# Charlie & His Orchestra



## Guest (Sep 30, 2015)

The German Composers and Nazis thread got me thinking of jazz in Nazi Germany. Jazz was labeled as "entartete musik" or "degenerate music." They saw it as a Jewish-Negro amalgam and therefore wholly without merit. But they were not entirely stupid about it. Prior to the Nazis, during the Weimar Republic days, many young Germans loved jazz and it was played at the nightclubs of Berlin, Bonn, Dusseldorf, Stuttgart, etc. The Nazis saw this as un-German, a filthy foreign, if not subhuman, influence.










While blacks living in Germany had it tough during the Nazi years, they were under no death orders and were not herded into camps. They were useful to men as Goebbels in showing the world that the Nazis were tolerant of other races. Most blacks tried to become part of a traveling show called "Afrika Schau" run by a woman whose mother was Liberian. She was married to a white German man. Although Afrika Schau was demeaning to blacks, it was a means of survival during the Nazi years. But certainly not all 20,000-25,000 blacks in Germany could be in the show and lighter-skinned blacks were barred from it altogether as they did not resemble the stereotypical idea of black Africans that the average German expected.

At the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, crowds adored Jesse Owens, a Black-American athlete, after watching him consistently beat the best German athletes in the running events. The story that he was snubbed by Hitler is not true. Hitler had been congratulating the German athletes who won medals (the Germans, in fact, did very well in those games) but was told by the IOC that he must congratulate all athletes or none. Hitler was not about to congratulate all of them and could not had he wanted to so by the time Owens won his events, Hitler was no longer congratulating any athletes. But Owens insisted throughout his life that he loved the German crowds at Berlin who cheered him wildly. Such a thing never had happened to him in the U.S. Owens also stated that after he won one of his medals, he passed closed to the box where Hitler was seated and Hitler waved at him and he waved back. Even Hitler had enough decorum to acknowledge the man of the hour.

After returning to the States, however, Owens was almost all but ignored except by blacks who rightfully regarded him as a hero. White-Americans could not have cared less about him. He was offered no endorsements, no movie roles, no book deals. The only money he received was when someone threw a bag containing $10,000 into a car he was riding in during a parade. He, in fact, ended up declaring bankruptcy and was successfully prosecuted for tax evasion. While in Germany, Owens stayed in the same swanky hotels that the German athletes stayed in and given the same treatment. Back in the States, in spite of his victories on the behalf of the U.S., he still was only allowed to stay in "colored" establishments. Owens had to make a living however he could and worked as a sportswriter for a time, at a dry cleaner, as a gas station attendant and a jazz music DJ. As publicity stunts he would outrun racehorses to win bets. He stated, "People say that it was degrading for an Olympic champion to run against a horse, but what was I supposed to do? I had four gold medals, but you can't eat four gold medals." While Hitler sent Owens an inscribed photograph of himself after the games were over, Franklin Roosevelt ignored him as did his successor, Harry Truman ("Hitler didn't snub me - it was FDR who snubbed me. The president didn't even send me a telegram."). Not until Eisenhower would Owens receive any recognition from a president for his achievements and the classy way he represented his country in Nazi Germany.

When German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl was commissioned to make a documentary of the games, she included footage of Owens winning his medals. Goebbels argued that the footage should be removed as it made Germany look bad. Riefenstahl replied that removing the footage would be precisely the thing that would make Germany look bad. Owens won fair and square and it would reflect favorably upon Germany not to shy away from it. The decision was sent to Hitler who never ruled against Riefenstahl over anything (she was the only person in the Third Reich that Hitler would see without an appointment). The Fuhrer said to keep the footage in.

Yet, when all is said is done, virtually nothing is known of what happened to those blacks that lived under the Nazi regime. How did blacks come to live there at all? French colonial soldiers from Africa were sent by the French government to occupy the Rhineland after World War I. These soldiers proved popular with the Germans as they were more courteous and well behaved than the French soldiers who were tired of the war and angry at their German neighbors. Some of these French colonial soldiers married German women. The resulting half-black children presented a problem for the Germans, many of whom did not like the idea of these people having German citizenship and being allowed to run for office, vote or join the military. About 400-600 half-black children were born from these marriages and were dubbed "the Rhineland ********." Hitler had railed against the Rhineland ******** in _Mein Kampf_ and perhaps for this reason, the Nazis sterilized about 400 of them. This was done without their knowledge. How other populations of blacks arrived is not known but 20,000-25,000 lived there and many were entertainers in the nightclubs were they were quite popular but, beyond this, the fate of Nazi Germany's black population remains largely a mystery. Even most Germans did not know blacks actually lived in Germany under the Nazis.

So we hear that when the Nazis took over Germany (quite legally, I might add), the banned jazz. Actually, this is not precisely true as we will see.

