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Relatives of a Russian officer who looted Nazi leader Adolf Hitler's Berlin bunker in 1945 have unearthed the dictator's record collection among his belongings. Amid the Wagner and Beethoven were works by Jewish and Russian composers - Hitler's greatest enemies - including Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky and Borodin.
Throughout the
12 years 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 the Russian 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 Marshall von Paulus after the Sixth Army was destroyed at Stalingrad in 1943.
When Berlin fell the Russian officer was sent 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 were locked and sealed.
Years later he wrote: "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 Moscow in 1991.
Besymenski, a much-honoured history professor and lecturer at the Moscow Military Academy, kept them in the loft at the dacha at Nikolina-Gora.
The family thinks the Russian captain hid the records, which bear the stamp "Fuehrer headquarters" across them, because he did not want to be thought of as a common looter.
But it was common practice for the Soviet military elite to take home the spoils of a war which cost 26 million Russian lives.
Marshall Zhukov, the victor at Stalingrad and Berlin, took home 55 classical oil paintings, seven boxes of valuable porcelain and silverware, nine gold watches and 713 silver ornaments pilfered from the castles of Potsdam.
The records, however, were a source of both shame and pride for the music-loving Besymenski, who died two months ago aged 86. During his life he played them for himself and a small clique of trusted friends.
Alexandra revealed the story of how Hitler's records came to be in the hands of his sworn enemy. The usual Hitler favourites are there: Beethoven's rousing Ninth Symphony, the Flying Dutchman by Wagner, and several works by Brahms, Schumann and Mozart. But there are also works featuring prominent Jewish soloists, including Polish violinist Bronislaw Huberman and the voice of Russian baritone Fyodor Shalyapin on a recording of Mussorgsky's Death of Boris Godunov.
"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.
- INDEPENDENT