The unwavering support of the heiress of the Wagner clan to the Third Reich

During the summer of 1914, the entire Bavarian town of Bayreuth, in the middle of a festival, resonated, as it had every year since 1876, with the operas of Richard Wagner. Winifred Williams, 17, attends, spellbound, the performances of the Germanic and Nordic myths of the German composer, who died almost thirty years earlier. This young girl of English origin, who lives in Germany with her adoptive parents, is so moved that she even adopted the first name Senta for a time, from the name of the captain’s daughter in the opera. The Ghost Ship (1843).

But above all, in Bayreuth, she met the conductor Siegfried Wagner, 45 years old, son of the famous composer and then director of the festival. Like the romantic character of Senta, Winifred dreams of an extraordinary destiny. And it will.

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Wagner’s musical legacy and anti-Semitism

The following year, she married Siegfried and joined the “Wagner clan”, the heirs and worshipers who convey the legend of the composer. She discovers the family villa, Wahnfried (“Peace of Illusions”), once named thus by the composer himself. Winifred soaks up the atmosphere of the house, imbued with Wagner’s musical heritage, but also with the virulent anti-Semitism he expressed in his pamphlet Judaism in music (1850 and 1869). Cosima, the musician’s widow, does not hide her penchant for the growing Nazi ideology. Her daughter, Eva, and her husband, theorist Houston Stewart Chamberlain, were avid readers of the daily Völkischer Beobachter (“Popular Observer”), bought in 1920 by the NSDAP (the Nazi party). Adolf Hitler, leader of the movement, was invited to Wahnfried at the end of September 1923. “Wagner is my religion”, Hitler told the family. The political leader, then aged 34, had boundless admiration for the musician’s work and his ideas. He seeks support from his descendants, informing them of a planned coup d’état he is preparing in Munich. Winifred becomes one of his most loyal admirers, finds common passions with him, speaks to him informally and calls him “Wolf”.

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But on November 9, 1923, Hitler failed in his putsch. He spent nine months in prison, where Winifred Wagner sent him typewriter paper for his editorial project: a book entitled My Kampf (“My battle”). “She would have encouraged him to write, when his morale was at its lowest”writes Fanny Chassain-Pichon in From Wagner to Hitler: a mirror image of German history (ed. Passés Composés, 2020). Upon his release from prison in 1924, Hitler was still seen by Winifred as “the savior of the world”. According to the Austrian historian Brigitte Hamann, author of Hitler’s Vienna (éd. des Syrtes, 2014), she raised funds for the Nazi party with her husband during a tour of the United States. A party to which she joined in 1926.

The relationship between Winifred Wagner and Hitler then caused a lot of ink to flow. They are credited with a romance, never confirmed, however. Archive images show them all smiles at Wahnfried, where the leader of the Nazi party now goes regularly. “Many archives have been destroyed, reports Fanny Chassain-Pichon. We know that there are nearly 200 letters forming a continuous correspondence between Winifred and Hitler.

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Hitler becomes the biggest patron of the Bayreuth festival

The beginning of the 1930s marked the rise of the duo. Adolf Hitler became chancellor in 1933. Winifred, after the death of her husband, held the reins of the Bayreuth festival. Which gradually turned into a social gathering for the glory of the Third Reich… Always closer to the Wagner clan, Hitler became the greatest patron of the event, as the Nazi architect Albert wrote after the war. Speer in his autobiography written in Spandau prison:

Without his financial assistance, it would undoubtedly not have been possible to maintain the festival.

Thanks to this support, in 1939, while Europe was sinking into war, Frau Wagner, supported by the conductor Heinz Tietjen, attracted the most prominent soloists and conductors: Richard Strauss, Victor de Sabata, Maria Müller… During his appearances at the festival, Hitler was acclaimed by the crowd. From 1939 to 1945, Kraft durch Freude (“Strength through Joy”), a leisure organization controlled by the Nazi state, now oversees the administration of the festival which Winifred continues to direct. The musical performances then take on the appearance of political meetings. In the public, soldiers, war wounded, arms factory workers and nurses are the “Guests of the Führer”.

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After the war, during the period of the denazification trials, Winifred Wagner, called to answer for her actions, defended tooth and nail the independence of her festival. “I always had the opportunity to work with Jewish collaborators or those of Jewish parentage, until their emigration”, she will proclaim. Escaping conviction, she locked herself into a long silence which she did not break until 1975, in a documentary by German director Hans-Jürgen Syberberg entitled Winifred Wagner and the history of the Wahnfried house from 1914 to 1975. “If the Fuhrer appeared, I would welcome him as the friend he has always been at home”she declares…

Following her controversial comments, she was definitively excluded from the festival and was not invited to the centenary in 1976. She died in 1980, but she was still buried in Bayreuth, the city where her destiny was forever sealed to that of ” Wolf.”

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➤ Article published in the GEO History magazine n°74, Nazism and womenfrom March-April 2024.

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