Adolf Hitler was a secret fan of Jewish musicians and Russian composers, a newly discovered record collection has revealed.
The Nazi dictator listened in private to the Jewish musicians and Russian composers branded 'subhuman' by his regime, The Daily Telegraph reported on Tuesday after 100 of his gramophone discs were found in a dacha outside Moscow.
Though the collection is dominated by recordings of Wagner, Beethoven and Bruckner, a sprinkling of Tchaikovsky, Borodin and Rachmaninoff has amazed many people.
The most astonishing find was a Tchaikovsky violin concerto featuring the violinist Bronislaw Huberman, a Polish Jew who fled Vienna in 1937 and was publicly declared an enemy of the Third Reich, according to the daily.
Officially, Hitler had despised Jewish music as much as he did the Jewish race, writing in Mein Kampf that Jewish art never existed.
In fact, the collection was discovered by Lev Bezymensky, a Jewish officer in Soviet intelligence, who had been ordered to search the Reich Chancellery shortly after the Berlin fell to the Allies in May 1945.
Bezymensky, who became a historian, claimed to have been at Hitler's autopsy, and in a 1968 memoir, he revealed what every British schoolboy had long believed, that Hitler did indeed only have one testicle.
He took the records back to Moscow but kept them secret, fearing he would be branded a looter. After his death last month, aged 86, his daughter Alexandra revealed them.
Alexandra said she was disgusted to find Russian compositions performed by Jewish musicians in the collection.
"This is a complete mockery. Millions of Slavs and Jews had to die because of the Nazis' racist ideology," she was quoted.
