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5. A Respectful Hearing for Nazi Germany's Apologists: The University of Virginia Institute of Public Affairs Roundtables, 1933-1941
American academia's most prestigious national and international affairs symposium, the University of Virginia Institute of Public Affairs roundtables, held each summer beginning in 1927, contributed to the Hitler regime's efforts to present Germany as a state with legitimate grievances and reasonable objectives. The Institute of Public Affairs often invited scholars and diplomats who rationalized or defended Nazi Germany's foreign and domestic policies to join its roundtables. On some occasions, avowed Nazis either chaired the roundtable or delivered one of the principal addresses.
The Institute of Public Affairs provided a major platform to scholars, polemicists, and German diplomats who advanced the revisionist argument on the origins of the World War, which denied that Germany was primarily responsible for starting it. Revisionist writings and conference presentations caused many Americans to view Germany more sympathetically. Professor Sidney Fay, who held a joint appointment at Harvard University and Radcliffe College, arguably the most influential of the revisionists, asserted in April 1933 that Hitler's "national revolution" was "Germany's answer" to the unfair conditions the victorious Allies had imposed on it at Versailles. [1]
The Influence of the Revisionist Argument on the Origins of the World War on Americans' Response to Nazism
The revisionist historians of the origins of the World War convinced many Americans that either the Allies themselves were primarily to blame for starting the conflict, or that all belligerents were equally to blame. Revisionist arguments appealed to much of the American public as they became increasingly isolationist during the 1920s and resentful of their nation's allies for failing to repay wartime loans. The United States had refused to ratify the Versailles Treaty and would not join its wartime allies in the League of Nations. [2] Many Americans during the interwar period, convinced by revisionist historians that vindictive Allies had imposed unnecessarily harsh conditions and reparations at Versailles on a Germany no more guilty of initiating hostilities than they were, sympathized with Hitler's determination to restore Germany's military strength and lost territories. They credited Hitler with restoring confidence and honor to a prostrated and seemingly unfairly stigmatized nation. By repeatedly disparaging Allied wartime propaganda about German military abuse of civilians, the revisionist scholars, and those who popularized their arguments in the mass media, convinced many Americans that reports of Nazi persecution of Jews were greatly exaggerated or even false.
The pioneering revisionist historians were Sidney Bradshaw Fay and the more strident Harry Elmer Barnes, both of whom were professors at Smith College during the 1920s. In 1929, Fay became the first professor to hold a joint appointment at Harvard and Radcliffe, and he taught there until 1946. Barnes left Smith in 1930 to become an editorial writer with the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain. During 1920 and 1921, Fay published three articles in the prestigious American Historical Review arguing that Germany had not intended to go to war and had made concerted attempts to avoid doing so. Fay's two-volume study The Origins of the World War, published in 1928, asserted that all the belligerents shared responsibility for the war's outbreak and called for revision of the Versailles Treaty, which had blamed Germany and her allies. The Origins of the World War was the most influential scholarly work on the subject in the United States for several decades after its publication.
