Hitler's Record Collection Found

[Teasing the Korean]

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,2722872,00.html

Adolf Hitler's music collection included some surprise choices: Russian and Jewish musicians considered "subhuman" by the Nazis. A woman found the music in her family's summer home near Moscow.

It's no surprise that music from Hitler favorite composers such as Richard Wagner and Ludwig van Beethoven would turn up in the Nazi leader's personal record collection.

Yet a Moscow attic has yielded a more complex picture of the Führer's musical taste. Nearly 100 records suggest Hitler also listened to Russian and Jewish musicians declared "subhuman" by the Nazis, according to an article in the current issue of Der Spiegel magazine.

A surprising find

Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: Hitler during the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth

In 1945, Lew Besymenski, a captain in Russia's military intelligence unit, went with two other officers to the recently captured Reich Chancellery in Berlin. The headquarters of the Nazi party were located near the secret underground bunker where Hitler committed suicide at the end of World War II.

Besymenski's comrades took silverware engraved with Hitler's initials home with them as souvenirs. Besymenski, a music lover, made an unexpected find. Behind several large steel doors that had been closed with special locks were boxes filled with personal belongings.

"It presented us with an odd sight: In each of the rooms there were numerous rows of sturdy wooden boxes all of them numbered," Besymenski wrote in a memoir years later, Der Spiegel reported.

The boxes were awaiting transfer to Hitler's mountain fortress in southern Germany and were filled with plates and various household goods, including Hitler's records.

Records kept in an attic

Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: Tchaikovsky was a Russian composer considered sub-human

Besymenski 's daughter, Alexandra Besymenskaja, who is now 53, accidentally came across the box in 1991 when she was at the family summer home near Moscow.

She had been sent to the attic to look for a badminton racket. Her shin hit something hard and she saw that she'd run into a stack of records labeled Führerhauptquartier, as the Reich Chancellery is called in German.

She asked her 70-year-old father about the records, but he didn't want to talk about them, saying that he had only listened for years to CDs.

Besymenski didn't want to be seen as a marauder who had ransacked the enemy's personal belongings. He had taken them because music was his personal passion, his daughter said. When he died in June at the age of 86, his daughter decided to talk publicly about her father's record collection.

Of the 100 discs, some are scratched, others are warped or broken, but many remain in relatively good condition. The records include Beethoven's piano sonatas and Wagner's famous opera "The Flying Dutchman."

Hitler loved music, attending the opera almost daily during the time he lived in Vienna.

Hitler's hypocrisy

Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: Richard Wagner was a Hitler favorite

Surprisingly, Hitler's collection also included Russian composers labeled by the Nazis as "subhuman" such as Peter Tchaikovsky, Alexander Borodin and Sergei Rachmaninoff, Der Spiegel reported.

One of the Tchaikovsky records featured the star violinist Bronislaw Huberman, a Polish Jew forced to flee Europe when the Nazis took over.

Hitler didn't care who had made the music he listened to in his bunker, despite in his book "Mein Kampf" stating that Jewish art had never existed.

Besymenski, who was a Jew himself, was surprised that so many famous Russian composers were included in Hitler's record collection, according to the memoir he wrote after being pressured by his daughter to record how he had had ended up with the collection.

"I feel that is complete mockery," Besymenskaja told the magazine. "Millions of Slavs and Jews had to die because of the racist Nazi ideology."

[AllenLowe]

I wonder if this is a put on - in 1986 it seems unlikely that he had been listening to CDs "for years" - as I recall they came into existence in the early 1980s, though I could be wrong -

if true, however, this confirms my suspicions that a former music teacher I had was actually Hitler - and here he is (I always thought there was a resemblance):

Edited August 7, 2007 by AllenLowe

[Niko]

Hitler loved music, attending the opera almost daily during the time he lived in Vienna.

as do so many people who live in Asylums... on a vaguey related note, just listening to Yusef Lateef's Live At Pep's and he announces his composition "Listen to the wind" as "a contemporary piece of jazz..." not "auto... music" in sight

[Aggie87]

I wonder if this is a put on - in 1986 it seems unlikely that he had been listening to CDs "for years" - as I recall they came into existence in the early 1980s, though I could be wrong -

I think you misread the timing there. He was 70 when she found the box in 1991 (and told her he only listened to CDs). He died two months ago at the age of 86.

[porcy62]

No Amboy Dukes' or Damn Yankees' in the collection.

Ted will be disappointed.

Edited August 7, 2007 by porcy62

[brownie]

Wonder where he kept his Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw records

[sidewinder]

I was expecting to see at least some 78s from the 'Swing tanzen verboten' set.

[porcy62]

I was expecting to see at least some 78s from the 'Swing tanzen verboten' set.

Der Führer throw it away after Jesse Owens won all those gold medals at Berlin Olimpia Stadium.

Edited August 8, 2007 by porcy62

[AllenLowe]

he was a helluva drummer - or was that Goering?

[AllenLowe]

maybe I should send Adolf a copy of "Jews in Hell" -

[porcy62]

he was a helluva drummer - or was that Goering?

Goering was the singer, a tenor I guess from his belly. The drummer was Goebbels.

[Larry Kart]

Did they find his Sophie Tucker and Belle Barth sides?

[AllenLowe]

no, but they did find the sheet music for "I Concentrate on You" -