Richard Wagner’s music is indelibly etched in world music history. Admired by intellectuals and politicians alike, it was elevated to unprecedented heights and ideologically abused during the Third Reich. Adolf Hitler confided to a young friend that Wagner’s opera Rienzi was a turning point in his life: “That was the beginning of everything. It was with this divine music that, as a young man in the theatre in Linz, I felt that I had a gift and that I would succeed in uniting the German nation.”
Hitler’s enthusiasm for Wagner’s music did not wane even after he came to power. Wagner’s music was played at the opening of party congresses, state funerals and the opening of the Bayreuth Festival, which Hitler patronized.
Hitler first came to Bayreuth, the site of the Wagner cult, in September 1923 to speak to his followers. Winifred Wagner, wife of Wagner’s son Siegfried and a Hitler fan, seized the opportunity and asked to meet the firer. “My husband didn’t go with me and I must admit that Hitler made a strong impression on me. I invited him to come to Villa Wahfried because he wanted to see Wagner’s house and his eternal resting place.”
There, Winifred introduced him to other members of the Wagner family. That evening began a long friendship between Hitler and Winifred Wagner. Hitler allowed very few people to tease him or call him names, but Winifred had that privilege. She called him “Herr Wolf” and he called her “Wini”. Firer later spoke very highly of this first meeting: ‘Mrs Wagner closely linked Bayreuth with National Socialism, this is her great historical merit.’
This was very unusual, as Firer never publicly emphasised his friendship with women. Even his mistress Eva Braun had to hide in the background and was hardly seen at the gala receptions. “Women have no business in public”, Hitler argued.
On the contrary, the German women were extremely enthusiastic about it. As early as 1923, the SPD party newspaper wrote of “crazy women infatuated with Hitler”, describing with derision the crowds of women who watched his speeches with moist eyes, sold their jewellery and contributed the proceeds to the party’s coffers.
Indeed, women were Hitler’s most loyal supporters. They paved the way for his success, introduced him to important personalities and saved his party from bankruptcy. Hitler did not mind and took everything they gave him. They were the best propagandists for the Nazi Party and persuaded their husbands to join the Nazi Party. As Party dues-payers, they were always welcome, but the Party ideologue Rosenberg said loudly: ‘But one thing must be clear; the judge, the soldier and the politician must be and remain a man’.
Nevertheless, Hitler kissed women’s hands, fondled them and courted them at official receptions. He already knew he needed the support of their powerful husbands. But the Nazi movement was a male event and women were not allowed access to leading positions in the party and in important state organs. Hitler was even clearer: “I am horrified by women who mix in politics.”
For a long time, the Nazis’ notions of ideal femininity were just wishful thinking, strongly influenced by the ideals of the post-World War I era. In the Weimar Republic, women were given the right to vote for the first time and held important party political positions with the Social Democrats and the Communists. The middle classes in particular saw these professions as the future for modern women. The Nazis wanted the opposite: ‘Man and woman are, from the beginning, two different beings with separate tasks. The world of woman is small compared to the world of man.”
Although women retained the right to vote even in the totalitarian Nazi state, it was legislated that no more than 10% of women could be in higher education. But women’s emancipation in Germany had become so entrenched in the public consciousness that it could not be stopped in the short term. They were successful in various professions; they won car races, were pilots, event organisers, writers and, of course, film actresses.
Hitler had a very contradictory idea of a woman. Although he used to say that “when a woman starts to think, it is bad”, at the same time he supported women’s careers. Thus he chose the architect Gerdy Troost to furnish the buildings in his residence on the Obersalzberg and allowed Leni Riefenstahl to make films about the Nazi Party days. Hanna Reitsch also easily became a celebrated test pilot of military aircraft.
The institution of marriage itself was initially held in high esteem by the Nazis. It is interesting how many times Hitler had to explain why he was not married. The Nazis did not support marriage on moral grounds, but simply because it was the ideal ‘procreative’ institution for them.
“Unfortunately, we have two million more women than men. Our goal is to get girls married. To avoid withering away like old virgins, they must have children.” The National Socialists boasted that they had solved the “women’s” question, convinced that they knew women’s wishes to the last detail. “The greatest desire of German women is to become wives and mothers, they do not want to be comrades as the communists persuade their women. They don’t want to work in factories, offices or parliament. A safe home, a loving husband and a bunch of happy children are enough for them.”
