The bonds of peace between nations

'How many people are aware the modern torch relay was introduced by Carl Diem, president of the organisation committee for the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, as part of an effort to turn the games into a glorification of the Third Reich. "Sporting chivalrous contest helps knit the bonds of peace between nations. Therefore may the Olympic flame never expire," - Adolf Hitler' - writes Patricia van den Brink from Herne, Germany in today's Guardian.

And how many people are aware that Hitler's court composer was a Harvard alumni?
Photo of demonstration in London on April 6, 2008 from Students for a Free Tibet UK. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

A good friend of the house of Wagner

BBC News reports ~ Photographs of Adolf Hitler - taken by a Nottinghamshire spy weeks before the start of World War II - have been made public for the first time. Charles Turner took the images at the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth, Germany in July 1939. He was given unprecedented access to the Nazi leader, and toured the festival as part of his entourage.

The photographs have been released by Mr Turner's son David, 64, after he began researching his family history. Mr Turner, of West Bridgford, told the Nottingham Evening Post that his father had chatted to the German leader and other members of the Third Reich - including Joseph Goebbels and Rudolf Hess - as the party toured the festival. They assumed Mr Turner - a guest of a member of Hitler's inner circle - was merely a fellow music fan.

Mr Turner said: "My father regarded these photos as an extraordinary souvenir of a remarkable and fortuitous event. "They are very, very important to me and my family and for all this period of time - my father died in 1977 - I have regarded the possession of these photos as an intimate family matter. "My father never spoke to me about it. Only he could answer why. That's not to say I didn't know what happened but as a child your perception and awareness of things are very different," he said.

He said he made the decision to release the images to the newspaper, which were taken on a Kodak Eastman folding camera, when he began to trace his family's roots. Charles Turner sent a detailed report of his meet back to London. His son has been told by the Home Office that the document is still classified and may never be released.

From BBC News. My header photo is not one of the spy photos, but comes from Winifred Wagner, A Life at the Heart of Hitler’s Bayreuth by Brigitte Hamann which I reviewed in my article The Phantom of the Opera, and which also supplies my headline quote. Elsewhere read how Hitler said Wagner - I don't get to hear anything else. And view more extraordinary photos from the Third Reich discovered via An Overgrown Path.
Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

The Phantom of the Opera

'Yes, Hitler had always been a good friend of the house of Wagner; she, Winifred, admired him and was grateful to him. Yes, he had been misled by the people around him, and pushed into making decisions. No, she had never slept with Hitler.'

An extract from an interview with Winifred Wagner, given, quite unbelievably, in 1945 immediately after the collapse of the Third Reich. The extract is from an interview with Klaus Mann (son of Thomas Mann) published in the US army newspaper Stars and Stripes, and quoted in the recently published Winifred Wagner, A Life at the Heart of Hitler’s Bayreuth, which also supplies my header photograph of Hitler with the book's subject.

The story of Winifred Wagner is the stuff of fiction. In 1907 a nine-year-old English orphan, Winifred Williams, was sent to live with distant relatives in Berlin. In 1915, in the middle of World War 1, the eighteen-year-old girl was married in Bayreuth. Her groom was Siegfried Wagner, the 46 year-old only son of Richard Wagner, head of the Bayreuth Festival, and a homosexual, or as author Brigitte Hamann tactfully puts it, “a man’s man”.

Therein lies one of the the many flaws in this meticulously researched book, which at 582 pages is Wagnerian, both in length and sympathy. Hamann lives in Vienna, studied in Germany and Austria, and is the author of a study of Hitler’s early years. A good biography gives the details of the subject’s private life, but does not pass judgement. I can only conclude that Hamann decided that chronicling Bayreuth’s musical beds might invite judgement. Her circumvention of issues central to the story verges on the comic. An eighteen-year-old girl marries a 46 year-old homosexual to provide an heir (Wieland) to the Wagner dynasty. Yet in the lengthy index entry for Siegfried Wagner there is no entry at all under 'homosexuality', and just one (on page 8) under the tactful heading 'sexual proclivities', while elsewhere we read that the notorious Nazi homosexual Ernst Rohm stays in Siegfried’s house with his 'friend' Franz von Epp. But at least gender equality is respected, and Winifred’s affair with Bayreuth artistic director Heinz Tietjen also gets the ‘don’t mention it in front of the children’ treatment.


