Jazz music, which developed in the Southern and then Midwestern and Eastern parts of the United States, hit Europe around the same time it reached the West Coast. Mother England, aided by a tradition of musical comedy and song very similar to what existed in New York, came first. Then it took off in France and Germany at roughly the same time in the 1920s.

When the Nazis came to power, they banned the music as a “Jewish-Negro abomination” that challenged Hitler’s message of a pure Aryan musical culture. But the swing era brought renewed popularity for jazz in Germany, and there was little Goebbels could do to stop citizens and even party members from dancing to the music. Swing bands in rough approximation of Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey flourished in the Berlin cafes.

The looking-glass world of German jazz – and the popular culture of the Third Reich in general – is explored in the new film “Hitler’s Hit Parade,” which opens at Film Forum tomorrow. (I only use the term “documentary” for lack of a better word, for the picture is actually a remarkable collage of sounds and images, bereft of both narration and narrative.) It has also been treated by several recent compilations of recordings from the era. Watching and listening to the performers of this era is fascinating – and disturbing.

The disturbing parts of “Hitler’s Hit Parade” include battlefield corpses, scenes from war hospitals, and an avuncular Hitler playing with babies and puppies, all in Hollywood-style Technicolor so vivid it only heightens the ghastliness. But most upsetting are the song-and-dance numbers, animated cartoons, and other “lighthearted” scenes from German musicals and comedies of the era, which make up the bulk of this 75-minute film.

Filmmakers Oliver Axer and Susanne Benze have selected sequences in which the original directors, writers, and (one assumes) performers, casually demonstrate their allegiance to the Nazi party. That they do it so breezily, and seemingly innocently, is what’s so shocking. For it’s tough not to like these talented, hard-working performers. And anyone who loves the movie-musical tradition or jazz and vintage pop music will inadvertently admire them.

American pop music forms, especially jazz and the Broadway-Hollywood musical, remained popular in Nazi Germany even after the countries went to war. “Swing Tanzen Verboten!” (“Swing Dancing Forbidden”), a four-CD retrospective released last year by the British label Properbox (56), presents an audio picture of what the wartime Continent sounded like.

This set, compiled and comprehensively annotated by Joop Visser, contains a retrospective of German bands from 1937 to 1944; a disc of swing bands from the occupied countries (mostly Holland and the fine Dutch Swing Band, The Ramblers); and a set of music from the two Nazi occupied French-speaking countries, France and Belgium. But Disc two is devoted to some of the most infamous recordings of all time: the Nazi propaganda swing sessions by “Charlie and His Orchestra.”

If I hadn’t heard this material myself – 23 of these unkind cuts are here – I wouldn’t believe it. At the same time Glenn Miller regularly transmitted his music from England to Germany, with vocals and song announcements in German but without overt attempts to persuade his German fan base. The Nazi propaganda broadcasts were of another stripe altogether, more a subject for study by a psychologist than a musicologist.

From 1940 to 1944, conductor and arranger Lutz Templin led a band that provided musical interludes for the propaganda broadcasts starring “Lord Haw Haw,” the British-American fascist whose real name was William Joyce and who regularly went on the air to persuade British listeners they were better off joining forces with the Germans than siding with the Jews and the Russians. The same message was conveyed in the music of the Templin band, fronted by a singer and lyricist named Karl Schwedler.

Like many, Schwedler took advantage of the Nazis to line his own pockets even as he sang their praises – in his case, quite literally. What he did was to take the lyrics to recent American and British popular songs and rewrite them with outrageous pro-German, anti-Churchill, and anti-Semitic lyrics. As a singer, though, Schwedler was no Al Bowlly – his ungainly tenor sounds very old-fashioned for the World War II era – and as a writer of lyrics he was no Sammy Cahn.

Typical of his work is this rewrite of “You’re Driving Me Crazy”: “But Jews are the kind who will hurt you, desert you, and laugh at you, too.” He rewrites Irving Berlin’s “Slumming on Park Avenue” as “Let’s go bombing / Like United Nations airmen do”; this song goes on with the line “Let’s go shelling / Where they’re dwelling.” Some of the texts are quite bizarre. When Kay Kyser recorded “So You Left Me for the Leader of a Swing Band,” Charlie followed with the surreal “So You Left Me for the Leader of the Soviets.”

It’s possible some members of the British Union of Fascists were swayed by Lord Haw Haw. But it’s hard to imagine any Allied civilians, listening to Charlie’s bad English, awkward accent, and terrible lyrics, regarded him as anything but a bad joke – one more frightening than funny. This is one band from the swing era whose work I don’t want reissued in a complete edition.

Yet the best German bands of the era – as heard in both the documentary and the Properbox – produced highly danceable music on a par with the best of the British or French Hot Dance and Swing bands. In the early 1940s, trombonist Willy Berking led a first-rate studio band in a series of original instrumentals with musical titles such as “Fermate,” “Legato,” “Rhythmus,” and “Tempo, Tempo.” The results are comparable to the British Ray Noble or such American bands as Larry Clinton or Ozzie Nelson. “Espirit” by Albert Vossen combines hot violin, accordion, and vibes in a manner equally informed by Raymond Scott and the Hot Club of France.

This period of jazz history has largely been lost to our ears, because it’s simply not possible to remember these fine performers and forget the culture they came from. But I wish it were.

“Hitler’s Hit Parade” at Film Forum until January 18 (209 W. Houston Street, between Sixth Ave and Varick, 212-727-8112).