Gustav Havemann

After the death of his father, he was further educated by the husband of his sister Frieda, music director Ernst Parlow, the son of Albert Parlow, as well as Bruno Ahner, and played in the court orchestra in Schwerin before he went to the Universität der Künste Berlin in 1898, where one of his important teachers was Joseph Joachim.

In the early 1920s he founded the Havemann String Quartet with Georg Kühnau, Hans Mahlke and Adolf Steiner and gave concerts internationally.

[5] After the Nazi seizure of power he wrote to the Deutscher Konzertgeberbund on 2 April 1933: "The Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur will know how to prevent Jewish influence from remaining in Germany's musical life".

In addition, he worked intensively on the Gleichschaltung of German musical life, especially since he had become a member of the Presidential Council of the Reichsmusikkammer in November 1933.

Since this was not allowed to become public, the Minister of Propaganda had a version published in the newspapers the following day, stating that Havemann had been dismissed from his office on the grounds of incompetence.

[citation needed] According to yet another version, Gustav Havemann left the Reichsmusikkammer in February 1936 with the official explanation that this was "in no way defamatory, but purely factual".

The Universität der Künste Berlin, the successor entity to the Hochschule für Musik, reported the wartime loss of a 1719 Stradivarius violin, which is said to have been bequeathed to the school on 27 March 1943 by Dr Maria Alois Lautenschlager.

During World War II, Gustav Havemann, then living near Berlin, took custody of the violin for safekeeping.