The Nazis therefore deliberately abandoned the female workforce, with fatal consequences for them later. The Allies employed a predominantly female workforce in their armaments industry, and Hitler, a prisoner of his own ideology, hesitated for a long time to order women to go to work in the factories.
Dear Siegfried
But all this did not influence Hitler not to have a special attitude towards Winifred Wagner. This was strange, because Winifred was not German at all, but English. She was born in June 1897 in Hastings on the English coast, the daughter of the journalist John Williams and the actress Emily Florence. She lost both her parents when she was two years old, so she was a complete orphan. She was taken in by relatives for a while, and then, at the age of ten, found a home in Germany with her great-uncle Karl Klinworth, a conductor, music lover and strict anti-Semite.
Her new home was the centre of musical life, and Richard Wagner’s widow Cosima invited her uncle to the annual rehearsal of the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth. The last dress rehearsal before the outbreak of the First World War was also open to 17-year-old Winifred. The performance of Wagner’s Flying Dutchman on 22 July 1914 was staged and conducted by Siegfried Wagner, the only son of the famous composer.
When the audience was told that Germany was at war, they left the show terrified. But Winifred didn’t even notice the dark mood, because she had fallen in love with Siegfried. The composer’s widow, Cosima, also noticed. Her son, a composer and conductor, was already 45 years old but still unmarried. He was constantly involved in high-profile homosexual affairs, and the chances of the Wagner family getting an heir were diminishing by the day.
Cosima quickly checked whether Winifred’s political views were in line with her nationalist and anti-Semitic beliefs, and what she found convinced her that the 17-year-old Englishwoman was a very suitable bride for her son. Siegfried, who had until then strongly resisted all attempts to marry him, had to give in to his mother’s pressure.
“Dear Siegfried, I am so happy that words cannot describe it. I surrender to you body and soul, guide me through life, shape me the way you want me to be”, Winifred wrote to him.
They married in 1915 and by 1920 had four children. But Siegfried, despite his apparently happy marriage, did not give up his frequent homosexual fence-jumping.
Winifred thus married into Germany’s most famous musical family, around which an international circle of sworn admirers of Wagner’s works had gathered for many years. Critics were not few, however, in pointing out the high-profile marriage and the fact that Bayreuth had become a meeting place for the rich. The Wagner clan was read to be concerned only with popularising Wagner’s works and never staging works by other German composers. Wagner’s works were an excellent source of income all these years, and between 1883 and 1914 alone the family earned six million marks in royalties.
Siegfried was not destined for a long married life, however, as he died in 1930, outliving his mother Cosima by only four months. The question of succession was quickly resolved, as both sons were still minors, and Winifred took over the running of the family and the Bayreuth Festival.
With no support and four children of her own, she faced a difficult task. But she was determined to do everything she could to preserve Richard Wagner’s legacy. Her late husband had stipulated in his will that she should take over the management of the Bayreuth Festival, but on condition that she never remarried.
When Siegfried was still alive, Winifred was well acquainted with the culture and the demands of Wagner’s cultural circle, and she easily assumed the sceptre of monarch. She became the administrator of the Wahnfried estate and villa, which was in fact the centre and shrine of the Wagner cult. But at that time she was not yet in a position to cope with the great difficulties. Reluctantly, she had to admit to herself that she had none of the professional skills needed to run the Bayreuth Festival. Even her adoptive parents had not given her any special musical training.
The grey eminences in Bayreuth only wanted her to take care of the biological continuation of the Wagner dynasty and not to interfere in the business affairs of the festival. But a will was a will, and a perfectly valid will, it could not be changed, and so Winifred was able to walk the beaten track and think about what she had to do to keep the Wagner Festival alive.
Richard Wagner wanted to ensure his financial independence with his own festival, where his works were screened. The performances were held each year in the city’s Festspielhaus theatre, the construction of which was supervised by Wagner himself. When deciding where to host the festival, he vacillated between Munich and Nuremberg, finally settling on Bayreuth.
Since its inauguration in 1876, the festival has been something of a socio-cultural phenomenon. The first opening performance was attended by Kaiser Wilhelm himself, Pedro II of Brazil, the philosopher Nietzsche and numerous princes and princesses, famous composers and conductors. Artistically, the festival was undoubtedly a success story. “Something happened in Bayreuth that will be remembered by our grandchildren and their children,” wrote Tchaikovsky.
