he never lost his belief in the power of music. In the same year he established a ‘War Festival’ at Bayreuth, to which he invited - or forced the attendance of - specially chosen guests, 142,000 of them in all during the five years of the Festival. ‘The war,’ he reminisced in January 1942, ‘gave me the opportunity to fulfil a desire dear to Wagner’s heart: that men chosen amongst the people - workers and soldiers - should be able to attend his Festival free of charge.’141 By 1943, Twilight of the Gods no longer seemed appropriate, in view of the rapidly deteriorating military situation, and, after consulting with Winifred Wagner, Hitler had it replaced by The Mastersingers of Nuremberg at the remaining two Festivals. In his own quarters, he had stopped listening to Wagner altogether after Stalingrad, and sought escape in The Merry Widow, his favourite operetta, by Franz Leha’r, conveniently disregarding the fact that the librettist was Jewish, as indeed was Le’har’s own wife.142

  Bayreuth and its festivals always occupied something of an anomalous place in the Third Reich, not least because they were in practice run by the Wagner family in direct consultation with Hitler, whereas other aspects of German musical life all fell under the aegis of the Reich Chamber of Music and therefore Joseph Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry. In 1940 the Ministry claimed that there were 181 permanent orchestras at work in the Reich, employing a total of 8,918 musicians.143 They had to adapt themselves to wartime conditions, playing in munitions factories and appearing at charity events for the troops. Political considerations continued to trump the regime’s general hostility to musical modernism; the fact that Hungary was an ally of Germany, for instance, allowed the Munich Philharmonic under its conductor Osvald Kabasta to play Be’la Barto’k’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste in concert in 1942, although the composer himself had never wanted his music to be performed in Nazi Germany (he had by this time gone into exile in the USA). But political considerations also entailed - or offered an opportunity to orchestras to set out on - tours of occupied countries, spreading German culture and proselytizing for German music. The repertoire was heavily German, with the music of Richard Strauss and Hans Pfitzner taking pride of place amongst living composers. Conductors such as Eugen Jochum, Hans Knappertsbusch and younger men like Herbert von Karajan and Karl Böhm ensured that standards were maintained until the destruction of concert halls and opera houses and the drafting of players and administrators into the armed forces began to take their toll from 1943 onwards. Böhm did his career no harm by giving the Nazi salute from the podium at the start of his concerts, while Karajan, a member of the Nazi Party since 1933, benefited from the fact that he was considered politically more reliable than the senior figure he began to rival for concert-goers’ affections during the war, Wilhelm Furtwängler.144

  Hitler remained, however, a fan of Furtwängler (‘the only conductor whose gestures do not appear ridiculous,’ he said in 1942, ‘is Furtwängler’). 145 Such approval further cemented Furtwängler’s commitment to the Third Reich: indeed, on 13 January 1944 Goebbels wrote in his diary: ‘To my pleasure I find that with Furtwängler the worse things go for us, the more he supports our regime.’146 During the war, Furtwängler became a kind of court conductor to the Nazi elite. He took an orchestra to Norway a week before the German invasion in 1940, an event described by the German Embassy in Oslo, which knew that German forces were about to launch an attack on the country, as ‘very suited to awaken and animate sympathy for German art and for Germany’. In 1942 he conducted a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony for Hitler’s birthday. All of this he did voluntarily. His conservative nationalism kept him in the Reich until January 1945, when he encountered Albert Speer in a concert interval. ‘You look so very tired, maestro,’ said Speer with a knowing look: perhaps, he suggested, it would be a good idea to stay in Switzerland after a forthcoming concert and not come back. Furtwängler took the hint and did not return.147

  Many people who went to his concerts, or more generally listened to music on the radio, were, as Furtwängler pointed out after the war, thereby enabled to take refuge for a while in a world of higher spiritual values than those purveyed by the Nazis. Yet music’s significance could vary enormously according to who was playing it or listening to it. ‘When I hear Beethoven,’ wrote one journalist in a radio magazine in 1942, for example, ‘I become brave.’148 A woman who attended the War Festival in Bayreuth in 1943 reported that the performance had given her ‘fresh courage and strength for the work to come’.149 Local townspeople in Bayreuth, by contrast, found the opulence of the Festival abhorrent. Seeing a group of War Festival guests drinking cognac, a group of soldiers agreed: ‘There you see it again: we’re always the stupid ones.’150 The spectacle was particularly annoying for people who had been bombed out of their h
omes. ‘These shits,’ said one of them, observing the guests at the theatre restaurant, ‘gobble and glug themselves up to the brim here, while those of us who’ve lost everything don’t get a single drop of wine to drink.’151 Even outside Bayreuth, people were reported to be complaining about the resources devoted to the Festival at a time when everybody was being exhorted to live frugally: the hard-pressed rail service was forced to transport 30,000 people to Bayreuth, many of them given leave from their jobs in munitions factories for the best part of a week.152 For those who attended, however, the Festival seemed a gift from Hitler of almost incredible generosity. Their expressions of gratitude were recorded at suitable length in the Security Service report. Yet for most of them, it was only a brief, if welcome, break. Music in the abstract has very little to do with life; and in listening to it, opera- and concert-goers were taking the very route of escapism that Goebbels had laid down for them. As one of the munitions workers who attended the Bayreuth Festival in 1943 confessed: ‘After the curtain went down, we were unable to find the way back to reality for ourselves at all quickly.’153 Many others must have felt the same.