From the Pittsburgh Press, 31 March 1935: 

Here is a question that needs answering. And the answer – an amazing one – is told in a series of articles starting in The Press tomorrow.

To find out just what the average German thinks about his government Marian Young, a special correspondent for The Press, has visited Leipzig, in the center of a rich German farming area, and has talked with many Germans, old and young.

She reveals that there are many things about Nazism that German women dislike. She tells how German militarism is dunned into the ears of German children. She describes the reactions to Hitlerism of the old man in Germany. Her stories give a new insight into what modern Germany, stripped of its Nazi fanfare and tinsel, is really like.

The first report in the series ran in the Pittsburgh Press on 1 April 1935:


Germany defies the world — and stolidly marches forth to a new destiny…. How, in these crucial days in his land’s turbulent history, does the plain German-in-the-street react to the Nazi regime’s new policies? This is the first of three articles attempting to find the answer.

The soldier is cock of the walk in Germany again.

Men civilians remove their hats when eight or ten troops march by. Women step from the curb into the gutter to let them pass. Small boys run up to touch the blood-red swastikas on their arms. Fair, red-cheeked girls beam – occasionally one dares to wave a hand. Students on the steps of the university applaud and cheer loudly. 

This is Leipzig. But in Berlin, in other towns and villages, I saw exhibited the same awed and awesome reverence for the military. 

Reichsfuehrer Hitler’s earnest young men have donned uniforms of brown, blue, and green – and are goose-stepping to martial music over the freshly dug grave of the Versailles Treaty. 

For soldiering is a young man’s business, and German Youth – for years jobless and desperately poor in a war-beaten land – has rushed forward eagerly to embrace the tools of militarism as symbols of reborn power.

To students the new regime provides excitement. It gives them a chance to wear uniforms. To discuss government. To feel grown up. They salute proudly as they walk to classes past the enormous tablet on which is written the names of 1,900 young men who were killed in action. Nineteen hundred from one university. Today’s students are the sons, younger brothers, nephews, and cousins of the men commemorated on the tablet. 

When they are not marching or studying, the students lead the kind of life movies of Heidelberg portray. They laugh. They sing. They clank their beer steins and drink to the health of the Fatherland. 

Youth is king, and kings can be cruel. I saw one laughing officer with a healthy-looking, ash blonde girl in his arms, rudely brush aside a tired, middle-aged interpreter in a neat, but not so new suit. To avoid their dancing feet the professional linguist slumped into a vacant chair at our table and gazed blankly at the array of uniforms evident everywhere. 

“They needn’t expect me to be impressed,” he said to me when a trooper at the next table rose to salute an officer. “I’ve seen enough already. I have no hopes. But perhaps we can never be worse off than we have been. 

“I know a man who lives on 70 pfennigs (28 cents) a day. I know what has happened to the unemployed who used to loiter on the street corners. Now they are all in uniforms – marching right past those street corners.” Not a trace of animation in his face.

Suddenly, he asked me if he might have the butter I had left on my plate. [Fats were rationed in Germany at the time.] Pausing barely long enough to hear my consent, he spread it on one small piece of bread, swallowed quickly and then slumped forward again, watching the dancers with dull eyes. 

He belongs to the skeptics. They are the ones that the inner sanctums of the government refer to as “enemies within the gates.” So worn out are they by the past years that the gala uniforms bring no tears of enthusiasm to their eyes. The martial music falls unheeded on their weary ears. 

In truth, compared to youth in uniform, the remaining population of Nazi Germany seems dull and colorless indeed. The aged and the middle-aged on the picturesque streets of Leipzig, famous for its 700-year-old semi-annual fair, have had their day. 

The eyes of older men in this quiet little trading city with its dimly lighted cathedral of St. Thomas where Bach was the first organist and its enormous, cold, gray Gewandhaus where, 150 years ago, Mendelssohn conducted a symphony orchestra, do not light up as they watch children and young men in uniforms parade the streets. They are too busy earning their daily bread. Often, as in the case of the landlord in whose home I stayed, that task is a difficult one. 

He is the head of a family which once had money. Proudly he displayed heirlooms, bits of priceless china and pieces of tapestry that once adorned a large house. Now the treasures are lumped together in corners. There is no room in an apartment for them.

The apartment, during Fair Week at least, is turned over to foreign visitors. The family moves out of its private chambers. A bed is placed in the living room with its purple walls and grand piano. Even the library with its family portraits and wall telephone becomes a bedroom. The porcelain stoves are filled with coal to keep the guests warm and comfortable. But the storerooms and halls where the family sleeps temporarily are unheated. 


Leipzig is about as far from Berlin with its hotbed of politics as Philadelphia is from Washington. It is surrounded by carefully manicured farming districts, the very backbone of Germany. 

