I am going to rescind any possible insinuation I made that the VPO's racist/chauvinistic attitude was in any way connected to Nazism and apologize to all who took offense at my wrong statements. I had earlier said that the VPO should audition candidates behind a curtain but found this in Wiki:
There have also been claims that the orchestra has not always accepted members who are visibly members of ethnic minorities.[69] In 1970, Otto Strasser, the former chairman of the Vienna Philharmonic, wrote in his memoirs, "I hold it incorrect that today the applicants play behind a screen; an arrangement that was brought in after the Second World War in order to assure objective judgments. I continuously fought against it... because I am convinced that to the artist also belongs the person, that one must not only hear, but also see, in order to judge him in his entire personality. [...] Even a grotesque situation that played itself out after my retirement was not able to change the situation. An applicant qualified himself as the best, and as the screen was raised, there stood a Japanese before the stunned jury. He was, however, not engaged, because his face did not fit with the Pizzicato-Polka of the New Year's Concert."[70] In 1996, flautist Flury still expressed the view that "The soul does not let itself be separated from the cultural roots that we have here in central Europe."[63]
So, in other words, the VPO feels that you ARE your race and nothing can outweigh that including your musical talent. While that certainly sounds like something that came out of the mouth of a Nazi, we must remember that the Nazis made allies of the Japanese. What Strasser and Flury expressed above wasn't the filtered, politically expedient racism of the Nazis but pure, naked, unabashed racism of a kind one rarely encounters anywhere. Even in the American South during Jim Crow, black musicians routinely played for white dances as the documentary "Louie Bluie" makes clear. But the idea that your race is your soul, I frankly find shocking and not even something a Nazi would utter--at least not in public.
So that trumps the following info that also came from the same Wiki article rendering it of no consequence. My apologies:
On 10 March 2013-a date chosen to precede 12 March, the 75th anniversary of the Third Reich's union with Austria, the Anschluss-the panel published its findings in a set of reports posted on the orchestra's website at.[83] Among the panel's findings are:
Before the Anschluss in the mid-1930s Rathkolb writes in the introduction to the main webpage, "20% of the members of the orchestra belonged to the Nazi party." Former Vienna State Opera Secretary-General Ioan Holender notes that these members joined out of conviction, rather than for professional advancement, as party membership was illegal in Austria at the time.[84]
By the orchestra's centennial in 1942, Rathkolb writes, "60 of the 123 active [Vienna Philharmonic] orchestral musicians had become members of the [Nazi Party]" -that is, 48.8%. Two were members of the SS. By contrast, in the other major German-speaking orchestra, the Berlin Philharmonic, TrĂĽmpi found that "barely 20%" were party members.[76][85] For further comparison, party membership in Austria as a whole was 10%.[86]
The thirteen Jewish members of the orchestra were expelled upon the Anschluss. Six of them escaped into exile;[87] the other seven were killed[88] - five in concentration camps, and two while still in Vienna, writes Rathkolb, "as a direct result of attempted deportation and persecution."
Rathkolb writes, "A total of nine orchestra members were driven into exile [including the six Jewish members noted above] ... The eleven remaining orchestra members who were married to Jewish women or stigmatized as 'half-Jewish' lived under the constant threat of revocation of their 'special permission.' ... It was only the intervention of Wilhelm Furtwängler and other individuals which ... with two exceptions, saved [these 11 remaining] 'half-Jews' and 'closely-related' from dismissal from the Vienna State Opera Orchestra."
Of the musicians hired to replace the 13 dismissed Jewish members, about half were Nazi Party members, Rathkolb says.[89][90]
The panel revealed in new detail how the New Year's concerts began during the Nazi era. The first concert, given on New Year's Eve in 1939, was proposed by conductor Clemens Krauss and enthusiastically approved by Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, because it served the Reich's purposes of "propaganda through entertainment."[91] (The concert was moved to New Year's Day for the concerts held from 1941-45; it was revived in 1947 when it was conducted by Josef Krips, who had not been able to conduct during the war years because he was half-Jewish.) Further, the profits from the 1939 concert were "donated entirely to the national-socialistic fund-raising campaign 'Kriegswinterhilfswerk'[24] The reports also note that Goebbels privately decided to ignore information about the partial Jewish ancestry of the Strauss family (Johann Strauss I's grandfather was Jewish by birth) partly because "it was not proven" and partly because he did "not want to undermine the entire German cultural heritage."[91]
At the war's end in 1945, the orchestra expelled ten of its members for Nazi activity; two were re-hired in ensuing years. One of them, trumpeter Helmut Wobisch, had joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and the SS in 1934, and during the war served as a spy for the Gestapo. He was rehired to the orchestra in 1950, and appointed executive director of the orchestra in 1953, remaining in the position until 1967.
The panel determined that it was Wobisch who in 1966 privately gave a replacement copy of the orchestra's "Ring of Honor" to Baldur von Schirach after the latter's release from Spandau Prison.[92] As a result of the panel's reports, the Carinthian Summer Festival in Klagenfurt, Austria, cancelled its annual concert in honor of Wobisch (who was co-founder of the festival).[93]
The panel details how the orchestra gave "a great number of honorific awards… to Nazi potentates, including Arthur Seyss-Inquart [who was sentenced to death for his crimes against humanity in 1946] and Baldur von Schirach [who was sentenced to 20 years in Spandau Prison for his]." The orchestra also planned internally to give its highest award (the Nicolai Gold Medal) to Adolf Hitler in 1942, but there is no evidence that this award was ever given.[94] (Rathkolb has told the press that Hellsberg "has asked [the orchestra] to revoke the rings of honour to these people.")