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.

In a 1928 speech, Goebbels expounded on his then-radical theories of manipulation. What he said then seems today to be cutting edge meme-ology, and provides an insight into why he favored using the most popular music of the day to spread his message of hate:

"An idea always lives in individuals. It seeks an individual to transmit its great intellectual force. It becomes alive in a brain, and seeks escape through the mouth. The idea is preached by individuals, individuals who will never be satisfied to have the knowledge remain theirs alone. You know that from experience. When one knows something one does not keep it hidden like a buried treasure, rather one seeks to tell others. One looks for people who should know it. One feels that everyone else should know to, for one feels alone when no one else knows. For example, if I see a beautiful painting in an art gallery, I have the need to tell others. I meet a good friend and say to him: "I have found a wonderful picture. I have to show it to you." The same is true of ideas. If an idea lives in an individual, he has the urge to tell others. There is some mysterious force in us that drives us to tell others. The greater and simpler the idea is, the more it relates to daily life, the more one has the desire to tell everyone about it."

The full text of this speech is here. Follow the link below for the MP3s of Charlie and His Orchestra.

