Music: Acquittal

In a small, bare, stuffy room in Berlin, a 60-year-old man sat nervously in a straight-backed chair, facing an eight-man tribunal. He was a famous man, a great conductor—Wilhelm Furtwängler. With a nervous stammer he groped for words:

"My attitude towards the Nazis from the beginning was clear. I only wanted to continue a career which I started ten years before 1933. . . . When the Nazis came Goebbels told me that I could stay in Germany as an unpolitical artist. This I did. . . . I've never conducted in a conquered country. I didn't want to follow tanks into other people's countries. . . . Where was the music of Beethoven more needed than in Himmler's Germany? . . . I am no more guilty than a potato dealer who continued to sell potatoes in the Third Reich."

One witness testified that, although Furtwängler was the Nazi-appointed Staatsrat (state councilor) of Prussia, he had conducted only four times at Nazi Party affairs, had turned down 60 invitations. Another witness, a Jew, said that Furtwängler had saved his life,' and the lives of other Jews. For nearly two hours last week the Germans on the tribunal, three of whom had been in concentration camps, deliberated. Their verdict: Wilhelm Furtwängler was not guilty of collaboration.*

The Russians had already reached the same conclusion. It remained only for the U.S. members of the Allied Denazification Committee to change their minds (they were expected to) and Wilhelm Furtwängler could once again conduct his Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.