I took a brief introductory course on the holocaust and I am just now going through the required reading material. I am reading a book called Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933-1945 by Saul Friedlander and he mentions in one of the many things that the Nazis censored and/or banned were Beethoven in 1937 and Mozart in 1938. I was not able to find this anywhere else. Is this true?
Yikes, this is certainly not true.
The Reichsmusikkammer (or Reich Music Chamber), the department of music within the Nazi ministry of propaganda put on many music performances, including the Reich Music Days. There's a recording of Goebbels introducing the 1939 Music performance in Dusseldorf, and you can hear (around the 3:00 mark) of him discussing which composers are appropriately German, and you can hear him mentioning Mozart:
" Now the great masters belonging to the first rank: Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Hugo Wolf and Bruckner also belong purely to us. Their music is undisputedly linked to the culture of our realm… "
As for Beethoven, he and Wagner were particularly revered, with Hitler speaking to troops during the war saying: "One German; Beethoven, achieved more musically than all Englishment of the past and present put together." In 1940 the Berlin Philharmonic toured Germany and the captured Nazi territories in concerts playing Beethoven's 2nd and 7th symphonies. In 1942, the Nazi party celebrated Hitler's birthday with a performance of Beethoven's 9th symphony.
In 1941, the Nazis published a propaganda piece called "We Are Protecting Beethoven: A Soldier’s Letter Accounts for the Meaning of the War" of a letter from a German soldier on the front lines talking about how listening to Beethoven's music taught him what he's fighting for.
I could produce a hundred more examples of performances, broadcasts, and references to both Beethoven and Mozart throughout the war, but needless to say, your author needs to check his sources.
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OK I made a mistake here. I must have had a lapse of attention. I misread 'Jews being banned from playing Beethoven and Mozart' as those two composers being banned in general. My apologies. I promise to be more attentive later.