Although there is a wealth of detail on the wonderfully bitchy world of Bayreuth and the ‘Master’, this is much more than a music book. It tells of a cataclysmic collision of politics and music, and the photo above from the book shows one of the points of impact - Tietjen and Furtwängler with Winifred’s friend ‘Wolf’ at the new Berlin City Opera staging of Lohengrin in 1929. As worlds collide Brigitte Hamann only makes a token attempt to disguise her allegiance to the Wagner camp, just one small example is how she recounts on page 374 how performances of the Wesendonck Lieder were banned at Bayreuth by Wagner’s widow Cosima, but omits any mention of the song cycle in the entry for Wagner, Richard Compositions in the comprehensive index, despite their appearance in the text.

Winifred confirmed the Wesendonck ban in 1944, and the end of the war did not see the end of her political blunderings. In 1952 she visited the GDR (interestingly following the same itinerary as my recent visit - Leipzig, Dresden and Zwickau), and upset the West Germans with her praise for the communist regime. Back in Bayreuth she lived in her husband's old house which she referred to as the Führer building, and it became a gathering place for the widows and children of the former Nazi leaders. When they were there Hamann describes how they "could talk openly about old times, which for all of them were the best times of their lives. And they could express their enthusiasm for the Führer to their heart's content." Another contact of Winifred was David Irving, who Hamann generously describes as "the revisionist British historian". Others describe him as a holocaust denier.

In 1975, at the age of 78, Winifred was at the center of yet another controversey when Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's documentary film about her was released. In the film she says the following - "If Hitler were to walk in through that door now, for instance, I'd be as happy and glad to see him here as ever, and that whole dark side of him, I know it exists, but it doesn't exist for me because I don't know that part of him". Four years later, in 1979, she was guest of honour in Bayreuth at a rally of hundreds of former Hitler Youth and Bund Deutscher Mädel members, and she followed this by attacking the award of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade to Yehudi Menuhin with these words - "despite all his achievements, I regret the prize has been given to a Jew, because it's just more grovelling to that race on the part of this generation - haven't we got any pride?" Winifred Wagner died in March 1980, aged 82.

An extraordinary, and truly frightening tale that is essential reading, particularly for the bon mots that litter the text. The most memorable include Winifred's description of Hitler's personal physician, Karl Brandt, who was responsible for carrying out Hitler's euthanasia programme which systematically murdered the mentally ill and the disabled. On hearing of Brandt's death sentence in 1948 Winifred Wagner complained: "What a nice, decent fellow he was, and what a price he's got to pay now for the things he was made to represent." (P 441)

Elsewhere Hassmann writes about the Bayreuth concentration camp (see note 1 below), in which Winifred's son, Wieland (see note 2), held a senior position until April 1945, and reassures us with these words - After 1945, ex-inmate Hans Imhof described his stay at Bayreuth as ‘the best part of my whole time in concentration camps’ (P 380).

Extraordinary words from an extraordinary book. Unless you read it you will never believe it.

Note 1. Bayreuth concentration camp was a satellite of the Flossenbürg KZ site. Around 30,000 died in Flossenbürg and its subcamps. Among those killed were Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, General Hans Oster, and others involved in the plot to assasinate Hitler on 20th July 1944. These men had been arrested following the collapse of the plot, but they were held in various prisons and camps until being sent to Flossenbürg, where they were hanged on 9th April 1945, shortly before the liberation.


