In the 1930s and 1940s, German residents were just as enamored of jazz as everyone else, but Nazi leaders saw it as much more than mere entertainment: they saw it as a threat. For one thing, the Nazis felt that jazz lyrics encouraged a level of sexual permissiveness that was at odds with the standards they set. But more deeply, jazz represented the enemy—both literally, in the sense of its being American, and figuratively in the sense that its African roots made it racially degenerate, an offense to Aryan purity. To enjoy jazz music was to thumb your nose at the Nazi cause. There were also those who claimed that American Jews were behind the whole jazz movement, and the Nazi anti-Semitic rage only added to their distrust of jazz.

Hitler's government tried repeatedly and in various ways (though with mixed success) to outlaw jazz. Playing, listening to, or owning recordings of jazz music was made illegal—and that included listening to jazz from abroad on a shortwave radio. The very worst form of jazz, from the Nazi perspective, was swing, which was especially popular among young people. As shown in the 1993 film Swing Kids, German youth frequently used swing music and dancing as their outlet for rebellion—in this case, rebellion against the Nazi values in general and the Hitler Youth in particular. Many of the young people who were caught at covert swing parties were sent to concentration camps. But, of course, every attempt to wipe out swing just galvanized its fans further. The surest way to make something desirable, after all, is to forbid it.

This much of the story is relatively well known. But there was another side to the swing phenomenon in Nazi Germany. Just as the government was doing its best to stamp out swing domestically, it was secretly using its very own swing band to spread propaganda abroad.

Josef Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister, was already in charge of radio broadcasts to the U.S. and Britain intended to demoralize and confuse the public, if not actually arouse pro-Nazi sympathy. Hitler suggested that these broadcasts should include music, just as comparable anti-Nazi broadcasts by the allies did. So Goebbels took it upon himself to assemble a group of talented swing musicians who could discreetly put Hitler's message to toe-tapping music. The group was headlined by singer Karl Schwedler, who anglicized his name to "Charlie." Along with an array of instrumentalists, including conductor Lutz Templin, he began recording in 1940, and shortly thereafter the group became known as "Charlie and his Orchestra."