But the Nazis had various tricks up their sleeves. While swing music was outlawed in Germany starting in 1935, the Nazis began to make their own swing music. The following clip is National Socialist swing by Charlie & His Orchestra.
Charlie and his Orchestra (Mr. Goebbels Jazz Band) - Bei mir bist Du schön - YouTube
Charlie & his Orchestra - Elmer's Tune (German Submarines) - YouTube
Charlie & His Orchestra was really Lutz Templin mit seinem Tanz-Orchester (a.k.a. Bruno & His Swinging Tigers). “Charlie” was really singer Karl Schwedler. When jazz was forced underground in Germany, Templin and his drummer, Fritz Bocksieper snapped up the best jazz talent they could find in Berlin and set about finding ways to slip under the radar. They did this by performing their jazz with pro-German lyrics. It was better than being shut down. They also occasionally utilized harpsichords instead of pianos to take the edge off the black sound of the boogie-woogie rhythms. Basically, they were trying to Germanize jazz over two decades before prog rock would Europeanize rock and roll.
Lutz Templin - ( 2 / 2 ) Für ein süßes Mädel - YouTube
When news of the band reached Goebbels, he saw them as a great opportunity to broadcast Nazi propaganda to the Allies and had the band absorbed into the Reichsministerium. Schwedler was allowed to travel to neutral countries to gather up jazz and popular dance music records and sheet music to bring back to Berlin for the band’s use. From March 1941 to February 1943, Charlie & His Orchestra made 90 recordings of swing covers with lyrics redone to reflect pro-Nazi and anti-communist propaganda under the auspices of Joseph Goebbels and the Propagandaministerium that provided the band their lyrics.
As one can hear, the music is beautifully arranged and performed. The arrangers were Templin, trombonist Willy Berking and Franz Mück. The recordings were broadcast over the radio every Wednesday and Saturday at 9 p.m. The recordings were distributed to POW camps and occupied countries on 78 rpm discs. When Allied bombing knocked out Berlin’s broadcast capabilities, the band was moved to Stuttgart to broadcast on the Reichssender Stuttgart station. When that too fell silent from Allied bombs, the band performed on international shortwave. Over a quarter of the British heard the broadcasts and even Churchill was said to be a faithful fan of the band. The band members were not really Nazis but joining the Reich Ministry was a way to survive. When not performing for the Nazis, the band continued playing at underground venues.
In January 1942, Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, wrote to Reinhard Heydrich, head of the SD, concerning the swingjugend, that “the whole evil must be radically exterminated now.” He wanted the “ringleaders” arrested and put into camps “to be re-educated.” He also wanted sentences extended to “2-3 years” saying that it was “only through the utmost brutality” that Germany would get these people under control and save the country from ruination. As a result, the swing clubs were raided and the swingjugend beaten, arrested and carted off to the camps.
After the war, Lutz Templin helped to found ARD, the second largest public broadcasting network in the world after the BBC. Karl Schwedler was said to have emigrated to the United States in 1960. For all its bravado, the Nazi Thousand-Year Reich lasted only 12 years, two years less than the Weimar Republic it hated so much. Many of the swingjugend were imprisoned in camps through much of the war, some were sentenced to death for their ties to the White Rose resistance even though none had actually worked for any resistance organizations (the war ended before any were executed), still others were forced onto the frontlines of the war and died in battle. But many swing youth survived the war and the camps to see justice meted out in Nuremburg.