Post by M KfivethousandAnd tbh I still swear we never had swamp milkweed where we lived
mk5000
Misdrawn swastikas and skulls on His sleeve
That His brain
Couldn’t rearrange
To form the hearts they intended to be,==He
DIGITAL POET
Exit, Stage Reich
The Nazi orchestra that turned jazz standards into anti-Western propaganda.
By WILL FRIEDWALD
Oct. 1, 2014 WSJ
One of the battiest notions devised by the Axis during World War II was "Charlie and His Orchestra," now the subject of "Propaganda Swing," a production by Peter Arnott that opens at England's Nottingham Playhouse on Oct. 3 after a two-week run in Coventry. The idea behind the Nazis' Charlie campaign, conducted from about 1940 to 1943, was that they could undermine Allied morale through musical propaganda, with a specially devised orchestra broadcasting messages in English to British and American troops. As Michael H. Kater wrote in his 1992 book "Different Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany," "Charlie's orchestra came to constitute the most bizarre phenomenon both in the history of Nazi popular culture and the Reich's strenuous propaganda effort."
The Nazis didn't try to seduce Allied listeners by broadcasting the best in German music: waltzes, polkas, brass bands, theater and pop songs like "Lili Marlene," or even Liszt or Wagner. No: What makes the tale of Charlie and His Orchestra so twisted is that the Nazis shot back American songs at the Allies, albeit doctored with especially demented propaganda lyrics. In an interview on YouTube Mr. Arnott said: "They rewrote jazz standards with anti-Semitic lyrics. I came across [these recordings] and I thought that this was one of the most extraordinary things I've ever heard, and there's definitely a story in this somewhere."
The surviving recordings of Charlie and His Orchestra (many of which are included in a four-CD boxed set titled "Swing Tanzen Verboten!: Swing Music and Nazi Propaganda," released by the British Proper label in 2003) are equal parts pathetic and disturbing, as in these lyrics sung to the tune of "You're Driving Me Crazy":
"The Jews are the friends who are near me to cheer me, believe me they do. / But Jews are the kind who will hurt me, desert me, and laugh at me too." The audacity of the songs led to Mr. Arnott's show.
Even though Germany had already experienced a long history with jazz and the blues, the band plays with a clunky beat that sounds anything but swinging. And then there's the featured vocalist, "Charlie," whose real name was Karl Schwedler. Surely there must have been some paid-up member of the Nazi party, somewhere in the Reich, who could sing in English without his broadly cartoonish German accent—it sounds like a joke, like a Peter Sellers routine or a Monty Python sketch, but of course it's anything but funny.
The most frequent target of Charlie's venom isn't the Jews, but Winston Churchill. A typically Charlie taunt is for Schwedler to sing, as Churchill, something like "I want to be happy, but I can't be happy, until I get the Americans in this war too" and later "Come in my darling Jewish people, just give me all your money." In the guise of a French Nazi sympathizer, Schwedler sings: "I double dare you to venture a raid / I double dare you to try and invade!"
W.C. Handy's "St. Louis Blues," a landmark of African-American musical achievement, gets this Charlie treatment:
"A Negro from the London docks sings 'I hate to see the evening sun go down / because the Germans, they done bombed this town!'"
And one of the weirdest recordings is Charlie's take on Irving Berlin's "Slumming on Park Avenue," in which Schwedler, this time portraying a British pilot with a mock-English accent, sings "Let's go bombing!"
But the single most outrageously wrongheaded performance is probably of "So You Left Me for the Leader of a Swing Band," a 1938 American novelty hit that Charlie transformed into "So You Left Me for the Leader of the Soviets." (Most if not all of the tracks mentioned in this story are available on YouTube.)
The idea of broadcasting music to the enemy troops was, quite possibly, the only concept that the Allies borrowed from the Axis. They improved upon it greatly, however.
In 1942, Glenn Miller disbanded his civilian band (the most popular one of the swing era) to organize and lead a special orchestra for the American Air Force. Beginning at the end of 1944, Glenn Miller and the Allied Air Force Orchestra made a special series of broadcasts titled "The German Wehrmacht Hour." Featuring the Miller band's trademark creamy saxophones, a romantic string section and the suave crooning of Johnny Desmond, these programs fall loosely under the umbrella of propaganda. But the sponsor's message, as it were, is amazingly subtle (much more so than advertising-driven radio programs of the day): The announcements and some of the singing is in German, but there's never an attempt to ridicule the German people or their leaders. At one point, the series announcer (a lovely-sounding fraulein named Ilsa Weinberger) states: "Isn't it wonderful that no restrictions [are enforced] for American musicians of any kind? They can play the type of music they want, whatever their listeners like, whether it be American, German, Russian, Chinese, or Jewish." And that may be the heaviest message ever delivered on the program.
Capt. Glenn Miller - Women Warriors - American Patrol, In The Mood
As for Charlie and His Orchestra, the whole enterprise was a colossal flop. Not only did the Charlie project fail to convert any Allies to the other side, but even Germany's own troops couldn't bring themselves to take Nazi swing seriously. The absolute pinnacle of the Nazi food chain were the Luftwaffe fighter pilots, who represented the highest ideals of Hitler and Goebbels, as Mr. Kater reports, and yet even these Aryan pinup boys refused to tune into the Reich's preapproved musical programming. Instead, they were listening to the Miller orchestra and other American and British bands every time their superior officers turned the other way. (In France, it later become known that the guitarist and composer Django Reinhardt, a Gypsy, survived the Nazi occupation only because he was personally protected by jazz-loving German officers.)
If the German high command had been as inept at building weapons and invading Europe as it was at coming up with convincing propaganda, the war would have been over well before Pearl Harbor. Here's hoping that Mr. Arnott's play, which has received good reviews in the English press, goes on to do what the Nazi war machine itself thankfully failed to: conquer London and New York.
Mr. Friedwald writes the weekly Jazz Scene column for the Journal.
BONUS: Glenn Miller, 'American Patrol' with WW2 aircraft: