Musik im Dritten Reich - Der Maestro und die Cellistin von Auschwitz | DW Doku Deutsch

Nov 9, 2022 | Warum war klassische Musik für Hitler und Goebbels so wichtig? Die Hauptpersonen des Films sind zwei Menschen, die auf sehr unterschiedliche Weise für die Musikkultur im Nationalsozialismus stehen: Stardirigent Wilhelm Furtwängler und die Cellistin des Frauenorchesters in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch. Hier ein Dirigent, der weltweit gefeiert wurde, der mit Hitler und seinen Helfern ein Bündnis einging. Dort eine junge Frau, die als deutsche Jüdin nach Auschwitz verschleppt wurde und nur dank ihrer musikalischen Begabung überlebte.

Beide waren von der Nazi-Diktatur betroffen: Furtwängler entschied sich in Deutschland zu bleiben und paktierte mit den Nazis. Lasker-Wallfisch dagegen versuchte im brutalen Alltag des Vernichtungslagers zu überleben, das Cello war ihre Lebensversicherung. Beide verband die Liebe zur klassischen Musik, die sowohl in der Berliner Philharmonie, beim Reichsparteitag in Nürnberg oder auch in Auschwitz-Birkenau zu hören war. Warum gingen begnadete Künstler wie Furtwängler einen Pakt mit dem Bösen ein? Warum wurde in Todeslagern Musik gespielt? Und wie veränderte sich für die Opfer ihr Blick auf die Musik?

Deutsche Musik sollte die Vormachtstellung des "Dritten Reiches" in der Welt legitimieren und von den Untaten der Nazis ablenken. Neben Beethoven, Bach oder Bruckner hatte Richard Wagner als Hitlers Lieblingskomponist einen besonders hohen Stellenwert. Hitler war sich der Macht der Musik bewusst und Propagandaminister Joseph Goebbels kontrollierte das Musikleben im Nazistaat, in dem jüdische Künstler keinen Platz mehr hatten. So wurden die Berliner Philharmoniker zum staatlichen "Reichsorchester"

. Gesprächspartner*innen in der Musikdokumentation von Christian Berger sind unter anderem die Dirigenten Daniel Barenboim und Christian Thielemann, die Kinder von Wilhelm Furtwängler und natürlich die 97-jährige Cellistin Anita Lasker-Wallfisch. Es sind besonders ihre Erinnerungen, die unter die Haut gehen. Historisches Filmmaterial, das für den Film restauriert und koloriert wurde, macht Geschichte greifbar und legt Zeugnis ab über eine dramatische Zeit.

The Abhorrent Crimes of Auschwitz Nazi Doctors | Destruction | Timeline

Mar 19, 2020 • The Madness of The Nazi Experiments - In KZ Auschwitz, infamous Nazi doctors such as Mengele and Schumann performed horrible and mostly fatal experiments "in vivo" on thousands of deportees, women, men and children, in order to find ways of fast and massive sterilization of "inferior races", and methods to promote the fertility of the German "Herrenvolk".

History Hit. History Hit is an excellent documentary service. It’s like NETFLIX for history. For those who wish to subscribe, there is a big discount if they use the code ‘TIMELINE’.

Ein Tag in Auschwitz – kompletter Dokumentarfilm auf Deutsch

Vandals Tag 9 Barracks at Auschwitz with Antisemitic Slurs

THE NEW YORK TIMES: The police and the Auschwitz Memorial are urging anyone with knowledge of the vandalism to come forward.

Wooden barracks at the former Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in Oswiecim, Poland, in 2005. | Czarek Sokolowski/Associated Press
THE NEW YORK TIMES: The police and the Auschwitz Memorial are urging anyone with knowledge of the vandalism to come forward.

Vandals sprayed antisemitic slogans and phrases denying the Holocaust in English and German on nine wooden barracks at the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial site, in what officials there called “an outrageous attack on the symbol of one of the greatest tragedies in human history.”