Harry Elmer Barnes, whom Professor Harold U. Faulkner of the Smith College History Department in 1935 called "the best-known man who has ever been on the Smith faculty," in his book The Genesis of the World War (1926) assigned most of the blame for causing the war to the Entente, identifying France a nd Russia as the "leading precipitators." 3 Barnes's campus presentations received passionate backing from students. In 1926 he delivered a speech to the Harvard Debating Union, arguing the affirmative on "Resolved, that this house favors the revision of the Versailles Treaty in respect to the war guilt of the Central Powers." The Harvard Crimson reported that Barnes "swept [the audience] off [its] feet," presenting "an unanswerable case." He asserted that France, determined to regain Alsace-Lorraine from Germany, and Russia, intent on seizing the Bosporus from Turkey, had together formulated plans "for a sweeping continental war." The Harvard students found Barnes so convincing that there was substantial support for a motion to not even hold a vote. In the end, eighty-one members of the audience voted in favor of Barnes's position, with only twenty-five opposed and twenty-nine not voting. [4]
Although critical of Nazism, Sidney Fay argued that protests against the Nazi regime were counterproductive. He also minimized the support for Nazism among the German people. In April 1933, Fay told the Harvard Crimson that what was happening in Nazi Germany was "really none of any other country's business." He pontificated that "[p]rotest meetings such as have been held in this country and in England ... merely add fuel to the fire." [5] In January 1935, Fay told an audience at Vassar College shortly after the population of the Saar in a plebiscite voted overwhelmingly to rejoin Germany that the outcome was "a great aid in the cause of peace." He still found 20 percent of Hitler's accomplishments to be "good." [6] Speaking at a mass rally at Radcliffe after the horrifying Kristallnacht pogroms of November 9-10, 1938, Fay declared that protests against the Nazi atrocities "would do no practical good." [7]
During May 1940, as the invading Wehrmacht pushed British troops toward the English Channel and drove into France, Sidney Fay sent an article on "The German Character" to Lester Markel, Sunday editor of the New York Times, for consideration for publication; the article revealed that his basic assumptions about Germany remained largely unchanged. Germany had already just conquered Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. Fay's major argument in the article was that the majority of Germans were not enthusiastic about the Nazis' domestic or foreign programs. He offered a rationale for much of what they did support. Fay mentioned that only 5 percent of Germans belonged to the Nazi party, and that there were many "terrorized opponents" of Hitler who did not dare speak out. Fay conceded that the vast majority of Germans had backed Hitler's early effort to "decreas[e] the influence of the Jews in Germany," calling the policies he imposed in April 1933 "relatively moderate." These included the I percent quota on Jewish university admissions and expulsions of Jews from professions such as law, medicine, and university teaching. But Fay claimed that he doubted whether even 30 percent of Germans approved of the Kristallnacht pogroms. Protestant and Catholic churches were thronged, "but not by Nazis and Nazi supporters." This suggested that Germany's vast churchgoing population was not in sympathy with the regime. [8]
Fay argued that a significant proportion of Germans turned against Hitler's foreign policy after the Munich crisis of September 1938. He asserted that the majority of Germans had up until then supported Hitler's "successful efforts to get rid of the 'shackles' of the Versailles 'Diktat.'" But Fay claimed that the German "masses" reacted "with revulsion" when they realized how close Hitler had brought them to war over the Sudetenland.
The German people's "doubts as to [Hitler's] wisdom" increased after Germany subjugated the rest of Czechoslovakia in early 1939, signed a nonaggression pact with Stalin later that year, and went to war with Britain and France in the spring of 1940. Fay conceded that the German people almost unanimously supported Hitler "in his determination to break British sea-power," but he ascribed this to their memory of the suffering Britain had inflicted on them by blockading German ports from "1914 to 1920," and to the Allies' "failure to live up to the promises in the Fourteen Points," Even so, Fay claimed that millions of Germans, living on rationed food in May 1940, were still "questioning in their hearts" whether they should support the invasion of France. The great majority of Germans might well turn against the Hitler regime should the Wehrmacht experience "two or three major reverses." Fay concluded by insisting that it was important for Germany to remain a strong nation. It was imperative that any peace settlement "receive her on equal terms into a new concert of Europe." [9]
Lester Markel rejected Fay's article for the New York Times because it seemed "almost in the nature of a defense of the Germans." Markel commented that Fay had failed to address key aspects of the German character and mind, including Germany's militarist tradition and antisemitism. He also sharply criticized as misleading Fay's emphasis on the small percentage of Germans belonging to the Nazi party. Markel was convinced that a large portion of Germany's population was Nazified and noted that the German population appeared united behind Hitler's spring offensive. [10]