Note 2. In 1949 Wieland Wagner was cleared of all political charges despite his Nazi past and close friendship with Hitler - the photo above shows him with Hitler watched by a member of the Bayreuth domestic staff. Wieland's failure to mention in his de-Nazification questionnaire that he held a senior position in the Bayreuth concentration camp was of no consequence as enquiries into these activities had ceased by 1949. He took over as Bayreuth Festival Director in 1951, holding the position until his death in 1966. Although Wieland symbolically removed the old order from the Bayreuth productions the pre-war legacy remained very much present behind the scenes, including Winifred's close friend Dortmund steel magnate Moritz Klönne, who became president of the Society of the Friends of Bayreuth. In another of the book's bon mots designer Emil Preetorius describes Wieland Wagner as "the arsehole of Bayreuth".

Although Winifred was removed from involvement in the Festival, the Wagner dynasty continues its control of Bayreuth to this day through Wieland's brother Wolfgang. He was born in 1919, and his close association with Hitler is chronicled in Hamann's book. Despite these Nazi connections musicians of the calibre, and integrity, of Daniel Barenboim work at Bayreuth. In an illuminating conversation with Edward Said Barenboim says - "one has to distinguish between Wagner's anti-Semitism, which is monstrous and despicable and worse than the sort of normal, shall we say, accepted-unacceptable level of anti-Semitism, and the use the Nazis made of it."

Winifred Wagner, A Life at the Heart of Hitler’s Bayreuth by Brigitte Hamann is published by Granta Books, ISBN1862076715

For more on Hitler’s musical inner circle take An Overgrown Path to Hitler’s court composer was a Harvard alumni.
Photo credits - Winifred Wagner, A Life at the Heart ofHitler’s Bayreuth, Granta Books. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included for "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Hitler's court composer was Harvard alumni

In Leni Riefenstahl's celebrated film of the 1934 Nazi Nuremberg there is a chilling sequence as Hitler and the other leading Nazis pass through the massed ranks of the Deutsche Arbeiterfront (German Labor Front). The soundtrack for this sequence captures a military band playing Deutsche Largo, a march from the same composer as Junge Marschiert (Youth Marches), which was played as the combined forces of the dreaded SA and SS paraded down Wilhelmstraße in Berlin on January 30th, 1933 to celebrate Hitler's appointment as Chancellor.

'Hitler's Piano Player' is a new book that tells the remarkable story of the composer of these marches. Ernst Hanfstaengl was a German who was educated at Harvard, and lived in America through the First World War before moving to Germany where he worked closely with Hitler as head of the Nazi foreign press bureau. Then, in an extraordinary example of poacher turning gamekeeper he fled the fascist regime, eventially moving to the US to lead an anti-Nazi psychological warfare project for his friend, president Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Ernst Hanfstaengl, (known as "Putzi"), was born in Munich in 1887, the son of a wealthy and famous German art publisher and an American mother. He spent most of his early years in Germany before moving to the United States to study at Harvard where his circle included members of the Roosevelt family, Hamilton Fish and T.S. Eliot. During his time at Harvard he also became a cheerleader for the football team and a pianist renown for his spirited performances of Wagner and other martial music. These two unlikely skills were later to heavily influence his stage-management of the Nazi rallies.

After graduating Hanfstaengl returned to Germany to perform voluntary military service before studying lithography in Vienna and joining the family art publishing business in Munich. In 1911 he returned to America to run the prestigous family owned Galerie Hanfstaengl on Fifth Avenue. Hanfstaengl remained in the US through the duration of the First World War, but following his mariage and birth of a son (whose godfather was to be one Adolf Hitler) returned to Germany in 1921.

Chance took Hanfstaengl to the Kindkeller in Munich in November 1922 to hear an unknown politician speak. The speaker was Hitler, and Hanfstaengl fell under his spell and quickly became a close friend and advisor to the future dictator, the photo below shows him with Hitler. Hanfstaengl became one of the earliest political 'spin doctors', and his bizarre achievements included allegedly devising the Sieg Heil chant, and financing the publication of Mein Kampf. His musical talents appealed to Hitler, and for years he was personal pianist to the Fuhrer specialising in spirited renditions of Wagner and Liszt. Hanfstaengl recalled that "I must have played Tristan und Isolde hundreds of times, and Hitler couldn't have enough of it, it did him good physically .. he chuckled with pleasure".

