The sound of oppression

In wartime Germany and its occupied countries, music was a carefully controlled part of the Nazi propaganda machine, as Erik Levi explains

- Erik Levi

It's astonishing: only six days after the D-Day landings, the Berlin Philharmonic was in Paris entertaining an enraptured audience with Beethoven, Brahms and Wagner. According to eye-witness accounts, the French greeted the orchestra with such frenzied enthusiasm that it had to play several encores before being allowed to leave the stage.

Such unrestrained French enthusiasm for German artists seems unfathomable, given that the German army had occupied Paris for nearly four years. Yet what this neatly illustrates is the premium the Nazis placed upon stellar performances of the core German repertoire for promoting their notions of cultural supremacy. This tactic of weaponising classical music to soften up the populations in the occupied territories proved to be remarkably successful - it enabled the occupiers to secure complete acknowledgement from the occupied of German artistic hegemony while creating the myth that the two parties shared similar cultural values.

The Berlin Philharmonic was undoubtedly one of the country's most potent assets in this process - from 1940-42, the orchestra gave well over 200 concerts outside Germany, of which the majority took place in occupied territories, though there were also tours to countries that were politically aligned to Nazi Germany. And the purpose of these concerts differed according to where they were performing.