Adolf Hitler first visited Haus Wahnfried in September 1923. After visiting the grave of Richard and Cosima Wagner, the future Fuhrer said „If I should ever succeed in exerting any influence on Germany’s destiny, I will see that Parsifal is given back to Bayreuth.“ He was referring here to the Lex Parsifal for which the Wagner family and their supporters had campaigned a decade earlier, i.e. a special copyright law that would restrict performances of Parsifal to Bayreuth. However, when German copyright law was being revised in 1934, Hitler decided that he could not honour his earlier promise to the Wagners; in November 1941 he told Goebbels that the opera was not to be reserved for Bayreuth alone.
Hitler as Parsifal with Nazi Standard instead of the Holy Spear
Hitler interpreted Parsifal as a member of a master race
The pure and noble blood in the chalice of the Grail
Nazi racial science
„What is celebrated in the Opera Parsifal is not the religion of compassion, but pure and noble blood, blood whose purity the brotherhood of initiates has come together to guard. The king then suffers an incurable sickness, caused by his tainted blood. Then the unknowing but pure human being is led into temptation, either to submit to the frenzy and to the delights of a corrupt civilisation in Klingsor’s magic garden, or to join the select band of knights who guard the secret of life, which is pure blood itself. All of us suffer the sickness of miscegenated, corrupted blood. How can we purify ourselves and atone? Note how the compassion that leads to knowledge applies only to the man who is inwardly corrupt, to the man of contradictions. And that this compassion admits of only one outcome, to allow the sick to die. Eternal life, as vouchsafed by the Grail, to those who are truly pure and noble!“