Felix Delbrueck wrote:

>There's the rub, the political shortsightedness, and no doubt that
>was also Mengelberg's failing.  But why was he more sinister than
>Pf.? Because he was less overtly vindictive and paranoid than
>Pfitzner, and therefore more insidious? - but surely that should go
>in his favour. To say the truth, I don't know at all enough about
>M.'s circumstances - that was the reason why I was scanning the list
>archives for him.  In the end, of course, he was treated far more
>harshly than either Pf. or F - stripped of his honours by the Queen
>personally and booted out of the country.  My instincts tell me very
>strongly that that degree of punishment was unjustified, that the
>man was a scape-goat, but who knows.

That seems to be the retrospective view in Holland too.  Bernard Haitink
(who had seen M.  conduct as a child) recently commented that Mengelberg
probably should have been disciplined, but his actual treatment was
appallingly unbefitting of the crime he committed.

>To what lengths did his accomodation of the Nazis go? What happened,
>for instance, to Jewish members of his orchestra?

He put pressure on the German authorities to keep Jewish members in
Concertgebouw orchestra when their Dutch brethren were already being
transported to the death camps.  Several testified after the war that
they probably wouldn't have been alive if it hadn't been for Mengelberg's
intervention.

>Did he conduct in other occupied territories than Holland itself? To
>what extent did he approve of the Nazis' political line? Pfitzner did
>to an extent, Furtwaengler, as far as I'm aware, not at all.

Mengelberg was a naive character where non-musical matters were concerned.
I'm not even sure he had any political line.  Don't forget that his parents
were German, and he apparently didn't feel uncomfortable mixing with German
officials during the occupation.  His most dismal error of judgement was
probably a performance with the Concertgebouw orchestra on a public
occasion of the Dutch national socialist party.  Another was his trip to
occupied Paris to conduct the complete Beethoven symphonies shortly after
the Normandy landings in June 1944.

Ruben
 [Thanks to James Kearney for calling my attention to this. Ah, the
dangers of deleting by title alone...]