I am currently writing a paper on the Reifenstahl/Sontag-defined Fascist aesthetic in Nazi state-sponsored and/or state-endorsed music for trumpet (and hopefully whatever counter-aesthetic that might have produced in, say, Hindemith, Stravinsky, Dahl, etc), and the link is, of course, Josef Goebbels' Symphony of Propaganda (I am using the rubric from Jowett & O'Donnell book "Propagation and Persuasion" to define, in rough terms, what this means). Of course, applying Sontag's Fascist aesthetic, which originated in film and photography, to music is a challenge, so my thought is to use Goebbels as a more concrete starting point. I'd really like to stick as close as possible to speaking about music in terms of fascist aesthetic, but it is important that fascist aesthetic and Goebbels are fairly well-connected. What problems might there be with this approach?
This research is important to me because of course artists (and everybody else) fled Nazi Germany in droves, and I think as time goes on we will start to see some clarity in style between refugee artists in the 30s and 40s and the ongoing Syrian refugee crisis. I think we can learn a lot about what it means to be a refugee and how to deal with this as a society with art from both eras.
If I were to compare the Symphony of Propaganda to anything, it would be other state-mandated music like Chinese Revolutionary Opera.
Lots of the music in Nazi Germany was either sanctioned or banned, but very little of it was made deliberately as a propaganda piece for the government, and so that kind of music makes a very specific genre.
Take the Russian composers under the communist regime, for example. Very few of them were really drinking the communist kool-aid, and although they wrote frequently, they weren't writing pieces directly to promote the communist regime. To me, that's a huge difference in genre and purpose.