The police in Oswiecim, the town in southern Poland where the concentration camp sits, said on Wednesday they were analyzing footage taken by security cameras on the site and looking for anyone who could give them information about the vandals, who they believe struck between 8 a.m. and noon on Tuesday. The barracks, which were defaced with black paint, housed men during the Holocaust and are near the Gate of Death in the Birkenau death camp. The police declined to give any further details about the slurs.

The Auschwitz Memorial site, in the statement published on its Twitter account, further condemned the graffiti as “an extremely painful blow to the memory of all the victims” who perished at the camp.

More than 1.1 million people, the majority of them Jews, perished in gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau, or from starvation, cold and disease.

Countries across Europe have witnessed an increase in antisemitism online and among people protesting at demonstrations against the restrictions related to the coronavirus pandemic, with observers expressing concern that Jews increasingly feel unsafe in the European Union. The European Commission has earmarked 24 million euros, almost $28 million, to increase protection around synagogues and other Jewish events or sites. » | Melissa Eddy | Wednesday, October 6, 2021

Vandals Tag 9 Barracks at Auschwitz with Antisemitic Slurs

THE NEW YORK TIMES: The police and the Auschwitz Memorial are urging anyone with knowledge of the vandalism to come forward.

Wooden barracks at the former Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in Oswiecim, Poland, in 2005. | Czarek Sokolowski/Associated Press
THE NEW YORK TIMES: The police and the Auschwitz Memorial are urging anyone with knowledge of the vandalism to come forward.

Vandals sprayed antisemitic slogans and phrases denying the Holocaust in English and German on nine wooden barracks at the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial site, in what officials there called “an outrageous attack on the symbol of one of the greatest tragedies in human history.”

The police in Oswiecim, the town in southern Poland where the concentration camp sits, said on Wednesday they were analyzing footage taken by security cameras on the site and looking for anyone who could give them information about the vandals, who they believe struck between 8 a.m. and noon on Tuesday. The barracks, which were defaced with black paint, housed men during the Holocaust and are near the Gate of Death in the Birkenau death camp. The police declined to give any further details about the slurs.

The Auschwitz Memorial site, in the statement published on its Twitter account, further condemned the graffiti as “an extremely painful blow to the memory of all the victims” who perished at the camp.

More than 1.1 million people, the majority of them Jews, perished in gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau, or from starvation, cold and disease.

Countries across Europe have witnessed an increase in antisemitism online and among people protesting at demonstrations against the restrictions related to the coronavirus pandemic, with observers expressing concern that Jews increasingly feel unsafe in the European Union. The European Commission has earmarked 24 million euros, almost $28 million, to increase protection around synagogues and other Jewish events or sites. » | Melissa Eddy | Wednesday, October 6, 2021

German Chancellor Merkel Pays Tribute to Holocaust Victims at Auschwitz Death Camp | DW News

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is making her first official visit to the former Auschwitz death camp. The site was the Nazis' largest death camp during the Second World War. Merkel's visit marks the 10th anniversary of the foundation in charge of preserving the memorial there. In a speech Merkel payed tribute to the victims of the camp. Almost 75 years have passed since Auschwitz was liberated. Germany is now providing another 60 million euros so that the memorial site can continue and the horrors of the Holocaust can be viewed up close.

Angela Merkel Speaks of 'Deep Shame' on First Visit to Auschwitz

THE GUARDIAN: German chancellor says crimes at Nazi death camp will always be part of country’s history

Angela Merkel has expressed “deep shame” during her first visit as German chancellor to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Holocaust memorial and vowed to fight rising racism and antisemitism in Germany and Europe.

Dressed in black, Merkel said the crimes committed at the site in southern Poland where the Nazis ran their largest death camp would always be part of German history.

“This site obliges us to keep the memory alive. We must remember the crimes that were committed here and name them clearly,” Merkel said during a ceremony also attended by the Polish prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki.

