Adolf Hitler considered jazz a ‘racially inferior’ form of American black music, and banned it from the airwaves. Germany’s gilded youth flouted the prohibition by playing Duke Ellington in secret and greeting each other loudly in English: ‘Hallo, Old Swing Boy!’ Resistance was useless. The Brownshirts raided parties and even beaches in search of portable wind-up gramophones and gleefully kicked the shellac records to pieces. By 1942, Hitler’s police were arresting up to 50 people a day in Berlin alone.
On learning of Hitler’s death in Berlin in January 1945, however, the Reich Chancellery staff put on jazz records and brought on the dancing girls. If Hitler had won the war, the future would have been millions of blond people reproducing themselves. As specimens of the approved Nazi type (blue eyes, flaxen hair), they would not have liked jazz that much.
Hitler was not the only one who advocated genetic breeding programmes to arrest the multiplication of the ‘unfit’, Norman Stone reminds us.
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