Music as propaganda

From time to time we at the Holocaust Centre get questions from students about various Holocaust related topics and these usually are sent to me for reply. Recently I had a particularly interesting, challenging questions about the Nazi's use of music for anti-Semitic propaganda. I could not think of an instance of such use of music. Wagner attributed racial characteristics to music performed by Jewish musicians and music composed by Jewish musicians, but Wagner being a spineless opportunist, his comments on Jewish music have to be taken with a huge dose of salt. He did not hesitate to make use of Jewish musicians, accept the help of Meyerbeer, let Levy conduct his music, Jews were OK when this suited him. But does music have the power to influence masses of people? If so, how? I have been greatly moved by music, and I assume that the performance of Beethoven's Ninth when the Berlin Wall fell had special emotional meaning. I cannot think, however, of any Nazi music, perhaps apart from the Horst Wessel song that made any emotional impact on a large number of people. In fact, the Nazis were not good at using music, or for that matter, the Arts, for propaganda. Compare the the way the Soviets used music for propaganda, Shostakovitch’s Fifth, and certainly the Seventh, the Leningrad Symphony, Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky and Peter the Great, Khatchaturian's Spartacus, and innumerable other great works of music with what was produced in Nazi Germany. Very little of Pfitzner or Richard Strauss composed over this period stood the test of time, perhaps with the exception of Strauss's Die schweigsame Frau and that is hardly a work in support of Nazi ideology. Carl Orff's Carmina Burana is still performed, but poor old Orff was broke, unrecognised, he desperately needed the the recognition this work attained, and musically it hardly bears of the hallmarks of Nazi world view. It came close to being deemed 'decadent' with its primitive rhythms. There is virtually no music, composed in Germany during the Nazi era that is still in the repertoire seventy years later. And similarly if we compare German literature under the Nazis and Soviet literature of the Stalinist era there are no significant books published in Germany that can compare with the great Russian books of the period: Sholokhov's And Quiet Flows the Don, Ehrenburg's The Thaw, or Vassily Grossman's Life and Fate. The great German novel about the Nazi Era was written after the war, The Tin Drum, by a young member of the Waffen SS, Gunther Grass. All totalitarian regimes are ruthless and terrible, but they are not all the same.