Hanfstaengl's own compositions included the marches Deutscher Föhn and Deutschland Trauert, and the monumental Volkschoral Hymne an das Deutsche Erbe (People's Hymn to the German Past). In 1932 he was assistant producer and composer for a film based on a book by Hanns Heinz Ewers. The subject was the life of the martyred Nazi, Horst Wessel, who had been murdered by communists in 1930. It was the Deutsche Largo from this score which caught Hitler's ear, the dictator commanded that it should be used at the 1934 Nuremberg Rally, where it was captured for posterity in Leni Riefenstahl's film.

Below is An Overgrown Path Leni Riefenstahl photo exclusive - this may just be the first time that this photo has been published in context. It was taken inside Luipold Hall at the 1935 Nuremberg Rally. I discovered the photo last year when I was researching my article on the Siegfried Lauterwasser Collection, and Andy Eskind who catalogued the photo archive at George Eastman House in Rochester identified the cinematographer visible centre-right in the photo below as Leni Riefenstahl. The Triumph of Will was filmed the previous year, Riefenstahl was apparently in Nuremberg in 1935 working on another project.


In 1934 Hanfstaengl visited Harvard to attend the twenty-fifth anniversary reunion of his class, a visit that was surrounded by controversey and anti-Nazi demonstrations. He brought with him a bust of his favourite composer Gluck, which he planned to present to Harvard's music department. The planned gift met with little enthusiasm, although it was finally reluctantly accepted by the department's head, and composer, Edward Burlingame Hill. While Hanfstaengl was in Harvard the Nazis murdered more than 200 senior Nazis including SA leader Ernst Röhm, in the infamous 'Knight of the Long Knives' on June 30th, 1934. It was this event that sparked Hanfstaengl's disillusionment with the Nazis, and his subsequent activities included helping 'non-Aryan' violinist Fritz Kreisler to recover his confiscated property. Hanfstaengl progressively fell out of favour with Hitler and was branded 'not politically reliable'


Finally in 1937, in fear of his life, he chose an evening when Hitler, Göring and Goebells were attending a Berlin Philharmonic concert conducted by Furtwängler to cross the border into Switzerland. In Zurich he fitted in a consultation with Carl Jung before moving to to England where he was interned at the outbreak of war, and formed a piano quartet in his detention camp. With a German invasion a real possibility enemy aliens were moved to Canada, and Hanfstaengl spent further time in detention reading the Bible simultaneously in English, Greek, Latin, French, German and Dutch, and comparing the quality of the translations. When this exercise was completed he moved on to the Koran. He was finally transferred to the custody of the fledgling US government Office of Strategic Services, the wartime intelligence-gathering service that was replaced in 1947 by the CIA.


Hanfstaengl was moved to Virginia and installed in Bush Hill, a secluded property some twenty-five miles outside Washington. Here he was the star of Roosevelt's 'S-Project' which provided the White House with biographical information on four hundred top Nazis, analyses of Hitler's speeches, and a detailed dossier covering Hitler's psychological condition, education and sex life. This dossier also contained Hanfstaengl's observations on Hitler's musical tastes. As noted previously Tristan was a favourite, while Meistersinger was preferred when the Fuhrer was facing adversity. Hitler's adoration for Wagner also meant that he apparently knew the libretto of Lohengrin by heart. As well as Wagner, Verdi and selected Chopin and Richard Strauss Hitler also enjoyed Liszt and Grieg. The dictator's musical dislikes tell us more about him than his likes - he disliked Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms.

