Hitler's Record Collection Shows He Listened to Russian, Jewish Music

BERLIN — Adolf Hitler's newly discovered record collection has shown that he listened in private to the Jewish musicians and Russian composers branded "subhuman" by his regime. Examples of Tchaikovsky, Borodin, and Rachmaninoff have amazed historians. Perhaps the most astonishing find was a Tchaikovsky violin concerto featuring the violinist Bronislaw Huberman, a Polish Jew who fled Vienna in 1937, a year before the Anschluss, and who was officially declared an enemy of the Third Reich. Officially, Hitler despised Jewish music as much as he did the Jewish race, writing in "Mein Kämpf" that Jewish art "never existed."

The collection was discovered by Lev Bezymensky, a Jewish officer in Soviet intelligence, who had been ordered to search the Reich Chancellery shortly after the city fell to the allies in May 1945.

Bezymensky, who went on to become a well-known historian, was present at Hitler's autopsy, and in a 1968 memoir, he said what every British schoolboy had long believed, that Hitler did indeed only have one testicle. He took the records back to Moscow but kept them secret, fearing he would be branded a looter. However, after his death last month at age 86, his daughter decided to open them.