Music to Invade Poland to

"What can you say to music like that, except: Get me a horse, I want to INVADE something!"

— Mark Steel on Beethoven

Art produced in Germany has had a startling tendency to be viewed by non-Germans through the prism of is this Nazism or not? This especially applies to German music. And, indeed, to any music that "sounds German" regardless of whether or not it was made in Germany.

Music To Invade Poland To refers to any music that gets accused of being Nazi because it sounds "Germanic," "Teutonic," "Wagnerian," or the like.

For the most part, this stuff does not advocate National Socialism. Unfortunately, the use of bombastic, dramatic, "Germanic-sounding" Orchestral Bombing as soundtracks in World War II films has cemented the association between grandiose, orchestral marching music set to relatively steady tempos with authoritarian and warmongering political movements.

This is not yet a Discredited Trope. The Trope Namer is a particularly infamous review of Rammstein's album Mutter; the review described the album as "Music To Invade Poland To" (although Rammstein, who are a bunch of lefties from the former East Germany, have nothing to do with neo-Nazism, unlike real neo-Nazi bands like the infamous, supposedly reformed "Böhse Onkelz" do). This trope is actually very common in Germany to this day, where it isn't even limited to music. Pretty much everything that could invoke similar associations creates the same feeling of unease with most Germans.

Not to be confused with Loud of War. May be associated with Germanic Depressives.

Actual military music from the Third Reich tends to be banal and uninspiring (e.g. Der Panzerlied, a chirpy little ditty featured in Battle of the Bulge), and was more often than not intended to be sung while... you know, actually invading Poland...

Incidentally, German music earlier came under attack during the anti-German hysteria of World War I. A generation before it became "Music to Invade Poland To", German music was denounced as "Music to Invade Belgium To". The hymn tune "Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken" very suddenly needed to be set to a new tune, as it used "Deutschland Über Alles" — a stirring theme, but not one held appropriate for British churches after August 1914.

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• The Britannian Anthem in Code Geass sounds aggressive and Germanic. It's in English.^note Which is, in fact, a Germanic language. This trope is what made most Japanese viewers mistake it for German (given the story, it's the music to invade Japan to).
• Germany's Anthem from Hetalia: Axis Powers parodies this trope, combining an extremely militaristic tune with frivolous lyrics such as "Polish this room and don't whine about it " and "I want to eat wurst with some beer".
  • Ironically, the real German anthem, "Das Deutschlandlied" does feature a pretty whimsical part about "German women, German wine and German songs". It's just isn't sung nowadays, just like the part about the "Germany above all", though for the different reason.
• Das Engelandlied from Hellsing, which was an actual World War II-era song from Nazi Germany about invading England.
• Die Flugel der Freiheit from Attack on Titan begins much like a German marching song.
• Girls und Panzer:
  • In the series, the Kuromorimine team, being based off German tanks and tactics, uses instumental versions of both Erika and Panzerlied as their Leitmotif. Bonus points goes to Panzerlied for playing when they reveal the PzKw VII Maus.
  • In Der Film, an instrumental version of When Johnny Comes Marching Home is played in a minor key to invoke this effect when The T28 Superheavy is revealed.
• Jojos Bizarre Adventure: Battle Tendency has Propaganda, which is theme of an actual Nazi, who is also a cyborg.
• Alluded to in the Patlabor: The New Files OVA. After having his cover blown by the Griffon's pilot revealing his voice, Utsumi states that it was stupid to even install external speakers on the thing, Kurosaki is quick to reply that it was his own idea, so he could play Wagner as it moved. Utsumi then complains that they haven't got to do that yet.

