In concentration camps, the Nazis forced prisoners to play music in camp bands. Even executions were accompanied by music. Secretly play…
Paris–The Nazis had a love song that was popular at the time played by the camp band in the Mauthausen concentration camp in 1942, while they cynically staged the execution of a prisoner caught trying to escape. And “All the birds are already there” the band then intoned immediately before the execution of Hans Bonarewitz.
An extensive exhibition at the Paris Holocaust Memorial is dedicated to the role of music, which was omnipresent in German concentration camps. It is about marching music, songs that the inmates were forced to sing, but also about inmates making music in secret and songs of political resistance.
The instruments, sheet music and photos, which came to Paris for the exhibition from memorial sites and archives around the world, “show the perversion of the Nazi regime,” according to the memorial’s head of culture, Sophie Nagiscarde. A recorder with which an SS man in the Buchenwald camp passed the time, the guitar of a member of the prisoner band in Mauthausen, a double bass made by the inmates themselves, or a secretly compiled booklet of resistance songs from the Sachsenhausen camp. The photos come from the SS men and paint a one-sided, distorted picture of a camp operation in which space was given to culture and music.
The Nazis also had many instruments and scores brought in for the building of camp bands, which the commandants carried out with ambition and pride, says curator and musicologist Élise Petit. The prisoners admitted to the chapels could count on benefits such as more food or bonuses. They also used the music paper they received to secretly compose their own music, which they played themselves away from strict surveillance. In the evenings, music from the prisoners’ countries of origin was also tolerated in the blocks. They also sang secretly in a place that the SS men avoided because of the stench – the latrines.
From Beethoven to Zarah Leander
The Nazis used military marches to show the prisoners how to get to forced labor in order to hurry them up, such as the triumphal march “Entrance of the Gladiators”. Inmates were also forced to sing for hours as punishment, and music that the SS people liked rang out from loudspeakers in the camps alongside Nazi propaganda. In addition to compositions by Richard Wagner and Ludwig van Beethoven, there were also sentimental songs by Zarah Leander.
Even torture and executions of prisoners were accompanied by music. That’s what curator Petit called the mass shooting of thousands of prisoners of the Majdanek concentration camp, which was drowned out with music from loudspeakers set up all day long. There was only one place in the Nazi extermination machinery that remained silent: “The orchestras did not play in the gas chambers and on the way to the gas chambers.”
The exhibition in the Paris memorial also features music that was performed and heard in the camps. The different music that a prisoner had to deal with during a day in the camp can be heard in an exhibition room. In one of the corridors, marching music sounds like the prisoners heard on the camp street. Individual concerts are also planned as part of the exhibition, which can be seen from this Thursday until February 24, 2024.
