[2] Upon reading Mein Kampf, Louise urged the family to flee, but Paul demurred, commenting that "Oh, no, this is our Germany, the country of great philosophers and artists".

[4] Paul and his brothers were sent to the Dachau concentration camp,[2] though an uncle successfully traded their freedom by giving the Nazis the family's estate in Venezuela.

During his thirty years with that paper, he was twice the recipient of ASCAP's Deems Taylor Award (1974 and 1978) and in 1982 won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.

[2][5][6][7][8] In 1966, Bernheimer became a faculty member of the Rockefeller program for the training of music critics at University of Southern California.

In 1982 he became an honorary member of a chapter of Pi Kappa Lambda, the national music honor society.