Recollecting the years of 1942/44, never I will be able to delete of the memory the tragic situation where in we found them, when he was so alive and spread in our hearts the desire of the ready surrender of Germany. This thought everything about silence, without having courage of saying this type of thing in public. In those tragic years the concerts continued to become fullfilled with regularity, not obstante the more difficult and precarious conditions each time. However, the affluence of the public to the concerts of the Filarmónica continues to magnify since 1943, the point of, in some occasions, to have itself to repeat the program four times and, in some cases, two concerts in one same day (to the eleven of the morning and the four of the afternoon). The old theater of the Filarmónica, conceived initially as one rinque of patinagem, with its formidável acoustics for orchestra and public, was destroyed by the bombardeamentos of the night of 29 and 30 of January of 1944. The orchestra changed itself, then, to the building of the State Opera (just-reconstructed) and when this also was destroyed for the second time, it moved to the Palace of the Admiralty. Orchestra and teacher made true miracles. The concerts left them without breath literally. It was as to be carried to a different and sublime world where we could forget as much misery and pain. It does not have no concert nowadays, exactly the those most important ones of the great festivais of music, that if can compare with those concerts of Furtwängler.

For me, personally, they had special a meaning: Wilhelm Furtwängler in 1941 had known and marries without no advertising two years later, in 1943. [... ] the musicians of the Filarmónica of Berlin touched with total spirit of self-denial - after all each concert could be also the last one! The public also was extraordinary. Who went to the concerts, with frequency it had to pass by means of the escombros of a city that was degraded to each day, and was not rare that the orchestra was interrupted by the antiaircraft alarms. A time I met in the known street with one, of who had counted to have suffered me a bombardeamento in the previous night; I complimented it and said to it of my hope from that it had received a notice baseless: " Not, not. It is truth. My house was bombed this night " - it said me - " but in the point where they are the things, that I can make of better senão to go to a concert of Furtwängler " Rudolf Pechel, one of the rare survivors of the concentration camps, said a time that the concerts of Furtwängler were frequentados by members of the resistance. There many met of that they had been murdered after 20 of July of 1944, or pursued for the Nazis, between which some friends of my husband, as Ulrich von Hassell, or conde Bernsdorf, brutally assassinated with a shot in the nape of the neck, in 1945. He would like to cite here Boleslav Barlog, that, later, would come to be superintendent of the theaters of Berlin: " Each eight or fifteen days a concert of Furtwängler represented plus a ratio to survive ". Recently, an article published in the weekly Die Zeit, of 14 of October of 1988, and intitled " the Last Tape ", disclosed to me with that easiness and rapidity in we can forget them those circumstances. After the hearing of the concert of 12 of January of 1944, transmitted for the Sender Freies Berlin (Free Radio of Berlin) - he was the last one before the destruction the old building the Filarmónica and had in the program the concert for violin of Beethoven and the Domestic Symphony of Richard Strauss -, the journalist observed: " That music is this? It is any thing of estupendo, never heard before, fantastic and... left-hand side ", after what it gave to wing to its imagination describing elegant a public fantasmagórico, with ladies in night suits and full cross uniforms. Absolutely false! [... ] In any mode is us a certainty: those shady days had given to the light artistic accomplishments without pair...