

Hitler: not just a crazed Wagnerian? Photograph: PA

Damn! Bang goes the neat theory that Hitler was a crazed Wagnerian who staged the immolation in the Berlin bunker as a kind of personal Götterdämmerung - an opera designer's wet dream. An article in Der Spiegel, now echoing across the media world, suggests that far from being just a Wagner maniac, he also adored Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov - degenerate music according to official Nazi policy. Hitler, says Spiegel, also doted on recordings by two prominent Jewish soloists - the Polish-born violinist Bronislaw Huberman and the Austrian pianist Artur Schnabel.

The evidence for this re-evaluation of the Führer's musical tastes is one of those caches of Hitleriani about which, in the wake of the Hitler "Diaries", one is immediately suspicious. The story is that a Russian intelligence officer called Lew Besymenski, who was given the job of cataloguing what was in Hitler's bunker after his suicide in May 1945, took away several boxes full of the Führer's favourite discs. Besymenski, it is said, later felt guilty about his larceny and hid the records in an attic, where his daughter, Alexandra Besymenskaja, discovered them by accident in 1991. Now, two months after her father's death, she has revealed all.

There are good reasons to be a little careful in swallowing the tale. Besymenski later became a journalist and published a contested account of what happened to Hitler's body after his death. He apparently confirmed the old rumour that Hitler did, indeed, only have one testicle - an assertion many authorities consider a lot of balls. It is odd that Besymenski never wrote publicly about the record collection. Surely over 60 years any feelings of guilt at having pilfered it would have faded.

But perhaps the reason was that, unlike the world's press, he didn't feel it was that newsworthy. We have yet to be given a complete breakdown of what is in it. The headline finding is that Hitler was happy, in his darkest hours, to listen to Russian composers and Jewish soloists. But more detailed reports suggest that the bulk of the collection is, indeed, made up of the composers one associates with Hitler - Wagner, Beethoven and Bruckner. Music to conquer the world by. Listen to the overture to Rienzi and you do, indeed, have an irresistible desire to invade Poland. Music, too, to give you an emotional high - important to Hitler, who evidently found emotional attachments difficult.

So we need to see the whole list. Clearly, Hitler didn't go through his collection - assuming this cache is indeed his - in 1936 rooting out everything the Nazis considered degenerate. We already know that Nazi ideologues were a good deal more thoroughgoing than their boss. A fascinating conclusion of Patrick Carnegy's recent book on Wagner is that while Hitler's henchmen wanted Nazi stagings of his operas at Bayreuth, complete with swastikas, Hitler refused. Art was to be allowed some space to operate; music mattered more than politics.

Similarly, he did not make a point of smashing his discs by Huberman and Schnabel, both legendary performers who, one assumes, meant a great deal to the musically talentless but music-loving Hitler. The case of Huberman is especially interesting. A great favourite of the German conductor Wilhelm Fürtwängler, he had taken a powerful stand against the rise of Nazism in Germany, wrote a letter to German intellectuals encouraging them to oppose the regime, and in 1936 founded the Palestine Orchestra, the forerunner of the Israel Philharmonic. If Besymenski did doubt the newsworthiness of his stolen collection, he evidently missed this nugget: so committed to music was Hitler that he was willing to give house room in his private collection to one of his most prominent critics.

Even assuming the authenticity of the collection, any conclusions have to be tentative. Certainly, we should stop considering Hitler an out-and-out Wagnerian. Other sources suggest he was fond of Franz Lehár's whimsical operettas and spent much of the war indulging in them. He was genuinely fond of music and used it as a form of relaxation and emotional enforcement. He didn't feel he had to obey Nazi dictates - he saw himself as a man apart, freed from the constraints of the cult he had been instrumental in creating.

The historian Michael Burleigh emphasises Hitler's separateness when, discussing Nazi policy on the propagation of large families, he quotes the Führer: "I am a completely non-family man with no sense of the clan spirit." He did what he liked, listened to what he liked, revered gay Russian composers and subversive Jewish violinists. Sod Nazism.