[Doctor Stochastic]

The Nazi's actually preferred Johann Strauss to Wagner. Supposedly Strauss had a distant (I forgot how far) Jewish ancestor and that was hushed up.

Music was the only art that really flourished under the Nazi's. As Beethoven's fifth sympnony was used in SS initiation cecemonies (the transition from the third to the fourth movement accompanied with the opening of a curtain to cast light on the new initiates), could Beethoven be blamed for Nazism?

The plastic arts (painting, scuplture) were really in bad shape as Hitler had his own aesthetic on these matters (and IMHO he couldn't tell a hawk from a handsaw.)

[Nebullis]

As Beethoven's fifth sympnony was used in SS initiation cecemonies (the transition from the third to the fourth movement accompanied with the opening of a curtain to cast light on the new initiates), could Beethoven be blamed for Nazism?

Beethoven's music surely captures the frenetic drama of the Third Reich. The other arts didn't flourish but I can't say that Hitler was wrong in his taste, say, for Rembrandt. I would say that the rejection of the abstract in favor of realism is a matter of personal easthetics and not of morality or godliness as is often claimed in certain conservative circles.