Financially, the festival was a fiasco and only started to turn a profit a few years later. But thanks to state support and the backing of Wagner’s ardent supporters, including Louis II. Bavaria, it somehow managed to survive. Well-known conductors and singers performed there with pleasure and often without remuneration, and considered it a special honour to be invited to join them.
After Wagner’s death, his widow Cosima took over the management of the festival and eventually included almost all of Wagner’s works. By 1920, the performances were exactly as they had been at the beginning. Cosima did not allow even the slightest changes, let alone the deletion of individual lengthy works from the list. “Isn’t everything as Papa wanted it in 1876?” she would say to her son Siegfried.
Wagner’s operas Tannhäuser, Parsifal, The Master Singers of Nuremberg, The Flying Dutchman, Lohengrin, The Ring of the Nibelung, Twilight of the Gods, Tristan und Isolde had to be presented in the traditional way, which was still cultivated by Richard Wagner.
After the First World War, which radically reduced and impoverished the number of aristocrats who could afford to attend the festival, a new class of visitors had to be found and the festival became more open to the public. But to do this, they had to advertise it and invite journalists to attend.
The Wagner clan was not particularly affected by the troubles of the First World War. At Villa Wahnfried, potatoes and lettuce were planted in the garden instead of flowers, they were crammed into fewer rooms in winter due to the lack of coal, the Festspielhaus was closed, but they did not go hungry. Only Siegfried Wagner, himself a composer, always complained that his works were under-appreciated and that the Jews were to blame. It was at this time that Winifred began to have confidence in her own abilities and slowly stepped out of her husband’s shadow.
Nazi reception
Already in November 1922, Winifred forged close ties with the Bayreuth branch of the newly founded Nazi party, the NSDAP, and by the following year the Wagners had become active supporters of the party. On 30 September 1923, thousands of Nazi Party supporters came to Bayreuth, and the next day Hitler was there too. He walked through the halls of the Festspielhaus and listened to a guide telling him: “We are planning a new theatre, but we don’t have enough money for it.”
He made a belated stop at Richard Wagner’s grave and then visited the surviving members of the Wagner clan. He made a theatrical promise that, when he came to power, Wagner’s opera Parsifal would be performed only in Bayreuth, as Wagner had wanted, but later reneged on his promise.
“When I first arrived at Villa Wahnfried, I was moved. The light shone from it and it was like a magnet,” he later said. He felt extraordinary there, as all the female members of the family succumbed to his charm. “In Bayreuth, the female part of the Wagner family in particular has a distinct Hitler cult,” the police report on the visit said.
Hitler was aware of the great propaganda potential of the Bayreuth Festival. He decided to exploit it, using a method he had used many times before. Like the famous Bechstein, Brickmann, Hanfstaengl, Hoffmann and Buch families, he approached the Wagner family as a genius without a family who longed for human warmth and a cultural circle where he could relax from the rigours of politics.
He allowed himself to be pampered and played ignorant about the simplest things. He sucked up to Cosima. “Cosima kept her femininity and charmed everyone with her charm even after she was a widow”, he gossiped, and he also flattered Winifred.
But on 9 November 1923, Hitler’s putsch in Munich failed and he was imprisoned. Many members of the Nazi Party were convinced that the National Socialist cause was finally lost and buried. But not Winifred Wagner. In a restaurant in Bayreuth, she stepped up to the table and made a fiery speech in front of the NSDAP members, which she ended by saying:
“All of Bayreuth knows that we are friends with Adolf Hitler. For years we have followed with great interest the work of this German man whose passionate love for his country and his life have striven for the creation of a national Greater Germany. I make no secret of the fact that I follow his path, that I stand by him in happy times and that I am loyal to him even in times of hardship.”
On 1 December 1923, Winifred also signed a letter demanding Hitler’s release from detention, supported by her husband. Hitler, who was sentenced to five years in prison and the NSDAP was banned, never forgot this.
In January 1924, the Wagner couple travelled to America to raise the money needed to reopen the Bayreuth Festival among music lovers there. Six million was needed and the hunt for patrons was on. Siegfried also gave a number of successful concerts in America, but the fundraising proved to be a fiasco. Instead of the expected $200,000, the couple managed to raise only $8,000.