Film

• Triumph of the Will. Justified because the film actually is Nazi propaganda, and deliberately appeals to the audience's passions with dramatic, soaring music.
• Oceania, 'Tis For Thee from Michael Radford's adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
• Manhattan Murder Mystery invokes and lampshades this trope when Larry, played by Woody Allen, says, "I can't listen to that much Wagner, ya know? I start to get the urge to conquer Poland."
• The Imperial March from Star Wars intentionally invokes this. The tempo is steady, the chord progressions are solemn and grandiose, and the music accompanies scenes of a totalitarian regime with a great sense of theatrical panache. (Williams stole it from Holst.)
  • Subverted by the filk version "Darth Vader's Mother" ("...wears army boots.")
  • The Imperial March is also a subversion in itself because aside from tempo and hitting the downbeats hard it doesn't actually sound like most real military marches, which tend to be played mostly at the mid to upper end of the range (at least for the melody line) and in a major key, giving them a bright, triumphant sound. The Imperial March is performed by instruments playing at the very bottom of their range in a minor key (giving it a dark sound), and there are deliberately dissonant notes in many of the chords to set up tension. John Williams knows how to write a march, and deliberately broke most of the rules to come up with the Imperial March. Appropriately for an Empire built on the Dark Side of the Force, it's meant to be menacing, not triumphant.
  • Star Wars Rebels officially establishes the march as the national anthem of the Empire In-Universe. Going further, "Empire Day" introduces a more upbeat version of the march during a parade on the titular holiday, making it more similar to a real world military march. In fact, in the behind the scenes features for "Empire Day", the producers explicitly point out how difficult it was to make a variant of the Imperial March that sounded like uplifting parade music, specifically pointing out that the official Imperial March is actually kind of dark for what would be realistically expected of a national anthem.
  • The awards ceremony at the end of A New Hope has much more triumphant music... and looks eerily like this scene from Triumph of the Will. Innocent influencing or darker subtext? You decide.^note Film students still study the propaganda films of Riefenstahl and Eisenstein because, despite the horrific nature of the regimes they propagandized, their techniques were innovative for their time and have since become the basis of much of modern cinematic language.
• Done deliberately in Killer Klowns from Outer Space; the composer has referred to the music played when the Klowns march the collection machine through the town as "tanks rolling into Poland", done so that the scene wouldn't be considered as funny as the rest of the movie.
• Casablanca had a well-known scene in which German officers singing a German song are eventually drowned out when the rest of the bar begins singing the La Marseillaise. The song was originally intended to be the Horst-Wessel-Lied, the official anthem of the Nazi party, however the actual song used is Die Wacht Am Rhein (the tune of which is [to different words] the Yale Glee Club's 'Bright College Days') — a German military song, for sure, but unaffiliated with the Nazi party. Warners was unable to use the Horst-Wessel-Lied due to copyright complications in neutral countries.
  • This scene is also a pretty nice aversion of the trope. Casablanca's cast featured a lot of European actors who had fled the onslaught of the Nazis; the emotion on display in this performance of La Marseillaise is not acted.
• In Cabaret, a bright young Aryan stands up in a cafe and begins singing "Tomorrow Belongs To Me" as a portent of the age to come. This is intended to show an alternative to the decadence & perversion of the cabaret lifestyle, but can come across as this instead.
• In Lars von Trier's Melancholia, the overture from Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde is used as the main musical theme. Von Trier even joked that he was a Nazi!
• Invoked with the Luftwaffe-Marsch from Battle of Britain. It's the Luftwaffe's Leitmotiv throughout the film, and was meant to symbolise its pride prior to the Battle. This tune apparently represented the Luftwaffe so well that many people now think it's an actual German march from World War II.
• Brought about in A Clockwork Orange when Alex's aversion treatment added his favorite music, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, to a combination of Nazi films and nausea drugs, causing them all to become fused together in his mind and rendering him unable to hear Beethoven without freaking out.
• Apocalypse Now's famous bombing run scene where Ride of the Valkyries is played was meant to invoke this, in order for audiences to really get how horrible war is by likening the battle with Nazism. It backfired spectacularly, and many who watch the scene end up Rooting For The Army instead. Since the practice of playing Wagnerian music actually has basis in history, more information is in the Real Life section.
• In a cut scene from Blazing Saddles, Lili von Shtupp refers to "I'm Tired" as "the song that closed Poland."
• Subtly invoked in the climax of The King's Speech. While Bertie gives his 1939 speech after the declaration of war the second movement (Allegretto) of Beethoven's 7th Symphony plays in the background. Though not as bombastic and aggressive as other examples it does however convey the unease at another brutal war against Germany.
• The film Fury (2014) does this in the conventional sense, as near the end of the film there's a scene with an SS battalion singing the actual SS marching song Marschiert in Feindesland. The trope usage is ironic because the film is set in April 1945 when Nazi Germany is on its last legs, Adolf Hitler is only a few weeks away from killing himself, and the Allies have much of the western part of the country occupied while the Soviets are racing towards Berlin. As much as Marschiert in Feindesland might talk about the SS reveling in their Villain Cred and bragging about the places they're going to invade and conquer, the best they can actually do is scrape together a few hundred men not to invade anywhere but in a completely hopeless and doomed attempt to resist their own country's invasion, which they do only because they're terrified of the prospect of facing judgement for their crimes after the war.
• Sausage Party has a brief example during the open musical number. A snippet of “Ride Of The Valkyries” plays after an anthropomorphic jar of sauerkraut, who is dressed like Hitler, sings about wanting to “exterminate the juice”.

Literature

• As a character in Gravity's Rainbow has it: "A person feels good listening to Rossini. All you feel like listening to Beethoven is going out and invading Poland."

Live-Action TV

• In Curb Your Enthusiasm, lead character Larry David expresses his appreciation of the music of Wagner. He is a Jew but is not a particularly devout one, however, other Jewish people around him are shocked when they find out he likes Wagner. He claims that he likes the music and does not care what it's associated with.
• Parodied on Saturday Night Live (season eight, episode 16, hosted by Robert Guillaume^note who was originally supposed to host a season six episode, but the season was cut short due to Seasonal Rot and a writers' strike; original airdate: March 19, 1983) on a fake commercial for an album collection called Heil Hits.
• Doctor Who
  • Lampshaded in "The Green Death" when the megalomaniacal computer BOSS is about to Take Over the World.
    BOSS: Stevens, you know, we should have arranged for a symphony orchestra to herald my triumph. To take over the world, to sweep into power on the crest of a wave of Wagnerian sound! You like that idea, of course? (exasperated response from Stevens) No? Oh, er... the 1812, perhaps? Or would we dare the glorious Ninth?
  • Inverted in "The God Complex". One of the alien characters mentions that their planetary anthem is entitled "Glory to (Insert Name Here)" - Music to be invaded to. It's their hat — surrender immediately in the face of military oppressors, because then the oppression won't be too bad, and they can slyly end up running things their way in the aftermath, thus surviving to be conquered by somebody else.
• In Foyle's War, Foyle enters a church to find the sneaky sort-of spy Hilda Pierce at the organ, playing Beethoven; he remarks on her choice of music seeming somewhat inappropriate under the circumstances, which she counters by pointing out that it's ridiculous to discredit and discard everything Germany has produced in the past just because they're fighting a war with them right now.

