Alexandra Birch: The Sound of Atrocity — Music in Nazi Europe

In this episode, we’re joined by Alexandra Birch, violinist, historian, and author of Hitler’s Twilight of the Gods: Music and the Orchestration of War and Genocide in Europe.
Birch’s research examines how music and sound functioned as tools of power, identity, and violence under totalitarian regimes. Drawing on survivor testimony and archival materials, her work exposes how sound, whether through forced singing, orchestral performance, or ambient noise, became intertwined with the machinery of genocide.
In this conversation, we explore:
* The concept of musical sadism and its codification in the Nazi camp system
* The symbolic and functional use of music in shaping identity and “otherness”
* Wagnerian myth, cultural delusion, and the final days of the Third Reich
* The lingering echoes of sound violence in memory and trauma
* The redemptive potential of recovering silenced music and voices

To purchase "Hitler’s Twilight of the Gods: Music and the Orchestration of War and Genocide in Europe" follow the link below:
 https://utppublishing.com/doi/10.3138/9781487549206#:~:text=This%20book%20demonstrates%20the%20integral,formation%20in%20the%20Third%20Reich.

00:00 – Opening
01:41 – Introduction
02:09 – Kurt Franz and the Orchestration of Musical Sadism
07:01 – Musical Sadism or Sound Abatement
11:55 – Music, Otherness, and the Making of the Subaltern
17:31 – Valhalla Burns: Wagner and the Myth of the Nazi Endgame
22:04 – Listening Before Killing: The Psychology of Perpetrator Soundtracks
27:23 – Songs vs. Symphonies: Edward Westermann on Lyrics, Meaning, and Violence
32:22 – Singing the Reich: Music Education and Indoctrination
37:15 – Total Sound Violence: The Concept of Gesamtgewalttätigklang
42:20 – The Motif of Redemption: Remembering Silenced Voices
48:35 – AI and Holocaust Memory: Ethics, Education, and Reconstruction

Transcript

0:00

And at the very end, Hitler is laying in his bunker and he's kind of in and out of these drug induced trances. And at one point he's asking Goebbels to kind of pat him on the head and say, you know, “you're a good king, you’re a good king like Frederick the first”. And they're very much intertwining these musical histories with these cultural delusions. With these military delusions. And they're saying, well, no, but this is really an empire. And if it's going to go down in destruction it’s going to go down in a Valhallaesque. Till the last ash, scorched earth end. his death, Hitler was very specific. He wanted to be burned not only so the Soviets wouldn't take his body, but because Wagnerian heroes and people are burned in kind of the Viking tradition. So every single aspect of this is, to some extent, stylized at the end of the war. Today, we’re joined by Alexandra Birch, Mellon Teaching Fellow at the Harriman Institute and Lecturer in History. She is also a violinist and author whose work examines the role of music and sound in systems of mass violence. Her recent book, Hitler’s Twilight of the Gods: Music and the Orchestration of War and Genocide in Europe, explores how music operated within the structures of Nazi ideology and genocide. Please enjoy our conversation. I'd like to begin with a figure who in many ways encapsulates the kind of perpetrator behavior you uncover throughout your book. Kurt Frantz, the commandant of Treblinka. You describe how he cultivated a personal repertoire of music and used it as a form of command, humiliation, and psychological control. You especially note Franz as the most notable musical sadist from survivor testimony, and in his case, we see forced singing to the formation of the Goldkapelle, effectively his private orchestra composed of victims along with further humiliation tactics. Now, this isn’t the Wagnerian allusions that many people associate with Nazis or Nazi command. This is something even sadistic at times. Could you tell us about who Franz was and walk us through the role music played in his behavior? And what does it tell us more broadly about the functions of music in Nazi violence? Sure. You know, it's a depressing but great kick off of the type of perpetrator behavior that we see intertwined with music and sadism in the Holocaust. And so Kurt Franz is an emblematic figure in a number of ways. First of all, when we think of music and its use in the Holocaust, specifically in victimization, I like to think of, like many other tortures, musical sadism as being something which was codified in the concentration camp nexus. So what we saw is we saw a lot of instances of clandestine musical sadism, forced singing, also things like forced dancing, ritual humiliation, and the mass shootings of the Einsatzgruppen in the East, and then when this moves into the Camp nexus, it's codified as an official and sanctioned and almost industrial part of the camps. Then what we see is there's a division specifically in Poland between kind of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, and Auschwitz, and Majdanek in the way that music was used. And this is also interesting because it points to the kind of two tiers of perpetrators in most cases. So the so-called Globocnik camps, the three that were under Odilo Globocnik, rather than Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka versus Auschwitz, and Majdanek had perpetrators which were taken from the T4 program. So the euthanasia program of the 1930s, these Globocnik camp perpetrators were ruthless. They were Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka like were all up in a relatively short time and yet tremendously destructive. And so what we see is this desire in the case of Franz to not only prove himself sadistically and in his mechanisms of mass murder, but also culturally. So he's kind of this like lower tier perpetrator who's trying to show like, no, we still have I'm still “Culturing the East” or subjecting people to the same sorts of humiliations, even though I'm more of a functionary responsible for just rapid extermination. So I think he took a lot of pride, like in his torture of Arthur Gold and this creation of this Goldkapelle, which, you know, sounds like this dandy orchestra on all of these things. He had special music stands made, he had uniforms made for