Jewish works found in Hitler's personal record collection

[kurth]

Jewish works found in Hitler's personal record collection
By Allan Hall in Berlin
Published: 07 August 2007

Relatives of a Russian officer who looted Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler's Berlin bunker in 1945 have unearthed the Führer's personal record collection among his belongings. What they found does not make sweet music to those who still worship the racial quackery of mankind's greatest tormentor. For amid the Wagner and the Beethoven, were works by Jewish and Russian composers - Hitler's greatest enemies - including Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky and Borodin.

Throughout the 12-year lifespan of the Third Reich, Hitler forbade his followers to listen to anything other than German composers. Even jazz was banned as "negro swamp music" and orchestras such as the Berlin Philharmonic were forbidden from playing anything other than Teutonic classics. The rest Hitler labelled "sub-human music"

Now the pillaged recordings, taken by a Red Army officer, Besymenski, after Berlin fell in May 1945, show that Hitler was a hypocrite as well as a monster. Besymenski, himself a Jew, was fluent in German and conducted the interrogation of Field Marshal von Paulus after the Sixth Army was destroyed at Stalingrad in 1943. When Berlin fell, the Russian officer was despatched with others to make an inventory of artefacts in the bunker and Hitler's destroyed Reichschancellery above it.

While his comrades set about recording - and pilfering - the monogrammed silver and swastika-embossed porcelain, Captain Besymenski noticed that many cabinets had special locks and were still sealed. Years later, he wrote these words: "They were all packed with paperwork indicating they were to be sent to the mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden. Among electrical appliances and things like washing machines, were the records." According to Alexandra Besymenski, his daughter, her father kept the records as souvenirs and first showed them to her at the family dacha outside of Moscow in 1991. The much honoured history professor and lecturer at the Moscow Military Academy kept them in the loft at the dacha at Nikolina-Gora. "I stumbled across them as I was looking for a football," his daughter Alexandra told Der Spiegel...

http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article2841357.ece