Leipzig’s citizens are simple, industrious folk who seem far removed from the hysteria of rearmament conferences and political intrigues. They are the people who are fundamentally responsible for Hitler’s continuing power. It is from them the answer to the question, “But what do Germans actually think of it all?” comes. 

And the answers, in the main, are optimistic. For one disgruntled intellectual and one unhappy former rich man, there are five to ten men who believe – or think they believe – or are afraid NOT to believe – that Hitlerism is the Reich’s salvation. 

The capitalist, represented by the bearded president of a concern that manufactures farm implements, was enthusiastic. “My business, thanks to the new tax law, has increased,” he told me. “In America you put up posters that say “Buy now.” Here, by having no tax on new automobiles and new machinery for the first year and heavy taxes that increase year by year on old machinery, we have forced people to buy.” 


A tall, blond engineer who speaks four languages and who has lived in half a dozen countries, including the United States, echoed what the manufacturer had said.

“The new tax law has increased the farm implement business from 40 to 50 per cent and the output of cars 60 to 70,” he said. “Instead of talk about limiting incomes, each man is urged to make as much as he can, providing, of course, his method of earning doesn’t interfere with the general welfare of the community. The price he sets on his merchandise must be fair. That’s Goerdeler’s job. He’s the price-fixer.” 

The engineer, himself, switched our conversation to recent governmental activities that have brought down fire on the heads of Germany’s people. 

“Diplomacy is the thing that is one hundred per cent lacking in the present regime. Germans never have learned the art of handling human relationships and statements to the press with kid gloves on their hands. They apparently have no respect for the old adage that you catch more flies with sugar than with vinegar,” he said.

The plump, round-faced little baker who served me afternoon coffee and pastry in the back of his tidy shop meant virtually the same things when he mumbled in broken English, “Other countries don’t understand us.” 

But the baker is happy, too. It’s true that he can’t raise the price of bread whenever he feels like it. But he sells more cakes and fancy pastries now than he did a few years ago. His family has three simple meals a day. He figures that Max, his twelve-year-old son, may be able to go to the University in a few years. 

The pleasant little baker’s stern-faced, dark-complexioned neighbor who has a cosmetic and postcard shop next door was patriotism personified. 

“We made up our mind that Germany is for Germans,” he told me. “Our plans will work, too. You see (this with a nod toward the northwest [sic] where lies Soviet Russia) we believe in God. Religion has not been pushed aside by politics. And we have fine soldiers to protect our faith.” 

Soldiers to protect their faith! I saw them as I came out of the postcard shop into the street…. Four out of every six men on the sidewalks wore uniforms! 




From the Pittsburgh Press, 2 April 1935, page 19:
 

Frau Nazi’s place is in the home. 

Der Reichsfuehrer Adolf Hitler is sending her there – tearing her from her typewriter, her loom, or her desk, and putting her back amidst her pots and pans, her darning needles, and her family dinners. 

“Kirche, Kinder, Kueche” – A Hohenzollern war-time slogan intended to show feminine Germany that it should have to do only with “church, children, and the kitchen” – has been revived to keep both married and unmarried women away from jobs that might be filled by men now unemployed. 

This, I quickly found by actual observation, has made the lot of the “bachelor girl” in Germany a particularly unhappy one. She is not wanted in industry. Her family hasn’t the means to support her. There are not enough men of marriageable age to go around. 

The ones who do manage to find employment are poorly paid. Their salaries are heavily taxed to help swell a governmental fund which is distributed among newly married couples who wish to buy furniture and who are likely to raise strong sons to shoulder arms for Germany. 

The recognition feminine executives of America receive at the hands of their associates is an unheard of thing in this charming old town of Leipzig with its historic landmarks and its famous fair.

“You don’t mean to tell me that women are encouraged in their careers,” a fresh-looking little blonde shop girl exclaimed after I had tried to answer some of her intelligent questions about the way an American woman lives. “Your men must hate you. How could they possibly like you when you are holding jobs they should have themselves?” It would take a great deal more than one short conversation to clarify in this girl’s mind the fact that, whether she be single or married, a lady must eat. 

A rather dashing mature executive was bitter. “My salary is 280 marks ($112) per month. However, after the bachelor and various other taxes have been deducted, I have left only 175 marks ($70).
“I could marry, of course. But I don’t want to marry for support as most German girls are forced to do. I’m not going to marry until I fall in love. 

“That’s one of the things that makes me sad. Since the war romance has undergone a steady decline. The thrill of the courtship chase is something our men of this generation know nothing about. How could they? Almost any girl jumps at the chance to marry the first who asks her. She doesn’t dare to be picky and choosey.” [This is consistent with the shortage of men caused by the First World War.] 

My charming companion shuddered as she heard the strains of martial music through an open window. If the young men of her own age are called to war, in 20 years she will be alone and old before her time just as many of her mother’s friends, her aunts , and older acquaintances are today as a result of the World War. She is one who has not reconciled herself to the inevitable fate of German women since the time of Bismarck. 

