See [this letter](On the Hans Rothfels Chair at Brown University | Perspectives on History | AHA) to the American Historical Association’s magazine Perspectives on History by Professors John Harvey and Georg Iggers.
The gist is that in 2006 Brown University took $1M to name a professorship and then in 2009 - just 6 years ago - they named it after a Nazi, Hans Rothfels, who " advocated an authoritarian government that would dominate Eastern Europe and subjugate its peoples under the German “master race.” Rothfels even prepared a detailed set of racial criteria for ranking the various European nations."
Note that Iggers actually had 2 classes with Rothfels: “I took two seminars with Rothfels at the University of Chicago in 1948,” Prof. Iggers told me [Rachel Medoff for JNS.org in an interview] this week. “I was shocked by some of his views.”
The letter says in part: "As the Weimar Republic spiraled into fatal crisis, Rothfels helped to lead his guild in integrating authoritarianism and nationalist propaganda into the practice of contemporary history. His writings about Europe as a region of adversarial cultures were easily shifted to priorities compatible with the Nazis’ dedication to biological struggle among incompatible peoples and to the “saving” of kindred Germans lost across new foreign borders. Examples of his propaganda included his key contribution in 1931 to The Rent in the East/Der Riss im Osten (aimed at an Anglo-American audience). He argued that Polish-Lithuanian lands were historically a Germanic “barrier against the eastern barbarians” that the Allies had severed from the nation’s “general circulation of life blood,” and cruelly “left to rot away under barbarians.”
“Works such as this helped to prepare colleagues and students for further radicalization under National Socialism. Around him formed a “Rothfels group” of loyal students, who closely aligned themselves to German policies of conquest, including plans for the ghettoization of Jews as a precursor to genocide. Others adopted Rothfels’s leadership example in Volksgeschichte (racist ethno-history), which brought them appointments to conquered “Reich universities” at Poznan and Strassburg.”
Note that after the war, Rothfells worked to rehabilitate the image of Nazi Germany and in particular downplaying Jew-hating as a reason for killing all the Jews.
Note that Rothfells was a convert (at age 19) to Christianity and “As his own political views radicalized, Rothfels could even vote for Adolf Hitler in the 1932 presidential election. With the Nazis in power, he sought an “honorary Aryan” status, so he could remain a loyal citizen of the Reich and direct his historiography to a “reborn” national community. But cooperation with Hitler was an illusion, one that ended painfully under Jewish racial laws with arrests and the expulsion of his family.”