While many German youths were swept up in the national socialist ideal, many were not and, in fact, detested it. Typical of teens, they wanted their independence and felt a need to rebel against societal norms. There were gangs of working class kids called _Meuten_, a group called _Edelweisspiraten_ who consciously rejected the norms of Hitler Youth and the more affluent youth who detested the martial and völkisch music the Hitler Youth played and marched to. They loved American jazz, particularly swing, called themselves _swingjugend_ or swing youth but are also known as Swing Kids (and mostly occupied the 14-18 age demographic).

The swing kids marked themselves off from the rest of society by wearing their hair longer than German boys normally wore it, girls wore their hair long without braids which were considered proper in German society. They dressed in their type of zoot suits: Boys wore long coats with a Union Jack pin and homburg hats (very popular in Britain), carried umbrellas, wore two-tone or checkered shoes with crepe souls, an ornate scarf, an expensive button-down dress shirt with a semi-precious stone. Girls wore the dresses popular among British girls who danced to swing and applied a lot of makeup-deliberately more than German society generally approved of. The swingjugend learned all the swing dances such as the jitterbug and the lindy-hop. They hung out at clubs even though most were underage. If they couldn't get into the clubs, they held loud swing parties. They were also fond of giving the nazi salute and yelling "Swingheil!" as a taunt to national socialists.










As jazz was outlawed in Germany, the swingjugend took great pleasure in illicitly procuring swing records even getting record storeowners to order them in if they promised to buy them. Some got hold of short wave radios and tuned into Allied broadcasts of swing. Among the swing youth, there was great prestige in owning the records and they were treated like priceless treasures.


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## Guest (Sep 30, 2015)

But the Nazis had various tricks up their sleeves. While swing music was outlawed in Germany starting in 1935, the Nazis began to make their own swing music. The following clip is National Socialist swing by Charlie & His Orchestra.














Charlie & His Orchestra was really _Lutz Templin mit seinem Tanz-Orchester_ (a.k.a. Bruno & His Swinging Tigers). "Charlie" was really singer Karl Schwedler. When jazz was forced underground in Germany, Templin and his drummer, Fritz Bocksieper snapped up the best jazz talent they could find in Berlin and set about finding ways to slip under the radar. They did this by performing their jazz with pro-German lyrics. It was better than being shut down. They also occasionally utilized harpsichords instead of pianos to take the edge off the black sound of the boogie-woogie rhythms. Basically, they were trying to Germanize jazz over two decades before prog rock would Europeanize rock and roll.






When news of the band reached Goebbels, he saw them as a great opportunity to broadcast Nazi propaganda to the Allies and had the band absorbed into the _Reichsministerium_. Schwedler was allowed to travel to neutral countries to gather up jazz and popular dance music records and sheet music to bring back to Berlin for the band's use. From March 1941 to February 1943, Charlie & His Orchestra made 90 recordings of swing covers with lyrics redone to reflect pro-Nazi and anti-communist propaganda under the auspices of Joseph Goebbels and the _Propagandaministerium_ that provided the band their lyrics.

As one can hear, the music is beautifully arranged and performed. The arrangers were Templin, trombonist Willy Berking and Franz Mück. The recordings were broadcast over the radio every Wednesday and Saturday at 9 p.m. The recordings were distributed to POW camps and occupied countries on 78 rpm discs. When Allied bombing knocked out Berlin's broadcast capabilities, the band was moved to Stuttgart to broadcast on the Reichssender Stuttgart station. When that too fell silent from Allied bombs, the band performed on international shortwave. Over a quarter of the British heard the broadcasts and even Churchill was said to be a faithful fan of the band. The band members were not really Nazis but joining the Reich Ministry was a way to survive. When not performing for the Nazis, the band continued playing at underground venues.

In January 1942, Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, wrote to Reinhard Heydrich, head of the SD, concerning the swingjugend, that "the whole evil must be radically exterminated now." He wanted the "ringleaders" arrested and put into camps "to be re-educated." He also wanted sentences extended to "2-3 years" saying that it was "only through the utmost brutality" that Germany would get these people under control and save the country from ruination. As a result, the swing clubs were raided and the swing kids beaten, arrested and carted off to the camps.

After the war, Lutz Templin helped to found ARD, the second largest public broadcasting network in the world after the BBC. Karl Schwedler was said to have emigrated to the United States in 1960. For all its bravado, the Nazi Thousand-Year Reich lasted only 12 years, two years less than the Weimar Republic it hated so much. Many of the swingjugend were imprisoned in camps through much of the war, some were sentenced to death for their ties to the White Rose resistance even though none had actually worked for any resistance organizations (the war ended before any were executed), still others were forced onto the frontlines of the war and died in battle. But many swing youth survived the war and the camps to see justice meted out in Nuremburg.


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## Guest (Sep 30, 2015)




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