A shopkeeper’s neat, gray-haired wife, aged about 45, was more philosophical. Her grandfather was killed in action in the Battle of Nations at Leipzig in 1813. Her father lost his life in the Franco–German War of 1870. Two brothers fell in the blood-stained forest at Verdun. She doesn’t hum, “I did not raise my boy to be a soldier,” when she sees her tall, handsome Storm Trooper son stride from the house. The strains of martial music is in her blood. She has learned the meaning of the word, duty. 

“The duty of every German man is to bear arms for his country. The duty of every German woman is to bear sons to bear the arms,” she said. Not sadly. Not bitterly. She accepts and questions not.
Younger women, without employment, face the situation as best they can, too.They must do something. Perhaps this is why one finds so many house daughters in Germany. 

We in America feel sorry for the little school girl who is taken into a home to do dishes and make beds for her board and keep. Yet here in Germany the lot of the young woman from a good family who goes to live with another family, ostensibly to learn how to run a different household, is far from pitiable. 

“This way, I am preparing myself for marriage with any kind of man,” the merry, laughing, blonde house daughter in the home where I stayed told me. “I do practically all the housework. But, in return, I get my food and room. I am no longer a burden to my own family. The people with whom I live are kind to me. I am happy.” 

If the little house daughter does not marry, perhaps she will become a professional housekeeper. Practically all other roads are closed to her. 

A few professional women are tolerated, of course. These are the ones like Käthe Kruse, the famous manufacturer of dolls. After all, she employs hundreds. She is an asset to the country. In addition, she is the mother of seven, no one can say that her career has interfered with her duty to her country. 

Right now, no German woman is told what clothes to wear or what cosmetics she may put on her skin. 

“Those rules – not laws – were forgotten along with the decline of various party members who had followed for years and were given some authority in the government when Hitler came to power,” a young woman secretary told me. “Each old follower, you may be sure, had some idea he wishes to perpetrate. And, in the manner of the spoils system, the leader gave him a chance. The follower had his fling. The leader waited politely for a time and then dismissed the rules with a light gesture. Everything is back to normal now.” 

Anyway, judging from the shining faces of the women on the streets of Leipzig, a ban on cosmetics wouldn’t have bothered many German women. They use practically no makeup. 

The first impression one gets of a healthy-looking Fräulein and her plump mother is their total lack of the artifices American women employ. They don’t need rouge. Their German husbands, brothers, and sweethearts detest lipstick and bright nail polish. Their clear skins have a freshly scrubbed look. 

Most of them, however, take great pride in their coiffures. Blond heads are bright and shiny and professionally waved. Their hair styles, even to Katharine Hepburn bangs, follow the same general trend as our own in the United States. 

They seem not to take any particular pride in their dress. But of course it is almost impossible to wear smart clothes when one’s own income or the head-of-the-house’s income is so limited. They wear plain silk and woolen dresses that are anything but form-fitting, department store cloth coats with fur collars, and serviceable hats. I saw little jewelry. 

A good many girls of grammar and high school age have no daytime clothes problems. During daylight hours they wear the Hitler youth uniforms that consist of blue serge skirts and khaki-colored sports jacket blouses. They, too, are regimented. They, like their brothers and dashing young admirers, are marching to the strains of martial music. 

The last installment focuses on the lot of the German worker.

The German workman and his family – how are they getting along under the Nazi regime? Has their lot been improved? What do they think of Hitlerism? To find out, Staff Correspondent Marian Young of NEA Service talked with typical members of the German working class in a typical German town – Leipzig. And her report is contained below in the last of three articles presenting the human side of life in present-day Germany. 

Leipzig, Germany. April 6. – The German laborer has put his shoulder to the swastika – and is striving with might and main to keep the Nazi machine going. 

He may be low paid (an estimated 95 per cent of German workers earn from $3 to $10 a week). His work may be harder (Germany is rushing her rebuilding program). Government propagandists may hide from him the fearful decline in Germany’s foreign trade (a 284,000,000-mark deficit of exports over imports in 1934). 

But with shrewd human understanding, Der Reichsfuehrer has devised other alluring means to win the workman to his banner. And I found the man behind the shovel – blissfully unaware of world-wide threats to boycott their products – shouting in unison: “Heil Hitler!” 

For instance, a housing program has provided laborers with homes that are a far cry from poorly ventilated, drab tenement flats where they used to live. The plodding steps of a weary worker quicken as he faces a house in the center of a garden, bright with growing things. His blonde, rosy cheeked wife sings at her dishpan. She knows some day they really will own this house. 

“I am so happy here,” the mistress of one of the workman’s homes told me, leading the way from a neat backroom with washtubs and pump into a spacious combination living room, dining room and kitchen. Farther back there is a parlor, used only on special occasions because coal for heating is expensive. 

