A century before Claudine Gay, Harvard helped Nazi Germany improve its image in the West

Doctor Ernst 'Putzi' Hanfstaengl, formerly Press Chief for German Chancellor Adolf Hitler at his London home on July 7, 1937

By MATT LEBOVIC

 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.

‘Everybody was doing it’

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.