“I feel deep shame given the barbaric crimes that were committed here by Germans,” she added. » | Kate Connolly and agencies | Friday, December 6, 2019

Auschwitz 70th Anniversary: Survivors Warn of New Crimes

Child survivors at Auschwitz - still taken from footage by Soviet forces

BBC AMERICA: Auschwitz survivors have urged the world not to allow a repeat of the crimes of the Holocaust as they mark 70 years since the camp's liberation.

"We survivors do not want our past to be our children's future," Roman Kent, born in 1929, told a memorial gathering at the death camp's site in Poland.

Some 300 Auschwitz survivors returned for the ceremony under a giant tent.

Some 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, were killed there between 1940 and 1945, when Soviet troops liberated it. » | Tuesday, January 27, 2015

WHITEHOUSE: Statement by the President on International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 70th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau » | Tuesday, January 27, 2015

Six German Women Investigated over Auschwitz Crimes

THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: Six women who were guards at the Auschwitz death camp are being investigated on suspicion of complicity in mass murder, German authorities confirmed on Friday.

The women are among 50 former Auschwitz guards still living in Germany whose cases are being examined by the country's Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes.

Thomas Will, an investigator at the Central Office, confirmed that the women were under investigation for allegedly aiding and abetting murder. The women are now in their 90s, Mr Will said. The female guards were assigned to women's barracks.

Earlier this year, German authorities launched a fresh attempt to bring surviving perpetrators of the Holocaust to justice, which has so far resulted in the arrest of alleged Auschwitz guard Hans Lipschis, 93.

Lipschis, who was arrested in Aalen, southern Germany, claims he was only a cook.

The renewed push follows the conviction in 2011 of John Demjanjuk, a guard at Sobibor death camp. » | Jeevan Vasagar, Berlin | Friday, August 09, 2013

The Holocaust Just Got More Shocking
THE NEW YORK TIMES: THIRTEEN years ago, researchers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum began the grim task of documenting all the ghettos, slave labor sites, concentration camps and killing factories that the Nazis set up throughout Europe.

What they have found so far has shocked even scholars steeped in the history of the Holocaust.

The researchers have cataloged some 42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps throughout Europe, spanning German-controlled areas from France to Russia and Germany itself, during Hitler’s reign of brutality from 1933 to 1945.

The figure is so staggering that even fellow Holocaust scholars had to make sure they had heard it correctly when the lead researchers previewed their findings at an academic forum in late January at the German Historical Institute in Washington.

“The numbers are so much higher than what we originally thought,” Hartmut Berghoff, director of the institute, said in an interview after learning of the new data.

“We knew before how horrible life in the camps and ghettos was,” he said, “but the numbers are unbelievable.”

The documented camps include not only “killing centers” but also thousands of forced labor camps, where prisoners manufactured war supplies; prisoner-of-war camps; sites euphemistically named “care” centers, where pregnant women were forced to have abortions or their babies were killed after birth; and brothels, where women were coerced into having sex with German military personnel.

Auschwitz and a handful of other concentration camps have come to symbolize the Nazi killing machine in the public consciousness. Likewise, the Nazi system for imprisoning Jewish families in hometown ghettos has become associated with a single site — the Warsaw Ghetto, famous for the 1943 uprising. But these sites, infamous though they are, represent only a minuscule fraction of the entire German network, the new research makes painfully clear.

The maps the researchers have created to identify the camps and ghettos turn wide sections of wartime Europe into black clusters of death, torture and slavery — centered in Germany and Poland, but reaching in all directions.

The lead editors on the project, Geoffrey Megargee and Martin Dean, estimate that 15 million to 20 million people died or were imprisoned in the sites that they have identified as part of a multivolume encyclopedia. (The Holocaust museum has published the first two, with five more planned by 2025.) » | Eric Lichtblau | Friday, March 01, 2013

Documenting the Holocaust: Auschwitz Photographer Wilhelm Brasse Dies

SPIEGEL ONLINE INTERNATIONAL: The photographer who took pictures of tens of thousands of Auschwitz prisoners during World War II died on Tuesday. Almost seven decades after the end of the war, Wilhelm Brasse's pictures preserve the memory of Holocaust victims.