Her home lived up to the German woman’s reputation for neatness. Not a speck of dust on anything. The windows were as clear and shining as her own blue eyes when she talked about the little green and white house. 

“For the first time in my life, I have space to store things,” she continued, pointing to a trap door in the ceiling at the top of the fireproof staircase. “And look at the garden plot and the lawn where my children can play!” 

The young storm trooper at my side beamed at her words.

“The best thing about the whole project is the infinitesimal amount of money it costs them to live here,” he said, in English, so she couldn’t understand. “They can’t pay because they don’t make much.”
“The government builds the house. When a man and his family move in, they are given four chickens, nine fruit trees and some garden seeds. During the first year, they pay only 7 marks ($2.00) per month for rent, light, and water. In return, they must plant a garden. 

“At the beginning of the second year, when the cellar is filled with potatoes, canned fruit, carrots, turnips, and cabbage, the rent is raised to 16 marks 35 pfennigs. But it is never raised again. Instead, with the birth of each child, it decreases 1 mark 75 pfennigs. 

“You might call the fee they pay installments rather than rent,” the officer went on. “In from 40 to 50 years, each rent-payer becomes the sole owner of his home. If he dies at the end of this period, the property goes to his heirs.” 

Another house I saw was occupied by an unemployed man, his wife, and their two small boys. He pays no rent at all now and receives an unemployment allowance for food and clothing. The rent, however, does not accumulate. As soon as he finds a job, he will begin to pay the regular first year rate. 

In the meantime, he must help to build more houses, mix cement for the wide streets that run past them, and be on the lookout for a job. There is little danger that he will slump into the sociological malady that comes from long unemployment and give up hunting for a position. The duty of the officer who paces up and down before the rows of houses is to see that each unemployed tenant conscientiously seeks work. 

Those who have jobs are given advantages far beyond the ones usually found in crowded factories. Once a week a symphonic orchestra plays in one plant during lunch. The music is broadcast to other factories. To the working man of many countries, this wouldn’t be much of a treat. To a German, however, with the love of music in his veins, it is. 

“Last summer, for the first time in my life, I went to Berlin,” one tall, dark, Prussian-type carpenter told me. “My company gave me a week’s vacation and paid all my expenses. I never had been there before.” 

Never had been to Berlin – a two-hour ride from Leipzig.

Others who have lived all of their lives in the interior are sent to coast towns for vacation at the expense of their employers. Men on the docks are given a chance to see the central sections with their broad expanse of immaculately groomed forests of pine and balsam. 

“A real vacation and a change of scenery will win a skeptical workman over to our way of thinking more permanently and certainly much more easily than any number of lectures or printed handouts,” a frank soldier in a blue uniform said. “If we win him by kindness, he gets behind the new regime wholeheartedly. And he stays behind it, too.” 

In addition, Hitler’s efforts to make personal contacts with his laborers are in some degree responsible for their feeling of friendliness. It is good to shake the hand of the highest power in the land. Particularly good when the hand is extended to you on the floor of your own factory. 

Even the middle class families react favorably to this new-in-Germany idea of personal contact. Those to whom the name Hohenzollern was but a headline across the tip of a newspaper, thrill at the sight of a man from the inner sanctum in Berlin. 

I heard the shout that went up when Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda, strode into the Grasse Museum, one of the most spectacular of the Fair buildings. Then a hush fell over the crowd. Natives of the quaint old city literally fell over each other trying to get a better view of him. They had their reward. The dapper little man with the smiling face that slighly resembles a tired Eddie Cantor’s (imagine it!) marched a few steps up a staircase, turned about and, still beaming, saluted. 

In the evening of that same day, I saw him, accompanied by his extremely beautiful wife and a retinue of friends and generals, at a concert in the Gewandhaus. They were shown to their box just before the leader of the famous symphony lifted his baton. The audience rose and faced the box. It cheered. It applauded. Publicity Director Goebbels was gracious. 

When the concert was over, he stayed in his seat until twenty minutes after the audience had descended the broad, redcarpeted staircases to the lobby below. There, grouped about the stairway, the people waited for him to come down. Finally, preceded by an array of brown, blue, and red uniforms, he appeared. He stopped and saluted. Right hands were raised slightly above shoulder level. A cry of “Heil!” filled the air. He marched out between rows of citizens. The show was over. The quiet, peaceful air that had hung over the music-loving Germans for two hours was charged with electricity. 

Outside, a hand organ played martial music.

