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The Man Who Said No to Hitler
(Wall Street Journal) Terry Teachout - Adolf Busch, the greatest German violinist of the 20th century, is at the very top of the short list of German musicians who refused to kowtow to Adolf Hitler. This aspect of his life is described in detail in Tully Potter's Adolf Busch: The Life of a Honest Musician. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Hitler and his henchmen started putting into place a policy of systematic persecution of German Jews. Numerous well-known Jewish musicians, including Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer and Emanuel Feuermann, either were forced out of their posts or quit in protest. In April, mere weeks after Hitler seized the levers of power, the Busch Quartet decided to stop playing in Germany. Busch was the only well-known non-Jewish German classical musician to emigrate from Germany solely as a matter of principle - and one of a bare handful of non-Jewish European musicians, including Arturo Toscanini and Pablo Casals, who resolved to stop performing there for the same reason. Virtually all of the other big names in Austro-German music stayed behind. Busch knew better. In a prophetic letter, he wrote, "Some of them believe that if they only 'play along,' the atrocities and injustice that are part and parcel of the movement will be tempered, can be turned around...they do not notice that they can only have a retarding effect, that the atrocities will still take place, only perhaps a bit later."