I … would like … to declare simply under oath that I have never been a member of the National Socialist Party, and that I never sympathized with it nor engaged in propaganda for it. My only relations to Mr. Goebbels’s Department of Propaganda are the result of the following: having been a leading German musician for forty years, and having worked, as founder and longtime president of the Genossenschaft deutscher Tonsetzer [Guild of German Composers], on a reorganization of STAGMA [ Staatlich genehmigte Gesellschaft zur Verwertung musikalischer Aufführungsrechte (Corporation for the Utilization of Musical Performance Rights)], I was in 1933 appointed by Dr. Goebbels in Berlin, without being asked for my agreement, to the post of President of the new Reichsmusikkammer; I did not reject this honorific post immediately, since I did not know the new men in power and believed that I could, perhaps, do some good for music and musicians. When I realized after a year that my position was only a front and that I had no influence whatsoever on the workings of the Reichsmusikkammer, I was relieved from my post by Dr. Goebbels on the basis of a letter to my friend and collaborator Stefan Zweig , intercepted and used against me by the Gestapo; in the letter I had spoken critically about the Reichsmusikkammer . For ten years, I have not had any dealings with the Department and the Party, except for plenty of harassments and hostilities.