_____________________________
1. Phil Daoust, “Swingtime for Hitler,” The Guardian 27 October 2004: “Who could be a jazz musician Nazi?” said drummer Fritz Brocksieper, whose grandmother was Jewish.
2. F. Steinbiss and D. Eisermann, “Wir haben damals die beste Musik gemacht,” Der Spiegel 18 April 1988: Hinter der Phantom-Band “Charlie And His Orchestra” standen der Bandleader Lutz Templin, der Jazz-Sänger Karl “Charlie” Schwedler und eine Besetzung, der in den letzten Jahren des Zweiten Weltkriegs die Elite der europäischen Swingmusik angehörte – aus Italien der Trompeter Nino Impallomeni und der bedeutende Jazzpianist Primo Angeli, aus Belgien der Klarinettist Benny de Weille und der Posaunist Josse Breyre, außerdem der Meistergitarrist Meg Tevelian und aus Deutschland der Posaunist Willy Berking, der Tenorsaxophonist Eugen Henkel und der Schlagzeuger Fritz Brocksieper.

This was something that the National-Socialist government of Germany sought to remedy. Here Wilhelm Furtwängler conducts Wagner for workers in a factory during the Second World War. The faces of the workers are as much the point of this little film as the performance. The film emphasizes that German culture is the property of the workers as much as any other German.

Making sure that the workers are initiated in the culture of their folk is an obvious way to prevent the development of a cultureless and nationless proletariat.

The translation is not strictly faithful to what the German narrator says. When the narrator says that the concert takes place in einer Werkpause, in a break from production, the translator specifies that it was the lunch break, but this is not evident from anything in the video.

The first regular television broadcasts in the world began in National-Socialist Germany in 1935 and ended in the fall of 1944.

One of the most striking facts shown in this documentary, given no notice at all by the narrator, is that the National-Socialist government had created bureaus to help the German people in many spheres of life, with instruction for example on the best way to garden and even how to succeed as a wife and mother. Government-operated television was used to make the public aware of these services.

In truth, exactly the same kind of dramatized advertisement is used in the United States today, except that instead of revealing where to ask for advice or assistance we are generally encouraged to buy some product. We also have “public service announcements,” which sometimes are presented in the form of a short drama.

As always, we can take it for granted that there is a strong negative bias in any presentation about the Third Reich.

Some of the clips included in this documentary seem to suffer from the smugness of unanimity. For example, some of the Germans who appear in these clips express an intense admiration for Adolf Hitler, wherein they presume — more or less correctly, in the original time and place — general agreement among the viewers: surely this did not seem so absurd in the original cultural setting. I get a similar impression from some recent broadcasting in the United States, which, like this programming from the Third Reich, is directed to an audience that is presumed to agree. As examples I could name Fox News, Christian broadcasting, and sometimes PBS when the focus is on racial issues. There is some smugness in some of this material from the Third Reich, but there is also smugness in the assumption that our present-day broadcasters have no such blind-spot. 

Those bad old Nazis were all about propaganda, we are supposed to believe, but there aren’t any biases in our news or embedded messages in our entertainment, are there?

Probably the most unflattering clip in this documentary is when the host of a “variety show,” some German forerunner of Ed Sullivan, briefly comments on the fact that National-Socialist Germany had some political discontents that did not want to stay in harmony with society, and have been sent to a “concert camp” (which is mistranslated as concentration camp, although obviously that is what he meant) to be taught to play along. It is not a funny discourse, but it is not really clear that it was intended to be funny: what events set the context of that commentary? It may well be that there was widespread irritation with these people that the variety-host mentions and that his commentary did not seem ill-tempered at the time. If you consider the very dangerous situation in which National-Socialist Germany existed, with military threats on both sides and the memory of large parts of the country being taken over by Communists, and the much more recent suppression of Ernst Roehm’s conspiracy through extrajudicial executions (which were widely applauded, including by President Hindenburg) many viewers probably felt that sending some political troublemakers to a camp for reeducation was letting them off easy, and the vast majority of Germans who supported Adolf Hitler may have felt relieved and proud that Hitler’s government by 1936 had acquired the strength and stability to deal with troublemakers humanely. That is a context in which the variety host’s monologue could seem reasonable.

Some of the footage is rather inane and is used in an effort to fill time, but we get that in live coverage of events today. It is in the nature of live coverage that there will be periods when nothing is happening. Today, though, instead of panning over the surroundings of an event and discussing  them, today’s television broadcasts will fill time with empty chatter between the reporter and the anchor and possibly some third personality brought in to help them fill time.

LETTER TO VICTOR SCHWOERER (1929)

Freiburg i. Br., 2 October 1929

Most esteemed Mr. Privy Councillor,

In the coming days, Dr. Baumgarten’s application for a fellowship will be sent to the Emergency Association (of German Science). I should like to add to the official letter of recommendation my personal request to you, esteemed Mr. Privy Councillor, to give this application your undivided attention. In what follows, I want to make more explicit what I could only indirectly hint at in my recommendation. Nothing less is at stake than our undeferrable facing of the fact that we are confronted by a crucial choice: either to infuse, again, our German spiritual life with genuine indigenous forces and educators, or to leave it at the mercy, once and for all, of the growing Jewish contamination, both in a larger and a narrower sense. We can only regain our own path, if we prove capable of helping fresh forces to prosper, without the usual baiting and fruitless controversies.

