Analyzing One Man’s Resistance to Nazis

While I appreciate the generally favorable remarks in Jonathan Kirsch’s review of my book “The Devil’s Music Master: The Controversial Life and Career of Wilhelm Furtwangler” (July 1), I cannot let a remark he made in that review pass without comment.

Kirsch says that Furtwangler’s “resistance” to the New Order (the Nazis) “does seem feeble. It was mostly a matter of discreetly putting in a good word for a few of his musical colleagues.”

In asserting that Furtwangler did little to help persecuted individuals during the Third Reich, Kirsch ignores a significant portion of my book devoted to documenting the German conductor’s astonishingly successful efforts in saving the lives of hundreds of persecuted people--Jews and non-Jews--most of whom would otherwise have perished.

Kirsch’s opinion also appears to reflect the captious attitude uttered most tersely by Bruno Walter: that saving “a few Jews” was scant reason for Furtwangler to remain in Nazi Germany. What reason could be more sacred?

To those who say Furtwangler would have been more effective fighting the Nazi menace from abroad, I ask: How many Jews were saved directly by that sainted model of an anti-Nazi hero, Thomas Mann, whose diaries (1933-1934), as many still choose to overlook, leave no doubt that he was anti-Semitic?

SAM H. SHIRAKAWA

New York