these people. And really, it was like a group of three people, including Arthur Gold, a very famous hazzan from Warsaw and a cellist, probably, although some of the survivor testimony points maybe there was a reed instrument at one point, but you can tell that he derived a lot of like personal joy from this group, which, as far as we can tell, largely played outside of the gas chambers. So it would have been kind of moved around the camp for perpetrator entertainment, not for noise mediation. And then he also had all of these other functions like forced singing. He had a song commissioned by the Czech Jew, Walter Hirsch, which kind of became like a camp anthem. We see this also in later phases of the Holocaust. There's very famously the Buchenwaldlied, for example, which one survivor likened to being like a university anthem, like he knew his Buchenwald song, not his university anthem. And so we see this similar type of use of music in Treblinka. And what I think is extraordinary are the number of testimonies that point to musical sadism and sound. And we have such limited testimony from Treblinka. So that's part of why he used it as a case study, and also that Kurt Franz had this specific musical fixation. That, as you say, went beyond this Wagnerian kind of Teutonic mythology of the command. It was something which was much more personal for him, along with things like boxing and his dog, that he intertwined it as military policy. Thank you for that. And I do want to expand on that notion of musical sadism, because that is such a pivotal part. And crucial part. In the role of music played in the camp system. And there's this specific striking image that stayed with me whenever I first encountered it. And especially in your book, you describe perpetrators playing lullabies over loudspeakers during deportations, especially of children. Some scholars might argue that lullabies over loudspeakers could have served practical purposes. Pacifying children, masking screams or creating order during deportations. Yet in your book, you emphasize the perpetrators humor and sadism in these moments. What convinces you this was primarily an act of musical cruelty rather than a functional tactic? Sure. So, again, what we see is we see the movement from the mass shootings of the East into codified violence in the camp system. Or I should say sanctioned mass implemented violence in the camp system. So what was entertaining on the individual level became entertaining on the level of hundreds of guards kind of enjoying this these musical tortures. So one of the origin myths for the book that I started out with. I guess the kind of apocrypha to here, was that Wagner was played in the concentration camps. So that's why we, for example, like the Israel Philharmonic, doesn't really perform Wagner anymore. This is not really true. We see a very clear creation of alterity in the camps. We see a very clear creation of alterity when music is compelled on the eastern front at the individual level. So what that means is we're not seeing perpetrators compel, “Play Wagner, play even big Beethoven Symphonies” and things like that, which would have been entertaining and to acculturate the East or to bring some sort of civilizing mission to the east. We do see that as far as like the Reich's Ministry of Culture Abroad. So they are commissioning symphony concerts and things like this in the East. What we see in the concentration camp Nexus is that the sadism of mass murder is something which has to be accompanied. So if we liken this to other things like drugs and alcohol use, it's not that alcohol or that drugs were necessary or that they were sufficient to mediate mass murder, but that they were part of the social camaraderie of this. And this is what we see with the use of music. So if you take specific examples like from mass shootings, you would think, well, those were close to towns, so they would need something to cover up the sound. But just the decibel level of this, doesn't make any sense. So like a single person playing accordion is not going to cover up, you know, hundreds or dozens even of machine gun fire at a time. In the case of something like, in the case of the east, you also have things like them compelling Jews kneeling at the edge of a pit to sing the Communist Internationale in Hebrew or in Yiddish, where like most of the Jews, they would have encountered, first of all, I mean Yiddish, yes, but would not have in Hebrew speaking. The Communist Internationale, of course, is not written in Hebrew. It's written in either Russian or in many cases, French. And so it's this ludicrous conflation of Judeo-Bolshevism right at the moment of violence. In the camps, things like playing lullabies, loudspeakers would not be particularly pacifying. There's other sensorial things which would have been a tell. Like the smell of death, the smell of burning bodies, guards screaming at you, heavily armed people chasing children, children being separated from their parents during deportations. So actually, I look at Operation Erntefest right to the Operation Harvest Festival, and this is they show that in addition to things like tangos being played, which are tangos and foxtrots, highly entertaining music, there was also things like lullabies. So this was not. It was to be parodic. This combines with things like forced ritual violence. So like in Auschwitz, there were selections of people on like Simchat Torah, on Yom Kippur on, you know, all the Jewish holidays we have coming right up. And this was to be accompanied with things like forced music that would have been appropriate for the holidays. And so because of the use of music Incorporated with these other kind of sadistic time periods and even lyrics ascribed to them, this is something which far transcended just kind of the practical levels of “would decibel sound be covered” and speaks to the level of perpetrator entertainment. You often emphasize in your book the distinction between types of music used not in terms of genre, but in terms of the symbolic and the functional. Not every song carried a Teutonic mythos. And of course, for our audience Teutonism is referring to the mythologized history Nazis often include within their ideology. But some of this music