Music

• Richard Wagner is the biggest victim of this, mainly because he was a notorious anti-semite and also because his biggest fan was the guy who started the greatest war in all of human history. He was also friends with Friedrich Nietzsche, another German content creator falsely appropriated by Hitler and the Nazis' vision of what ideal German heroics should be. Hitler himself had been quoted to say: "In order to understand National Socialism, you must first understand Wagner." However, unbeknownst to him, Wagner was also a left-leaning socialist for much of his life. He befriended Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakhunin and participated in the Dresden May Uprising, which caused him to be exiled by the Saxon government. Wagner died in 1883 and unfortunately, Hitler got addicted to his operas during his years in Vienna where he suffered from poverty and depression, with only them as his only meaning in life.
  
  Thus he and the Nazis appropriated his music and theatrics fifty years after his death. Hitler deliberately patterened his theatrics after Wagner (e.g. in scenes of Triumph of the Will where he would be depicted as a larger-than-life Germanic hero). In his private talks, he constantly shilled Wagner to his inner circle of friends, like an otaku does about anime, much to their annoyance that they of course could not express lest they offend their Führer. Wagnerian music would be played whenever the Nazi tanks charged in their Blitzkrieg, and Romantic classical music and opera (including, you know, Wagner) would be constantly played on the Reich's radio when it wasn't broadcasting propaganda. Even in his downfall and eventual suicide Hitler envisioned himself as a tragic hero ala Götterdämmerung come to life, but instead of allowing his enemies to relish the victory of ruling over Germany, he intended on bringing all of Germany down with him in dramatic flames.
  
