New research: How Mozart became a Nazi

Salzburg’s Mozarteum today released an investigation by Professor Oliver Rathkolb and Dr Alexander Pinwinkler into its activities under the Third Reich.

The conclusions are predictably awful.

Taken over in 1938 by the regional governor of the State of Salzburg, Albert Reitter, the Mozart Foundation was ordered to remove the word ‘international’ from its title and was harnessed in all major activities to Nazi propaganda. The 1941 festival of the 150th anniversary of Mozart’s birth was a flagship event in Josef Goebbels’s reorientation of ‘aryan culture. Mozart was reinvented as a blond hero.

Reitter, the man at the head of this operation, was an SS-Oberführer with close links to Heinrich Himmler. The IMF has not yet released details of his involvement in the persecution of minorities. In 1944 he was removed from the post over a corruption scandal.

After the war, he was interned as a Nazi criminal but by 1950 he was working again as a lawyer, living happily in Salzburg until his death in 1962.

The new research has been published by Anton Pustet Verlag as Die Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum und der Nationalsozialismus. Politische Einflüsse auf Organisation, Mozart-Forschung, Museum und Bibliothek. We have not yet received this comprehensive document.