were simple folk tunes, camp songs or marching songs. And yet these everyday song and sonic choices often helped define who belonged and who didn't. Can you explain how music was used to shape the subaltern other? When, to many people, it would appear to have been either for entertainment or escapism, or even for sound abatement What I found fascinating researching this is how durable the Teutonic identity is for the Germans. So, yes, we know that Hitler had a personal fixation with Wagner, and I thought, okay, but that's just because he enjoyed going to the opera in Vienna. Or like, maybe he read some of Wagner's writings and Wagner had very anti-semitic leanings. And so, you know, he was a sympathetic personal figure as well. But Hitler seemed personally very wrapped up in this entire Teutonic myth that Wagner used to then derive like libretti and, you know, the so called total artwork, “Gesamtkunstwerk” of his operas and, you know, costume design and staging and all this. And what you see as you see that Hitler takes this into military strategy and kind of this like gesamtkunst-warfare or something, this total warfare. And he's like naming bunkers. I mean, at the end of the war in 1945, he's naming bunkers after Wagnerian and characters, all of his, the personal stylings of many of the things like the inside of his train cars and his even his fashion. And like Hermann Göring’s fashion is very much tied to like this Wagnerian specifically Wagnerian and Teutonic identity and I thought, okay, well, certainly this is just these couple of friends. They grew up in a specific moment in time. There's, you know, Bavarian and or Austrian. So they have interwoven into a kind of a micro culture within a culture. And no, it's like I mean, Göring is from the north. He's not he was Pomeranian. He's not even Bavarian. So this kind of falls apart, even just looking at the command. Then what you see is that the troop songs that are being given to ordinary soldiers are kind of intertwined with these Teutonic and longer historical myths. So the troops are not given just kind of “let's go fight the enemy, rah rah”. You know, you think about the troop song of, for example, the British or Americans, and it's songs like “Run Rabbit”, you know, “Bugle Boy” from the Andrew Sisters. It's kind of songs which are just rah rah war songs. It would be very bizarre in like any other European context to kind of have this longer European continuum of historical mythology being given to troops. In the use in the Holocaust, then what you see is you see this first start in kind of the Reichskulturkammer like in the Reich's cultural chambers, and they're defining what is Nordic. So what is the classification given by musicologist was “Dinarish”. So like Nordic and Dinarish versus shades of non-German, I should say. So you have this very bizarre classification of composers like Tchaikovsky, who was Russian but arguably also gay as being classified as Nordish-Dinarish. He's classified as kind of this ultimate German because they loved his music, whereas then anybody who was Jewish, even by ancestry, so somebody like Felix Mendelssohn is classified as Jewish and like and you know, as subaltern and this and this. And so then this continues into the concentration camp structure where there's a clear division between music intended for perpetrators and so that they would have played separately, they would have played out of the camps, they would have played only for when perpetrators went to work. for example. And then music, which was okay to be consumed by like by prisoners going to work. So like the Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz famously played a good amount of Bach, probably because he was a Lutheran and his music was kind of this religious pacifying music, which was not attractive to the command. It doesn't have a heroic undertone. And the camp songs and things, the music is, as you say, it's folk music, it's not super. I didn't do a lot of analysis of like the camp songs. I did a lot of analysis of the text, but the songs themselves are just to increase prisoner camaraderie or compliance or things like that. What you do see is an interesting feature where, for example, like the so-called gypsy camp or “zigeunerlager” in Auschwitz, they're allowed to keep their instruments for perpetrator entertainment. So the perpetrators are like, how just how appropriate that this group of, you know, singing Roma would be over here playing their musical instruments until a bitter end. It was entertaining to them. But had we any incidences of them trying to play like Wagner or Strauss or something, I'm sure that would have gone a very different way. They would have been like, no, you need to stay in your lane. So I never found any instances like that in any camp of people kind of overstepping their musical allowances for the Third Reich. In the chapter titled Valhalla Burns, you describe the music the Nazi high command surrounded themselves with, particularly in the final days of the war. So we have composer’s such as Beethoven, Wagner, and Bruckner. You suggest that this wasn't merely aesthetic preference; it reflected an inward mythology that mirrored the endings of Wagner’s operas, with the destruction of the world seen as both tragic and heroic. How do you understand this musical self-mythologizing and what is it that the Nazi High Command valued in Wagner's music? The final chapter, I guess, penultimate chapter to the book is one of the first that I wrote because I was curious about how durable this identity was until the very end. And I think just the image of a violinist playing Beethoven's violin concerto in a bombed out Berlin Philharmonic Hall at the end of April in 1945, and then a full Bruckner Symphony, which is an hour long. Bruckner symphonies are hard to perform like in good conditions. Beethoven's Violin Concerto is hard to perform in good conditions, and this is being kind of commissioned and held up and that, you know, Hitler's clinging to this ideal until the bitter end. The concert was basically called just for him. We can tell that there are only a handful of the high command there and the final concert of the Reich's orchestras, so the Berlin Philharmonic before the fall was actually