In an even more bizarre development the US intelligence service arranged for Hanfstaengl to record a piano recital of Debussy and his own works interspersed with appeals for Hitler to sue for peace. CBS pressed thousands of copies of the recital as a single-sided phonograph record. These were then dropped by parachute over Germany addressed to the Nazi leaders, with instructions that the packages be delivered unopened to the addressees - I wonder how many of the brittle shellac discs survived the parachute drop?. The recording of the recital was also beamed to Germany from a radio transmitter here in East Anglia where I write these words.


Eventually Hanfstaengl lost his appeal for Roosevelt's intelligence experts, and he was returned to England, from where he was transferred to a former punishment and starvation camp in Germany. He was released in 1946, but still had to undergo the mandatory denazification process. His final years were spent in Germany, where the publication of his memoirs in 1970, the continued controversy caused by his Harvard connections, and a stormy private life ensured he remained in the public eye. Ernst Hanfstaengl died in Munich in November 1975 aged eighty-eight.

Peter Conradi's excellent life of Hanfstaengl ends with his death. But there is a fascinating coda to this extraordinary story, where fact is often far stranger than fiction. On the penultimate page of Conradi's book the author writes: '(Hanfstaengl) took great pride in his grandchildren - especially Eynon, the eldest, who had inherited his grandfather's musical talent, taking an impressive twenty-fourth place in the prestigous Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in June 1974.' The pianist career of the junior Hanfstaengl seem to have been obscured by the mists of time, and my researches found no further information on this. But tantalisingly my search found a German German film actor and writer called Eynon Hanfstaengl. One of his acting roles was Count Durkheim in the 1972 movie Ludwig - Requiem Fur einen jungfraulichen Konig. The film is a cinematic requiem for Wagner's patron Ludwig ll of Bavaria, and the music credits include excerpts from Furtwängler's Tristan, and Karajan's Siegfried and Gotterdammerung. Is this Ernst Hanfstaengl's grandson?

* Hitler's Piano Player, The Rise and Fall of Ernst Hanfstaengl, Confidant of Hitler and Ally of FDR by Peter Conradi is published by Duckworth, ISBN 0715633732. The text of this article is drawn from this book, other sources, and my own research. Corrections and additions will be gratefully received, email overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk
* All the rarely-seen photographs in this article (which as noted above are of the 1935 Nuremberg Rally) come from the Siegfried Lauterwasser Collection. Read the full story of this extraordinary archive, and see more haunting photographs, in my article Downfall - and the mystery of Karajan's personal photographer.
The photo of Hanfstaengl and Hitler is from Signature Books.
* One of Herbert von Karajan's more memorable excesses is his LP of Prussian and Austrian Marches made with the Berlin Philharmonic. Sadly it doesn't contain anything by Ernst Hanfstaengl, but Gottfried Sonntag's Nibelungen-Marsch is a very adequate substitute. And to preempt a shower of emails, yes, I am aware Karajan passed through the denazification process. But please do read Melissa Muller's commentary on denazification via this link.
* Leni Riefenstahl's famous film of the 'Triumph of the Will' which captures Hanfstaengl's Deutsche Largo is available on DVD.
* Although the Harvard music department's Chairman Edward Burlingame Hill accepted the bust of Gluck from Hanfstaengl there is no suggestion at all that he was in any way sympathetic to the Fascists. Hill was among the first Americans to study composition in Paris, and his innovative compositions signposted the way to many early twentieth-century innovations. He was an enthusiastic champion of French music, and wrote the first English-language study of French music from Chabrier to "Les Six."

With thanks to Garth Trinkl for prompting me to write another article on the Third Reich, and with apologies to Bernard Tuyttens for writing another article on the Third Reich. And special thanks to Carol Murchie whose research helped make the Siegfried Lauterwasser Collection article possible. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included in "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk
If you enjoyed this post take An Overgrown Path to Wagner - I don't get to hear anything else

Wagner - I don't get to hear anything else

He was genuinely convinced that he had an infallible musical ear. Heinz Lorenz suggested, 'My Führer, you ought to give a concert in the Great Hall. After all, you could afford to invite the best German musicians, Gieseking, Kempff, Furtwängler and so on. You don't go to the opera or the theatre any more, but you could listen to music. It wouldn't strain your eyes either'. Hitler rejected the idea. 'No, I don't want to trouble such artists just for me personally, but we could play a few records.'

