The documentary The Last Musician of Auschwitz (BBC Two/BBC iPlayer) sets out the experiences of the musicians and composers of the concentration and extermination camp, whose liberation took place 80 years ago on 27 January. Anita Lasker-Wallfisch played the cello in the Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz; at 99 she is its last surviving member.

Her job – the camp had 15 orchestras and a music room – was to play marches as inmates were sent out to work in the morning, often in freezing temperatures, and to welcome them back (those still alive) in the evening. ‘We were scared stiff of playing wrong notes’, Lasker-Wallfisch recalls, ‘but better to be scared stiff to play the wrong notes than to look to the left and see the smoke coming out the chimney.’ One prisoner, who by chance was asked to play a game of cards with a bored SS guard, let slip that he had been a violinist; the guard immediately invited him to audition. His companion, laughing darkly, butted in: ‘And if you’re really good – you might get to live a little longer.’

‘It is a shocking realisation that music and the extermination of human beings can be in any way connected at all,’ says Raphael Wallfisch, son of Anita, and a celebrated cellist himself. Throughout the programme, his quartet perform in and around the ruins of the camp. Their first appearance restages – perhaps with shades of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, which saw perpetrators and victims relive their experiences across a nine-hour documentary – a story told by one survivor, who heard Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik played as she arrived in the camp: ‘It is enough to make you lose your sanity.’ They performed at the end of the railway tracks, after dark – what kind of ‘night music’ belongs in such a place?

The programme asks difficult questions about art and its place in the world. The philosopher Theodor Adorno’s dictum that ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbarism’ has been widely misconstrued. Adorno didn’t call for a prohibition on the creation of art ‘after Auschwitz’. Rather, he described a change in the chemistry of art, inevitable after the Holocaust and the historical fact of mass extermination.

For Adorno, the Holocaust sunders the apparent wholeness of human beings, their dignity, their capacity to appreciate and manifest beauty or capture experience through the established forms available to artists. To pretend that we can be elevated by the promised universality of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or the fineries of what Wagner in The Mastersingers of Nuremberg  called ‘Holy German Art’ is an act of supreme bad faith. For Adorno, any residual glow that emanates from the artwork after Auschwitz only heightens the shadow that has fallen on human beings.

It’s hard to dissent from this view when Lasker-Wallfisch describes playing the cello for Josef Mengele. After a long day committing unimaginable atrocities in his ‘infirmary’ – he had a special interest in experimenting on twins – he visited Lasker-Wallfisch. He asked her to perform Robert Schumann’s Träumerei, an exquisite miniature from –  sickeningly – his Kinderszenen, ‘scenes of childhood’.

The obscenity of Mengele’s actions are plain enough, but I found myself, irrationally, somehow furious with the music itself, that this elevated German Romantic tenderness – what Thomas Mann would call ‘Innerlichkeit’ – could so easily provide a comfort blanket to monstrosity. Isn’t it supposed to be better than that, and shouldn’t it make us better people? I learned a while ago of the story of Schiller’s piano, the premise of a recent composition by Lawrence Osborn, where the Nazi authorities tasked inmates at Buchenwald with making a reproduction of his instrument for display, so that the real one could be taken away for safe-keeping. They created a box with the outward appearance of the piano, but no strings, felt, hammers, or music inside it. German art as the ultimate fraud.

There is film and audio of the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler performing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony for Hitler’s birthday in 1942, with all the top Nazis arrayed in the audience. Furtwängler had elected to stay in Germany as the conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic because he believed someone had to try and save German culture from the Nazis – he hated Hitler and never joined the party, though his relationship with fascism is complex. But a similar disgrace hangs over hearing music – and words by Schiller – that attest universal brotherhood and human dignity thunderously applauded by Nazism. The performance itself almost collapses under these very contradictions, taken at a manic, self-destructive pace; every blow from the percussion feels like the music is blowing itself up from the inside.