With this great goal in mind, I would be particularly obliged, if Mr. Baumgarten whom I have chosen as my “assistant,” could receive the fellowship support requested.

We are currently enjoying the most beautiful fall days in our new home, and I take great pleasure, every day, in seeing my work deeply rooted in our native soil.

In sincere appreciation, I am, most esteemed Mr. Privy Councillor,devotedly yours,

Martin Heidegger

Some interesting details in that BBC program but also some very questionable claims made by Jewish author Mike Zwerin. He says, “The Germans didn’t like jazz.” Saint Louis Blues was a well known tune, even to the Germans. Zwerin’s claim that the Germans were made to believe that it was a French folksong is ridiculous.  Zwerin even claims that Hitler’s government did not want Germans to have fun: obviously this expert never heard of Kraft durch Freude. Have a look at Unexpected Pop Culture from the Third Reich and you will understand how ridiculously off-base Zwerin is.

The narrator also seems to be ignorant of the fact that the Allies bombed France, and therefore he finds it incomprehensible that Django Reinhardt in Paris worried about bombing.
 

It is of some small comfort that totalitarian regimes are never quite as total as either their leaders or subsequent historians might imagine. As much as the Bolsheviks may have wished to “abolish” religion, faith and observance persisted all through the Soviet sphere and contributed to the disintegration of the Communist system. Similarly and more recently, the Taliban exercised less than certain–and certainly less than the publicized–influence over the people of Afghanistan. 

By the same token, we have long been used to the idea that the Nazis proscribed jazz and sought to ban it from every corner of the Reich. To the ideologists of National Socialism, it was music of racial impurity, lumped in with other examples of entartete Kunst or “degenerate art,” damned as “Judaeo-Negroid” and not fit for the ears of good Germans. In recent years, this rather one-dimensional picture has begun to shift significantly. 

One tiny example suggests the complexity of the real situation: the strange tale of guitarist Django Reinhardt, who managed not only to survive but to thrive in Nazi-occupied France, despite the fact that he was a gypsy, and a handicapped gypsy at that, thanks to the patronage and the protection of a jazz-loving Luftwaffe officer. Those last four words represent such an oxymoron that most recent encyclopedia entries on Django, who died half a century ago in 1953, make no mention whatever of Oberleutnant Dietrich Schulz-Koehn.

One of the strangest photographs of the war was taken by Schulz-Koehn outside La Cigale, a jazz club in Paris. It shows a gypsy (Django), four Africans and a Jew posed smiling beside a fellow officer. The Germans were there not to arrest these men but to listen to them play. With its whisper of collaboration, this remains an awkward detail for jazz fans to deal with, but it is even more unsettling, given the prevailing notion of the Nazis’ attitude toward jazz.

There have been a number of attempts to rewrite this odd corner of popular music history. Michael Zwerin’s La Tristesse de Saint Louis: Swing under the Nazis took its title from the habit of disguising jazz tunes–in this case “St. Louis Blues”–from the authorities under safely translated titles. The story of wartime swing is also told in a chapter in Hitler’s Airwaves, a study of propaganda broadcasting under the Third Reich written by business executive Horst J.P. Bergmeier and economist Rainer E. Lotz. Now, though, their exploration of the period has been taken a step further and given additional flesh in an ambitious box set of music with the arresting title Swing Tanzen Verboten: Swing Music and Nazi Propaganda during World War II, just released by the English firm Proper Records with text by Dutch jazz expert Joop Visser. Its four CDs are an eye-opening experience, not so much musically, though there are fine cuts by Reinhardt, but because they raise the possibility that far from banning jazz, the Nazi authorities were aware of and tried to harness some of its appeal.

Imagine for a moment that you are a British or American jazz fan in wartime scanning the airwaves in hopes of finding some familiar music. Out of the ether a male voice begins to sing a familiar melody. “I’m the Sheik of Araby,/Your love belongs to me./At night, when you’re asleep/into your tent I’ll creep./The stars that shine above/will light a way to love./You’ll rule this land with me/the Sheik of Araby.” Before the war you heard umpteen versions of this song, which was inspired by RudolphValentino in The Sheik. Even if a band didn’t have a singer, most fans could mouth the words. But this time, something strange happens. After that first verse, a voice cuts across the music: “Here is Mr. Churchill’s latest song.” The melody stays the same, but the words are unfamiliar. “I’m afraid of Germany/her planes are beating me./At night, when I should sleep,/into the Anderson I must creep./Although I’m England’s leading man/I’m led to the cellar by ten./A leader in the cellar each night/that’s the only damned way I can fight.” 

