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  A Souvenir from the Bunker: Hitler's Record Collection Surfaces In Moscow

A Souvenir from the Bunker Hitler's Record Collection Surfaces In Moscow

By Georg Bönisch and Matthias Schepp in Moscow

Part 2: Taking Refuge in the Music of His Enemies

As Hitler, possessed by his manic idea of conquering the world, grew increasingly solitary and seldom faced the public anymore, he apparently tried to relax by listening to records. His radio operator Rochus Misch, who is 90 years old today and is the last surviving witness from the bunker, told SPIEGEL about how Hitler once ordered his servant to play a record following an intense argument with the command of the Wehrmacht at the Werwolf headquarters in Vinnytsia, Ukraine: "Then he sat there, absorbed in thought. The Führer probably wanted to distract himself," Misch says.

In moments like that, the otherwise bigoted Hitler apparently didn't care who the music was by -- notwithstanding the fact that he had always denied that Jewish people were capable of independent cultural achievement. In "Mein Kampf," he insists there has never been such a thing as Jewish art, and that the "queen of all arts," architecture, "owes nothing original to the Jews."

As late as his last directive to the soldiers on the Eastern Front from April 15, 1945 -- one day before the Soviet Red Army crossed the Oder River and prepared to siege Berlin -- Hitler ranted against the "mortal Jewish-Bolshevik enemy" from the Führerbunker beneath the garden of the Old Reich Chancellery.

But the dictator and his minions were quite capable of appreciating the works of Jewish artists. The record collection, which was presumably stored in the air-raid shelter beneath the New Reich Chancellery, includes recordings of musicians such as Austrian Jew Artur Schnabel. Schnabel left Germany immediately after the Nazis came to power in 1933. His mother, though, stayed behind and was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp and murdered by the Nazis.

Besymenski, himself Jewish, was surprised by the number of famous Russian names he discovered on the records from the bunker. "They were recordings of classical music, performed by the best orchestras in Europe and Germany, with the best solo performers of the time. ... I was surprised that it also featured Russian music," the historian wrote when he was pressured by his daughter three years ago, for the sake of posterity, to leave a written testimony of how he obtained the collection.

US troops had already discovered numerous records in a cavern in the Berghof in 1945 -- a different part of the musical collection that was compiled for Hitler and other high-ranking Nazis. Historian Philipp Gassert of Heidelberg University had access to some of these records when he was doing research in the United States. Like the records now rediscovered in Moscow, those examined by Gassert had small serrated labels.

Lev Besymenski sometimes listened to the Nazi records together with his best friends. Sometimes, he wrote, he also lent them to musicians -- included conductor Kiril Kondrashin and famous pianists Emil Gilels and Jakow Sak.

His daughter Alexandra says she will think calmly about what she wants to do with her father's collection, "over a glass of wine." That's the name of a cheeky soldier's song set to music by the court chapel master of Braunschweig, Franz Abt, in the 19th century. The number of the record is "Führerhauptquartier 779."

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