Re: horns

[Marvin <physchem...>]

----- Original Message -----
From: <lipkowitz (at) aa(dot)edu>
To: "World music from a Jewish slant" <jewish-music (at) shamash(dot)org>
Sent: Friday, January 18, 2002 1:10 PM
Subject: RE: horns


> Riefenstahl is a liar.  She knew exactly what Nazism was about and what it
> was up to.  Fritz Hippler (director of the Eternal Jew--and head of
> Germany's film industry during the Nazi years) also makes the same kind of
> whining--"I didn't know"--talk.  This is not a case of an honest, though
> failed, attempt to produce art in a particular style.  It was and is high
> quality, racist propaganda.  Music is different. Music (free of words)
does
> not lend itself as easily to ideological interpretation. That is why it is
> far easier to lift musical ideas from a group of people you otherwise
> despise.
>

In my experience, Germans old enough to know anything in WW II are consumate
liars about what they knew and did.  I knew a German scientist
professionally who kept telling me that Hitler was a bad man.  I just let it
pass, until he volunteered that he was only a short distance from one of the
camps (I think he mentioned something like 20 miles), but knew nothing about
it.  I responded that I was all the way across the ocean, but I heard about
concentration camps.

When I graduated from high school in 1943, it was a few months before my
birthday, so I found a job.  There was a German Jew there who told me that
he was put in a camp after Kristallnacht, but was released and allowed to
leave Germany because he was an officer in the German Army in WW I.
However, his health was ruined.

When I went into the army, I wound up in combat in the Pacific.  I never ask
Japanese of my age group what they did in the war, and if the topic somehow
comes up they won't talk.  I prefer that to outright lying.

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