  This permanently smeared his character for people unfamiliar with his actual music. Thus, today any of his music or other dramatic sounding music will be unfairly associated with fascistic political views that Wagner never held. However, people who have actually understood his music dramas realize, in the spirit of what Romanticism actually stood for, they advocate something close to liberalism: power and authority corrupts, but love is good.
  • David Goldman, writing as Spengler in the Asia Times, wrote an article on why Wagner was popular and why the Nazis felt such affinity. There was hardly a political movement promising a new man for a new dawn that did not traffic in similar ideas.
  • Lampshaded in Edmund Crispin's mystery novel Swan Song. We have the sophomoric anti-Wagner comments of Oxford students met by a girl who tries to point out how illogical they are, and complaints by a German refugee (who, ironically, has delayed his return because Wagner is now taboo in Germany and he can only attend the operas in England.)
  • As if being appropriated by German fascists wasn’t bad enough, there is now also a Russian paramilitary organization called the Wagner Group, which effectively functions as Vladimir Putin’s private army. Anyone care to listen to some music to invade Crimea to?
  • The State of Israel has long had something of an unofficial ban on the performance of Wagner's music. There's been some movement on that front in recent years, but it is understandably a rather contentious issue.
• A literal example would be the Hohenfriedberger March, supposedly written by Frederick the Great, about the Battle of Hohenfreidberg, where his Prussians crushed the Austrian attempt to remove him from Silesia.
  • This march was also used in a number of Allied propaganda films from World War Two as something of a leitmotif for German and Axis militarism, most notably in the first Why We Fight installment (the march is played over increasingly belligerent footage of marching German, Japanese and Italian soldiers, picking up more bass and booming drums with every repetition) and a post VE-Day training film for US occupation troops called Here is Germany.
• Another literal example would be the Düppeler Schanzen-Sturmmarsch written by the Prussian march composer Johann Gottfried Piefke during the Second Schleswig War against Denmark in 1864. It was created specifically to be played on the front-lines by a military orchestra during the Prussian attack on the Danish forces in the Battle of Dybbøl. As the Prussian army had expected, the outnumbered Danes had their positions completely overrun and suffered a crushing defeat, and their fate as the losers of the war was effectively sealed.
• "Preußens Gloria" ("Glory of Prussia"), a song still played by the German Army, is a quintessential example. It was also played over the newsreel footage of the German parade in Paris during the acclaimed BBC series "The World At War".
• As composer to Louis XIV, JB Lully made a lot of this music:
  • La Marche des Combattants.
  • Marche des Mousquetaires.
  • Marche des Mousquetaires Noirs.
• Later on, Napoléon Bonaparte would march his Grande Armee into Russia to the rousing strains of "La Victoire est a nous". Listen to it, and then try and say you don't want to be a world-conqueror.
  • Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture" is an inversion of the trope, since it celebrates Russia's victory over France when Napoleon tried to invade. Less "music to invade to" and more "music to kick the ass of whoever is invading."
• Gustav Holst's Mars is music to invade something to—and given that the work's full title is "Mars, the Bringer of War," deliberately so. It sounds very martial, though it would be kind of hard to march to because of the time signature (it's written in 5/4; most marches are 2/4, 2/2, or 6/8).
  • The reason for that odd meter is to give the listener a disquieting feeling of nervousness and aggression. It works. Don't listen to it while driving your car!
  • The piece was composed on the eve of the First World War. So, music to invade Belgium by?
• Rammstein, for obvious reasons.
  • The cover of the band's debut album◊ Herzeleid featured a shirtless photo of the members; leading to some critics and audiences accusing them of depicting themselves as 'Herrenmenschen' (the master race), and in turn, promoting racist/Nazi/Aryan values.
  • The band wrote "Links 2-3-4" as a response to accusations of Nazism, but since the song's based on a German drill instructor's chant, and you're not going to pick up on the "We're left-wing, dammit!" message in the lyrics if you don't actually speak German, the message didn't exactly get through. To wit, the Trope Naming review was of Mutter, the album containing "Links 2-3-4". The fact that the marching cadence is actually the one used by the pre-Nazi German Communist Party is also missed by most people. Perhaps the band thought their listeners were geniuses.
  • "Amerika", a song poking fun at America, contains a Gratuitous English part to avoid another backfire. But some listeners still didn't catch on.
  • "Deutschland" is a harsh criticism of the band towards their parent country and its history, however this is evident only to German-speakers. As for the rest, the song, and especially the video accompanying it, may border on Misplaced Nationalism.
• Probably everything said about the band "Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft" ten years before Rammstein can be copypasted without change, except the name...
• Industrial Metal bands other than Rammstein are also accused of this. German band KMFDM was accused of this in the aftermath of the Columbine massacre (the shooters were both huge fans of the band), which also caused them to gain a reputation as "Music to Shoot Up Your School To".^note They later recorded "Me & My Gun" on the 2009 album Blitz as a Take That! towards the Columbine gunmen. They used this trope as far back as their first commercial album, What Do You Know, Deutschland?, whose cover art is a man beating a war drum while a city is being bombed behind him.
• Another good example that fits the bill is Deathstars. To make things even more interesting, it sounds kind of like what would Rammstein be if Till Lindemann sang in English (Whiplasher's voice is VERY similar to Lindemann's). Also they, um, tend to dress like this.◊
• A Stock Phrase to describe the music of French Avant-Garde Music band Magma, which basically sounds like Richard Wagner, Carl Orff and Frank Zappa made a band.
• E Nomine has some songs that raised questions, such as Ring der Nibelungen, in that case due to fair parts being march music and repeated mentions to a 'Reich'. It's based on the Opera by Wagner.
• Ludwig van Beethoven also gets, at times, used as the background music for scenes of German fascism. Beethoven would be rolling in his grave if he knew, since he was a liberal democrat^note small-l, small-d if there ever was one. He was in full support of The French Revolution; dedicated his Third Symphony (Eroica) to Napoleon when he was a good general of the Revolution; promptly un-dedicated it when Napoleon betrayed the Revolution to become Emperor; and his Ode to Joy is a setting of a poem calling for "all men to be brothers" and various other classically liberal lines.
  • For bonus points, the text of "Ode to Joy" is adapted from a poem by Schiller, the poet-playwright who celebrated the striving for liberty, equality, and fraternity in play after play. The best part? In Schiller's version, the quoted line went "Beggars become princes' brothers." If anything, Beethoven was more liberal than Schiller.
    • For extra super-duper special bonus points, "Ode to Joy" is the anthem of the European Union, which — whatever you think of it as it is now — grew out of a desire to get everyone to stop invading things, please, can't we all just get along? The anthem doesn't include Schiller's words — not because the sentiment was disapproved of, but because it would be a bit weird having an anthem for all of Europe that had lyrics in German, or indeed any other language.
  • Beethoven's Fifth Symphony was used by the Allies as a motif in propaganda films ('V' for 'Victory' and fate knocking at Nazi Germany's door). Helpfully illustrated by Donald Duck here (starting at about 2:30, and proceeding throughout the rest of the clip ). The first four notes of the Fifth Symphony (which spell "V" in Morse code) are still widely-known in France for being the opening leitmotif to the French-language BBC broadcast during World War II.
• "Das Deutschlandlied," better known as "Deutschland Über Alles", whose first line translates "Germany over all", is assumed to refer to the goal of Germany to Take Over the World. In truth, the song was written by a 19th-century liberal, who wanted Germans to put aside petty provincial distinctions (such as being Prussian, Bavarian, or Austrian), eschew the divisive and reactionary petty states, and think of themselves as united Germans above all else. He was, in fact, expressing a desire for German unity, not domination. The third stanza is today's national anthem of Germany (its first line is "Unity and Justice and Freedom", which sounds way more peaceful).
