A Nazi at Harvard

In 1934, the Harvard class of 1909 held its 25th reunion—then as now an occasion for members of the American elite to parade in public and celebrate their achievements. But this year the star attraction was a German: Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, the son of a Munich art dealer and publisher who had joined the Nazi movement and enjoyed personal access to Hitler (Hitler liked hearing him play the piano, as had his Harvard classmates, for whom he composed football fight songs). In the early 1930s he served as foreign press chief for the Nazi party.

Ernst Hanfstaengl (center, with raised arm), who served as foreign press chief for the Nazi party, in the Harvard Class of 1909 parade, June, 1934, from Stephen Norwood’s The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower, courtesy of the Boston Public Library, Print Department

When Hanfstaengl’s plan to attend the reunion became known, a scandal blew up. He declined to serve as an officer of his class, but he came, visited the estates of wealthy Harvard men around Boston, and took tea at the house of the current president, James Conant, who would later serve as American high commissioner, and still later ambassador, in postwar Germany.

Liberal journalists and politicians, especially in New York, denounced the Nazis and dwelled on Hanfstaengl’s support of their policies. A rabbi confronted him, two girls chained themselves to railings in Harvard Yard, and a few students from MIT protested and were arrested. But Harvard’s members, old and young, responded to such critics with striking solidarity. The Crimson denounced the demonstrators as “extremely childish.” Conant went ahead with plans to send the mathematics professor George Birkhoff, a staunch anti-Semite, as an official representative of the university to the 1936 anniversary celebration at the University of Heidelberg—an institution that, purged of its Jews, taught “German physics.”

Stephen Norwood, a distinguished American Jewish historian, tells these grim stories in a lucid, well-informed book: The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower. Many of the richest and oldest colleges and universities in the United States showed less understanding of Nazism than newspaper columnists like Heywood Broun (who, to be fair, also attended Harvard, where he met John Reed and Alan Seeger).

In some cases, university presidents did more than send greetings to the odd dictator. Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia went back and forth to Europe on German ships, sent representatives to the big German university festivals—and expelled students and fired professors who protested. Worse still, he allowed Columbia’s Italian Academy to become a center of Fascist propaganda. Meanwhile the Seven Sisters welcomed Nazi exchange students and sent their own young women off to witness the wonders of German prosperity and order at the University of Munich.

At times, Norwood offers an indictment—a justified indictment—rather than a history. In his first chapter, he argues at length that any sentient American should have known what the Nazis stood for. He has a point. But it’s one thing to show that Conant and Butler came late to the war against Fascism, as they surely did (in 1940, Conant was appointed Chairman of the National Defense Research Committee, which oversaw the Manhattan project); quite another to explain why they were so blind and deaf.

The universities took their stand where they did for many reasons. Administrators believed in hierarchy, and they and many faculty disliked Jews. But many older professors and administrators—as Norwood nowhere indicates—had deeper reasons for viewing Germany through a haze of sympathy. American universities looked to the German ones as their models. Many scholars and scientists had actually begun their research careers in German libraries and labs. In Berlin, Butler saw that even Bismarck treated great professors with respect. Breaking those ties came hard.

Communism also played a big role in this ugly story. In the 1930s, the Party had cells and reading groups on all major campuses. They drew their members from the same anti-Fascists who opposed official visits by Nazis. The dignitaries who refused to help or listen to protestors often saw them as a threat in their own right to the republic. This fact can’t excuse their violations of student and faculty rights or their sympathy for the Nazi devil—but the historian can’t ignore it.

In some cases, Norwood fails to think his way outside the categories of modern American Judaism and into those of the 1930s. One of his minor characters is the long-term dean of Barnard College, Virginia Gildersleeve, who excused Nazi removal of Jews and women from German universities as a response to overcrowding. After the war, Norwood notes, Gildersleeve emerged as a passionate defender of the Palestinians and opponent of Zionism. The same anti-Semitism that inspired these activities presumably instilled her with warm feelings for the Nazis.

In fact, Gildersleeve was a complex character. A passionate believer in women’s rights and aspirations, she hired male professors to ensure Barnard’s high academic standing. Gildersleeve may well have wanted to cut the number of Jewish students in her college. But her opposition to the expulsion of Arabs from Palestine did not stem only from anti-Semitism. She shared her views with friends like Judah Magnes and called for the admission of 200,000 displaced Jews to the United States, even as she fought the founding of Israel. Yet somehow she also admired the early achievements of the Nazis (particularly for putting the male population back to work after the economic disasters of hyperinflation and slump), as she did the passion play at Oberammergau. No indictment can do justice to such complexities.

In the end, though, the complexities Norwood misses matter less than the central point he proves. It is a principle universally acknowledged that those in search of examples of civil courage waste their time if they look for them among university faculty members and administrators. That simple rule does much to explain why the denizens of great universities pretended not to see where the wind from the Rhine and the Tiber was blowing.

Stephen Norwood, The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses (Cambridge University Press, 2009)

There are still Nazis at Harvard. There is a guy named something Witsel or whatever and he tried foisting some Nazi theories about Aryan race into textbooks and in the process he made the mistake of attacking people from India. They dug out information about this guy and found that he blamed America for the German support of Nazis and that he had connections to a White Nationalist named Roger Pearson who had founded a neo-Nazi group called Northern League. This professor, not surprisingly, fancies himself to be a liberal.

Leftist intellectuals like fascists. They demonize the word and project it onto conservatives but the real definition of it, private ownership of but state control of business / production coupled with socialstic public policy admisnstered by an all-powerful central government is exactly what they want, what Obama is trying to do. They love Castro and Chavez, and in the day they loved Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin.

They only turned on Hitler when he made war on the only dictator they admired more, Stalin.

There’s something here that doesn’t add up.

Why go after Hanfstaengl if even before the war he recanted, fled Germany and worked for the US war dept

You can’t even say that he was a day late and dollar short.

http://www.knowledgerush.com/kr/encyclopedia/Ernst_Hanfst%C3%A4ngl/

Ernst Hanfstängl

Ernst Franz Sedgwick Hanfstängl (Munich, February 2, 1887 - November 6, 1975) was a friend of Adolf Hitler and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

His mother was a member of the New England Sedgwick family and a descendant of American Civil War heroes. He studied at Harvard, where he composed football songs, and there became acquainted with Walter Lippmann, John Reed, and Roosevelt, a distant cousin. On February 11, 1920, he married Helene Niemayer/Helen Neemeyer of Long Island. They had a daughter, who died young, and a son, Egon, who joined the US Army.

He later returned to Germany and became friends with Adolf Hitler, who called him "Putzi". He wrote Brownshirt marches based on his Harvard football songs. After the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch he sheltered Hitler in his attic. Helene reputedly prevented Hitler from killing himself.

He financed the publication of Mein Kampf and claimed to have participated in the firing of the Reichstag. He became head of the Foreign Press Bureau in Berlin, but aside from his official position his importance lay in the fact that he entertained Hitler, who relaxed when "Putzi" played the piano.

He divorced Helene in 1936, and fled Germany in March 1937 after becoming disenchanted with Hitler. After first escaping to Switzerland, he moved to England, where he was imprisoned as an enemy alien after the outbreak of World War II; he was later moved to a prison camp in Canada. In 1942 he was turned over to the U.S. (possibly on Roosevelt's personal intercession), but was handed back to the British in 1944, who returned him to Germany after the end of the war.

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