Adolf Hitler had a vast collection of music by Jewish and Russian composers despite the fact that politically he deemed both as subhuman.
London, Aug 7 : Adolf Hitler had a vast collection of music by Jewish and Russian composers despite the fact that politically he deemed both as 'subhuman'.
While the Jews were herded off to concentration camps spread across occupied Europe, Hitler gave personal orders to regular Wehrmacht troops that Russian soldiers were not to be treated as PoWs and provided the same benefit as surrendered British and French troops; the reason being that Slavs were inferior to the Nordic race.
Now, 100 gramophone discs belonging to him, found near a dacha outside Moscow, has revealed his musical tastes.
Compositions by German maestros Beethoven, Wagner and Bruckner apart, the collection also boasts of works by Tchaikovsky, Borodin and Rachmaninoff.
The most astonishing composition among the lot, historians say, is a Tchaikovsky violin concerto featuring the violinist Bronislaw Huberman, a Polish Jew who fled Vienna in 1937, a year before the Anschluss, and was publicly declared an enemy of the Third Reich.
Officially, Hitler despised Jewish music as much as he did the Jewish race. He wrote in Mein Kampf that Jewish art 'never existed'.
According to a report in the Telegraph, Lev Bezymensky, a Jewish officer in the NKVD (Soviet intelligence), discovered the collection while searching the Reich Chancellery shortly after the city fell to the advancing Russians in May 1945.
He took the records back to Moscow but kept them secret, fearing he would be branded a looter.
After his death last month, at the age of 86, his daughter made the discovery public.
Alexandra Bezymenskaya said she was disgusted to find Russian compositions performed by Jewish musicians in Hitler's collection.
"This is a complete mockery. Millions of Slavs and Jews had to die because of the Nazis' racist ideology," she said.
The collection includes:
Richard Wagner - ouverture of the Flying Dutchman performed by the orchestra of the Bayreuth Festival House.
Modest Mussorgski - aria "Death of Boris Godunoff", sung by the Russian bass Fjodor Schaljapin. yotr Tchaikovsky - one entire album with the star violinist Bronislaw Hubermann as soloist. lexander Borodin.
Sergei Rachmaninov, and, Austrian musician/singer Artur Schnabel (who left Germany in 1933, as he was Jewish).
ANI