a German Requiem. So Brahm’s Deutsches Requiem, which you know, is a little bit also on the nose. And it was for the troops, the troops of the Third Reich immediately before capitulation or I guess before, yeah, before Dönitz signed the surrender papers. And so what I had done is the entire structure of the book has this kind of Wagnerian underpinning. It's loosely structured according to the Ring Cycle of Wagner. And so that means that this essentially final chapter takes Götterdämmerung, the final opera and the three strains of fate, which I think mirror the three kind of possibilities for the command at the end. So the bunker diehards, the people with Hitler until the very end. So basically just Hitler and Goebbels, the people like Speer and Schellenberg, who saw a path forward for Germany, who wanted to kind of divorce this Teutonic mythology, a longer historical myth from the possibility of a German future. And then the people like Göring and Bormann, who went to the south and who were trying to preserve their own Teutonic myth, their own sense of self and had also these very bizarre things at the very end. So like Goering is going at the very end and he's shooting his favorite bison and packing up his drinking glasses and putting a giant gold swastika on his forehead. And at one point, one testimony says that he was he took the antlers from the stag that he also shot and was wearing the antlers as he got into his Porsche when he was driving off. So you have these incredibly bizarre reactions to the end of the war when he was arrested.

He was: 20:35

“I have to sing Die Meistersinger” and asked one of the American privates for an accordion. And I thought, the story is just too bizarre to be true. And I later found out that actually a museum of Jewish heritage has this accordion. And this is true. So he's you know, they're really clinging to these musical delusions as well as the cultural delusions until the end. I mean, we have And at the very end, Hitler is laying in his bunker and he's kind of in and out of these drug induced trances. And at one point he's asking Goebbels to kind of pat him on the head and say, you know, “you're a good king, you’re a good king like Frederick the first”. And they're very much intertwining these musical histories with these cultural delusions. With these military delusions. And they're saying, well, no, but this is really an empire. And if it's going to go down in destruction it’s going to go down in a Valhallaesque. Till the last ash, scorched earth end. And so I think that there was also something appealing to that. Fighting for Berlin until the very end, fighting the war until the bitter end and not having surrendered. Kind of having this Teutonic Führer. I mean, even Evem his death, Hitler was very specific. He wanted to be burned not only so the Soviets wouldn't take his body, but because Wagnerian heroes and people are burned in kind of the Viking tradition. So every single aspect of this is, to some extent, stylized at the end of the war. You know, Nazi High Command are listening to this very specific music. And then making decisions that cost thousands of lives. And I recall you pointing out this juxtaposition. It would be it would be like General Petraeus listening to I Feel Pretty by Bernstein before calling strikes in Afghanistan. Just for our viewers to have a contemporary understanding of it. Because Wagner to those who don't know Richard Wagner, extremely prolific German composer, notable for his operas. And coming back to this image, you think of contemporary political agents. Some have very particular tastes and for instance needing a very specific recording of Ave Maria, say the Pavarotti recording. From a political psychology and micro order perspective, do you see these musical selections, this listening behavior, as significant? And from your research, why or why not? Should we read meaning into what perpetrators choose to listen to, before or during the acts of violence? So I think that there's tremendous contemporary overlap unfortunately. I mean, it is absurd to the highest order. So if you think about like the Halt Order, the famous Halt Order that was given at Dunkirk, Göring was supposed to have gone off before he gave the halt order and done an enormous amount of heroin, first of all. And then listen to like all of Ring, Ring is like 9 hours long. So the Ring Cycle of Wagner is 9 hours long. And this is just a stupid use of time. It's a weird use of military resource. It's something which obviously changed his mental framework. And if we saw this in other contexts, which, you know, unfortunately we are starting to, this would be something very bizarre. The closest allusions, I think, are other political systems, not necessarily fascist political systems, but other political systems that have very strong cultural ideology. So like the Soviet Union, we know that many of the Soviet premiers have their own like personal favorites of classical music. And I mean, like Stalin was famously relatively uncultured. And so he would take offense at the most minor things. You know, this is how we got denunciations in 1934 by Stalin was he was very upset about the tone of, for example, Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony, and then he walked out of the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, after the war. And so we have these instances for the Soviet premier also having this very specific cultural esthetics. This is a this also has parallels for like Pol Pot in Cambodia who was not as cultured as the intellectuals that he was targeting and felt personally threatened by it. There's very famous uses of music during the Indonesian communist purges, specifically a song called Genjer-Genjer about about grass; it was from a film. And so this film was like piped in over loudspeakers during during acts of violence, during the Indonesian communist purges. So we do see the use of music. Of course, Rwanda has use of loudspeakers and use of radio, but mostly not necessarily only for music, but also for communication. So kind of the mechanized use of music and of sound during acts of political violence is of tremendous importance, and it's something which is rapidly being studied. And what I find interesting in