A model of micro-history

Adolf Hitler considered jazz a ‘racially inferior’ form of American black music, and banned it from the airwaves. Germany’s gilded youth flouted the prohibition by playing Duke Ellington in secret and greeting each other loudly in English: ‘Hallo, Old Swing Boy!’ Resistance was useless. The Brownshirts raided parties and even beaches in search of portable wind-up gramophones and gleefully kicked the shellac records to pieces. By 1942, Hitler’s police were arresting up to 50 people a day in Berlin alone.

On learning of Hitler’s death in Berlin in January 1945, however, the Reich Chancellery staff put on jazz records and brought on the dancing girls. If Hitler had won the war, the future would have been millions of blond people reproducing themselves. As specimens of the approved Nazi type (blue eyes, flaxen hair), they would not have liked jazz that much.

Hitler was not the only one who advocated genetic breeding programmes to arrest the multiplication of the ‘unfit’, Norman Stone reminds us. Many British writers and thinkers of the early 1930s dreamed of a samurai class of technocrats who would apply scientific panaceas to Europe’s social malaise. In an article for the Evening Standard in 1930, Aldous Huxley called for the sterilisation of ‘mental defectives’; Hitlerite ideals of racial rejuvenation through eugenics appealed to Huxley.

Huxley’s faith in a genetically engineered society ceased in 1934 when he witnessed thuggery among Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts at a London rally. Horrified, he warned against the ‘crazy blasphemies of dictator-worship’. As the 1930s progressed, in contrast, Mosley’s fascist party became increasingly pro-Nazi (and, inevitably, anti-Semitic) as it tried to prevent Britain from going to war with Hitler. Members were recruited from among the working classes as well from the upper classes.