The dark story of Adolf Hitler’s very own jazz band
Bad Bunny crushed the Super Bowl Halftime show in February. This made an awful lot of people incredibly angry because an American citizen decided to play some pop songs in a language that over 60 million citizens of the USA speak. By performing in his native tongue, this was deemed un-American and woke by the Bud Light-drinking, Fox News-watching brigade, who decided to organise some counter-programming.
Turning Point USA’s ‘All-American Halftime Show’ was a truly humiliating affair where a bunch of washed-up has-beens sang about cold beers and pickup trucks, or something. I’ll be honest; I didn’t watch. It wasn’t meant to be watched; it was just meant to exist. It was meant to be something for the red-cappers to point to and say to call “real” music.
But what does this have to do with an article supposedly about history? History is nothing more than the same five horrible things repeating themselves for all time, and just as MAGA presented a mockery of pop music as a way of showing they were just as relevant and important as anyone else, the Nazis did exactly the same thing with the pop music of the 1940s, jazz music. This was after they’d tried to suppress everything to do with jazz music for years, of course.
They called it degenerate music (at least in public), but the problem with pop music is that it’s undeniable. People love it, and by the early 1940s, even German citizens couldn’t deny their love for it, no matter how much their government decried it. Thus, Joseph Goebbels, chief propagandist for the Nazi Party, took a different tack. He reasoned that suppressing a sound that people wanted to hear only made people want to hear it more, so rather than oppress it, he would provide a state-sponsored alternative.
Again, history is just the same five horrible things repeating themselves for all time.
Goebbels recruited the saxophonist Lutz ‘Stumpie’ Templin for this cause. Templin was a fascinating breed of coward who swore blind that he wasn’t a Nazi, but he was happy to embrace all the benefits that sucking up to the regime gave him. Templin would form the band, and Karl Schwedler, a former civil servant, would front the band with creative input from William Joyce, otherwise known as the radio personality Lord Haw-Haw.
In 1940, the band were ready for radio. Their name was changed from The Templin Orchestra to Charlie and his Orchestra, and they debuted on the show Political Cabaret. There, they found out the hard way that trying to be cool is the very definition of uncool, and while the band were decent enough players, it still sounded brutally lame. Obviously. It was Nazi jazz, how could it not be?!
However, it was slightly more bearable to the German populace than the endless nationalistic choir music, German classical music and beer hall chants that made up the rest of the airwaves. This was enough for the Reich’s propaganda wing, so Charlie and his Orchestra remained gainfully employed until the very end of the war, until their studio in Stuttgart was blown up in a final retreat by the SS in 1945. Charlie and his Orchestra weren’t meant to be good. In fact, it wasn’t even really meant to be art.
It was meant to be like everything else to the fascist, merely an extension of their fascism. After all, you don’t need thoughts; you’ve got the doctrine.
Once more, with feeling. History is just the same five horrible things repeating themselves for all time.