the contemporary context are especially it seems to especially be post-communist or communist leaders with these very specific musical aesthetics, but like Kim Jong Il and Kim Jong Un have like this fixation with this North Korean band called Moranbong. And they like they put this aesthetic out there and they're like obsessed with this music and they pipe it in and all these national events and it's an aesthetic which holds even to things like their national announcements on television. So this is very strange to me. It's kind of like a like almost a Korean pop group. It sounds very eighties. And so it's funny that this is kind of the national aesthetic that they've chosen. In the Russian context, I can think of no political leader who is as personally stylized today as Vladimir Putin. And so, you know, a lot of his personal styling or aesthetic stylings of the Kremlin, his ideas for what his inner circle should look like as far as like who should be the most powerful, who should be this or who should hold political roles, for example, not only comes from his own military sensibilities in his own time serving in police forces, but also from like the cultural edicts of people like Prigozhin, who famously founded the Wagner Group, who headed the Wagner group, which is a Russian paramilitary, but also people like Alexander Dugin. I mean, these people who are extremely tied to culture in the post-Soviet Union. This brings me to the specific use and role of music within Nazi concentration camps, but also just largely within the Third Reich. Our audience question today, I think, encapsulates this. And the following question was submitted by Professor of History at Texas A&M University, San Antonio Edward Westermann, who is cited in your book a couple of times. He is a former guest and friend of the podcast

who writes: 27:50

Hi, Alexandra, congratulations on your book. My question relates to your thoughts on the ways in which the use of instrumental music versus the use of songs could be interpreted. Do songs such as the Treblinka Lied or songs with anti-Semitic lyrics sung by members of the SA (Sturmabteilung) have a greater impact on both the perpetrator and the victim versus instrumental music? In the case of the latter, I was struck by Auschwitz prisoners who remembered the SS Doctor Josef Mengele whistling classical music or operatic scores during his selections for the gas chambers. In short, can we separate lyrics from the melodies when thinking about the role of music among the perpetrators? Yeah, this is a fantastic question. Thank you, Dr. Westerman. He's a tremendous scholar, and his book on alcohol kicked off a lot of my own thoughts about perpetrator mediation and mass violence in the East. So I think that this is a difficult question to parse apart. It's difficult for me also as an instrumental musician. I would say I'm just tremendously or disproportionately moved by instrumental music alone because that's kind of like my professional training. So that's what I kind of hone in on. Whereas if I were a literary scholar, then I would maybe be more immediately fixated on lyrics. And I do think that in the in the immediacy of mass violence and in also in creating choralities or groups of masculine singing, lyrics are of paramount importance. I think that the music to those sorts of instances and uses of music, the music itself is secondary to the lyrics. So what we've seen in the study of choralites, mass singing, compelled singing, things like this, both for perpetrators, and for compelled singing by victims, is that there's this kind of element of social contagion of like compliance and that singing rote—we think about this kind of cynically—like hymns. That rote singing of ideology is very helpful for retention, for ideological retention, for understanding. I mean, we can even do this, like with small children, to teach them to learn things. The lyrics are the most important and the song is supposed to be something secondary to simply help along with that memory boost and that mnemonic boost, I guess. So that's something where the lyrics are of paramount importance would be something like Troop Song. As far as instrumental music and I think a figure like Mengele is a good example of this, where there was a sense of culture and a sense of being an acculturated person and one who is doing a job, but perhaps a dirty job in the East, but one where the perpetrators were proud to be doing it, and yet they were maintaining their German ideals, their, quote, “civilized ideals” while they were doing it. And for those perpetrators, for people like Mengele, for people even like Kurt Franz, who had this on a perhaps more boorish level, they saw this maintenance of instrumental music as a way to, I wouldn't say maintain their own humanity, maintain their own position of authority, perhaps maintain the sense of Germaness of who they are. And this gave a larger purpose to their work. This gave a larger purpose to their exterminative work, where they were able to kind of set this down at the end of the day and feel like they were building this Lebensraum, this living space for the German Reich, and that this was necessary and essential. So that's where I see instrumental music being used kind of by individual perpetrators within the camps where it's institutionalized. It's again, it's kind of more like a civilizing mission for the guards. It's something which is like, “oh you'll listen to some Beethoven as everybody goes off to work for the day”. It was never with the intention of being able to civilize victims and say, we're going to be able to convert you to the German way of life, as it were. But we do see tremendous importance on things like officially organized concerts as well, like outside of the concentration camp system, so instrumental music concerts like for perpetrators of the Wehrmacht, for the Einsatzgruppen, etc.. So they're organizing concerts as they like invade the Soviet Union. So it's something important for the perpetrators. That's an incredibly important point that I feel that everyone has to leave with, which is the reinforcement mechanism of which music can serve as, for identity. And that goes for both perpetrator and victim. And it is merely a tool to achieve