Professor Claims Harvard ‘Feted’ Known Nazi Official Before World War II

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The fuehrer called him Putzi, a German nickname from childhood.


By 1934, Ernst Franz Sedgwick Hanfstangl, a Harvard-educated pianist and scion to a family of prosperous New York art dealers, had helped finance the publishing of “Mein Kampf” and risen through Nazi party ranks into Adolf Hitler’s inner circle as foreign press chief.


Now one historian is claiming the deceased Hitler aide was a channel through which Harvard University fostered and sought to develop “friendly” ties with Nazi party officials during the early- and mid-1930s, an early time in Hitler’s reign when most Jews were banned from German high schools and universities, anti-Nazi books burned, and Jewish businesses boycotted.


In a paper to be presented at a conference for Holocaust studies at Boston University on Sunday, a tenured professor of history and Judaic studies at the University of Oklahoma, Stephen Norwood, said he plans to expose a number of Harvard’s relationships with senior Nazi officials, such as Hanfstangl, and Nazi-sponsored universities.


“It’s an outrage,” Mr. Norwood said by telephone, calling the actions of Harvard officials and other elite universities during the period “shameless” in their “indifference to anti-Semitism.”


One issue at the heart of Mr. Norwood’s paper is the Harvard administration’s decision in the summer of 1934 to let Hanfstangl attend his 25th reunion.


In an editorial dated June 13, 1934, and titled “Render Unto Caesar,” editors at the school’s newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, argued that Hanfstangl should be received “with the marks of honor appropriate to his high position in the government of a friendly country.”


The Crimson editorial sparked outrage among some students. “The only honors [Hanfstangl should be] entitled to are funeral wreaths made out of the splattered brains and broken bones of his victims,” one student wrote in a letter to Crimson editors.


Despite the protests of those offended by Hanfstangl’s presence on the Harvard campus, Mr. Norwood claims Hanfstangl was “feted” at posh alumni parties and offered free room and board in “the mansions of the school’s most prominent and influential” alumni.


Hanfstangl, who graduated in 1909, also attended a tea at the home of the school’s then-president, James Bryant Conant, Class of 1914.


While that was the first and only encounter between Hanfstangl and Conant, Mr. Norwood argues that the failure of the school’s alumni and president to take “a principled stand” against receiving a senior Nazi official suggests an “open reception of Nazi barbarism” and “a disturbing indifference to anti-Semitism.”


The impact of Harvard’s well-publicized reception of Hanfstangl, Mr. Norwood added, “gave a certain legitimacy to the Nazi cause.”


A spokesman for Harvard, Joseph Wrinn, said that contrary to Mr. Norwood’s claims, a search of the school’s historical database yielded evidence that Harvard officials rejected Hanfstangl’s many attempts to support the school. While alumni were free to host guests of their choosing during the reunion, Mr. Wrinn argues that the school’s president publicly denounced the Nazis and also on two occasions refused Hanfstangl’s attempts to donate $1,000 travel scholarships to Germany.


One reason, according to a citation from Conant’s own biography “My Several Lives,” was that the president became “convinced that Hitler’s henchman were trying to use Harvard as an American base to spread approval of the Nazi regime.”


Still, the political impact of Conant’s embrace of Hanfstangl was felt on campus, especially among anti-Nazi students. At Conant’s first commencement address, the president’s speech was drowned in the heckles of protesters handcuffed to wooden bleachers screaming “Down with Hanfstangl!”


Seven other anti-Nazi protesters were demonstrating outside campus, on city property. All were arrested, according to the Crimson.


While Conant sought to intervene to get the charges dropped against the students protesting on the Harvard campus, Mr. Norwood says the president did nothing to support the seven other protesters who were sentenced by a jury to work hard labor in prison for six months.


However, a November 30, 1934, story in the Crimson states that Conant personally pleaded for the protesters’ clemency. The demonstrators, a month into their prison term, received a pardon from Governor Ely of Massachusetts.


While Conant publicly supported the protesters, Mr. Norwood claims that in the Harvard president’s private correspondences he mocked the anti-Nazi protesters as “ridiculous.”


Without seeing Conant’s private correspondences, which Mr. Norwood declined to make public before Sunday’s conference, Mr. Wrinn said Harvard could not adequately respond to them.


Mr. Wrinn added that a number of articles from the period, along with Conant’s autobiography, suggest that the president was active in denouncing the Nazi regime.


He was later instrumental in the Allied war effort, chairing the National Defense Research Committee and overseeing the development of the atomic bomb.


After falling out with Hitler and Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, Hanfstangl fled and was captured at the hands of British troops, who sent him to a detention camp in Canada.


Hanfstangl was later released and recruited as an informant for the American war effort through another Harvard alumni connection, President Franklin Roosevelt, his old and regular dinner companion at the Harvard Club in New York, according to “Hitler’s Piano Player,” a Hanfstangl biography.


Hanfstangl would visit Harvard again for his 60th reunion, and for his 65th, a year before his death at age 88 in 1975.


In anticipation of Sunday’s conference, “America’s Response to the Holocaust: New Questions, New Perspectives,” the directors of the group sponsoring the event, the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, offered a formal invitation to current Harvard president Lawrence Summers, who cannot attend the event because of a scheduling conflict, Mr. Wrinn said.


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