A thick book listed all the records that the Führer owned. There must have been hundreds of them. The wooden panelling of the wall turned out to be a cupboard holding records, with a built-in gramophone that was invisible till the cupboard doors were opened. The black discs stood in long rows, labelled with numbers. Bormann operated the gramophone. Hitler nearly always had the same repertory played: Léhars operettas, songs by Richard Strauss, Hugo Wolf and Richard Wagner. The only pop music he would let us play was the 'Donkey serenade'. It usually formed the conclusion of the concert.

Hitler's colleagues enjoyed the musical evenings with the records even less than those conversations around the hearth. One after another they would leave the Hall. You could hear them laughing and giggling and talking in the living room, where the deserters assembled to amuse themselves in their own way, leaving their boss alone with the sleeping Morell and the faithful Eva, the duty adjutant and the von Below and Brandt ladies. I must admit that I sometimes slipped quietly away myself, until the valet came in to say, 'The Führer misses his company, and back there in the Hall he can hear your noise.' Then the 'faithful' reluctantly went back on duty again.

'No, my entourage isn't very musical,' Hitler said, resigned. 'When I was still going to official festival performances of opera I usually had to keep an eye on the men with me to see they didn't go to sleep. Hoffman (he meant the press photographer Heinrich Hoffman) once almost fell over the balustrade of the box during Tristan und Isolde, and I had to rouse Schaub and tell him to go over and shake Hoffman awake. Brückner was sitting behind me snoring, it was terrible. (Pliable - this is Wilhelm Brückner, one-time adjutant to Hitler.) But no one went to sleep during the Merry Widow because there was a ballet in it.'

I asked Hitler why he only ever went to hear Die Meistersinger or other Wagnerian opearas. 'It's just my luck that I can never say I like something without finding I'm stuck listening exclusively to one piece of music or hearing one particular opera. I once said that Meistersinger is really one of Richard Wagner's finest operas, so since then it's supposed to be my favourite opera and I don't get to hear anything else.'

From Traudl Junge's 'Until the Final Hour - Hitler's Last Secretary' (Weidenfield & Nicholson ISBN 0297847201). Traudl Junge was Hitler's private secretary from 1942 to his death, and she typed his last private and political will and testament in the Berlin bunker. Her journal was written in 1947, and the extract above describes the musical soirées at Hitler's Berghof retreat in the Obersalzberg. Oliver Hirschbieger's excellent film Downfall draws heavily on Traudl Jung's account of the last days of Hitler.

The photographs in this article are from the remarkable Siegfried Lauterwasser Collection. Follow these links for the extraordinary story of this archive, and to view more stunning photos:- * Downfall - and the mystery of Karajan's personal photographer * The mystery of the Siegfried Lauterwasser Collection solved via the internet * How photo archive was salvaged from a trash can *

Also relevant are * The Berlin Philharmonic's darkest hour * Furtwängler and the forgotten new music * Dresden Requiem for eleven young victims * Holocaust opera's rare performance *

Downfall - and the mystery of Karajan's personal photographer

Bruno Ganz in the cinema as Hitler.

Following on from The Chorus we went to see Downfall last week. Director Oliver Hirschbieger has made a stunning film, but the accolades must go to Bruno Ganz's extraordinarily powerful performance as Hitler. In my book his performance is up there alongside Dirk Bogarde's Aschenbach in Visconti's Death in Venice for immersing himself so totally, and so convincingly, in the role. Yes, I understand the reservations about the film 'humanising' the Nazi leaders, and the 'white-washing' of the role of Hitler's secretary Traudl Junge, on whose memoir the film is partly based. But just as Shakespeare's plays provide a valid 'drama-documentary' view of English history, so equally Downfall gives us a dramatised (and arguably sanitised) view of the last days of Hitler. The film lasts for more than two and a half hours (and thankfully uses music very sparingly, there is no Wagner of Bruckner at all, despite the fact that the slow movement of the Seventh Symphony was played on Berlin Radio after the announcement of Hitler's death). I have never seen an audience (of all ages) so engrossed throughout a film, or more silent at the end. We need documentary facts, but we also need dramatisations to bring history to life.