that, to achieve that goal. And I think that in your section relating to Hitler youth, it expands upon an aspect of this, of the building of a perpetrator identity or a building of national identity. And you discuss how music was central to the indoctrination of children, not just through lyrics that glorified the Reich, but in how singing together cultivated a collective affect and national identity. You write that these songs were often composed of particular techniques such as onomatopoeia or even accompanied by physical movements, notably marching, all of which are not lyrical. However, they factor into the accumulative potency of these songs and can you tell us what music education under the Third Reich looked like and its purpose? I can speak a little bit about like music as far as troops are concerned, and also for the Hitler Youth. Music education, it kind of like the university level in all of this is something which becomes heavily infiltrated by Nazi ideology and something which is just sanctioned towards the creation of a high art. I think you can kind of look at three strains within the creation of Reich's culture. So you have like the creation of high art, the creation of popular art, and then perhaps separately or a division within that, the creation of specifically troop song or troop materials. What I think is striking is that the troop materials are oddly cultured and oddly classical for what they are. So you see, like a lot of references to like mythology and to these longer historical continua and to, I don't know, like even classical music references and things in these in national songs, in rally music and things where you would not expect a lot of kind of like high art references necessarily. So I thought that was striking. The other thing, which is interesting, is this reinforcement of group identity and groupthink. And within this you have the tremendous scholarship that's been done in the last 40 years or so on gender in the Third Reich, which is definitely a reinforcement of a masculine identity. So when you're looking at Troop song, when you're looking at the songs for the Hitler Youth, it's almost always with the implication that these are young men or boys. It therefore implies a kind of a collective singing or a collective thought, I suppose. Certainly a collective ideology. And what I find interesting are those songs which which compel things like to march right and left. So you sing the song, you march right and left, and you have a different song and it compels, you know, maybe clapping your hands at a certain time in a certain way. You have a degree of social compliance built in with other physical actions. Like the big obvious one, of course, is like, you know, Sieg Heil and everybody raises their hand at the same time. So there's these large social actions which if you look at the amount of time this, you know, German society writ large became highly socially compliant. I mean, like where people would have this as a greeting, right. For years. And this was something very quickly adopted in German society. So I think that music allowed this to be very pervasive. It allowed this to be something easily commodifiable and sent out to people, before the age of really mass media. And it's something where it's also very attractive, through film and through other media dissemination of materials. You're not just having to send songbooks out to everyone, but with these kind of choreography integrated into the choralities it's something which becomes really important. But these presumptive masculine choralities are interesting because if you can get everybody to march in a line or you can get everybody to, for example, clap at the same time, then it's not a large stretch to imagine that you can have social compliance with things like everybody shoot at the same time. So that's a relatively small bridge to create, once you already have a degree of social compliance and a degree of social camaraderie. And so you do see this like in the crimes in the east, the crimes of both the Wehrmacht and the Einsatzgruppen. But you see, for example, a high degree of social cohesion which involves things like drinking games from the interwar period, songs from the interwar period. And it was something which was a reaffirmation of social cohesion after a long day of shooting people and mass genocide, you have then this reaffirmation of German social cohesion. And now we're bridging from the discussion of music and the use of music into sound and what we can, broadly call either musical conduct, musical behavior and a striking neologism you introduce in the book is Gesamtgewalttätigklang roughly translating to total sound violence. It strikes as a counterpart to Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk which where Wagner envisioned this term as a unified aesthetic ideal bridging music with theater and writing. What you describe here is a totalized system of acoustic control and domination and terror. Could you expand on this concept of Gesamtgewalttätigklang, and how it helps us understand the auditory strategies of Nazi perpetration? really struck by a couple of important works on sound and sonic violence. The first of which is J. Martin Daughtry's seminal book on the Iraq war and how sound was kind of this pervasive and infiltrating thing for troops like the dust, like the other sensorial experiences of warfare that, you know, mortars and all of these things would be kind of this daily quotidian, which was just this daily thing of sound. And then also, Suzanne Cusick has a fantastic article about the use of music as torture, sonic torture. So like loudspeakers and prison music and all of these different things, which is also this fantastic landmark article. So I was struck by this in reading ‘Sound’ in the Nazi concentration camp system as something parallel to like smell or things which are also recalled in testimony. Treblinka is a good case study for this, I looked at Treblinka because we don't have a lot of spatial knowledge about Treblinka. And so what I did is I combined a bunch of testimony—with the limited testimony we have of Treblinka—but with the two kind of not architects, but people who would have had knowledge of how the camp was physically constructed. So