Meanwhile, the liberal press in Germany was harshly attacking the Wagners and their involvement in favour of the NSDAP. When the couple returned from America, despite the debacle, they continued preparations for the start of the festival. They had to keep an eye on costs, so Siegfried simply repeated the entire production he had staged in 1911, confining himself to bringing the set up to newer technical standards.
Winifred helped him a lot, but her name did not appear on the list of collaborators of the festival management. What a disappointment. “Fifteen years into my marriage, I am still known to the public only as a housewife, a wife and a mother, even though I was Siegfried’s secretary and he entrusted me with the whole organisational and propaganda side of the festival; I was at all the trips and meetings and all the voice tests.”
After a ten-year hiatus, the Bayreuth Festival was revived on 22 July 1924 in a pre-war production of The Master Singers, Parsifal and Nibelungenlied. Siegfried ordered that the black, white and red flag of the German Reich be unfurled in honour of the opening of the festival. The liberal press was upset that the Wagner family was once again in the service of the NSDAP.
During the festival, right-wingers and monarchists staged a demonstration against the Jewish Republic, and it was only when this began to interfere with the festival and a nationalist song was played at the end of the Master Singers that Siegfried lost his nerve and put a poster on the front door of the theatre saying: ‘Here we go art.’
Meanwhile, Hitler was languishing in prison, regretting that he could not attend the festival.
On 14 December 1924, Bayreuth, the centre of the Nazi movement, was overjoyed to hear that Hitler had been released from prison. Winifred immediately rushed to Munich to congratulate Hitler, who was in the meantime pretending to be a moderate and loyal democrat. The following year, at the invitation of the factory owner Bechstein, Hitler finally attended the festival and told the party members – public speeches were still forbidden to him – “Wagner’s music has everything that National Socialism aspires to.” He later recalled this visit with nostalgia: “I arrived in Bayreuth at eleven o’clock in the evening. The next day, early in the morning, Mrs Wagner came to me with a bouquet of flowers.”
This was Hitler’s first and, for a time, his last visit to the festival. It was only after the end of the war that Winifred told why Hitler no longer wanted to attend Wagner’s opera performances. Each of his performances was usually accompanied by large gatherings of fascists, which ended in riots, and Winifred did not want that.
But Hitler gave a different explanation: ‘At that time I was listening to the Ring of the Nibelung and the Master Singers. The fact that this Jew Schorr was singing the part of Wotan upset me very much, it was a disgrace to the race for me. I didn’t go there for many years, and that made me very sad. Mrs Wagner was very sad, she wrote to me twelve times and telephoned me twenty-five times.”
Hitler did not attend the festival from 1925 until he took power in 1933, but that does not mean he had no contact with Winifred and her circle.
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The Thorn Trail to the top
The politician and young Winifred were already seeing each other. Hitler was also a frequent participant in the Wagner family life, playing with the children as Uncle Wolf, putting them to bed and telling them fairy tales. This was also the time when Winifred was fully occupied with the organisation of the festival. She was the first woman in Bayreuth to get a driving licence and so she drove her husband back and forth to negotiate with the artists.
She was very loyal to her family, although she had long since ceased to have any illusions about her marriage. She knew about her husband’s illegitimate son and also his male friendships. But the other members of the family did not remain silent and she heard many a scathing remark. But there was always her understanding Uncle Wolf, her ally and comforter, whose word counted for something.
In their great enthusiasm for Wagner’s works, Winifred and Siegfried were perfectly aligned, but in politics their paths diverged. Despite his sympathy for the Nazis, Siegfried refused to become actively involved in the Nazi movement. He was not a party member, nor a member of the Nazi Society for German Culture. This hurt Winifred, who, with a membership number of 29,349, was an important member of the party and counted among its old guard.
Her tireless advocacy of Nazi ideology attracted many senior Party politicians to her neighbourhood. Goebbels wrote in 1926, after a visit to the Wagners: “Frau Wagner took me to her house for lunch. She is fantastic on our side. Cute children. She told me of her pain. Siegfried is a paw. Ugh! He’s shitting himself. He’s a cowardly dog who kneels before Judy.” The reason for this outburst was the fact that Siegfried refused to fire artists of Jewish origin.
Winifred found solace in her platonic friendship with Hitler for the insults caused by her husband’s homosexual inclinations. Siegfried Wagner, on the other hand, was uncomfortable with Hitler’s frequent presence in his house. In 1926, the couple set off in a car across Germany to find sponsorship.
