In September 1939,
the Nazis invaded Poland, and Britain declared war on Germany.
MUSIC: Symphony No. 5 by Ludwig van Beethoven
Two months later, Hitler retaliated with a musical missile.
In a bierkeller packed full of the party faithful,
Hitler fired up his audience.
"Beethoven," he said,
"has produced more of cultural worth than all the English put together."
In boasting about Beethoven,
Hitler was championing German superiority and mocking what he saw
as pitiful British inadequacy.
In the tumultuous conflict that followed,
music would become a weapon of war.
And both sides would use it.
During the war, Beethoven's most famous four notes were transmitted
nightly over the airwaves, not by the Germans, but by the British.
In Morse code, dah-dah-dah-daaah - dot, dot, dot, dash - means "V".
That's V for victory. It was a clever ruse -
to take Germany's musical signature tune and turn it into a two-fingered
symbol of Allied defiance.
In this programme,
I'll explore how World War II was more than a military fight.
It was an ideological battle in which both sides used music
to secure their vision for civilisation.
I'll discover how radio and film music were used
to get the patriotic blood pumping.
Immediately you've got rolling English countryside and planes in the sky
and, I mean, he just knew how to write these big patriotic tunes.
I'll show how smash hits of the day were intentionally twisted to try
and weaken the enemy.
MUSIC: Let's Go Shelling by Charlie & His Orchestra
Out of Let's Go Slumming, they made Let's Go Shelling.
"Let's go shell Churchill and the women and the kids."
And I'll confront music's abuse as a tool of persecution
and how it became a means to survive.
This was a life lived from day to day and we were very well aware that
as long as they want us, it'd be stupid to put us in the gas chamber.
In this series, I've been exposing music's unrivalled capacity
to manipulate us.
During World War II,
music would become more contested and corrupted but also perhaps
more vital, even transcendent, than ever before.
In the Second World War, the authorities tried
to keep strict tabs on the music people listened to.
# We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when... #
In Britain, that even affected the Forces' Sweetheart, Vera Lynn,
with her signature tune, We'll Meet Again.
# Keep smiling through, just like you always do
# Till the blue skies chase the dark clouds far away... #
We'll Meet Again is still a classic "get round the old Joanna" number
and it's incredibly easy to sing.
And while it might seem a little bit schmaltzy to us today,
its wartime message of yearning and hope really struck a chord with
people who feared they might never see their loved ones again.
# ..And I will just say hello to the folks that you know...
In 1942, these fears were being keenly felt.
In February, Britain lost Singapore.
Months later, they suffered humiliating defeats in North Africa.
And, extraordinarily,
some thought Vera Lynn should take her share of the blame.
During these tough times,
Vera and her apparently innocuous songs came under intense scrutiny.
Was she really helping the war effort?
Amid military setbacks,
and with questions being raised in Parliament,
the BBC set up the Dance Music Policy Committee,
to police Vera Lynn and her kind of music.
This is a copy of the original statement issued by the committee
to BBC staff, to the press, bandleaders and publishers,
and it instructs them...
"Performance by women singers will be controlled to the extent that an
"insincere and oversentimental style will not be allowed.
"No numbers will be accepted for broadcasting which are slushy in sentiment."
So, Vera Lynn, despite her starriness and popularity...
Well, singing about bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover really
wasn't going to cut the mustard.
MUSIC: The White Cliffs Of Dover by Vera Lynn
Vera's BBC radio show, Sincerely Yours,
was taken off the air.
This was a full-blown moral panic.
There'd been a series of letters to the Daily Telegraph,
where the type of music that Vera Lynn sang was described as being a
"flabby amusement", um...
Flabby amusement?
Flabby... A flabby amusement. It's so incredibly sort of looking down
your nose at it. Absolutely, absolutely.
The British kind of emotional culture really emphasises stoicism
and if you are lonely, if you are grieving, if you are anxious,
you keep this to yourself.
If you give way to these emotions in public,
it is not only going to undermine morale at home,
it's going to undermine morale with the troops.
What, so the Brits might well have lost Singapore because they listened
to Vera Lynn, that was what went wrong?!
I think that's part of the concern here, yeah, yeah.
So, I can't listen to slushy, croony ballads - what can I listen to?
Well, you can listen to the kinds of songs that they had on programmes
like Music While You Work, which went out every morning.
Workers' Playtime,
so sort of songs that people would recognise and could sing along to,
while they were working. So music that makes you feel a part
of a collective.