  • Also, the "Deutschlandlied" was intended to be sung as a drinking song for politically-minded men at beer gardens and suchlike; the second verse (which hardly anyone sings anymore) is a celebration of "German women, German loyalty, German wine, and German song", and the original writer included an alternate ending for the third stanza that calls for a toast!
  • Older Than Radio: The melody comes from Joseph Haydn's hymn to Kaiser Franz of Austria, which he then used as the theme for the second movement of the "Emperor" String Quartet (hence the name). Haydn's Kaiser hymn was, incidentally, inspired by hearing God Save The King on a trip to London and deciding that if the mere King of Great Britain got a song, why not the Holy Roman Emperor?
• Liszt's LES PRELUDES also gets tarred because a theme from it was used to introduce news (or propaganda) bulletins on Deutschlandsender during the war.
• Industrial music, which is relatively popular in Germany, often gets accused of being National Socialist. In particular, bands like Front 242 and Nitzer Ebb (the latter of which deliberately cultivated a militaristic, Germanic image, and neither of which were actually German) were on the receiving end of this accusation regularly.
  • Industrial act Laibach very deliberately invoked this trope and made dramatic, Germanic-sounding, martial music. They pushed the nationalism angle to the point of issuing passports and claiming to have formed their own state. They're Slovenes. Laibach is the German name of Slovenia's capital (Ljubljana), and their shtick is to troll to make fascists look stupid, having anticipated that post-communist Eastern Europe would see a revival of far-right nationalist movements and seeking to nip the power of fascist iconography in the bud by associating it with ridiculous kitsch. "Tanz Mit Laibach", for instance, states that they dance with Ado Hinkel rather than Adolf Hitler.
  • Laibach turned this on a classic Queen song with their cover of "One Vision", titled "Geburt einer Nation". The original song is generally held to have been either about Martin Luther King, Jr. or inspired by Queen's Live Aid performance, while Laibach's version translates it into German and gives it a far more martial feel but keeps virtually all of the lyrics word-for-word. Suddenly, lines like "one flesh, one bone, one true religion" don't sound so uplifting.
• Industrial Metal project Hanzel und Gretyl (which usually sings in Gratuitous German, but is composed of Americans originally from Greece) deliberately invoked this in their album Uber Alles. They wanted an album that invoked every single German cliche imaginable, so they went for what they called the "obvious German cliche." Some song titles include "Third Reich From The Sun" and "SS Deathstar Supergalactik." The album was banned in Germany. Since this means the songs are not legally listed by the GEMA (a copyright institution that handles many things including usage of music on webportals), the music can be freely found on YouTube. The album 2012 is similar in style, but isn't not banned.
• The genre of Power Metal is also a case of this trope. The Power Metal band Blind Guardian, for instance, are fantasy geeks that make bombastic, Teutonic-sounding Heavy Mithril. Unsurprisingly, they are accused of Nazism. The band, or at least vocalist/songwriter Hansi Kürsch, is reportedly a left-leaning liberal. They don't talk about politics much, though.
  • There are some actual National Socialist metal bands, some of which indulge in Viking mythology to the point of practicing racist variants of Asatru (Norse neo-Paganism), but such groups make up only a very small minority of metal acts. In recent years, the rise of folk metal and viking metal has been met with a rise of paranoia from anti-Nazi activists, leading to bands' gigs being protested for something as innocent as including Germanic runes in their logos or album art — often, ironically, in Germany. One such case was with the recent Paganfest tour. The bands responded with surprising restraint.
• The Mexican National Anthem, which is extremely Teutonic and military.
• Kraftwerk got their share of this too, mainly for their cold, modernist, inhuman aesthetic. And for being German.^note  Which makes it very ironic that Florian Schneider was part Jewish....
• A lot of Imperial German marches were recycled by the Nazis, and so have since become associated with them. Probably the best example is the Königgrätzer Marsch, written to commemorate the victory of Prussia over Austria in 1866, but best known for being played at the book burning in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
• Joy Division's first EP had a black-and-white picture of a blonde Hitler Youth member beating a drum on its cover. Then they were surprised that people thought they were Nazis — their name was a reference to the Nazi regime's kidnapping of women to serve as sex slaves in Army Brothels, via the 1955 novel House of Dolls. When the band reformed, they kept the joke by renaming the themselves New Order.
• Quite a few Neofolk acts make heavy usage of fascist/militaristic imagery. It doesn't help that a minority of them *cough*Boyd Rice*cough* actually are fascists^note To be fair, Rice has never actually been confirmed as a Nazi beyond any reasonable skepticism; while he has been involved in some things that are pretty damning, the man is notoriously prone to fucking with people and it's not out of the realm of possibility that it's all an elaborate ruse just to generate controversy.. Von Thronstahl are in fact confirmed as Nazis.
  • Don't forget its derivative form: Martial Industrial too, in fact this one is pretty much invoked.
• The memetic Eurobeat song "Gas Gas Gas" by Manuel, which, in the general Eurobeat tradition, is just a car anthem with sexual undertones, became an unfortunate example of this once it started getting used in YouTube videos that associated the word 'gas' with the gas chambers of Auschwitz. The Christchurch mosque shooter, who livestreamed his killing spree, even played the song on his car stereo as he was speeding away from the scene of the crime. The song itself is Italian, but it features numerous traits shared with other victims of this trope, such as its operatic chants, steady thumping beat, and grandiose production. The enthusiasm with which Manuel screams his lines becomes truly morbid when heard through this lens. Like most Eurobeat vocalists, not much is known about Manuel himself, but he has been reportedly outraged by these memes and has tried hard to discourage them to no avail.
• tool's "Die Eier Von Satan" seems to be channeling this trope for comedic and ironic effect. The song combines grinding guitars industrial percussion with growling German vocals that frequently rise to a crescendo that is met with rapturous applause by a thronging crowd. The lyrics turn out to be a recipe for hash cookies. Even the ominous sounding name (literally "The Eggs of Satan" and figurately "Satan's Testicles") is a German pun. The singer repeatedly screams in German "And no eggs," so "The Eggs of Satan" contain no eggs.
• Oddly enough, the Death Metal band Vader gets this a lot due to the video for "Cold Demons", which heavily features WWII footage of Panzer tanks. This accusation is ridiculous when you learn that the band is Polish. Not that Polish Nazi bands don't exist; Vader just isn't one of them.
• Inverted with "Never Again" by Disturbed, which is a pissed-off Jewish Heavy Metal musician yelling at neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers.
• Ditto for "Again We Rise" by Lamb of God, which mocks neo-Confederates as Lower-Class Louts buying into a set of prepackaged lies sold to them by opportunistic politicians, saying that they'd be among the first to die in a real "second Civil War".
• Swedish band Sabaton get this a lot. They make bombastic power metal, their vocalist rolls his Rs in a very particular way, and most of their songs are about WW I and II, quite a few of them from the perspective of German forces. Disregard that they have several songs from the perspective of the nations fighting against Nazi Germany as well as definite anti-war anthems, and that their eight minute epic about the Nazis' rise to power is called Rise of Evil. One of their songs, "Counterstrike", is about the Israeli victory in the Six-Day War. They also have three songs ("40:1", "Uprising", and "Inmate 4859") celebrating the Polish soldiers who fought off the Nazis, making their music a case of "Music To Defend Poland To". Particularly funny would be "Panzerkampf", which is often flagged on YouTube as "inapproppriate", despite its lyrics in clear and unambiguous English describing the Soviet counterattack at Kursk, which finally broke the invasion. The album Coat of Arms also has a song titled "The Final Solution" which portrays the Holocaust as a horrible and condemnable thing, albeit with some lyrics that sound very unfortunate out of context. ^note "Start the Holocaust, the Reich will rise!" and "Enter the gates, Auschwitz awaits!" It is also said that for a while, the band stopped playing this song live due to being uncomfortable with fans headbanging to a song about the Holocaust.
