Stolen Music tells the chilling stories of Jewish musicians Wanda Landowska, Arthur Rubinstein, Shony Braun, Alma Rosé, and Władysław Szpilman from the interwar period’s vibrant musical scene to the Nazis’ persecution. Parallel to these musicians’ fates is the story about music’s role in the Third Reich, and the wide-spread and systematic looting of tens of thousands of instruments, manuscripts, and books. Many of these are still lost to the world.

The special command Sonderstab Musik led the hunt for Europe’s foremost musical treasures, invaluable instruments and manuscripts from masters such as Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. Headed by Herbert Gerigk, the aim of this musical looting was to obliterate Jewish influence over European music once and for all.

Stolen Music is not only a tale of the Nazis’ attempt to silence their opponents, but one about music as an act of resistance.

[Stolen Music is] a book which paralyzes with its terrors and pleases with its high quality. It deserves great international attention. From the first 150 brilliant pages’ sharp exposé of the 19^th century’s antisemites in different shapes and Wagner’s fanaticism to a later time, the book is easy to read, concrete, nicely disposed – with gruesome examples not only from the camps but from the thorough looting of, for example, nearly seventy thousand Jewish homes in France alone. No matter how well-read I am about the history of Nazism, [Stolen Music] is, through its delineation, so convincing on every page that I will not be able to forget it. May it be recognized according to merit!
–Per Wästberg, former president of PEN International and member of the committee for the Nobel Prize in Literature.