Music was a vitally important element to keeping up morale on both sides during the Second World War – so much so that some songs – Lili Marlene is the best known example – were popular, and sung, on both sides of the lines. For the Nazis, however, music did pose a particular problem; by far the most popular varieties were the different forms of dance music, whose forms and rhythms not only ran counter to what Goebbels and his propaganda teams considered to be 'true Aryan musicality,' but whose most exceptional performers were often black or Jewish musicians who, Nazi race theory suggested, ought to be excluded from the airwaves.

Goebbels understood that his ministry needed to do more than merely hammer home the messages of Hitler’s ideology. He needed to engage—with an increasingly war-weary German public, and with the Allied servicemen whose morale he sought to undermine. This clear-eyed determination to deal with reality, not fantasy, led him to some curious accommodations, and from that perspective I have a story for you that is several degrees stranger than the one you already have in mind, and which I'll adapt from an earlier essay of mine. It concerns Goebbels's attempts to harness the dangerous attractions of dance music to Hitler’s cause. It was an effort that led directly to the creation of that oxymoron in four-bar form: a Nazi-approved, state-sponsored hot jazz band known as Charlie and His Orchestra.

By the late 1930s, swing and jazz were by far the most popular music of the day, for dancing and for listening. But, originating as they did in the United States, with minimal contributions from Aryan musicians, the Nazis loathed them. The official party line was that these forms were entartete musik (“degenerate music”), and that their improvised breaks and pounding rhythms risked undermining German purity and discipline. In public speeches, the Nazis put it more harshly than that. Jazz, Goebbels insisted, was nothing but “jungle music.”

Throughout the war years, it was German policy to suppress the music, or at least tame it. This resulted in some remarkable decrees, among them the clauses of a ban promulgated by a Nazi gauleiter in Bohemia that were recalled (we only have his word for it, but faithfully, he assures us—“they had engraved themselves deeply on my mind”) by the Czech dissident Josef Skvorecky in the introduction to his novella The Bass Saxophone. They are worth quoting in full:

1. Pieces in foxtrot rhythm (so-called swing) are not to exceed 20% of the repertoire of light orchestras and dance bands.

2. In this so-called jazz type repertoire, preference is to be given to compositions in a major key and to lyrics expressing joy in life rather than Jewishly gloomy lyrics

3. As to tempo, preference is also to be given to brisk compositions over slow ones (so-called blues); however, the pace must not exceed a certain degree of allegro, commensurate with the Aryan sense of discipline and moderation. On no account will Negroid excesses in tempo (so-called hot jazz) or in solo performances (so-called breaks) be tolerated

4. So-called jazz compositions may contain at most 10% syncopation; the remainder must consist of a natural legato movement devoid of the hysterical rhythmic reverses characteristic of the barbarian races and conductive to dark instincts alien to the German people (so-called riffs)

5. Strictly prohibited is the use of instruments alien to the German spirit (so-called cowbells, flexatone, brushes, etc.) as well as all mutes which turn the noble sound of wind and brass instruments into a Jewish-Freemasonic yowl (so-called wa-wa, hat, etc.)

6. Also prohibited are so-called drum breaks longer than half a bar in four-quarter beat (except in stylized military marches)

7. The double bass must be played solely with the bow in so-called jazz compositions

8. Plucking of the strings is prohibited, since it is damaging to the instrument and detrimental to Aryan musicality; if a so-called pizzicato effect is absolutely desirable for the character of the composition, strict care must be taken lest the string be allowed to patter on the sordine, which is henceforth forbidden

9. Musicians are likewise forbidden to make vocal improvisations (so-called scat)

10. All light orchestras and dance bands are advised to restrict the use of saxophones of all keys and to substitute for them the violin-cello, the viola or possibly a suitable folk instrument.

It is possible to trace the Nazi’s fear of jazz and swing back at least as far as the radical nightclubs of Weimar Germany (setting for the musical Cabaret), which Goebbels described in his diary as “a Babylon of sin.” But the Reichsminister also recognized, Horst Bergmeier and Rainer Lotz note, that “National Socialism set to music was not what most listeners wanted when switching on their radio sets,” and as the war years bit into German morale and bombs rained down on German cities, he began to make compromises that would have been inconceivable before 1939.

There was still reluctance to allow real American swing and jazz to be heard on the home front; Dr. Fritz Pauli of German state radio sketched the criteria for a “model dance band” that would have seemed alien to Glen Miller: twelve violins, four violas, brass, bass, drums–and a zither. Goebbels went further; he ordained that jazz be banned from the airwaves altogether, and all radio dance programs be prefaced by “a neutral march or overture.”

Behind the scenes, though, Hitler’s propaganda chief was hatching a plot: music deemed unsuitable for decent Germans was to be harnessed to help drive the Nazi war effort. Here Goebbels’s catspaw was a jazz fanatic named Lutz “Stumpie” Templin, a fine tenor saxophonist who had led one of the best German swing bands before the war.

Templin was an equivocal character; no Nazi himself, he had nonetheless taken full advantage of the opportunities that opened under Hitler’s regime. As early as 1935, what would become the nucleus of the Lutz Templin Orchestra ousted its Jewish leader, James Kok, in order to secure a recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon. By the autumn of 1939, Templin’s reputation as a sax player and his links to the Nazis were strong enough for the Propaganda Ministry to turn to him when it took the decision to begin piping musical propaganda to British troops.

Lurking in the shadow of the new initiative were William Joyce, the notorious “Lord Haw Haw,” an Irish-American employed by Goebbels to broadcast propaganda to Britain, and Norman Baillie-Stewart, another fascist turncoat whose chief claim to fame was being the last Englishman to be imprisoned in the Tower of London. They provided ideas, and perhaps some lyrics, to a former civil servant named Karl Schwedler, the man hired to front the crack jazz musicians who made up Templin’s band.