The journey was full of accidents, punctured tyres and a flat tank. It was Winifred again, fixing the car and looking for places to stay. But in 1927, despite the lack of funds, a long-cherished wish came true with a new production of Tristan und Isolde. Hitler could not help them, as his party was still relatively small at that time. But Winifred’s faith in him was unwavering: “The time will come when I will remember and thank my friend with pride.”
Siegfried Wagner was conducting the opera Der Ring des Nibelungen in Milan in 1930 when his mother died. He and Winifred attended the funeral of the 92-year-old Cosima, which was similar to that of a monarch, and then went on holiday to Merano. However, Winifred could not resist visiting Hitler on the way, in the luxurious new apartment given to him by a client.
Hitler was already a constant topic of disagreement between the couple, and Siegfried stung her in various ways. He did not want to attack Hitler directly, but he attacked her for her curves. “Wini, don’t look so much,” he liked to say to her.
In August 1930, during orchestral rehearsals in Bayreuth, Siegfried suffered a heart attack and died. His will, made in 1929, made Winifred the first patron of Wagner’s work. “Winifred Wagner will inherit the entire estate, and after her all descendants. They will be heirs in the event of Mrs Wagner’s death or remarriage.” The cautious Siegfried was convinced that Winifred’s marriage to Hitler was not impossible and wanted to prevent it.
Winifred thus became the second powerful wife of the Wagner clan after Cosima. The thirty-two year old heiress has quietly consigned her late husband’s musical works, of which he was so proud, to the past, turned his room into a shrine to Richard Wagner and devoted herself entirely to the Bayreuth Festival.
Her absolutism has brought great changes to the festival. Under Heinz Tietjen, the Berlin Opera House was then considered the benchmark of world opera life. It wisely agreed with him to take over the artistic direction of the festival. With his connections – protected by Göring – and financial resources, the festival could only benefit.
But the sensitive festival conductor Arturo Toscanini, who was still receiving standing ovations in 1930, could not bear to see the festival’s structure altered in such a way. In 1931, he turned his back on Bayreuth and left the festival because of “artistic disappointment”. His successor Wilhelm Furtwängler thought the same.
The widow set up a heavily criticised propaganda department and dismissed her husband’s illegitimate son, who was working as a festival collaborator. All these turbulent events did not go unnoticed by the public, and in 1931 the number of tickets sold plummeted. “The drive against the festival, which is after all of Jewish origin, does not shy away from any lies and insolence”, one heard from the Wagner clan.
All this forced Winifred to turn to Hitler, and Wolf the Uncle immediately helped her. She flew to Berlin and the case was solved in a quarter of an hour. On his tip-off, the Party leadership, the Nazi Wives’ Union, the Nazi Teachers’ Union and other Nazi organisational units had to buy whole blocks of tickets and distribute them to their most loyal members. For the 1934 season alone, the Propaganda Ministry bought almost 400,000 marks worth of tickets.
Uncle Wolf remained loyal to the Wagner clan and was soon considered a surrogate father to Winifred’s sons, who had to write to Uncle Wolf regularly. This allowed the young Wieland to take photographs of his uncle and increase his pocket money by selling them. Rumours soon spread in Bayreuth about Winifred’s imminent marriage to Hitler. One of the children wrote frankly: “Mum was for it, but Uncle Wolf wasn’t.”
In an interrogation after the war, Winifred referred to all these rumours as newspaper ducks. The Wini-Wolf relationship remained platonic and Winifred became intimately attached to her colleague and the festival’s artistic director Heinz Tietjen. The latter did not like Hitler, but was able to extract important benefits for himself from this relationship. He was constantly travelling between Berlin and Bayreuth and there was almost a family atmosphere at Villa Wahnfried.
Since Hitler came to power in 1933, he was a regular guest in Bayreuth. He was followed obediently by all the elite of the Nazi Party and then by all the diplomats. All his visits were organised as a Nazi celebration. Thousands of people met him on the roadside, and Winifred and her eldest son Wieland met him at the entrance to the festival hall. There, they discreetly handed out leaflets to the spectators with the inscription “The theatre is not a place for political ovations”, but it didn’t help much.