That was certainly not the way Ted Snyder, Harry B. Smith and Frances Wheeler wrote it, so jazz fans will rightly insist on some personnel details for this curious performance. The band included Riimis van den Broek, Helmuth Friedrich and Ferri Juza on horns, Franz Muck on piano and the Krupa-like Fritz “Freddy” Brocksieper on drums. The conductor of the orchestra was a man called Lutz Templin, but he’d ceded nominal control to the singer Charlie Schwedler. “The Sheik of Araby” was one side of the first record issued in late 1940 on the Klarinette & Mandoline imprint, soon to be familiar from its maroon label and K&M prefix. As those altered lyrics suggest, the artists–Charlie and His Orchestra–weren’t merely German swing enthusiasts flouting their leaders’ disapproval. They were government employees broadcasting to the enemy in the enemy’s own language and in a musical form that their employers were nominally committed to stamping out. Though less well-known than the infamous Lord Haw-Haw (William Joyce) or Axis Sally (Mildred Gillars), who broadcast on behalf of the fascist regimes, they were an important part of the Reich’s propaganda effort to smuggle a defeatist message into British and American homes.

The history of wartime jazz abounds with such ironies. That a form of music proscribed as “degenerate” should become an instrument of state policy seems more than a little perverse. Within weeks of Hitler’s coming to power in March 1933, the new Nazi government’s broadcasting authority announced the banishment of swing and hot music from the airwaves. Jazz had long been suspect and such a directive was inevitable, but in practice, it would be a further two years before Eugen Hadamovsky, the program director of RRG, could announce that “as of today, nigger jazz is finally switched off on the German radio.” [Wasn’t this just a programming decision? Jazz certainly was not banned from society; it continued to be performed in the German cinema, for example in films featuring Marika Rökk.]

There were no more consensuses in government circles about what defined jazz than there was in the jazz clubs and cellars of Berlin and Frankfurt, where such matters were debated as passionately as in New York or London. From an ideological point of view, jazz was “Judaeo-Negroid” music and thus complicit in the “shame of Versailles.” From a Nazi point of view, defeat in the First World War was the result of Jewish treachery at home and led to still further racial defilement, most hurtfully symbolized by the presence of black French colonial troops in the occupied Rhineland. The distorted rhythms and “atonality” of jazz might originally have seemed an unconscious expression of “Negroid” sexuality, but they became–to Nazi ears–part of a new Jewish fifth column, a sinister conspiracy to undermine Aryan culture. [After elaborating this caricature, Morton tells us in the next paragraph that this really was not the consensus : it was the opinion of Rosenberg but not of Goebbels.]

The more extreme exponents of anti-Semitism and cultural nationalism like ideologue Alfred Rosenberg’s Kampfbund fur Deutsche Kultur (Campaign for German Culture), would have happily cauterized cultural modernism and replaced it with a fey folk culture. To a degree, Hitler was of similar mind, but Hitler’s views on music and art were inchoate and largely unconsidered, expressing personal knee jerks rather than a coherent aesthetic philosophy. Much more significant to this story was the more thoughtful and sophisticated approach of his propaganda minister Josef Goebbels. Whatever else he might have been, Goebbels was a man of some culture and viscerally opposed to the populist strain that ran through the lower ranks of the Nazi Party. He was also profoundly convinced that the radio loudspeaker was the key instrument in the struggle to maintain national unity and resistance to the forces of “Bolshevism” (a term almost as amorphous and cloudy as “jazz”). 

The piano-playing, widely read Goebbels saw an urgent need to maintain a certain level of sophistication in German broadcasting. There was no such consensus within his ministry. His deputy Hans Hinkel would have sanctioned nothing but “good German music,” which usually meant ersatz folk songs and oompah bands. Surprisingly, given his somewhat exaggerated enthusiasm for Wagner and Bruckner (light operetta was probably more his speed), Hitler took a generally pragmatic view and in summer 1942, according to transcriptions of his table talk, was suggesting that propaganda broadcasts directed at Britain and America should contain a proportion of musical material that would appeal to such audiences. This was the policy that would prevail and would lead to the formation of Charlie and His Orchestra.

However ironic the story of wartime swing might seem, it is also full of gaps and occlusions. Jazz fans are as addicted to gaps in information as to the known details, and there is a perverse appeal in the Proper set’s fragmentary discographies and obscure personnel’s. The man chosen to lead the propaganda orchestra, saxophonist and violinist Lutz Templin, was not a card-carrying Nazi and seemed to have no strong political convictions. He had no strong musical ideology either. There is a certain mythology that Templin played hot music. Indeed, it’s probably safer to talk about German swing than German jazz, since there was little hot playing to be heard until the bebop revolution swept in at the end of the war and young men like the Mangelsdorff brothers in Frankfurt, Albert and Emil, began to construct a new German jazz inspired by the most advanced American models. For the propaganda swingers of the war years Paul Whiteman’s much-derided but hugely successful symphonic jazz was regarded as the acme of taste.