  • Notably, they also closed their 2020 Wembley show with the screens showing an image of the band overlaid with "Make love, not war" (after "Drinking to the UK" and waving a British flag around), making their position rather clear.
• Type O Negative were accused of being Nazis during their first European tour, due to their song "Der Undermensch", which was written about "social parasites", such as drug dealers and welfare cheats. The hilarious irony of this is the fact that their keyboard player, Josh Silver is Jewish.
  • Which led to them writing "We Hate Everyone" and "Kill All The White People" for their next album. It is likely many did not realise they were sarcasitcally poking fun at the situation.
• Slayer's "Angel of Death" made the band face accusations of being Nazi sympathizers for writing a song about Josef Mengele, a doctor who performed heinous experiments on Jewish concentration camp prisoners. While the band denies condoning his actions and claims they wrote merely the song because they thought it was an interesting subject, they're still sometimes labeled as neo-Nazis. Seeing as the song is performed from the perspective of Mengele (or, at least, one of his lackeys), and sounds downright gleeful, it's no wonder some people are unconvinced. Adding to this, on one of their previous albums, they have a song called "The Final Command" which includes the lyrics "Machine gun tactics of the German command, born with the power of God in his hand." which is referring to Adolf Hitler
  • Slayer is notorious in general for attracting fans with neo-Nazi/white supremacist sympathies, which is ironic because not only is half the band (at least their classic lineup) Latino, but neither of said Latino members were even born in the US. Of the two remaining members, one is Jewish.
• The German band Scooter, simply because their vocalist is a blond haired, blue eyed, tall guy who shouts at people to "Move Their Ass" and to "Get Ready For The Next Attack". It also doesn't help the band love wearing matching uniforms, as seen on the cover for the album "Under The Radar Over The Top", and the singles "The Night" and "The Age Of Love".
• A lot of the German military marches used in World War II such as "Die Wacht Am Rhein", "Erika", and "Lili Marleen". Even though this last was eagerly adopted by the British, who heard their German opposition singing it in North Africa, and given English lyrics. Ironically, the two latter songs have entirely innocent lyrics about soldiers pining for their girlfriends^note And flowers — "Erika" is German for "Heather" both as a flower and as a female name. without any hint of invasion-mindedness.
• The Blue Öyster Cult's live rabble-rouser ME262, which namechecks Hitler and Goering and which tells the story of the last days of WW2 through the PoV of a jet fighter ace, has a middle eight punctuating guitar stings with the sound of falling bombs and marching jackboots. Despite the fact the BOC have names like Bloom and Pearlman and Roeser, and by inference belong to the last ethnicity to be sympathetic to Nazism, they were accused of Nazi sympathies.
• The Ramones had goofy semi-hits like "Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World" and "Kommando" that traded on Nazi imagery. A few listeners didn't get the joke, and didn't realize that Joey was Jewish.
• Gothic Industrial singer Yade often invokes this, with a Nazi-inspired uniform and songs about revolutions, though the lyrics are either anarchistic, or too vague to associate with an ideology. It doesn't help he is Swiss-German, which straddles the very uncomfortable line between "Oh he is not German then" and the accusation that Swiss Nazis (or supporters) were Karma Houdinis in the post-war Europe.
• German Industrial/EBM group X-Fusion invokes this in "Follow Your Leader". It is peppered with voice clips of Hitler from rallies and has a somewhat militaristic tune. But the lyrics are actually a rage-filled tirade against those who followed Hitler, and those who stood by the sides and let it happen. Arguably, it is also a general rant against tyranny.
  Follow your leader, you misguided fools. Follow your leader, lest you break any rules.
• Parodied in one of They Might Be Giants' spoken-word intros for live shows, in which they insist that they are "not an easy-listening Nazi-rock band". Of course, nobody could ever confuse TMBG with Nazis, especially given that their biggest folk influences are polka and klezmer.
• Invoked by Amon Düül II in Deutsch Nepal.
• Liers In Wait pretty much took this trope and ran with it, including blatant Nazi imagery in the lyrics and album artwork.
• Madness, quite strangely, have been accused of being (depending on the source) Nazis, members of the right-wing National Front, or just fascists in general, in no small part because they ended up having quite a skinhead (as in National Front / BNP) following during the 1980s. This is in spite of the fact that they wrote anti-racist songs like "Embarrassment", which is explicitly about the sax player Lee Thompson's anger over negative reactions by some of his older relatives to his sister being pregnant by a black man, and "Waiting for the Ghost Train", which was a massive Take That! against apartheid. The extreme-right-wing element probably latched onto them as they were the only major 2 Tone group to have an all-white line-up.
• Zig-Zagged by German Industrial act Funker Vogt, who make aggressive, military-themed music but are very anti-war. One of their members specifically expressed disgust at the idea of his band being mistaken for Nazis. However, after the original vocalist Jens Kästel retired, he was replaced by Sacha Korn, whose works have been featured on a far-right compilation CD. On the other hand, Korn has expressed a desire to keep politics out of his music and none of his Funker Vogt songs are military themed.
• To an extent, "In the Flesh" and "Waiting for the Worms" from Pink Floyd's The Wall, where the protagonist pictures himself as a neo-Nazi leader during a drug-fueled breakdown. In between them is "Run Like Hell", which is far too catchy and poppy to qualify.
• Invoked by "fashwave", a subgenre of synthwave and vaporwave made by avowed neo-fascists and alt-rightists, many of whom turned to electronic music out of both a rejection of the "African rhythms" of rock and its derivatives like punk and metal on one hand, and a celebration of technology (which they see as the domain of white people and Western civilization) on the other. Whereas most non-fascist synthwave and vaporwave artists, such as John Carpenter and Vektroid, use the style to satirize and snark at neoliberalism, consumerism, and yuppie capitalism, fashwave has been described as "the neon-lit cityscapes of synthwave visuals... populated with red-eyed cyborg death squads", appropriating the dystopian satire of '80s culture employed in films like Escape from New York and RoboCop (1987), and in the many synthwave and vaporwave artists who have taken after such, and unironically "embrac[ing] that decade's grim sci-fi forecasts as paradise." That said, given that fashwave, like most of synthwave and vaporwave, tends not to contain lyrics, it's practically impossible to tell simply by hearing if you're listening to a fashwave song unless the artist decided to put in more obvious touches, such as martial sounds or snippets of far-right speeches. Most of what constitutes of fashwave literally relies on the title and thumbnail the musician gave it.
• Morrissey has been accused of having racist or ethno-nationalist opinions for years, due to his use of British patriotic or homoerotic skinhead imagery, and the lyrics of songs like "Bengali in Platforms" and "Asian Rut". In 2012 he settled a libel suit against the NME over a 2007 interview which he claimed had been maliciously distorted to make him appear to be expressing anti-immigration views. However, he pretty well burned his boats on the subject with two incidents in 2017: first, after a suicide bombing at a pop concert in Manchester, when he tweeted that he blamed immigration for the attack (by a British-born perpetrator) and that politicians were too frightened or too PC to blame Islam for terrorism as it deserved to be; and secondly when, during a live radio performance, he expressed support for Anne Marie Waters, a very anti-Muslim unsuccessful candidate for leadership of the nationalistic UK Independence Party.

