Researcher Alleges Harvard Was Warm to Nazis at University Events in the 1930s

Associated Press | November 15 2004

BOSTON (AP) - Harvard University enhanced the reputation of the Nazi regime when it sanctioned events in the 1930s attended by Nazis, a historian claimed Sunday.

"Harvard remained largely indifferent to the persecution of Germany's Jews," said Stephen H. Norwood, a University of Oklahoma history professor who is writing a book about the response of American universities to the Nazi party.

Norwood presented some of his findings at a conference on the Holocaust at Boston University, where he was the keynote speaker.

A Harvard spokesperson did not immediately return a phone call Sunday, but the university issued a brief statement to The Boston Globe.

"The university was then and is now repulsed by everything that Hitler represents," the statement said.

Norwood claimed administrators welcomed one of Adolf Hitler's closest deputies to a reunion, hosted a reception for German naval officials and sent delegates to a celebration at a German university that had expelled Jews.

Harvard administrators, alumni and student leaders "remained indifferent to Germany's terrorist campaign against Jews and indeed on numerous occasions assisted the Nazis in their efforts to gain acceptance in the West," he said.

Norwood criticized former Harvard President James Bryant Conant for failing to speak against the Nazis despite numerous opportunities between 1933 and 1937.

He said that during that time, it was widely reported that German Jews were segregated in schools, beaten in the streets, purged from universities and their businesses boycotted. The persecution later culminated in the Holocaust, in which millions of Jews across Europe were executed in Nazi concentration camps.

Much of Norwood's presentation focused on a campus visit by Ernst Hanfstaengl, the Nazi party's foreign press chief.

Hanfstaengl, a Harvard graduate, attended a 25th-year reunion on the campus in 1934 - the year after Hitler became chancellor of Germany.

The reunion sparked protest in the Jewish community.

"Conant could easily have denounced the visit but did not," Norwood said.

Conant claimed in his 1970 autobiography that he later rejected Hanfstaengl's attempts to donate money to the university.

After Norwood's findings were described by a Globe reporter, a university spokesman said Norwood had mischaracterized the motives of school leaders or blamed the institution for the acts of individuals.

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