The Heroes' Symphony op. 72, composed in 1936, is to be understood as a tribute to the soldiers who died in the World War. The later deliberately misinterpreted patriotic stance of the composer Ferndinand Wilhelm Kranzhoff directs, in the words of German poets, our gaze to the German nation on behalf of all victims of a senseless slaughter for the aims of an unscrupulous political elite.
As the composer, only 36 years old, fell in combat barely four years later at the beginning of the Second World War, this work seems like a foreboding foresight into one's own fate.