During his 10-day stay in Bayreuth, Hitler lived in an annex of the Villa Wahnfried and had his own kitchen, where vegetarian meals were prepared for him and he often dined with the Wagner family. For him, his stay in Bayeuth was a kind of rest and he always paid for his own tickets. For many people, sitting in the theatre, which was unbearably hot, was a real torture. If they were sitting in the boxes, they could sneak out for some fresh air after the start of the show and return to the theatre just before the show started. In this way, nobody noticed their absence.
Pre-war and wartime
In the Third Reich, Wagner’s music was preferred to other types of music because it fitted perfectly with Nazi mythology. Nevertheless, some senior Nazi leaders wanted a more contemporary “National Socialist” music. Thus, the leader of the Nazi Workers’ Front, Robert Ley, tried to persuade Hitler to use the music of a living German composer at the annual party rallies. Hitler agreed and listened to the symphony orchestra play a new composition for two whole hours, and at the end remarked, “I want them to play the overture from Rienzi at the opening of the annual party rally in Nuremberg.” Wagner won this way too.
The Wagner Festival in Bayreuth became so important to the Nazis that they refused to allow the Ministry of Culture to interfere, and all important decisions were taken by Hitler himself. He was so enthusiastic about Wagner’s music that he stayed up late into the night drawing up stage ideas for individual operas, notably Tristan und Isolde and Der Ring des Nürnberg. Over the years, he became a real “expert” on stage layout, insisting on certain details, setting the dimensions of the scenery and working on lighting techniques.
In general, however, Wini and Wolf the Uncle were of the same mind about the set-up. They were both conservative and disliked novelty, everything had to be as Richard Wagner had once imagined it. Hitler did not communicate unpleasant orders directly to Winifred. Goebbels wrote: “Firer was relentless about homosexuality. We had to purge the theatre of this evil.”
So the Propaganda Minister himself walked up to Winifred and said, “This one and this one are caught up in Section 175 (homosexuality) and they have to go.” Goebbels was convinced that Bayreuth was a black spot in this respect and that it should be cleaned up with a vacuum cleaner. “I discussed this with Mrs Winifred. She was shocked, but realised that it was no longer possible to go on like this.”
In March 1938, Winifred had the idea that an institute should be set up to deal exclusively with the works of Richard Wagner. She turned to Hitler’s right-hand man Martin Bormann and on Wagner’s 125th birthday the institute was founded. It was able to devote itself to its first scientific task – proving Wagner’s Aryan origins going back several generations.
With this institute, Winifred was also able to merge and preserve the valuable Wagner archive. Towards the end of the war, she wanted the precious original Wagner scores, which had been presented to Hitler by German industrialists for his 50th birthday, to be transferred from Berlin to Bayreuth. But Hitler could not be persuaded and wanted to keep the precious scores for himself. In the last year of the war, they were transferred to Obersalzberg and put in wooden crates, and have been considered lost ever since.
World War II started with the invasion of Poland and Winifred was convinced that the festival would not take place for some time. But Hitler ordered a “war festival” to be staged in 1942, because he believed victory was imminent. Rumours spread among the population that Winifred had even predicted the exact date of the end of the war. He was euphorically convinced that Wagner’s wish should be realised at the very moment of the war; to allow ordinary people, soldiers, war invalids and workers to take part in the festival.
The normal ticket sales were stopped and the distribution of tickets was taken over by the “Kraft durch Freude” (Nazi Leisure Organisation), which by 1944 had paid one million marks from ticket sales into the state coffers, of which the Wagner family received 17%.
Even in wartime, there were enough musicians available, as Winifred was able to request musicians to be brought to Bayreuth from even the most remote war zones. Even in wartime, Winifred, with Tietjen’s support, did not lose control of the running of the festival. But her sons were now grown up and were no longer content with small roles in the running of the festival. So tensions were bound to arise.
The son Wieland, who was later to take over Winifred’s role, was exempted from military service, Wolfrang was seriously wounded in Poland and began to learn conducting in Berlin, and the eldest daughter Friedelind left the family in 1940 and later had no qualms about denouncing her mother, Hitler and the regime.
In 1940, when Hitler was returning from a war march in France, he stopped the train at Bayreuth so that he could attend a performance of Twilight of the Gods. This was his last visit to Bayreuth. He did not attend the theatre after that and did not appear in Bayreuth again during the war, although he was still interested in what was going on there and listened to the performances with the greatest interest. In his own way, he still maintained control over what was going on there, as is evident from a letter that Winifred wrote to Hitler:
“My dear, dear friend and firer. The fact that the festival will open its doors again this year at your command makes us proud and grateful. We welcome all suggestions in the selection of works, but we place the final decision in your hands. The current audience would like to see the Master Singers, so we are asking for your consent to re-mount the Master Singers this summer.”