one is the testimony of Chaim Sztajer, he did like postwar models, he's a survivor of the camp. So I looked at these two kind of spatial models of the camp, and then I looked at this testimony. And what's striking about it is first of all sound, which might not be perceptually violent, so you might think, “Oh crackling fire. This is like home and hearth or this is something which is nice and it's warm in the winter.” Triblinka was open through a good chunk of the winter, a very cold winter in Poland, and no for the survivors testimony of the fire at Treblinka, is that of burning bodies and it's this additional horror. And so it becomes something which is sensorially totalizing in their mind, in their imagination of the camp, where you can, of course, imagine the smell of death and of smoke getting into all of your clothes, all of your hair, all of this. But also the sound of this was really pervasive, the sound of the excavator. A lot of people mentioned it of Treblinka, and this is something which holds over to other camps. Mass machinery for immolation, for grave digging and so on. This machinery is almost given a humanistic or an animalistic characterization where it joins the perpetrators with its voice or with its clanging and with these sorts of things. And again, this sound, people remember the excavator working 24 hours a day. This is unlikely. But it's perceptually the case. Where people are ascribing these sounds as being never ending and ceaseless the way that they talk about the smell of the camp. I also think it's interesting because just from like a human memory perspective, sound is pretty durable in our memory as far especially things like repetitive sound or violent sound, where it can become an important point of recall. For example, for PTSD like a years on, whereas smell is something which is immediately identifiable years on. So people will like recognize their mother's perfume 30-40 years after she passed. But it would be very hard to recall that smell if you were not given access to it or a sound you would be able to recall. Oh my gosh, there was this never ending beep or there was this whatever. And I think that this is something which is evidenced in our own life. Where if you can imagine your own house, you have a smoke detector or a microwave or something that beeps and it drives you insane. And you're like, I have to find it. I have to turn this off. And so you can imagine for survivors of these different situations, there would be sounds, which we might just associate with kind of daily life that were forever changed into lingering sonic violence, lingering reminders of torture, kind of which transcended the concentration camp sense, as it were, transcended the event as well. And now, as we start talking about memory, Holocaust memory, within this respect, I do have a final question with a follow up as well. And this relates to the epilogue of your book, which is titled Das Erlösungsmotiv, or “the motive of redemption” or the “Motif of Redemption”. A term rooted in Wagnerian theory. You use It not to offer narrative closure, but to point towards the losses of lives and musical cultures. And in that vein, I wonder what this redemption may look like. An example I recall from your book is confronting the history of instruments still played today, whose provenance may lead to looted homes or silenced victims. And does remembering the musical lives of victims and even the afterlives of their instruments carry any redemptive potential? Furthermore is the programing of music by victims of the Holocaust, or even the aversion to programing music of composers complicit— I'm thinking Strauss, especially—in the crimes committed an act of redemption? Or is it closer to mourning than recovery? I'm really excited about this question, So thank you. This is where I end up performing a lot of things in the kind of practical, real world applications for me. So this is very exciting. But I have this very strong kind of artistic stance that one of the things long before I wrote this book that I do not like is the kind of segregation, resegregation, reghettoization, however you want to contextualize that of classical music, which would fall into the perhaps ethnomusicology category. So you see a lot of concerts for like, “it's Holocaust Remembrance Day, let's do a concert of kind of vaguely Jewish pastiche and put Bloch and maybe a concentration camp survivor and maybe some Mendelssohn and then anything else that we can vaguely call Jewish and put it on a program.” And that is, you know, what you get for Holocaust Remembrance Day or “it's African-American History Month, let's do this pastiche of black composers, anybody who we can remotely ascribe to being darker skinned.” At some point they were even trying to shoehorn Beethoven into having Moorish ancestry so that Beethoven could still be programed during African-American History Month. I mean, you see these absurd kind of recategorizations within the classical music world. What we unfortunately see is—and a lot of this has changed since 2020,—we've had a large, especially in the United States and to a lesser extent Western Europe. We've seen a larger kind of racial reckoning. This is trickling down to classical music where you've seen a more sincere engagement with kind of like the world of post Marxist scholarship or whatever. We’ve seen a large engagement with critical race theory in classical music. There's still much work to be done, but as far as like championing unheard composers and lost voices, I think that this is being done with a much more critical eye now. One of the things that I like is to reincorporate classical music works along with the would be perpetrators or would be dominant group, because I think that this gives legitimacy and the same sort of dominance to them these silenced voices. So if you program somebody like Viktor Ullmann and like one of the programs that I give is the Viktor Ullmann Sonata that I recovered for violin and piano. Unfortunately, the piano part was lost in the war. I have only the violin part, so I play a movement of this Viktor Ullmann sonata. And I almost always program it with Strauss, the Strauss Violin Sonata, or like Wagner's Albumblatt, because I think that putting