Academia's historic mistake

A loaded book in every sense of the term, Professor Stephen H. Norwood, who teaches history at the University of Oklahoma and previously published a two-volume Encyclopedia of American Jewish History (co-edited by Eunice G. Pollack), documents how academics spread throughout America's major universities responded to Nazism in the 1930s. His concise text, which stands at 256 pages, is supplemented by 117 pages of notes, a detailed bibliography and a superb index, all of which will assist those eager to read further. Twenty photographs representing luminaries and several demonstrations, mostly in the New York area, grace the book too.

Norwood is the recipient of several awards for his writings, including the Herbert G. Gutman Award in American Social History. An established scholar, his accusations should not be taken lightly, for he sets out to systematically decipher the very nature of the sympathy Nazism elicited among American elites after Adolf Hitler assumed power, while, ostensibly, public opinion protested against it.

The book opens with a devastating examination of "Harvard University and the Hitler Regime, 1933-1937", which exemplified how educated administrators "ignored numerous opportunities to take a principled stand against the Hitler regime" (page 36). The reader is overwhelmed by the sheer amount of detail, including comical episodes that saw campus police officers tearing down anti-Nazi fliers, ostensibly because there was a "desire to foster amicable relations between the university" and Nazis (page 73). This, at a time when news of anti-Semitic activities out of Germany was widely known, which leads Norwood to ask whether profits stood before principles (they did).

Norwood then devotes a chapter to Columbia University and its responses to fascism. In this instance, the author reveals painful but important facts, including president Nicholas Butler's silence after German ambassador Hans Luther declared that his country was a democracy and only had "peaceful intentions" (page 85). Butler could not bring himself to change the temerity with which ties to German institutions dominated his policies.

The author then turns to the seven Ivy League women colleges — Barnard, Wellesley, Vassar, Smith, Mount Holyoke, Radcliffe and Bryn Mawr — that embarked on outright propaganda efforts. A Barnard dean back from her annual leave in Germany lectured her student body and guests that Berlin's desire to acquire new land, presumably the Sudetenland, Poland, Austria and eventually Russia and France, was "legitimate" (page 104). Establishing junior-year abroad programmes, many of these universities and colleges sent thousands of their students to Germany where they could witness the "German sense of justice" (page 111) and other achievements.

Norwood's ire then turns to this reviewer's alma mater, the University of Virginia, whose prestigious Institute of Public Affairs organised a series of roundtables between 1933 and 1941 that provided an influential forum to apologists. In April 1933, Professor Sidney Fay (Harvard-Radcliffe) asserted the mind-boggling claim that "Hitler's ‘national revolution' was ‘Germany's answer' to the unfair conditions the victorious Allies had imposed on it at Versailles" (page 133). Others helped Germany make its case too. Frederick Krueger praised the Nazis while Virginius Dabney, an influential editorial writer for the Richmond Times-Dispatch malevolently wrote that he did not find it "so difficult to understand why the Nazis became disgusted with democracy" (page 141). At the conclusion of these presentations, audience members clapped, as Americans were urged not to work themselves into becoming anti-German.

Various German language departments are painstakingly studied along with American Catholic universities' flirtation with fascism. Norwood also addresses the limits of campus protests after the infamous Kristallnacht anti-Jewish pogrom on November 9 and 10, 1938. Triggered by the assassination of a German diplomat, Ernst vom Rath, Berlin launched a coordinated attack on Jews (91 were killed and an estimated 30,000 were placed in concentration camps), as various properties, including synagogues, were destroyed or ransacked. Hardly a peep was registered on American campuses beyond organising a few refugee scholarships.

Norwood's study is morally upsetting as he demonstrates how American educators helped Nazi Germany improve its image in the West while intensifying its persecution of Jews before the Second World War. If American academics and their institutions could flatter Nazis by trading their principles to the highest bidder, one wonders what their successors might be capable of.

Indeed, because academics and administrators know that they enjoy an incredible reach into the highest levels of government, it is imperative to instil basic transparency norms. Providing legitimising umbrellas, whether to Nazis or to Neo-Cons more recently, may literally mean life and death for millions around the world. Although Washington encouraged appeasement and failed to confront atrocities before it was too late, Norwood teaches us that those who fail to understand the mechanisms that generate prejudice inevitably practise it.

 Dr Joseph A. Kéchichian is an author, most recently of Faysal: Saudi Arabia's King for All Seasons (2008).