Downfall reminded me of one of life's little mysteries. When I was writing my recent post My first classical record I started researching Siegfried Lauterwasser, the 'official' photographer to the conductor Herbert von Karajan - an example of his work is seen below. I worked at EMI in the 1970s when Karajan was one of our artists and I was fascinated by the 'court' that surrounded him and was intrigued by their background. It is documented that Karajan joined the Nazi Party on April 8th 1933 in Salzburg, two months after Hitler came to power. He was cleared by an Austrian Governement denazification tribunal in February 1946 which concluded that Karajan was not involved in any illegal activity between 1933 and 1938. A transcript of the tribunal is given in Richard Osborne's Karajan - A Life in Music (Chatto & Windus ISBN 1956197638, the following exchange is taken from that transcript:

Dr Zellweker, Deputy Chairman of Tribunal: 'Surely you must have had some thoughts about (politics), and then there you were in 1935 joining the Party.'

Karajan: I'm prepared to admit that it was an error, but we artists live in another world, a self-contained one. Otherwise it would be impossible to play music properly, and music is the highest and only thing for me.'


A Google search on Siegfried Lautterwasser returns a web site at the George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film. It appears this archive is part of Ryerson University in Toronto. It contains the Siegfried Lauterwasser Collection of photos. These are all available online, and they are quite an eye opener. Open the links for coverage of Martin Borman's Visit to Unteruhldingen - May 4-6, 1935 (Boorman was Hitler's number two, and a racist who was outstanding among some finely developed examples of the species), the Nuremberg Rally - September 1935, and much more. The photos have a captivating, haunting and chilling quality. Forget their repugnant subjects, these are compelling images.


Hitler in real life, as captured in the Siegried Lauterwasser Collection

But here is the mystery. Who actually took these photos? They are on the web site as the Siegfried Lauterwasser Collection, and the Lautterwasser in question must be the same one as Karajan's photographer as his dates are identical. There are 'Research and attribution' notes on the site, but these are as clear as mud about the origin of the photos, and talk vaguely of 'an unknown Nazi photographer'. So presumably Lautterwasser didn't take them. If not, why are they labelled as his collection? What is the link between him and the photos? The mystery deepens as a key link on the 'Research and attribution' notes is broken. I've sent several emails to both Ryerson University and George Eastman House about the collection, and have not yet received a reply. (For an update on this post, and for confirmation that the pictures are indeed the work of Lauterwasser see my post The mystery of the Siegfried Lauterwasser Collection solved via the internet - Pliable 19/04/2005).

So what is the link (if any) between Siegried Lauterwasser and these extraordinary photos? Or is the whole thing an elaborate (and bad taste) hoax? Anyone who can shed any light on this fascinating mystery plesae post the explanation using the comments icon below.

Update -For confirmation that the pictures are indeed the work of Lauterwasser see my post The mystery of the Siegfried Lauterwasser Collection solved via the internet - Pliable 19/04/2005).

Further update - just as some other sites have picked up on this post the server hosting the photo archive in Canada at George Eastman House/Ryerson University has started intermittent performance/connectivity problems (nice to think its the traffic we've generated!). If you aren't getting the images on my post, or can't link across to the Siegfied Lauterwasser Collection site please keep trying, it is well worth it when you finally connect - Pliable 27/04/2005)

29th April - a further update with fascinating information on the discovery and attribution of the Lauterwasser archive – see How photo archive was salvaged from a trash can


Another image from the mysterious Siegfried Lauterwasser Collection
Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk