Hitler's lost music collection reveals 'forbidden' Jewish and Russian composers

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Recordings by Mendelssohn and Offenbach were hidden in sealed boxes - but scratchmarks suggest they were among his favourites.

Russian composers were also banned under the Third Reich. But in private Hitler repeatedly played Rachmaninov and Tchaikovsky and hundreds more works he publiclly labelled "sub-human music".

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Hitler: had a secret stash of 'forbidden' music by Jewish composers

The secrets of what the Nazi dictator really liked to listen to were revealed by the family of a Russian officer who stole the music from his bunker in 1945.

Captain Lew Besymenski, who was Jewish, was ordered with other Red Army troops to make an inventory of artefacts in the bunker after Berlin fell. He found the huge collection in sealed crates and sent it back home to Moscow on a train.

According to his daughter Alexandra, he kept the records as souvenirs and first showed them to her at the family dacha outside Moscow in 1991.

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Music to his ears: As well as listening to German-born Beethoven's rousing Ninth Symphony, records by Russian Tschaikovsky also turned up in the collection

He was ashamed of having stolen them and played them only for himself and a small clique of trusted friends.

Besymenski died two months ago aged 86. Now his daughter is trying to decide what to do with the collection of 78 rpm shellac recordings, which also contains works by Hitler's German favourites, mainly Wagner and Beethoven.

"I think my father found it astonishing that millions of Jews and Russians had to die because of the ideology of Hitler yet here he was all the time enjoying their art," she said yesterday.