Snakewood,
The whole matter with Karajan and the nazi party is completely blown out of proportion. If you actually look up what happened with Karajan you'll see that it's far from what most people say. This quote from another forum is a great summary of everything you should know:
"Anyway, it appears that Karajan filled out an application for party membership in April of 1933, a few days after the NSDAP had taken control of the administration of the small city of Ulm where he was employed as second conductor at the time. They started sacking political and cultural officials in masses in Ulm, as elsewhere throughout the country. Details are unclear, but it appears that K was approached by a party official in his home town of Salzburg, and it must have seemed a good idea to him then to fill out the form. However, that membership never became active.
The following year he was let go from his job in Ulm, not for political reasons, but apparently because he had outgrown the small provincial theater and that caused a lot of envy. People can be really mean.
Not only did he not actively pursue his party membership, but he also failed to register with the Reichsmusikkammer, the musicians' organization that everybody working as a professional musician had to be a member of.
He spent several months hanging around, mostly in Berlin, auditioning for jobs until he got a chance for a good job in Aachen. It was made very clear to him that he could have the job, but not without a party book.
There was also another problem: the NSDAP had actually been outlawed in Austria after some very violent incidents in 1933. As close as Austria and Germany have always been, it was not a good situation for an Austrian citizen in Germany right at that moment.
And then there is another fact that is almost universally unknown but very significant: you could not actually apply for a party membership between May 1, 1933 and some time in 1937. Why? Because the party wanted to be able to tell the "true followers" apart from the opportunists (they came to power in January of 1933 and seized more or less complete control of the country through a series of complex manouevres in the following 3 months).
The only way you could get a membership was through invitation by official channels, and that is apparently what happened in 1935 to take care of that "little formality".
His membership did not get him any advantages, however. In fact, his career massively stalled and almost completely fell apart during the later years of the regime. He was denied interesting jobs like at the opera in Dresden and was basically stuck with a number of concerts every year with the Staatskapelle Berlin, his job in Aachen (I don't recall how long he stayed there), and random engagements here and there.
Hitler disliked K and found him arrogant because he always conducted without a score. He blamed K for an incident during a performance of "Die Meistersinger" in which the singer (who was drunk IIRC) lost his way and decreed that everyone had to conduct from a score (Hitler decreed that, not the singer). K put a score on his desk, but it was the wrong way around and he turned the pages randomly once in a while. That did not go unnoticed and probably didn't go down very well either...
Neither did the fact that he married a young lady who was by NS racial definitions "quarter Jewish". He was ordered to divorce her, but refused. According to K, he was called before a party inquisition commitee and resigned his membership. Although there are hints that such a hearing actually occurred, he was not able to produce evidence of his resignation after the war.
In addition to this, the party officials (mostly Goering and Gobbels) played a lot of political games in which leading cultural personalities also saw themselves involved. There was a lot of bad blood between him and Furtwängler who apparently thought that K used political connections to work against him. However, there is no evidence at all that K did that.
I think it is quite obvious that somebody as decidedly individualist as K could not have been too convinced of an ideology like the NSDAP's. On the other hand, somebody as intelligent as him is not really believeable if he claimes that he didn't really see what was going on.
Still, as has been said before, there is no point in judging people from where we are. None of us (luckily) finds himself in a similar situation."