Lasker-Wallfisch relays the story of Mengele with fierce disgust. (She is plainly a remarkable person, chiding her son for thoughtless phrasing as he warms up on a Bach cello suite). ‘How did I feel? I felt nothing. I played it as fast as possible, and said – “Get out”.’ Refusal would have meant death. It is a situation dramatised in Mieczysław Weinberg’s Holocaust opera The Passenger (1968). In its climactic scene, the prisoner Tadeusz is dragged before the commandant to play a waltz on his violin. Refusing, he strikes up a different dance, the conclusive Chaconne from Bach’s D minor partita. It’s a breathtaking musical coup de théâtre, with the vast, thunderous orchestral forces Weinberg employs, lacerating strings and fusillades of percussion, silenced in the face of a solo violin, which treads out Bach’s celestial variations. Until he is stopped.

What, then, could music do in the camps? As in The Passenger, it was a powerful act of resistance. Communal singing, even just humming, provided forms of solidarity and humanity that, as Szymon Laks put it, could help ‘heal the damaged psyche of the prisoners’. ‘It gives you self-respect’, one survivor said. ‘You are somebody.’

‘We didn’t need concerts – we needed food!’ remarked another, spotlighting the absurdity of music-making in such debased conditions. But as the documentary shows, they really did need music. I am reminded of Czech harpsichordist Zuzana Růžičková, who took a scrap of a Bach keyboard partita with her into Auschwitz and turned to it for comfort, like a holy relic; she survived to become one of the great performers of her age. We are told the story of Ilse Weber, who wrote lullabies and songs for the children in her care in Terezín; she reportedly sang the song Wiegala  to comfort them as they went together into the gas chamber.

Some of the musical works explored are vessels, arks: attempts to salvage the cultures the Nazis wanted to eradicate. A Roma folk song describes life in the camp and acts as testimony; Roseberry D’arguto wrote the Jewish Death Song in Yiddish as a preservation of a language that could have been wiped out. It adapts a folk song about ten brothers who are wine merchants, and die off one by one, to tell the story of the gas chambers. Syzmon Laks’ Third String Quartet was composed and rehearsed in secret, and draws on Polish folk themes in a gesture of nationalist defiance. ‘Musicians realised that they had a duty to save civilisation,’ said musicologist and composer Francesco Lotoro, who has collated many of the works created in the camps. ‘This music belongs to the future.’

The very simplicity of these works, delivered unaccompanied in the programme, mostly, with a little instrumental underlay added as they go on, has an unbearable poignancy, but also feels like an attempt to build music up from its very simplest elements, a single human cry turned into melody. Adam Kopycinski’s Lullaby (1941) for piano is made from unfussy musical means. Its melody is built around a fifth, the most fundamental interval or diatonic harmony. Stylistically, they make a striking contrast to the musical language formulated in response to this cataclysm by the avant-garde, who felt that tonality, pace Adorno, had gone up in the same smoke of the crematoria, and was no longer fit for purpose, such as in Schoenberg’s convulsive, explosive A Survivor from Warsaw. Though such music was directed outwards to an audience who needed to witness the witnesses, rather than those inside the wire.

The background to the Holocaust is told plainly by the journalist Jonathan Freedland, and scenes from Lasker-Wallfisch’s past are realised with some dramatic reconstruction. Some of the musical sequences, which also feature archive film and photomontage, offer well-worn images, though ones that never lose their power. This is a mixed blessing. I think they turn this very special music into a soundtrack and rob it of the autonomy and dignity that its existence asserts. But given a worrying collapse in the effectiveness of Holocaust education among Millennials and Gen Z, I can hardly fault the producers for feeling the need to set these images out, and throw the kitchen sink, in production terms, at what is unquestionably an urgent piece of public service and educational broadcasting.

If you can bear to hear more, and you should, then BBC Radio 3 has also something equally extraordinary to offer. Composer of the Week spotlights ‘Voices from Terezín’, the waypoint to the extermination camps. The material is remarkable. Viktor Ullmann’s choral piece Scha Schtil adapts a playful Jewish folk song into an account of hiding from the Gestapo; Hans Krása’s string trio Tanec  interleaves folk melodies with the thrumming of the trains in the background, a pre-echo, somehow, of Steve Reich’s later memorial Different Trains. We are guided through these musical jewels by Donald Macleod, whose restraint and grace affords these stories room to come to life. It is Radio 3 at its absolute finest, even if it sees humanity at its worst – and yet also at its most enduring.