In The Political Orchestra: The Vienna and Berlin Philharmonics during the Third Reich, Fritz Trümpi tells how these two distinguished musical institutions conducted themselves during—and after—the era of Nazi rule. Norman Lebrecht writes in his review:
Neither emerges with any credit. The Berlin Philharmonic musicians surrendered their hard-won self-governance in 1933 in exchange for fat salaries from Joseph Goebbels’s Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, taking Nazi orders on what not to play and which countries to tour as standard-bearers of the new Germany.
Wilhelm Furtwängler, their apolitical chief conductor, was long believed to have intervened to save Jewish players from the death camps. In fact, as Trümpi points out, there were none left in the orchestra for Furtwängler to worry about. After [the orchestra’s leader and violinist Szymon] Goldberg’s dismissal [in 1934], there were two solo cellists, Nikolai Graudan and Joseph Schuster, and a first violinist, Gilbert Back. They were the last Jews in the Berlin Philharmonic. . . .
After the Anschluss of 1938, the Vienna Philharmonic struggled with Hitler’s decree to reduce Austria to a province of the Third Reich. Goebbels refused to fund the orchestra, placing it under the authority of the Vienna Gauleiter Baldur von Schirach, a lover of sentimental music. Schirach, who described the deportation he oversaw of 65,000 Jews to the death camps as a “contribution to European culture,” authorized the New Year’s concerts that became the orchestra’s trademark. It was not until 2013 that the Vienna Philharmonic revoked the Ring of Honor it had bestowed on three leading figures in the Nazi genocide: Schirach, [the Austrian Nazi leader Arthur] Seyss-Inquart (later Reichskommissar of the occupied Netherlands), and the German railways boss Rudolf Toepfer.
A Vienna Philharmonic trumpet player, Helmut Wobisch, trained mass murderers to play marches. After the war, this SS man became the orchestra’s business manager. . . .
The Vienna Philharmonic [also] welcomed old Gauleiters to its concerts the moment they came out of jail. The Berlin Philharmonic, under Herbert von Karajan, stuck to the Nazis’ anti-modernist [musical] agenda [after the war], though the anti-Semitic program was modified slightly with doses of Mendelssohn and Mahler. Both orchestras were valued as prestigious state assets and neither faced much scrutiny or criticism until the present century.
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