This is such a fascinating item, we just HAD to repost it today.
Someone send THIS LINK to Iran’s President.
It takes you to a fascinating page on the critically acclaimed WMFU radio’s website: a page of Nazi swing music.
Last March, I posted what I thought was the first volume of music by Charlie and His Orchestra, a Nazi big band assembled by Hitler’s minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels. You can find that post and all 22 tracks from it here. It turns out that what I posted was actually the second volume of this material, so here are the 22 tracks from volume one.
Charlie and His Orchestra was led by Karl Schwendler, an English speaking German who broadcast Nazi-themed swing and big-band hits every night on the medium-wave and short-wave bands throughout the 1930s to Canada, the US and Britain. Leave it to Goebbels to take the music of The Andrews Sisters, Paul Whiteman and Irving Berlin and fill it with venomous rants against Jews, America and the British. The man took his propaganda seriously. But at least he admitted it was propaganda, unlike the current crop of spin-meisters.
Scroll down you’re able to listen to 1940s swing music that do indeed contain the angry propagandistic rants. It’s quite jarring to generations who’ve only read about this kind of hatred in history books (but then we’ve seen rage-filled political polarization so perhaps we’ve been clued in a bit on about how intense political emotion works).
The interesting thing is: as vintage swing music, the musical selections themselves aren’t bad, and the vocals are reminiscent of some of the jazz or 1920s-1930s recreations recorded abroad that you can buy on amazon (the accents of non-Americans trying to duplicate an American accent). And the message: It helps you relive World War II.
UPDATE: The post has seemingly disappeared from the radio station’s website. Perhaps they got complaints about it being available on the Internet. The above link doesn’t work and we couldn’t find the post.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.