Dark secrets of Hitler's orchestra

But it was, until very recently, an orchestra with a hideously dark secret. Three years ago, as it celebrated its 125th anniversary, a Canadian-born historian and stage director, Misha Aster, unleashed the fruits of his research into its murky past with a book that revealed the extent to which the orchestra sold out to Hitler's Nazi party, paraded itself before giant swastika backdrops at official Nazi rallies, and allowed itself to become the symbolic flagship of Joseph Goebbels's cultural propaganda.

The Reich's Orchestra: The Berlin Philharmonic 1933-45 is published for the first time in the UK this week. And despite Astor's laboured pen and heavy-handed syntax, it lays out astonishing truths that had somehow remained suppressed - they were not completely unknown - for more than 60 years, partly because surviving records of the time were few and far between, and partly because the whole sorry episode had been shoved under the carpet by the collective superior air that exists even today (think of Rattle's battles when he took over) within the proud membership of the Phil.

Aster's account, however, does offer a sympathetic balance between the moral ambiguities that were borne largely from the orchestra's dire financial situation as a self-governing co-operative at the depths of economic hell in Germany between the world wars, and its utter determination to survive, no matter what ethical compromises had to be made.

With the orchestra's debts piling up perilously in the early 1930s, and little hope of an agreed combined rescue package from Germany's cumbersome matrix of city, region and state authorities, the "white knight" proved to be Adolf Hitler and his Third Reich project.

In 1933, his propaganda minister Goebbels took financial control of the orchestra, bestowing on its players all the privileges and perks due to favoured civil servants of the Reich.Jewish players were initially overlooked (within two years of Hitler's accession, though, they had all emigrated), and by the time war broke out in 1939, members of the orchestra were excused all military service, meaning that they were operational as a musical outfit right up to a month before the Russian Red Army marched into Berlin.

There was a price to pay, of course. The orchestra was required to undertake obligatory annual three-day showcase performances marking Hitler's birthday. It undertook foreign tours, more as an official propaganda machine than as altruistic cultural ambassadors.

Aster points out that as the war progressed, "the Berlin Philharmonic was mobilised like a military unit", and given Wermacht trains to travel in, which had special dining facilities and priority on congested rail lines "ensuring the orchestra would arrive on time".

The orchestra even became known as the Vorkmpfer der Fallschrimjger (those coming in advance of the paratroopers), leaving it open to threats to its own security in unoccupied territory. "The equation of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra with the Nazi Reich was only fully formed with the war," Aster writes.

The Hitler pact imposed obvious musical conditions. Mendelssohn's music was banned from the anti-Jewish perspective; so was Schoenberg's, both because he was Jewish and, because like Hindemith, his modernist tendencies were considered anti-Volk. But the Phil could - and did - play Bruckner, Beethoven, Wagner and Schubert till the cows came home.

But then, it always did. A survey by Aster of the 1935 concerts by the Berlin Phil lists many multiple performances of Beethoven, Brahms, Bach, Handel, Schumann, Wagner, Weber, Bruckner, Haydn and Mozart, with only Tchaikovsky showing any real prominence among the non-Germans. Nothing much had to change to satisfy the authorities, he argues. "Nazi musical predilection and core Berlin Philharmonic repertoire were well harmonised from the outset."

One exception was the banning in 1941 of a broadcast performance of Mozart's Requiem. That year, the Nazi armies on the Eastern Front had been severely thwarted, not by the Red Army, but by the Russian winter. "Goebbels and his ministry wished to avoid the embarrassment of having Hitler's military blunder immortalised in music," writes Aster. This was clearly not the moment to broadcast a Requiem, even if it was Mozart's.

It could all have ended in disaster for the orchestra. In May 1945, only weeks after its last performances under the Nazi regime, with its home razed to the ground, and with political and cultural authority almost non-existent, the Nazi-backed musical machine was left homeless, penniless, and without status.According to Aster, "the orchestra was simply a community of slightly fewer than 100 shell-shocked, world-class, unemployed musicians with a severely tarnished name".

What led to its ultimate survival, he argues, was that "the Berlin Philharmonic's greatest assets came to the fore: its collective combative spirit and the group's shrewd political judgement".

Assets, indeed, that stretched back to its founding in 1882, when a bunch of disgruntled musicians from the Bise'chen Court Orchestra broke away from its autocratic patrons to form the independent, player-run collective that we still know as the Berlin Phil.

A set of unfortunate coincidences - time, place and circumstances - led to that unsavoury 12-year dalliance with one of history's most sordid regimes, but it came out relatively untainted, most definitely survived, and was soon back on its feet with Frtwangler (cleared of Nazi involvement at Nrnberg) and the non-German Sergiu Celibidache jointly picking up the conducting reins.

But ten years later, the orchestra itself elected Herbert von Karajan as the man "best suited to continue the traditions of the Berlin Philharmonic".

That he had a proven Nazi past (he was banned from conducting immediately after the war) might seem astonishing. "With this collective decision," says Aster, "the orchestra again chose to hitch its wagon to an ethically questionable, but politically, commercially, and musically astute selection".

Karajan's dictatorial reign lasted until 1989, during which questions on the "Reich Orchestra" years were quite simply "not welcome". Like the orchestra itself, the whole wartime episode seems unsavoury, yet part of what has made the Berlin Phil all it is.

At least now, its collective conscience is clear. As former managing director Pamela Rosenberg put it in 2007, "a silent pact with the devil had to end".

l Misha Aster's The Reich's Orchestra is published tomorrow by Souvenir Press, price 20.