Exchanges on politics and engagement from Lewis Hahn's The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer (Open Court, 1997):
"Gadamer gives us little clue about himself as an individual, a political agent, as opposed to Gadamer the philosopher. But if one believes, as I do, that the scholar is not separated from his/her existence as a sexual and political being, the few clues about his concrete life become troubling..." (p. 499). --Robin May Schott From Gadamer's reply to Schott: "In the essay 'Uber die politische Inkompetenz der Philosophie,' I illustrated with Plato and Heidegger what I myself think about the relation between philosophy and politics. With modesty, I lay claim to the same incompetence" (508).
"In what way has [Gadamer] added to the discussion of the political-philosophical issues that now appear so central to what Heidegger was thinking about the work of art? Just how open--or how reticent--has Gadamer been in addressing these matters?" (p. 445). --Diane P. Michelfelder From Gadamer's reply to Michelfelder: "For a contemporary American the interest that dominates runs directly counter to my own interest...I remember clearly how we, in 1936, passed over the fantastic dead-end reverie of the 'people' with the most embarrassed discretion" (p. 457).
From Brice R. Wachterhauser's Beyond Being: Gadamer's Post-Platonic Hermeneutical Ontology (Northwestern, 1999):
"[Gadamer] is suspected of a reactionary politics, which is supposedly based on his no less reactionary ontology. The fact that this criticism comes from philosophers knowledgeable of Gadamer and to varying degrees sympathetic wtih his program has made this criticism into something approaching a new orthodoxy..." (46). "Because we are intimately identified with the various isues that the human sciences study and because there are both logical constraints on actualizing all these possibilities as well as very real practical constraints, we cannot help but feel 'interested,' 'concerned,' 'engaged' by these phenomena. We have an 'ontological stake' in these issues; apart from them we have no other way to define ourselves as human beings" (61).
Link to precis of Gadamer's paper, "On the Political Incompetence of Philosophy." (1998). Diogenes 182: 46/2, 3-11.

SOURCES ON GADAMER & NATIONAL SOCIALISM

Three essays from The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, 1997, Ed. Lewis E. Hahn, Chicago: Library of Living Philosophers:

Robert R. Sullivan, "Gadamer's Early and Distinctively Political Hermeneutics"

Diane P. Michelfelder, "Gadamer on Heidegger on Art."

Robin May Schott, "Gender, Nazism, and Hermeneutics."

These papers, together with Gadamer's responses to them, constitute significant statements about Gadamer and engagement in political life, Heidegger, and the war years. Gadamer's own direct statements about what he calls "the political incompetence of philosophy" are sketchy and sparse. Even the book of collected essays entitled Heidegger's Ways only refers in passing to Heidegger and the war years (pp. 111-2). Gadamer himself has two full length essays that are as direct as he gets on this topic:

Hans-Georg Gadamer on Education, Poetry, and History, Ed. D. Misgeld & G. Nicholson, New York SUNY: "Interview: The 1920s, the 1930s, and the Present: National Socialism, German History, and German Culture," 135-154.

"On the Political Incompetence of Philosophy." Diogenes, No. 182, Vol. 46/2, Summer 1998, pp. 3-11.

"The fundamental purpose of practical philosophy, as Gadamer describes it, is to help our practical judgments and actions by providing a 'target' of what is good...There is, in general, a sense that something is missing, a sense that we have not yet heard from Gadamer nor been able to infer from his work the kind of statements that we might expect to find in a practical philosophy (a level of concreteness)....We lack clarity about the functions of practical philosophy from the hermeneutical perspective." (61).
from GADAMER AND PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY: THE HERMENEUTICS OF MORAL CONFIDENCE, by Matthew Foster, Scholars Press, 1991.