One of the BBC's responses was to put out a programme called
I Am John Citizen,
which was a male singer with a very male kind of masculine choir,
a leather-lunged choir, I think they were described as.
Sorry, a leather-lunged...? What is a leather-lunged choir?
It sounds revolting! Yeah, I think...
It wasn't very popular, it didn't last very long.
I don't imagine they'd sound brilliant.
"Yeah, I've got to get tickets to hear that leather-lunged choir."
The policy was failing.
In spite of the BBC diktat, Vera was just too big a star to silence.
In 1943, she kicked back,
making her film debut with a rather familiar title and theme tune.
# We'll meet again... #
As the film made clear,
mushy morale-boosters like Vera Lynn's
were exactly what British civilians and soldiers did need.
I can hear the butcher boy whistling it already.
It's lovely. That's good. There's sunshine in it.
And British audiences weren't the only ones to appreciate the power
of a heart-tugging tune.
SHE SINGS IN GERMAN
The Great Love was Nazi Germany's biggest hit film,
and it's full of sentimental songs.
This is Germany's highest-paid musical star,
the Nazi's answer to Vera Lynn,
screen siren Zarah Leander.
Sure enough, she had her own signature tune and, like Vera,
she sang it in a film.
Just have a listen to this, the lyrics are remarkably familiar.
I absolutely love this,
it has all of that We'll Meet Again sentimentality,
only here it is vamped and camped up to the max.
This is no Vera Lynn, girl next door,
but a statuesque Teutonic goddess.
And if you wanted evidence that this had the Nazi seal of approval,
look no further than the accompanying angels.
They're actually SS guards in drag.
It was the ideal Nazi chorus line, imposing and perfectly uniform.
Not surprisingly, there were no close-ups
on those "ladies" with their five o'clock shadows.
MUSIC: Symphony No. 5 by Ludwig van Beethoven
Throughout the war, the Nazis would draw time and again on Germany's
peerless musical heritage.
Hitler favourites, including Beethoven, Bruckner and Wagner,
became the soundtrack to cinematic newsreels promoting
German military triumphs.
BEETHOVEN CONTINUES
And, convinced of their supremacy in both war and art,
the Nazis repeated an old German taunt,
that Britain was "das Land ohne Musik" - the land without music.
But we hit back.
With the film, The First Of The Few,
the British proved more than able to coin an instant patriotic classic.
There are all the ingredients here for a great British blockbuster.
There's the aviation film unit,
silver screen idols Leslie Howard and David Niven,
there are real-life RAF pilots who joined the cast -
but what this film did was really stir the nation's heart with its
thrilling soundtrack, by William Walton.
Walton was a pillar of the musical establishment.
Dubbed Head Prefect by fellow composers,
he'd written George VI's Coronation March.
With these credentials,
Walton had been exempted from military service and deployed
instead to write film music.
But despite it getting him off the battlefield,
Walton himself was slightly sniffy about writing propaganda music
for the movies.
That said, he was very good at it, and his music's still admired
by film composers today.
The tune for The First Of The Few is...is embarrassingly simple.
Go on, then. And so it's simply within the five notes,
the first bit...
And then he even repeats it.
Same thing again. But, I mean, a child could play that.
I was going to say, that's the kind of thing you'd play after three piano lessons, you'd be... Exactly.
You'd be in there going, "I can play this stuff."
But then, how does he make it patriotic and how does he make it different?
It's that famous descending bassline.
Which, again, couldn't be simpler on its own.
But then you put the two together...
And immediately you've got rolling English countryside and planes
in the sky and, I mean... why is that?
But I think there's something about that descending bassline that says
thoroughly honest, dependable stuff.
It's... Absolutely. It is stiff upper lip Britishness.
And also the thing with a descending bassline is that it suggests some
kind of journey. You're going through a sequence, you're...
And to come out the other end successfully.
Even from the beginning of this piece,
there is that rousing fanfare that just feels very spirited,
bulldog British and then, lyrical loveliness, it's sort of all there.
Absolutely, but there again, that fanfare couldn't be simpler.
It's a C major triad, that's all he does at the beginning.
So, he starts with that.
But then he gets a little bit sexy.
And then we get the romantic chord...
Oof! Scrunchy! And then what happens now?
The strings! Strings come in and there we go.
His tunes are exactly like the tunes that John Williams is now writing
for the Spielberg movies, like Hans Zimmer is writing.
