Singer was a Nazi Party member

Famed soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, who was born in Germany but later became a British citizen, acknowledges in her memoirs that she joined the Nazi Party in the 1940s in what she says was “a strictly administrative gesture which was necessary.”

The autobiography of the singer, now 89 and living in Austria, was recently published in French under the title “Les Autres Soirs” (The Other Nights). In it, according to the website andante.com, she writes, “People know -- or have they forgotten? -- that under certain regimes one can join a party without being a militant or even a sympathizer.”

Schwarzkopf joined the Nazi Party while she was performing at Berlin’s Deutsche Oper in the late 1930s. She became a naturalized British citizen in the 1950s.