Five years ago, I spoke to a few surviving musicians of the period, for a BBC documentary series on wartime and propaganda swing. None remembered Lutz Templin as anything other than a competent player and leader, and this is borne out by the cuts on Swing Tanzen Verboten; they’re competent, but mechanical and rather soulless, and there is certainly no sign that any of these players ached to fire off a hot solo. A few of those I spoke with remembered or had heard of Charlie Schwedler as a smooth opportunist, happy to lend his light voice and unctuous personality to whatever message was required of him. [You didn’t really expect a fair assessment from a post-war writer, did you?] Only drummer Freddie Brocksieper commanded anything like admiration. One elderly man, who’d played clarinet in a wartime orchestra in Hanover, and who declined to be named on air, said that Freddy was a finer musician than any of the Americans and the only one who had any real understanding of hot jazz. Musicianship, though, was secondary to a political message, and whatever their private instincts, these players must have been relieved to be not just surviving the war but seemingly contributing to the effort in a relatively risk-free capacity. 

RRG’s “Political Cabaret” began broadcasting on shortwave to the United States early in 1940. Schwedler was, it seems, an occasional contributor, but it was later in the year before Charlie and His Orchestra was properly convened and began to issue those K&M discs that now represent the ambiguous legacy of wartime propaganda swing. Propaganda music had been made and broadcast since the early days of the so-called Phony War. The first listed by Bergmeier and Lotz is a sourly anti-Semitic reworking of the old Protestant hymn “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” recorded on October 11, 1939, by one Erhard Bauschke and his orchestra. The sentiments are generic and predictable; the rhyming is, by comparison with what followed, fairly sophisticated: “Onward conscript army, /marching on to war, /fight and die for Jewry, /as we did before.” Later on, the propaganda lyricists had to adapt to events as quickly as possible. The Gershwins’ “They All Laughed” provided a useful template, especially in the dark days after Dunkirk when it was thought the British might be intimidated into defeatism. “They all laughed at Germany and its leader/when he said that Germany will rise/…They all laughed at Germany wanting colonies/said, she was reaching for the moon!/Now it’s a joke to deny German victory/wise guys have to change their tunes.” George was already dead by this time, but Ira, the lyricist, must have been turning uncomfortably in his sleep as lines like these went out over the airwaves. 

Just as “St. Louis Blues” was translated as “La Tristesse de Saint Louis” in occupied France to keep the suspect title from the ears of Wehrmacht soldiers, so the W.C. Handy song was also turned into a propaganda vehicle, introduced by Charlie as the lament of a Negro working on the London docks during the blackout. “I hate to see the evenin’ sun go down/’cause the German, he done bombed this town.” The revisions, here and elsewhere in Charlie’s repertoire hardly constitute deathless blues poetry, but they survive in a curiously subversive relation to the original. Just as jazz musicians understood the power of transforming a light and simple song into something dark and resonant–John Coltrane’s reworking of “My Favorite Things” would be a good example–so the very familiarity of these songs increased their propaganda value; given that British and American audiences could hum the melody, how long would it be before they treacherously sang the new words as well? It is as unwise to underestimate as it is difficult to quantify the impact on listeners–and, as Goebbels hoped, sophisticated listeners–in the Allied countries. 

The success of the German propaganda effort can only be judged in the context of ultimate defeat, but it is clear that during the war Goebbels and his more responsive officials found a way of harnessing modern technology with the most flexible and responsive form in popular music and creating a propaganda weapon of considerable power. Some “black” stations, like Radio Arnhem, were conceived with such skill that Allied troops and even some of their intelligence officers were convinced that they were listening to the real thing. The supply of English-speaking Nazi sympathizers willing to broadcast on behalf of the Axis was never large. For all the publicity given to “Lord Haw-Haw” and to Ezra Pound, for his insane ramblings [more of Morton’s objectivity!] on behalf of Mussolini, they were exceptions. Music proved to be a more potent and a more insidious propaganda device. 

Listening to the tunes on Swing Tanzen Verboten is a fairly dispiriting business. Nothing here merits a second listen on purely musical grounds [Morton would die rather than admit that this is good music], and yet these strange survivals offer important historical insights. To repeat, it has been casually accepted that the Nazis and the Soviets “banned” jazz. Neither is more than hypothetically true. But while it’s long been understood that the Soviet authorities made a distinction between jazz as the spontaneous expression of a beleaguered proletariat and jazz as a bourgeois affectation, a similar finessing hasn’t until recently been applied to the situation in Nazi Germany. The survival of jazz under the Third Reich is a curious story of oversight and tacit tolerance.