They're immediately accessible, they tug at our heartstrings,
it's instant emotion, and that's so hard to do as a composer.
Um, I'm a little bit jealous, actually, I think he was
just too good, you know.
Even more than cinema,
radio allowed millions to share the soundtrack to national identity.
This was the Nazis' Broadcasting House in Berlin, completed in 1933,
the year after Britain's own BBC HQ.
In the war, this vast Art Deco palace became the epicentre
of the Nazis' hi-tech musical propaganda machine.
"What newspapers were to the 19th-century, radio will be to the 20th."
That prediction could have been made by the BBC's Lord Reith,
but this was Joseph Goebbels talking,
the Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.
German radio would have to do more than just inform,
educate and entertain,
it would carry the hopes and aspirations of the Nazi state.
It would be, as Goebbels put it,
the mediator between the movement and the nation,
between "the idea", and man.
That mission meant cleansing the airwaves of any music the Nazis
considered degenerate - anything Jewish or black,
especially jazz and swing,
and instead promoting folksy songs and the classics.
After their rise to power,
the Nazis had flooded Germany with over nine million cheap radio sets.
But radio didn't just plant the right values in home audiences,
it could be used as a weapon to attack the enemy abroad.
So, what did the Nazis pick from their musical arsenal to launch
at the British?
A bit of Wagner, some thigh-slapping German folk tunes?
No, they decided on a little light swing.
TO THE TUNE OF YOU'RE THE TOP:
While the tune might sound familiar,
the lyrics are a little more unusual.
After all, Cole Porter isn't known for peppering his verses
with machine guns and U-boats.
But this is one of the Third Reich's most bizarre cultural experiments -
Nazified cover versions,
arranged and performed by a hand-picked band,
Charlie And His Orchestra.
Hitler himself had endorsed the playlist.
In 1942, he issued a memo,
stating that broadcasts aimed at England had to feature the kind of
music that the British really loved.
# Let's go slumming
# Take me slumming
# Let's go slumming on Park Avenue... #
The original songs,
like Irving Berlin's Slumming On Park Avenue,
were all popular hits on British radio.
# ..And make faces when a member of the classes passes... #
And as tunes like this were banned in Germany, Charlie's bandleader,
Lutz Templin, was given special licence to tune into
British radio stations for inspiration.
# Let us go to it, they do it Why can't we do it too? #
Then, with the help of the British traitor turned Nazi broadcaster,
Lord Haw-Haw, the words were given their own unique spin.
Thank you so much.
Andrej, what a fantastic song, Irving Berlin classic. Thank you.
What happens to that song when it comes to Nazi Germany?
Nothing good, actually.
Charlie & His Orchestra was doing this song with totally different
lyrics. Out of Let's Go Slumming, they made Let's Go Shelling.
"Let's go shell Churchill and the women and the kids."
And you have experience yourself of being in a propaganda unit,
just tell me a bit about what you did and how you judge Charlie's efforts.
Well, I was serving in a propaganda unit in East Germany during the
so-called GDR times,
and we would have been slapped in the face for such a cheap propaganda
if we would have done this in East Germany,
and the propaganda of East Germany, as you know, was also quite high,
but this was very poor, very poor.
It's pretty crude as an attempt.
It is crude and it's bad, it's just very bad.
I mean, how can you imagine to convince someone by telling him,
"We will kill your children, we will kill your women," I mean,
what is this? Is this making you to say, "Oh, yes, yes, yes!
"Let me change, let me come over to you"? No, not really.
But the whole purpose behind Charlie & His Orchestra was
to undermine British and US morale.
I mean, they took it very seriously, it was not a joke.
The band...the band wasn't bad.
It doesn't sound like a very good American swing orchestra,
but it sounds like a very good German one.
What do you mean by that, what's the difference?
Well, I can always recognise a German band, it's not as relaxed
and not as swinging as an American one, you know.
The American soldiers and the British ones,
they had Glenn Miller to listen to or Benny Goodman,
so why should they go for Lutz Templin and his Charlie?
Charlie & His Orchestra
recorded over 250 songs.
But did their musical blitzkrieg
have a negative impact on British morale?
Not exactly.
This is the Daily Express from the 11th of September 1944, and the
broadcasts get a write-up.
"Lord Haw-Haw's mockery,
"threats and intimidation merely proved irritating interruptions.
"The musical part of the programme was excellent."