Theatre

• In Margin for Error, the Consul buys a record of Richard Wagner's "Liebestod," but puts on the wrong record first:
  Max: I—I was just listening to the music—
  Consul: Yes, very soothing. Hitler and I also have Wagner in common.
  Max: That's not Wagner. That's Mendelssohn. Played by Heifetz.

Video Games

• In Metal Gear Solid V, you can upgrade your attack helicopter with a set of loudspeakers. You can then play this trope straight by going on the battlefield while listening to Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries... or sit back and enjoy the show of your trusty chopper mowing down helpless enemy troops with its dual miniguns while cheerfully playing the 80's synth-pop hit Take On Me. Your choice.
• Invoked in Mother 3, wherein the Pigmask Army uses themes that are half-colonial American, half-Wagnerian. This is best heard in the orchestrated soundtrack.
• Attack of the Airships,Super Mario Galaxy's remix of the airship stage theme from Super Mario Bros. 3, not only sounds similar to the Imperial March and Mars, Bringer of War, but is paired with Bowser's military invasion of the Mushroom Kingdom where he takes Peach's castle through outright blitzkrieg.
• Hell March from the game Command and Conquer: Red Alert, an Alternate History where the Nazis never existed but World War 2 was instead fought against the expansionist Soviets.
  • Prior to the invasion of the Ukraine, this could be seen and heard a lot on YouTube as backing music dubbed on to triumphal marches by the modern Russian Army, or to stock footage of Russian Army field exercises. For some reason these vids are hard to locate today. (October 2022)
• Combine Harvester, a track from the Half-Life 2 soundtrack that sadly doesn't appear in the game. It combines (heh, get it?) this trope with alien sounds and serves (or rather, would have served) as the theme for the Combine, which has similarities to both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.
• The Leitmotif for Targent in Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask and its sequel, where said organization serves as the Big Bad.
• The general theme for the Luftrausers sounds rather Wagnerian once it gets going. Though this is likely intentional since your allies all have a rather Nazi aesthetic to them.
• The ''Axis theme'' from Hearts of Iron IV, which serves as music for the Axis nations to invade Poland, Greece and China to.
  • That should be "Music to get invaded by Greece to".
• In the soundtracks composed by Masato Nakamura for the first two Sonic the Hedgehog games, all of Dr. Eggman's boss themes and the Wing Fortress theme fit this trope, as to be expected from a world-conquering Mad Scientist who even made his own Death Star.
• In Fallout 3 the Enclave, a fascist remnant of the pre-war US Government uses various patriotic American ditties such as “Yankee Doodle”, “Battle Hymn of the Republic”, “Stars and Stripes Forever”, “America (the beautiful)”, Dixie”, the Marine Corps Hymn and modified, sped up versions of “The Washington Post” and “Hail Columbia” as music to invade the Capital Wasteland to.

