Tuesday, August 07, 2007

Hitler had a Huberman record...

A report in today's Indy reveals that Adolf Hitler's personal record collection has turned up, in the hands of Alexandra Besymenski, the daughter of a Russian Red Army officer who looted Hitler's bunker in 1945.

And what's in it? Russian music like Rachmaninov and Tchaikovsky, Chaliapin singing Boris Godunov, a smattering of Jewish musicians like Bronislaw Huberman...(oh yes, and The Flying Dutchman in case you were wondering). While he was forbidding his troops to listen to anything that wasn't German, he was lapping up the stuff himself.

Many of the records are scratched, indicating they were played over and over again while the war that Hitler began cost millions of lives across Europe and the wider world.

"I think my father found it astonishing that millions of Jews and Russians had to die because of the ideology of Hitler and here he was all the time enjoying their art," said Alexandra.



Read the whole thing here...