MUSIC: German National Anthem
The Nazis operated what you might call a Ctrl-Alt-Delete policy
when it came to music,
controlling the German people with patriotic numbers like Wagner's
and Zarah Leander's.
Altering music to serve their purpose, with Nazified swing.
And, if in doubt, delete - and get rid of it.
Work by Jewish composers and musicians had already been eliminated,
but even card-carrying Nazis weren't immune from the censors.
Take, for example, Hugo Distler.
He was a music teacher,
a composer of mostly religious music and a choirmaster at the
Berlin Cathedral. So far, so innocuous.
But Distler repeatedly came under fire.
After the premiere of this concerto, he was denounced as degenerate.
The Hitler Youth sabotaged rehearsals of his choral works.
Increasingly disillusioned with the Nazi Party,
Distler was desperate not to have to put on a uniform and go to war.
By October 1942,
Distler had been called up five times and on each occasion managed
to evade conscription.
But he was certain that the next call would come soon.
On Sunday the 1st of November,
he conducted the choir at the cathedral,
went home, turned on the oven and gassed himself.
One of the most promising German composers of his generation
had been silenced.
That was the bleak situation in Germany.
By contrast, in Britain,
if you were a composer raging against the war and the system,
amazingly enough, you might get...this place.
In February 1945, the Royal Albert Hall -
Britain's most prestigious concert venue -
put on a performance of Michael Tippett's new oratorio,
A Child Of Our Time.
The auditorium was packed with war-weary concertgoers,
eager to hear the classical hit of the day.
A month earlier, the work had been broadcast to the nation by the BBC.
Being given all that signalled pretty emphatically
the cultural value of Tippett's new piece,
and yet the man and his music went against the grain -
A Child Of Our Time was unapologetically anti-war.
Tippett, like Hugo Distler,
was a conscientious objector, and A Child Of Our Time expresses
his pacifism and horror of war.
The child of the title was Herschel Grynszpan, a young Jew who,
in 1938, had assassinated a German diplomat,
the trigger for Kristallnacht and a wave of violence aimed at Jews
across the Reich.
Tippett's message wasn't simply anti-Nazi,
it wasn't pro-British either.
For him, everyone was culpable.
The whole world had turned to the dark side.
# ..on its dark side... #
We are a world away here from the patriotic rallying cry of Walton.
Instead what we get is a warning of the dire consequences of war.
As the chorus laments, "It is winter."
Tippett had been vocal about his pacifism throughout the war.
From 1940 he was director of music
at this London working men's college.
So this is a selection of newspaper cuttings and concert programmes that
all relate to Tippett's work here at Morley College during the war.
At which point he's still a young man, a man in his 30s,
but a man of incredibly strongly-held views.
But he does pay a price for his beliefs.
Yes, ultimately, he's sent to prison.
He was sent to prison for three months.
He only served two,
and it's felt that he was treated
very leniently in prison, he was allowed to put on a concert.
And when he came out, he was able to go straight from prison to a concert
at the Wigmore Hall, and fit straight back in to the musical establishment.
I love that. So, he has his wrists slapped, but it's pretty cushy, that -
"Go to prison for three months. Oh, make it two.
"Oh, have a concert with your friends."
I mean, it's sort of... It's not a bad, you know...
Well, of course, he went to prison with...
having had words of support,
very public words of support from none other than Vaughan Williams,
who was the grand old man of English music by that stage.
And here we have Vaughan Williams quoted in The Times.
"I think Tippett's pacifist views entirely wrong, but I respect him
"very much for holding them so firmly.
"I think his compositions are very remarkable
"and form a distinct national asset,
"and will increase the prestige of this country in the world."
So, I mean, that is really interesting.
There's a sense, what, that just being a musician is enough to be
part of the war effort, whether you support the war or not?
Yes. He was already recognised as a composer of national importance,
but of course, we were fighting for free speech,
we were fighting for the right for people to express themselves
artistically with a great degree of freedom.
MUSIC: Faust by Charles Gounod
On June the 22nd, 1940,
Germany conquered France after just six weeks of fighting.
Within a week, Hitler made a triumphal entry into Paris.
It was to be a mere three-hour whistle-stop tour.
But there was one place that he was determined to see.
Hitler was on a musical mission.
His first stop - the Paris Opera.
MUSIC: Carmen by Georges Bizet
Hitler's chief architect, Albert Speer, later recalled the visit.
Speer wrote, "We visited the great stairway with its excessive
"ornamentation, the resplendent foyer, the elegant, gilded parterre,
"all of them carefully inspected.
"Hitler was fascinated by the opera, went into ecstasies about its beauty,
"his eyes glittering with an excitement that struck me as uncanny."
Knowing the pride the French took in their culture,
Hitler used the Opera House as a billboard to crow over his victory.
But the Fuhrer didn't try to obliterate French music.
The Germans weren't foolish enough to think that they could just dump
their own culture onto the French and that audiences would buy it.
They knew that to keep the peace,
they'd have to allow home-grown music by French composers
like Bizet, Berlioz and Auber.
Their plan was to show the world that under Nazi leadership,
French culture was flourishing.
As a member of the barrier-smashing modernist group, Les Six,
the proudly French composer, Francis Poulenc,
might well have been considered a potential troublemaker
by the occupying Nazis.
Nonetheless, in 1942, he premiered a new ballet, Les Animaux Modeles,
right here at the Paris Opera.
Model Animals is a pretty wacky piece.
It's set on a farmyard in rural France on a hot summer's morning.
It features a cicada who plays the violin, an amorous lion
who makes love to a beautiful young French girl
and cockerels fighting to the death.
What on earth was Poulenc playing at?
Was he selling out, writing nonsense for German officers to enjoy?
Well, not exactly.
In fact, Poulenc was walking a tightrope between collaboration
and dangerous subversion.
He was a member of the clandestine Front National des Musiciens,
a French resistance movement that was waging a cultural war
against the Nazis.
And his music contained coded messages of defiance.
That is the tune that Poulenc sets during the amorous lion part of his
ballet, and it is a tune that would have been very well known to anyone
French. It's called Vous N'aurez Pas L'Alsace Et Lorraine -
You'll Never Have Alsace And Lorraine -
and it was coined during the 1870s in the Franco-Prussian War when the
French and Germans were skirmishing over the disputed region of Alsace and Lorraine.
Essentially, it tells the Germans where to stick it, saying,
"You might have our land, but you'll never have our French hearts."
While this musical reference would have been blindingly obvious
to the French, it went completely over the heads of the Germans
attending the premiere.
When it went by unnoticed, Poulenc wrote in his diary,
"I just sat there and smiled."
Nights at the opera, cafe-lined boulevards -
the playground of Paris was a cushy posting for any German officer,
a world away from life back home.
Here, music that was forbidden in Germany positively flourished.
There, jazz was "entartete" -
degenerate.
But in 1940, following the occupation,
125 new jazz clubs opened in Paris.
All that jazz didn't just slip through the net,
it was sanctioned by Germany's top brass.
As Hitler said to Albert Speer,
"What does the spiritual health of the French people matter to us?
"Let them be degenerate."
And if jazz was deviant, how about a little bit of Gypsy jazz?
Double degeneracy!
That's what was driving Parisians wild in the 1940s -
it was called Jazz Manouche.
Gypsies, like Jews and homosexuals,
were being murdered in vast numbers by the Reich,
but the Nazis left Jazz Manouche untouched.
Its leading light, Django Reinhardt,
was himself a Roma Gypsy.
Django did try to flee to Switzerland,
but when he was caught at the border, he wasn't punished -
the German officer simply sent him back to Paris.
He, too, was a Django fan.
Claude Abadie was part of that wartime jazz scene.
Bravo!
Thank you.
Tell me about this photograph. How old were you?
18. That makes you how old now?
97. You look good.
The music is working for you, it's kept you very young.
One must be patient.
As a practising musician,
did the Nazi occupation have much of an impact on your working life?
Were you very aware of the occupation?
The only adjustment was that we were not supposed to play American music.
So we played any kind of music,
but we didn't give the title of the tunes, that's all.
So you were still playing all of the stuff that was forbidden?
Quite. But nobody knew what it was?
Quite.
So, this is from 1942.
Tell me about this concert.
I don't remember.
I was part of this concert because I had just been winning
the amateur jazz contest a few days before.
And you were on the same bill as Django Reinhardt.
But black musicians, obviously, Jewish musicians,
were banned, and then you have somebody like Django
who is a Roma Gypsy - was there a tension there?
Nobody...
Nobody paid attention to Django as a Gypsy.
He was just a French musician, so no problem.
Music made life under occupation a little easier to bear for many
French performers and composers.
