Were there any "Hitler Cantatas"? I have always wondered about that. Why are Stalin and Lenin "OK" but not Hitler? I guess because Stalin "won". Stalin murdered way more people than Hitler.
I sometimes wonder about that too. There were officially tolerated composers in Nazi Germany whose job it was to write propagandistic music for the regime, same as in any country, but they're all completely forgotten nowadays and even the slightest hint that a composer was affiliated with the Nazis puts a serious damper on performances of their music (well, apart from Orff, perhaps). Yet not only has the music glorifying Stalin survived but it's also notably more popular than most of the music that was officially banned or censured. (Look at the Shostakovich symphonies—2, 3 and 4 considered too "formalist", and nowadays rarely played outside complete cycles—5 and 7 and 10 showered with official honours, still heard all the time—13 and 14 as close as they come to actual critiques of the regime, how often do you hear those?) It makes you wonder if Zhdanov was on to something.
Of course, Hitler's regime only lasted ~12 years, and he had a bad habit of sending anyone who looked too intellectual to a death camp, so the amount of Nazi music out there is significantly smaller.
From what I know (e.g. Michael Kater's study "The Twisted Muse"), it seems that there were no Hitler cantatas; the Nazi leaders did not go in for that sort of musical hero-worship; it was really a Stalin speciality. You don't get many Khrushchev cantatas either. There are probably some works on Hitlerish texts, but I get the feeling that even paid-up party members tended to balk at setting such tawdry stuff. You would think that there should be "victory symphonies" penned by German composers c. 1940-1942, but I find no trace of them. Works by composers like Hans-Georg Görner (if you can find them) all seem to be pleasant stuff that one would not take exception to if you heard it "blind".
The regrettable thing is how after the war, there was a tendency (at least in Germany) to associate all tonal composition with the Nazi regime, and hence only 12-tone music was considered acceptable. So it is a subject that has to be addressed to understand the trajectory of late 20th C musical history.
There are pro-fascist works that ended up blacklisting composers who were on the wrong side of history. I believe Paul von Klenau and Alfredo Casella to be notable examples. In my opinion, we should let the music speak for itself rather than the political views of the composer because otherwise it can be difficult to filter fact from fiction.
