How the Nazis Used Music to ‘Re-Educate’ the Prisoners at Auschwitz
They forced them to sing, and beat those who didn’t.
A music theory professor, Patricia Hall, visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, where she discovered several handwritten manuscripts of popular German songs. One of them was titled The Most Beautiful Time of Life and had extremely euphoric lyrics about falling in love with spring and cherishing precious time.
She took the manuscript and revived the song back in 2018 at the University of Michigan but most of her audience was visibly uncomfortable with the performance. This was not because of the happy tune of the song, but because of the twisted history it had.
In the Nazi concentration camps, SS soldiers used music to torture, humiliate and degrade the inmates.
Prisoners who didn’t sing were beaten
In 1933, when early concentration camps were organized, the camp guards used to order the detainees to sing while marching, exercising, or during punishment actions.
This was done to mock and humiliate those poor Jews who were locked up despite their wishes. Eberhard Schmidt, a former prisoner and musician, remembered that unlucky prisoners who didn’t know the song were beaten. He said,