For one, it was a way of transcending
desperate circumstances.
During the war, the music of Olivier Messiaen spoke of a world
radically different from the jumping nightspots of Paris.
Messiaen was a devout Catholic, and since 1931 had been organist at this
Parisian church, La Sainte-Trinite,
where he quietly established himself as one of France's
leading avant-garde composers.
But his most extraordinary work wasn't written in the peaceful
sanctuary of this church,
it was composed amid the chaos and desolation
of a prisoner of war camp.
At Stalag VIII-A on the 15th of January 1941,
in front of his fellow prisoners and captors,
Messiaen premiered his Quartet For The End Of Time.
At the start of the war,
Messiaen had been conscripted into the army as a medical orderly.
After France's surrender, like many French soldiers,
he'd been sent to a Stalag, or prisoner of war camp,
on the German-Polish border.
Everything about this piece is extraordinary, even its orchestration -
it's not the usual gang of four strings,
instead, it's the instruments that Messiaen had at his disposal -
a piano, a violin, a clarinet and cello.
Philippe Akoka is the son of the original clarinettist.
I mean, it must have been the most extraordinary premiere, these
strange collections of instruments that shouldn't have been together.
What memories did your father have of that premiere?
Even if you didn't know it had been written in the middle of all of that
misery and squalor,
Messiaen's Quartet still has a profound effect on you.
For me, the piece is a window on the eternal,
a world away from the constraints of time and space.
When the clarinettist Henri Akoka tried to escape from the camp,
Messiaen had refused to join him.
His Quartet was all the escape he needed.
Messiaen's premiere was a triumph,
but it only happened because the Germans allowed it to.
By printing out neat little playbills
for the audience to keep as a memento,
the German camp commandant was creating the artifice that they were
all in it together, enjoying a jolly good night.
But there was no escaping the fact that these people were prisoners,
utterly trapped and under control.
Nowhere would the Nazi desire for command and control
be more horrifically exploited than in the Reich's relentless quest
to purge Germany of those considered to be...
..undesirables.
By the end of the war, the Nazis were responsible for the deaths
of many millions across Europe,
including six million Jews.
Yet, even in the concentration camps,
the Nazis found a place for music.
In Auschwitz-Birkenau, there were 12 official orchestras.
While no footage of the Auschwitz orchestras exists,
the Germans did film musical life at Theresienstadt camp in 1944.
Looking at the footage of Theresienstadt,
it's tempting to think that the musical life there
might at least have been a crumb of comfort
to the prisoners, a shred of humanity,
which was in very short supply.
But that's a dangerous thing, and precisely what the Nazis wanted the world to think.
They made this film to show that, with music in the camps,
life for the Jews couldn't be all that bad.
But in reality, music had been co-opted to serve the Nazis' evil cause.
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch was just 18
when she arrived at Auschwitz in 1943.
What happened when you first arrived?
You go into a place where people process you and shave your head
and tattoo a number on your arm,
and this is all done by prisoners.
And take your clothes off you -
most important thing, everyone has to be naked.
A lady said, "What did you do before the war?"
I said, "Well, I used to play the cello."
She said, "Fantastic.
"You'll be saved. Stand here, I'll come back in a minute."
If you imagine me, I'm sitting there, hairless, tattooed, no clothes on.
The lady approaches me and says, "Oh, you play the cello, how fantastic.
"My name is Alma Rose...
"..and I'm the conductor of the orchestra and we badly need a cello,
"we haven't got anybody to play low notes."
And that's how I started my life in the...
..band in Auschwitz.
Those prisoners who weren't gassed on arrival were incarcerated
in blocks like this - 2,000 to each block, 11 to each bunk.
While Anita's musical skills secured her slightly better
living conditions, she knew that she was only being kept alive
to fulfil one purpose.
Our job was to play marches,
so every morning we had to walk out with the chairs and the music stands
to the gate. That's where we sat, and that's where thousands of people
marched out every morning.
And in the evening we did the same thing the other way round,
and we are very well aware that as long as they want us,
it'd be stupid to put us in the gas chamber.
It must have been the most bizarre, macabre scene -
jolly German tunes wafting on the air,
played sickeningly fast to make all of those marchers keep pace.
And, if they didn't keep up, prisoners would be shot.
This was music systematically designed to dehumanise people,
to get inside their heads and destroy them from the inside out.
