Doctor Ernst 'Putzi' Hanfstaengl, formerly Press Chief for German Chancellor Adolf Hitler at his London home on July 7, 1937. (AP Photo/ Eddie Worth)
Posted on 01/03/2024 6:12:07 AM PST by SJackson
Research into ‘active collaboration’ between Harvard and Nazi Germany gains relevance as Harvard continues to frame antisemitic rhetoric on campus as freedom of speech
Doctor Ernst 'Putzi' Hanfstaengl, formerly Press Chief for German Chancellor Adolf Hitler at his London home on July 7, 1937. (AP Photo/ Eddie Worth)
Ninety years ago at Harvard University, campus administrators had what some historians call “friendly” relations with Nazi Germany.
Whether Harvard president Claudine Gay’s resignation was catalyzed by a plagiarism scandal or her much-criticized lack of response to calls for the genocide of Jewish students, the university already has a century-old history of repressed antisemitism, historian Rafael Medoff told The Times of Israel.
“What today’s Harvard administration has in common with its predecessor in the 1930s is its reluctance to reject an evil regime and its supporters,” said Medoff, director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies.
“In her recent congressional testimony, Gay’s instinctive response was to equivocate when asked about restricting those who advocate genocide of the Jews,” said Medoff.
“Now pro-Hamas non-university groups are being allowed to march on the Harvard campus,” said Medoff, whose center has researched the ties of American university leaders to Nazi Germany for two decades.
In the past few years, Harvard made efforts to atone for its history regarding slavery, including renaming buildings and erecting historical plaques. However, the university maintains a fellowship and professorship named for Alfried Krupp, a top Nazi industrialist.
According to some critics, including the Institute for the Global Study of Antisemitism and Policy, Harvard’s response to antisemitism cannot be disconnected from billions of dollars that Mideast regimes — some of them totalitarian — have donated to Harvard in recent decades. Top donors include Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Qatar, where Hamas leaders are said to be hiding.
On December 27, a prominent international partner of the school — the Lauder Business School in Vienna, Austria — severed ties with Harvard “in solidarity with the Jewish student community,” according to a statement.
In a 1934 editorial, Harvard Crimson student journalists spoke out in favor of hosting top Nazi and former Harvard man, Ernst F.S. Hanfstaengl.
Nicknamed “Putzi,” Hanfstaengl was Hitler’s foreign press chief and graduated from Harvard in 1909. The Crimson editorial was published when the Nazis had been in power for a year and issued enabling laws for Hitler to be Germany’s dictator.
“If Herr Hanfstaengl is to be received at all, it should be with the marks of honor appropriate to his high position in the government of a friendly country… a great world power,” wrote the editors.
At the time, Harvard administrators said the decision to invite Hanfstaengl was made by an alumni group and not the university. However, op-eds in the Crimson demonstrate students and faculty alike welcomed Hanfstaengl’s visit to Cambridge for his reunion.
Hanfstaengl arrived to Harvard in June 1934, attending receptions given in his honor at the homes of alumni and top administrators, including the president.
“Many of Hanfstaengl’s fellow alumni seem to have regarded the affair as a joke, turning his visit into the central theme of the parade,” wrote historian Peter Conradi.
“According to contemporary accounts, some participants goose-stepped their way around the stadium in Bavarian peasant costumes. Hanfstaengl was cheered when he gave a Nazi salute to several friends in the crowd,” wrote Conradi, author of “Hitler’s Piano Player: The Rise and Fall of Ernst Hanfstaengl.”
In Harvard Yard on the day of Hanfstaengl’s visit, several students were arrested for protesting Nazism and Hanfstaengl’s welcome back to campus.
“Seven were found guilty of disturbing the peace and sentenced to six months hard labor in the Middlesex House of Correction. Six of the seven were pardoned after just one month, however, immediately becoming Harvard heroes,” wrote Conradi.
Harvard’s president from 1909-1933, A. Lawrence Lowell, did not mince words when he told a friend that “blood will be spilled” if American Jews did not learn to assimilate.
In 1922, Lowell proposed a quota on Jews admitted into Harvard wherein no more than 15% of the student body would be Jewish. The measure was not formally implemented but was favored by President James B. Conant, who succeeded Lowell in 1933. [Many American universities maintained quota systems until after World War II.]
Today, Lowell House is an undergraduate residence on campus, while the college’s dazzling Lowell Lecture Hall was renamed to honor the Jewish quota-supporting Harvard president in 1959.
When Lowell passed the baton of leadership to Conant in 1933, the latter made a clear choice to support the Nazis, said Medoff.
For example, Harvard sent a high-profile delegate to the University of Heidelberg for celebrations on the heels of the university purging all of its Jewish faculty. Oxford and Cambridge, for their part, declined to send delegates, demonstrating the agency of higher education institutions to protest Nazism before World War II.
“[Harvard] contributed to Nazi Germany’s efforts to improve its image in the West,” wrote historian Stephen Norwood in his book, “The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses.”
“Harvard’s administration and many of its student leaders offered important encouragement to the Hitler regime, as it intensified its persecution of Jews and expanded its military strength,” Norwood wrote.
Conant “was not just silent” about antisemitism, said Norwood, but “actively collaborated in it.”