The last festival in Bayreuth during the Third Reich was held in August 1944. After that, the festival gates were closed, although Tietjen was already making plans for 1945.
For a long time, Bayreuth was spared Allied air strikes. But on 5 April 1945, an aerial bomb fell on Wahnfried and destroyed the part of the house where Richard Wagner’s room was located. Then came defeat and the end of the war. On 20 April 1945, Winifred sent a birthday card to her friend “Wolf”.
A mild condemnation
When the former “Queen of Bayreuth” had to defend herself in court in 1947 for collaboration with the Nazi regime, she wrote in her 64-page defence: “… I can confirm that I had personal contacts with Hitler, that we met and wrote to each other from time to time, but I cannot be accused of having been an active member of the Party.”
Numerous witnesses and extensive documentation should be enough to prove that she did not take advantage of her position in the Third Reich. She is said to have employed Jewish artists, helped many opponents of the regime, allowed church weddings, etc.
The indictment, however, accused her of the opposite, claiming that as an old party member she had fanatically and loyally served the Third Reich. She also refused to employ artists of Jewish origin from 1933 onwards. The indictment also relied on a book by her daughter Friedelind Wagner, The Inheritance of Fire, although Friedelind had telegraphed forbidding the use of some of the disputed passages.
Friedelind Wanger, with the help of Arturo Toscanini, moved to the United States in 1941, appeared on some anti-Nazi radio programmes and became an American citizen. In 1945, she wrote her autobiography, in which she denounced Nazism and also her mother.
In July 1947, Winifred was placed in a group of people who had profited from the Nazi regime, had her property confiscated, was banned from practising her profession and sentenced to 450 days of hard labour. The lawyer appealed, of course, and in 1948 the sentence was overturned. Now Winifred was judged to be only a “lesser” collaborator of the Nazi authorities. The ban on practising the profession still remained.
A year later, Winifred renounced any involvement in the organisation of the future festival: “My sons Wolfgang and Wieland will take over this task.”
It still owned the Villa Wahnfried, the theatre and the Wagner Archives. There followed quarrels and intrigues by some of the festival’s board of directors to exclude Wagner’s grandchildren from the management and control of the festival. The disputes lasted until July 1951, when a new era in the Festival’s history began. When the Bayreuth Wagner Festival reopened its doors at the end of July 1951, Winifred was just a spectator. Her sons Wieland and Wolfgang now had to fill the new festival with content.
Until 1957, Winifred lived in Oberwarmensteinach, which she called “the asylum”. She returned to Bayreuth later, when she was already 60 years old, because the American army had to vacate her villa first. She did not change her way of life even then, and her two sons watched with discomfort as she openly welcomed and socialised with former important members of the Nazi regime. Edda Göring, Ilse Hess and other former Nazi greats were frequent guests in her home.
For Winifred, who has given so much to family life, it has been painful to see how, over the years, the individual members of the family have become more and more distant from each other and especially from her. Arguments, disagreements and demands for a redistribution of the Wagner fortune became commonplace.
At the grand old age of 75, she once again embarked on a major project to preserve Wagner’s fame: the creation of the Wagner Foundation. She wanted to separate many of the items of Wagner’s estate from her sons’ ownership and transfer them to the Foundation’s fund. These were mainly the Villa Wahnfried, the theatre, Wagner’s archives and some of his personal belongings.
Finally, she agreed to a several-hour interview in which she reiterated her relationship with Hitler: “I have never denied my friendship with him. But I am able to separate Hitler as I know him from what he is accused of today. The part of his person that I know I still value today, just as I did in the past. The other Hitler does not exist for me, because I do not know him.”
Her statements provoked a wave of criticism. The family was also appalled by her mother’s careless statements and her son Wolfgang banned her from the theatre.
The final break with the family members, however, did not materialise. She reconciled with her daughter Friedland and also with her son Wolfgang, whom she visited in Milan in 1978. She spent the last weeks of her life with her daughter Verena on Lake Constance. She died there of cardiac arrest on 5 March 1980. Her remains were transported to Bayreuth and buried in the city cemetery in the grave of her son Wieland, whom she outlived by 14 years.