those composers together, it gives them a similar type of legitimacy. They were essentially cultural parallels. I mean, they were at the same time period, they just had different musical aesthetics. Ullmann was more in the vein of Schoenberg, and Strauss is a very kind of following this programmatic music train. So they have a very different musical aesthetic, but they were parallels they both would have lived in the Nazi under the Nazi system, but obviously with very different outcomes. Ullmann died and was murdered in Auschwitz, and Richard Strauss had a very complicated relationship with the Third Reich, but ultimately was fairly complicit in their artistic motivations. And so programing them together kind of gives them equal credence, which I really like. As far as recovering musical instruments and physical artifacts. We can do some of that. And this has been done in the visual art world. It's hard to know how many instruments were taken from people. And there are ongoing restitution projects for this to recover material items. But what I think is a tremendous loss is what do you do about communities like the Sinti and Roma, whose music was largely passed in an oral history? And when you murder the people, therefore you've also destroyed their culture. You've destroyed these musical legacies. This destruction of musical culture is nothing new as far as being something that we have to reconcile. This was mentioned specifically as one of the categories in the prosecution of Adolf Eichmann in the sixties, and it was the destruction of Jewish culture and also Roma culture in Europe. And this was a specific question raised by people addressed at the Eichmann trial about how do we deal with the material losses when you're talking about murdering composers, murdering people like Hazzans, ritual singers in the Jewish world, what do you do with this? Because you can't recover these lives and you can't recover the musical traditions that are lost. And I think that's a more complicated answer that deals with like maybe removing some anti-Gypsyist language from the world of classical music, giving equal credence to things that we've perhaps previously labeled as being folk music and try to reintegrate those into the classical canon. Thinking critically about a classical canon, which is very heavily rooted in a German aesthetic, and why that might be, why that is the dominant canon. And I am very optimistic because I see a lot of this work being done. So I don't want to dunk on my musical colleagues, because I think they're doing a fantastic job in this realm. As a follow up to that, in tandem to your current work, you've mentioned before that A.I. has a complicated role in Holocaust Studies today. On the one hand, fueling denial and misinformation, but on the other hand offering powerful tools for education and museums. Could you share how you approach this balance and perhaps give An example of how you've used A.I. in your teaching or seen it used effectively in public history? I do use A.I., I use A.I. every semester when I teach because I think it's important to understand for people to confront myths and disinformation and to be able to recognize it. A.I. has started to put up ethical guardrails where it won't give you outright Holocaust denial. Like if you ask it, tell me why gas chambers didn't occur. It really will tell you, this is Holocaust denial. Or here's a source of why this is true or whatever. So they're starting to put up some ethical guardrails. Unfortunately, A.I. also is heavily reliant on the information that comes into it. So if you have a lot of people who are writing Holocaust denial, especially if it's publishable, then that's searchable by A.I.. So this is something where, you know, this is a problem. What I will give you is it will give you apocrypha as far as images. So if you tell it, “give me Auschwitz, that looks like a summer camp” or “give me Babi Yar that just looks like a ravine or a nice playground”. It will give you this as an image. And this is a problem because A.I. images are getting better and better and harder to distinguish for students or especially for the general public. So this is something where we need to be trained and train our students to like kind of critically look at that. One of the things that I have my students do is answer the responses or respond to those images in different character lengths. So you might not always have the privilege of writing a monograph book or sitting down on a wonderful podcast for an hour. You might have to respond to that in 50 words in a Twitter post responding to some person who posted 50,000 of these images. And so, like, how do you respond to these images in different media I think is really important. I think it's also great because generally on the positive side, you have things like generative A.I., which could be used in the future to, for example, reconstruct musical scores. You could fill in like a body of work by somebody like Viktor Ullmann where we have like a lot of his piano writing, and you could say,“hey, write me a piano part for this violin sonata that's in the style of his previous works”. We're several years, I think, off from that. But this is something where we do have the potential maybe for some reconstruction. We theoretically will be able to put things like mapping into A.I. in the future and get more complete maps of concentration sites of sites like Treblinka, where there are subterranean levels to like burial pits and things that we don't want to disturb for ritual reasons. I think also the capability to handle like large volumes of names and things is really tremendous. Where we'll be able to put in and say, I need to find, you know, 50 people who were deported on X, Y, Z date from X, Y, Z city, and that A.I. will be able to do that faster than any researcher. So this is also tremendous for our field. So I would say let's approach it with a grain of salt and keep teaching with it as a as a tool, but recognize that it also has its foibles and that its contributing to Holocaust denial in many cases. This was Not to Forgive but to Understand with our guest Alexandra Birch. To our listeners. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and stay tuned for more discussions.