Web Video

• Invoked in Hellsing Ultimate Abridged as a prelude to the attack on London.
  The Major: ...ze accompaniment tonight has been selected by popular survey... and I hope you're as excited as I am! Ze song tonight is ze most appropriate for... ironic reasons. Ze best reasons! But first, a toast... to ze answer of an age-old question.
  (the attack starts to the tune of Edwin Starr's "War")

Western Animation

• The "Breen National Anthem", leitmotif of Æon Flux's primary antagonists, has a deliberate Wagnerian sound to it. Originally it was meant to represent a single character, a very Germanic-looking soldier in one of the original Liquid Television shorts (who died a minute into his first and only appearance), but the music was kept because it was felt that it suited the nation of Bregna's authoritarian character.
• In one Family Guy special, Alex Borstein objected to Seth McFarlane singing "Edelweiss" on account of her being Jewish. Nevermind that the song was written for the extremely anti-Nazi The Sound of Music.
• The Simpsons Mr. Burns has a taped version of 'Ride of the Valkyries' ready for when he was going to get Homer's mother arrested for being among the protesters who destroyed his biological weapon lab. Unfortunately, the music immediately switches to 'Waterloo' by ABBA.
  Mr. Smithers: I'm sorry, Sir. I must have taped over that.
• In Robot Chicken sketch, a radio DJ enthusiastically introduces Rammstein knock-off/parody song, as "Get 'em, They're Different by The Nazis".

Real Life

• Ottoman Turks used this trope to intimidate their enemies, making this trope Older Than Steam.
• During The Vietnam War, the Army actually did use music like Wagner to intimidate North Vietnamese forces. The iconic scene in Apocalypse Now is indeed based in fact.
  • The scene in Apocalypse Now was taken, nearly frame by frame, from an old Wochenschau Report (starting at three minutes) about the German conquest of Kreta in 1941.
• Fryderyk Chopin's Polonaise in A major, Op. 40, No. 1 is an inversion of the trope. It was played on Polish national radio the day Germany attacked, thus making it "music to be invaded by Nazi Germany to".
• After having invaded Poland from the East and having been invaded himself by the guys who had invaded Poland from the West, Stalin ordered a song for the Great Patriotic War to be written. ''The Sacred War'', listen yourself. Like the Imperial March from Star Wars, this one is somewhat atypical in that it's in a minor key, though it uses major chords in the chorus.
• The Red Army used patriotic marches, broadcast at German lines, as a sort of psychological warfare. The Strauss Radetzky March interspersed with dry statements like "Every ninety seconds a German dies in Russia" were fairly effective. Especially when the music played while tanks attacked.
• There is truth to the legend that SS panzer divisions, at the Battle of Kursk in 1943, attacked with Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries playing over the radio.
• The concert Music for a Time of War.
• Inverted by Dmitri Shostakovich’s "Leningrad Symphony", which became greatly beloved in Russia as "Music to Defend Mother Russia To".
• A minor sadness in 2022, on top of all the other things, is that stirring Russian military songs such as V'Put!^note Into Battle and Svyaschennaya Voina ^note "the Sacred War", referenced above with link, although they celebrate the USSR's great achievement of defeating Nazi Germany and are as justified as a war song can get, just can't be played now without, at the least, a sour taste of black irony and cynicism. Current events have tainted them. These are, in fact, Music To Invade Ukraine To. (On the plus side though, the Ukrainians have helpfully supplied their own version, which constitutes Music To Invade Ukraine To To Defend Ukraine From Those Who Listen To Music To Invade Ukraine To To.)
• Most Islamist extremist groups reject all instrumental music as un-Islamic (the Taliban has even killed people simply for listening to music), and instead use a cappella religious chants known as nasheeds. During its campaigns in the mid-2010s, the Islamic State recorded several nasheeds extolling their war, the most famous being "Salil al-Sawarim" ("Clashing of Swords" or "Clanging of Swords"), which has been largely purged from most websites due to its subject matter and who it's celebrating (though it can still be found fairly easily). The associations caused even many non-jihadi nasheeds to take on similar connotations in non-Muslim communities; a YouTube search for "ISIS music" will bring up playlists filled with nasheeds, the comments for which are often filled with jokes about both terrorism and the FBI and NSA surveilling everybody who listens to them. There have also been examples of jihadi hip-hop songs, although hip-hop music is still very far removed from what typically constitutes this trope.

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