The Peculiar Truth about the Jazz POW of WWII

• The Nazis hated jazz. They considered it inferior. During WWII, they would never permit that form of music to be played at prison camps. Instead, only classical music could be performed, if at all.

• But a black man being held prisoner at the St. Denis camp in Nazi-occupied France, Arthur Briggs, was a renowned jazz trumpeter. He helped bring jazz music to the continent and achieved fame as the Louis Armstrong of Europe.

• 1940: The leader of the Nazi invasion of France, Otto von Stulpnagel, was coming to St. Denis. A special musical performance was demanded in his honor. Would Briggs and his band defiantly play jazz?

• At the turn of the 20th Century, Arthur Briggs was born on the Caribbean island of Grenada. In his teens, he emigrated to the US and settled in Harlem, although he claimed to have been raised in South Carolina. Throughout his life, he hid the fact that he was not a natural born US citizen.

• Young Arthur became a gifted trumpet player, and he got in on the ground floor of the hot new musical style called jazz. He played with some of the finest musicians of the burgeoning genre, including Sydney Bechet.

• After the First World War, he went overseas to perform, and Arthur Briggs essentially helped introduce Europe to jazz music.

• Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Briggs’ travels took him all across the continent, performing in various cities like London, Paris, Vienna, and Istanbul. He was well-received everywhere he went and settled in Berlin.

• He performed with legends like Django Reinhardt, Josephine Baker, Coleman Hawkins, and Marlene Dietrich. He was likened to America’s premier trumpeter, Louis Armstrong.

• World War II, 1940: Germany occupied France. Citizens were rounded up into internment camps.

• St. Denis was outside Paris. It wasn’t a labor camp and people wore their own clothing, but it was still a horrible place. Meals consisted of thin soup and bread. Heat and hot water became nonexistent. Wintertime was cruel.

• The prisoners were primarily British with some Australians and Canadians - mostly white folks but several Africans. Most of the black men held at the site were musicians who formed a classical orchestra.

• Briggs was assigned the task of blowing reveille every morning and ‘taps’ every evening. He also led the brass section of the camp’s orchestra.

• When Stulpnagel, the Nazi leader in France, announced his visit to St. Denis and demanded a concert, the prisoners had to erect a makeshift stage out of old crates.

• Stulpnagel requested the orchestra play Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Arthur Briggs, the lone black man onstage, performed the piece to perfection.

• The Nazi leader commended him and inferred that he “never thought it possible” for a black man to play so well. Briggs replied, “There’s a lot that you don’t know.”

• Stulpnagel did not react to the insult. Instead, he complimented Briggs again and then left.

• When France was liberated and the war ended, Briggs formed another band and kept performing jazz. In his later years, he settled in Paris and became a music teacher.

• He always claimed to be an American, despite spending very little of his life in the States. Then from his home in Paris, Arthur Briggs, the Louis Armstrong of Europe, died in 1991.