In May 1934, Conant was publicly mute during the visit of the Nazi warship Karlsruhe to Boston, some of whose crew members were entertained at Harvard.
The next year, Conant permitted Nazi Germany’s top diplomat in Boston to place a wreath bearing the swastika in a Harvard chapel, according to Norwood.
Throughout the 1930s, Harvard tried to keep out Jewish refugees — and especially Jewish professors — as demonstrated in research on European scholars who attempted to flee Hitler.
Conant did not speak out against Nazism until after the Kristallnacht pogrom in November 1938. Three years had passed since the Nuremberg race laws stripped German Jews of citizenship.
In response to Norwood’s book, published in 2004, Harvard issued a rebuke declaring former president Conant maintained “consistent opposition” to National Socialism.
“The University was then and is now repulsed by everything that Hitler represents, and the specter of Nazism rightly inspires horror and revulsion to this day,” Harvard spokesman Joe Wrinn said in 2004.
However, Norwood pointed to examples of Conant building personal relationships with Nazi university leaders across academic disciplines, including those involved in race sciences.
“Conant was determined to build friendly ties with the Universities of Heidelberg and Goettingen, even though they had expelled their Jewish faculty members and thoroughly Nazified their curricula, constructing a ‘scholarly’ foundation for vulgar antisemitism, which was taught as ‘racial science,'” wrote Norwood.
Conant was far from the only Harvard man to be inspired by Hitler’s new Reich.
In 1934, the dean of Harvard’s law school, Roscoe Pound, toured Germany and Austria and wrote favorably of Hitler’s leadership. Pound noted Hitler’s potential to reign in “agitator” groups that plagued Germany in the liberal Weimar years.
In his book, Norwood highlighted the agency and influence held by American university presidents during the lead-up to World War II.
“The excuse that ‘everybody was doing it’ in the 1930s is not impressive,” said Medoff.
“Williams College ended its student exchanges with Nazi Germany; British universities refused to participate in events at Nazi-controlled universities; and the New School for Social Research welcomed Jewish refugee scholars. Harvard made a choice — it chose the wrong side,” said Medoff.
They fired Larry Summers for telling the truth to the woke mob.
After the First World War, the defeated Germany had enormous debt to other countries.
It appeared that Hitler was getting Germany economically going again, and thus there was some support for Nazi Germany in the early 30’s.
By the way, during that period, many Jews wanted to leave Germany and come to America. There was significant opposition within America to them coming here. It was a problem for Roosevelt.
Putzi, a flash from the past. Not just Hitler's press secretary, but with his wife Helene Elise Adelheid Niemeyer, close confidents. Helene, on whom Hitler had a crush of sorts, is credited with preventing him from committing suicide as police came to their home where Hitler was hiding to arrest him after the Beer Hall Putsch.
Read an interesting book recently on the rise of Nazism, which recounted that story, and speculated how much innocent blood would have been spared had Helene only said, “Go ahead, Adolf! Pull the trigger!”
Not to mention that the architect of Pearl Harbor, Yamamoto, was a student there.
Forward looking Harvard had both theatres of war covered.
Way back then lots of folks were friendly towards fascism,especially since it was in opposition to the commie trash in Russia.
The same phenom happened, the quick switch, when Hollywood etc were all in support until Hitler violated his peace treaty with Stalin and invaded Russia. The commie trash in the US got their orders switched.
Great history lesson many had no idea about.
Remember William F Buckley said that the country would be better off being run by random people picked from the Boston phonebook, than by the faculty of Harvard University.
Lawrence H. Summers
@LHSummers
I admire Claudine Gay for putting Harvard’s interests first at what I know must be an agonizingly difficult moment. Alan Garber, who is universally liked, admired, and respected, is a superb choice as Interim President. At this complex juncture, there will be much to reflect on as Harvard sets its course forward.
https://twitter.com/LHSummers/status/1742296415299105078
Oh man. It’s like the Pulitzer Prize winner saying there was no starvation in Ukraine.
I’m praying for the day when universities get converted to trade schools.
Just how many college graduates do we need? Gender/ethnic studies majors are fine as long as we don’t pay for it.
Albertsons. A friend gathers the food for online shoppers. He disclosed that some were using EBT cards to pay for it. To think that he was paying taxes for the privilege of doing their shopping.
figures
Back when Hitler and Stalin were pals, National Socialism was considered quite “enlightened” and “progressive” by the “intelligentsia”. They were communists, of course ... so when Hitler and Stalin broke off their bromance, National Socialism became the worst thing ever.
Yep, they blacklisted Charlie Chaplin for going after Hitler. On the other hand, Communists were the most isolationist of all the groups before Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. And that's when they really went after Lindbergh.
Perhaps a minor point of semantics, but Adolph Hitler was not a fascist. Fascism was Benito Mussolini's gig. Adolph Hitler was a National Socialist. After Hitler and Stalin fell out, American (and other western) communists didn't want the word "socialism" associated with their new enemy (former friend), so they appropriated Mussolini's term ...
Never mind that fascism IS socialism; propaganda depends on using the right words to make people feel a certain way.
Exhibit A:
“Fascist” was basically anyone who was an Anti-Communist. A lot harder to use the term “Nazi” for that.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.