I draw to your attention an informative and powerful essay by Guido Fackler on music in the Nazi camp system. It deals both with music as an instrument of domination and torment and with music as 'a defense against the terror of the camps'. One occasionally hears nowadays that there has been enough said of this historical experience and that we risk making it banal by repetition. The truth is the opposite; it is always the opposite with regard to the worst human horrors. We do not know the half of them. If your worry is about banality, you need to acquaint or re-acquaint yourself with the detail.
Fackler takes us into his subject in such detail, quietly, factually. What he tells really does speak for itself:
The guards used singing on command to intimidate insecure prisoners: it frightened, humiliated, and degraded them. After a long day of hard manual work, being forced to sing meant an enormous physical effort for the weakened prisoners. In fact, under these extreme conditions, being forced to sing could be life-threatening.
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It was by no means unusual for singing to provide the macabre background music for punishments, which were stage-managed as a deterrent, or even as a means of sadistic humiliation and torture. Joseph Drexel in the Mauthausen concentration camp for instance, was forced to give a rendering of the church hymn "O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden" ("Jesus' blood and wounds")... while being flogged to the point of unconsciousness. Punishment beatings over the notorious flogging horse (the "Bock") were performed accompanied by singing, and the same is true of executions.
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Loudspeakers mounted on special vehicles were in use in Majdanek, an extermination camp, and from them poured unremitting dance music - fox-trot - during executions, the purpose being to confuse the victims of the genocide, to quieten them, and also to drown out the screams of the dying.
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[I]n the extermination camps, particularly Birkenau, the prisoner orchestras performed their most inhuman activity, an activity that caused some surviving musicians to experience feelings of guilt and depression for the rest of their lives. Some orchestras had to play directly in connection with the so-called selection process: this was supposed to deceive the newly-arriving prisoners into thinking that they did not face immediate death.
To make of one of the prime resources of life a mocking accompaniment to, and further means of, cruelty was one of the infernal incongruities of this system. It was reproduced in the human character of the overseers:
A sufficient number of cases have shown that some brutal mass murderers were at the same time sensitive music lovers.
But there was, even so, another side to this picture, another type of music:
[M]usic served [also] as a form of cultural resistance, as practical assistance in the struggle to survive.
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Music gave the prisoners consolation, support and confidence; it reminded them of their earlier lives; it provided diversion and entertainment; and it helped them to articulate their feelings and to deal with the existential threat of their situation emotionally and intellectually.
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[P]risoners being marched to the gas chambers in Birkenau sang the Czech national anthem, or the Jewish song "Hatikvah"...
The essay is well worth your time.