Wilhelm Brasse, the man responsible for innumerable photographs of prisoners in the Auschwitz concentration camp, died on Tuesday at the age of 95 in his hometown of Zywiec in Southern Poland. As a prisoner of the Nazis himself, Brasse took pictures of fellow inmates at the death camp as well as portraits of SS officers stationed at the infamous facility. He once estimated that he photographed between 40,000 to 50,000 prisoners.

Brasse was born in Austria in 1917 to an Austrian father and Polish mother and grew up in Southern Poland. He learned photography from [an] aunt in the Polish city of Katowice.

When the Nazi army invaded Poland in 1939 he refused to pledge his allegiance to the Germans and joined the Polish army instead. He was captured by the Nazis as he was trying to cross the Hungarian border in 1940. After again refusing to declare his loyalty to Adolf Hitler, he was sent to the newly opened camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau in August 31, 1940. » | rr -- with wire reports | Wednesday, October 24, 2012
Returning to Auschwitz: Photographs from Hell »

World's Oldest Survivor of Auschwitz Death Camp Dies at the Age of 108
FOX NEWS: WARSAW, Poland – The oldest known survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp — a teacher who gave lessons in defiance of his native Poland's Nazi occupiers — has died at the age of 108, an official said Monday.

Antoni Dobrowolski died Sunday in the northwestern Polish town of Debno, according to Jaroslaw Mensfelt, a spokesman at the Auschwitz-Birkenau state museum.

After invading Poland in 1939, sparking World War II, the Germans banned anything beyond four years of elementary education in a bid to crush Polish culture and the country's intelligentsia. The Germans considered the Poles inferior beings, and the education policy was part of a plan to use Poles as a "slave race."

An underground effort by Poles to continue to teach children immediately emerged, with those caught punished by being sent to concentration camps or prisons. Dobrowolski was among the Poles engaged in the underground effort, and he was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Auschwitz in June 1942. » | Associate Press | Monday, October 22, 2012

Auschwitz: The Nazi and the Final Solution
At the Auschwitz camp, a large amount of wealth was stolen from the Jews. The Goldjuden or Jews of gold were in charge of handling the money, gold, stocks, and jewelry. They subjected the prisoners to an intimate search just before the gas chambers. Jewish women had relationships with SS guards to save their life.

So called camp doctors, especially the notorious Josef Mengele, would torture and inflict incredible suffering on Jewish children, Gypsy children and many others. Patients were put into pressure chambers, tested with drugs, castrated, frozen to death and exposed to various other traumas.

Josef Mengele, did a number of twin studies, and these twins were usually murdered after the experiment was over and their bodies dissected. In the case of the twins, he drew sketches of each twin, for comparison. Mengele was almost fanatical about drawing blood from twins, mostly identical twins. Only a few survived....






Related »

Auschwitz Survivor: 'What I Told the England Squad'
BBC: England players have been visiting the Nazi death camp Auschwitz in Poland ahead of Euro 2012.

They met Zigi Shipper, who was interned in a ghetto from the age of 10, then taken to Auschwitz when the Russians drew near.

When he arrived in Auschwitz he saw guards trying to rip babies out of mothers' arms, shooting them if they resisted.

Disabled people, women, children and babies were sent to the gas chambers.

His friends saw their parents, brothers and sisters being taken away to be killed. (+ video) » | Friday, June 08, 2012

Zug in Belgien: Unbekannter schockiert Fahrgäste mit Nazi-Durchsage
WELT ONLINE: Mit dem Spruch "Willkommen im Zug Richtung Auschwitz" hat ein unbekannter Mann in Belgien Fahrgäste in einem Zug aufgeschreckt. Wie der Mann an das Mikro gelangen konnte, ist noch unklar.

Mit einer antisemitischen Durchsage in einem Zug hat ein Unbekannter in Belgien die Fahrgäste schockiert.