The writer and Auschwitz prisoner Primo Levi wrote that music was
"The voice of the camp,
"the perceptible expression of its madness,
"of the resolution of others to annihilate us first as men
"so that they could kill us more slowly afterwards."
Another camp survivor remembered,
"Anyone who didn't know the song was beaten.
"Anyone who sang too softly was beaten.
"Anyone who sang too loud was beaten."
Nazis in the camps could demand performances at any moment.
At Auschwitz, the infamous camp physician, Dr Josef Mengele,
carried out warped experiments on women and children,
but he was a music lover,
and to relax, would visit the camp orchestra,
ordering private recitals of his favourite pieces.
One day Mengele came in, and he wanted to hear the Traumerei
by Schumann and that was in my repertoire,
so "Anita, play the Traumerei."
So I played it as fast as you could possibly play the Traumerei and,
"Just get out".
That piece by Schumann is part of the Kinderszenen,
these scenes of childhood. Yeah. It's about as innocent a piece of music...
It's nursery music. Exactly.
And for somebody like Mengele to come in in that situation
and ask you for the most innocent piece of "dream music" -
that's what it is... What the hell was he dreaming about?
Yeah. You ask yourself.
Yeah.
Well, I wish I could give you an explanation
what goes on in these people's minds.
I mean, at the time when I played it, you know, you didn't think,
you just did what you have to do and that's it.
People always trying to plant a big,
you know, philosophical thinking...
Forget it, you know, this was a life lived from day to day.
All I could think... "Get out as fast as you can, I don't want to see you."
People ask me, "How could you still play the cello now
"if you played the cello then?"
Music is completely untouchable.
I mean, the Nazis destroyed...
..unspeakable amounts of things.
I'm not letting Mr Mengele destroy the beauty of the Traumerei for me,
you know?
To me, it is beyond comprehension that a man like Josef Mengele,
a man who truly believed that Jews were subhuman,
who carried out the most despicable experiments on pregnant women
and children, would ask a young Jewish girl like Anita
to play for him some of the most profoundly human
and tender music ever written.
She did play, he listened, and then he returned to this torture chamber.
On the 27th of January 1945,
Auschwitz was finally liberated by the Russian army.
7,000 people remained alive at the camp.
Over a million had been murdered here.
Two months later, the Russians reached the outskirts of Berlin
and were preparing for the final attack.
Throughout the war,
the Nazis had used and abused music to turn their regime into a grand,
grotesque spectacle.
Now, even as the Third Reich faced imminent annihilation,
the Nazis chose to stage one last momentous concert.
The Berlin Philharmonic, the Reich's orchestra,
would sound one final blast of German patriotism for the Nazis,
with a playlist of Beethoven, Bruckner and, of course,
Hitler's favourite, Wagner.
And it was a particular piece of Wagner's,
the Immolation Scene from his opera Gotterdammerung,
depicting the world of the gods destroyed by fire,
the sky glowing red.
It was a mirror to the Third Reich as it went up in flames.
The city of Berlin lay in ruins, its outskirts reduced to rubble,
its centre under constant shelling.
The audience, gathering together to listen to Wagner one last time,
consisted of those too elderly or infirm to flee,
and Nazi zealots fighting to the bitter end.
It was an apocalyptic finale for the Third Reich.
One member of the audience later recalled the young men of the
Hitlerjugend offering out cyanide pills by the bucket-load.
Two weeks after the concert,
Hitler committed suicide and Germany surrendered.
The Third Reich was over.
And yet, the band played on.
Just one month later, in one of the few venues left standing,
the Berlin Philharmonic reassembled for a new performance.
This concert had a very different programme.
No Wagner - instead the audience was treated to Mendelssohn,
A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Because of his Jewish heritage,
Mendelssohn had been banned by the Nazis since they came to power.
What better way to mark their downfall?
But, added to that symbolism, the music itself had a message.
A Midsummer Night's Dream conjured up fairies, magic, make-believe,
a world where anything was possible
and where things could be made new again.
Sprinkling a little fairy dust couldn't erase the recent horror...
..but this was, in every sense, an overture -
music offered hope for the future.
Music will always have that special force that aims straight
for our heart and bypasses our head.
That emotional force is what makes it so vulnerable to manipulation
and abuse.
Of course we should continue to love it, to celebrate it -
music gives us licence to dream.
But, as the events of the 20th century show,
we should also be wary of its seductive power.
MUSIC: A Midsummer Night's Dream by Felix Mendelssohn