Harvard--home of Nazi sympathizers?

College Search & Selection
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<p>"his time, though, our academic leaders should get it right. Because Stephen H. Norwood's just-published, brilliantly researched, utterly thorough and morally upsetting The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses (Cambridge University Press) shows how they got it wrong in the 1930s. A chilling chronicle of pro-Nazi enthusiasm, shabby indifference, and amoral tolerance toward Hitler in elite American academe of the 1930s, this book should exert direct impact in this season of cracking heads and bones in Tehran. It relentlessly names names, depositing fact after sordid fact before the reader in a way that leaves its implications for then and today overwhelming.</p>

<p>Norwood, a professor of history at the University of Oklahoma and co-editor of the Encyclopedia of American Jewish History, attracted media attention when he unpacked some findings in the past. At a conference last year about Columbia University's ties to Nazi Germany, he detailed how its longtime president, Nicholas Murray Butler, invited the Nazi ambassador Hans Luther to campus in 1933, remained friendly with Nazi-run German universities into the mid-30s, and punished Columbia faculty members and students who protested.</p>

<p>Speaking at a 2004 Boston University conference on the Holocaust, Norwood shared other research that now appears in his fully detailed chapter on Harvard's bad behavior. In the updated version, he describes in gruesome detail how prominent "Harvard alumni, student leaders, The Harvard Crimson, and several Harvard professors assumed a leading role in the 10-day welcome and reception accorded the Nazi warship Karlsruhe when it visited Boston in May 1934."</p>

<p>At the 25th reunion that year of the Class of 09, writes Norwood, President James Bryant Conant, who'd sailed the previous year to Europe on a Nazi ocean liner, feted Ernst Hanfstaengl, "one of Hitler's earliest backers" and his foreign-press chief. In the summer of 1935, Harvard allowed its student band to perform regularly on a Nazi ship. In 1936, Conant dispatched a delegate to help celebrate the 550th anniversary of the Nazified University of Heidelberg, despite its bonfire of "un-German" books in 1933. Conant allowed the German consul in Boston to place a laurel wreath, swastika affixed, in one of Harvard's memorial chapels. Conant continued to maintain until Kristallnacht, Norwood writes, that Nazi universities remained part of the "learned world" and should be treated politely. In the 1950s, Conant, then U.S. ambassador to Germany, drew repeated denunciations from Congressional officials for his efforts to free Nazi war criminals, including some of the most bestial.</p>

<p>And who knew that the "stiff-armed Nazi salute and Sieg Heil chant" was "modeled on a gesture and a shout" that Hanfstaengl had used as a Harvard football cheerleader?"</p>

<p>Pretty nasty stuff. Pay site</p>

<p>The</a> Shame of Academe and Fascism, Then and Now - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education</p>

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<p>Well, its easy now to look backwards and point the finger of shame. We know now what Hitler and his nazi henchmen were up to. In 1935 it wasnt altogether so clear. There were concerns, to be certain, and his rhetoric was awful and the brown shirted storm troopers smashing Jewish business entities (Crystalknacht etc) was absolutely repugnant, but in the context of the CLEARLY repugnant actions of Soviet Dictator Josef Stalin who had murdered MILLIONS in the 1930’s BEFORE the war, the reactionary right wingers believed to be on the moral higher ground. Of course, anyone remotely schooled in history and politics knows that Stalin and Hitler actually had more in common than they did opposition. </p>

<p>It is fascinating history. I am not whitewashing the actions of academe in those days. But there were also significant communist sympathizers on those same campuses at the same time, some of whom managed to get into the United States Government and do considerable damage. </p>

<p>Extremism begets Extremism. A warning for recent political currents…</p>

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<p>This topic is irrelevant to this forum’s intention for college search and selection help.</p>

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<p>Those were different times.</p>

<p>And, indeed, this should be moved to the Harvard section. :D</p>

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<p>This guy is saying the Nazis gat their salute from Harvard? That’s ridiculous. The Nazis got it from Mussolini and the Italian Fascists who in turn had intentionally copied it from the “ad locutio” poses of the ancient Roman emperors and orators when they appeared before crowds in public. </p>

<p>It’s not clear whether the Romans ever used it as a military salute, although they are often depicted using that way in modern sword and sandal movies. In any case it was firmly established in Europe as one style of military salute by Napoleonic times and is depicted as such in the paintings of Jacques Louis David. </p>

<p>Mussolini openly viewed his Fascist Italy as a refounding of the Roman Empire and copied many of their outward signs and symbols, including the salute. Indeed the term “fascist” derives from the Roman fasces - bundled wooden rods carried by lictors in front of Roman government officials in public as a symbol of their authority. Early in the Nazi movement Hitler openly admired and copied Mussolini, including the salute.</p>

<p>To think that the Nazi salute originated with a Harvard cheerleader of all things is simply absurd. I hope this nonsense is not typical of the accuracy of the rest of the article.</p>

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<p>[Alan</a> Dershowitz - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Dershowitz]Alan”>Alan Dershowitz - Wikipedia)</p>