"Willkommen im Zug Richtung Auschwitz", tönte es am Donnerstagnachmittag in einem Zug von Namur nach Brüssel aus den Lautsprechern, wie die belgische Bahngesellschaft SNCB am Freitag bestätigte.

"Alle Juden werden gebeten, an der Haltestelle Buchenwald auszusteigen". Nach Angaben eines Bahnsprechers war ein unbekannter Passagier in die Kabine mit der Lautsprecheranlage eingedrungen, die normalerweile abgeschlossen ist und vom Zugpersonal für offizielle Durchsagen genutzt wird. » | Freitag, 04. Mai 2012

Poland Wants Auschwitz Website to Drop .pl Suffix
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: Poland wants to ditch the .pl suffix to the Auschwitz.pl website in an effort to ensure people realise that Nazi Germany’s most infamous death camp was not Polish.

Bogdan Zdrojewski, the Polish culture minister, said he had asked the authorities at the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum, along with their counterparts at the Majdanek and Stutthof concentration camps, to change their domain names to either .com or .eu. >>>

150 Auschwitz Surgical Instruments Found in Nearby Polish Home
THE TELEGRAPH: More than 150 surgical instruments from the Nazi German Auschwitz death camp have been found in a nearby house in Oswiecim, according to an Auschwitz museum spokesman.

The gynaecological and surgical instruments were found in a house that was located inside a strictly closed zone surrounding Auschwitz during the war.

Describing it as “one of the greatest discoveries in recent years”, Bartosz Bartyzel said the instruments were most likely used by the physician Carl Clauberg. >>> | Thursday, August 26, 2010

Holocaust Memorial Day 2010: "The Legacy of Hope"

Netanyahu at Auschwitz: World Must Unite to Confront New Threats
HAARETZ: Holocaust teaches that murderers must be stopped before they act, says PM in apparent reference to Iran.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told dignitaries gathered at the Auschwitz extermination camp on Wednesday that the world must learn from the Holocaust to unite against new threats.

In what was apparently a thinly veiled reference to Iran, Netanyahu called on the international community to come together to confront "impending dangers".

Israel believes Iran to be building a nuclear bomb and views the Islamic Republic as an existential threat. Iran insists its nuclear program is purely for civilian purposes.

"We must warn of the impending danger to the rest of the world and at the same time to be ready to defend ourselves," Netanyahu said. "The most important lesson from the Shoah is that murderous evil must be stopped as soon as possible, before it can realize its schemes."

"We the Jewish people learned the lesson [of the Holocaust] well after we lost one-third of our people," Netanyahu said, adding that a strong state of Israel with a powerful army was the only guarantee of preventing a second Holocaust.

"I pledge as prime minister that we will never let the hand of evil harm our people and our state, never again," he said.

Netanyahu added: "All enlightened nations must absorb this lesson," pledging that as the head of the state of he would not to allow a "new Amalek" to threaten again to destroy the Jewish nation - a reference to a biblical king who waged war against the Jews.

Earlier on Wednesday, Pope Benedict XVI recalled the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz, and event which revealed "the unprecedented cruelty," of the Nazi Holocaust.

The 82-year-old pontiff made the remarks in his native German during his weekly general audience.

"On 27 January 1945, the gates of the Nazi concentration camp near the Polish city of Oswiecim, better known by its German name of Auschwitz, were opened and the few survivors freed," Benedict said.

"That event, and the testimony of those who survived, revealed to the world the horror of the crimes of unprecedented cruelty committed in the extermination camps created by Nazi Germany," added the pope, who as a teenager - like most others at the time - had been a member of the Hitler Youth in the waning days of the war.

International Holocaust Remembrance Day which is being marked in several European nations, serves, according to Benedict, to recall "the planned annihilation of the Jews, and to honor those who, at the risk of their own lives, protected the persecuted and sought to oppose the murderous insanity." >>> Cnaan Liphshiz, Haaretz Correspondent, Haaretz Service, and News Agencies | Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Requiem for the Pain: 65 Years After Auschwitz Horror