Fay conceded to Markel on June 6, 1940, that "under present circumstances," with British and French forces in a desperate rearguard battle against the Wehrmacht, "people would think the article pro-German." But he told Markel that did not worry him. After' all, people had considered his Origins of the World War "very pro-German" when it was published, but "scholars and many laymen" now rated it "the best book on the subject." [11]
Another of the prominent revisionist historians of the origins of the World War, Charles C. Tansill, professor of American history at American University in Washington, D.C., from 1918 until 1937, and then at Fordham (1939-44) and Georgetown (1944-58), became an outspoken defender of Nazi Germany during the 1930s. Tansill, who received Ph.D. degrees from both Catholic University and Johns Hopkins University, regularly presented papers in diplomatic history at the American Historical Association conventions. The u.s. Senate Foreign Relations committee selected Tansill in 1925 to prepare the Senate's official report on responsibility for the World War. In 1931, Johns Hopkins invited Tansill to deliver the prestigious Albert Shaw lectures in American diplomacy, and during the 1934-35 academic year he served as acting dean of American University's Graduate School. In 1938, Tansill published a major revisionist book, America Goes to War, in which he argued that prominent American officials, most notably Secretary of State Robert Lansing and White House advisors Colonel Edward House and Joseph Tumulty, had drawn the United States into the war because they placed British interests a bove American interests. [12]
Professor Tansill publicly proclaimed his support for the Hitler regime during the summer and fall of 1936 on a visit to Nazi Germany sponsored by the Carl Schurz Society of Berlin, which promoted friendship between the United States and the Third Reich. In September, Tansill was one of fourteen American "honor guests" who participated in the Nazi party's Congress at Nuremberg, an event that U.S. ambassador to Germany William E. Dodd each year refused to attend. On the eve of the Nuremberg Congress, Tansill wrote to Ernest Griffith, who had succeeded him as dean of American University's Graduate School, that the Nazi party rally "should be a great demonstration in honor of Hitler whom I regard as one of the great leaders in German history." Tansill looked forward to meeting Hitler, along with the other "outstanding men of the party." He told Griffith that the Fuehrer "has given a new outlook to the German youth, one of optimism and hope." Tansill also noted how "deeply impressed" he was "with the efficient manner in which everything [in Germany] is conducted." He commented that the German people were "well-fed and well-clothed." [13]
Ambassador Dodd expressed disgust about the 1936 Nuremberg Nazi party Congress and Professor Tansill's participation in it. Dodd would not listen to Nazi leaders make "violent speeches" attacking democratic nations. He noted that Hitler had gone "so far as to call all democracies 'anarchies.''' [14] Dodd told nationally prominent historian Howard K. Beale of the University of North Carolina that when "[t]hat Tansill man" had visited Germany the previous August and September, he did not see him. He had learned that Tansill at Nuremberg had taken "an almost worshipful view toward the Fuehrer." Dodd commented that "a propagandist is not a good professor." [15]
In September 1936, while in Berlin, Tansill was asked by the Nazi government to broadcast to the United States over shortwave radio his impressions of the Third Reich. Tansill told Dean Griffith that he considered the invitation "a distinct honor," one he knew Griffith would appreciate. In Tansill's address, "The New Germany," broadcast on September 20,1936, he enthusiastically praised Hitler's accomplishments and denounced the American press for its critical stance toward Nazi Germany. Tansill proclaimed that Hitler was "the one man who has inspired the spirit of the people." Under the Fuehrer, Germany was "emerging rapidly from the dark cloud that followed Versailles" and was making "significant advance." [16]
After listening to the broadcast in Washington, D.C., with Tansill's family, Dean Ernest Griffith wrote Tansill a letter of congratulations. He declared that it had been a "pleasure" to hear his address on "The New Germany" and praised "its clarity and vigor." [17]
After his return to the United States, Tansil! continued to effusively praise the Third Reich. In an address before the Presbyterian Ministers Association in Washington, D.C., in November 1936, Tansill proclaimed that under Hitler Germany was "emerging from the shadow of defeatism and despair into the sunlight of prestige and power." Hitler had restored to Germany not only law and order but also the self-respect that the Versailles Treaty had "completely shattered." He claimed that, in the Third Reich, there were "no breadlines (and] no slums." Tansill declared that Nazi Germany constituted the "strongest bulwark in Europe against ... Communism." He insisted that Germany had no interest in developing military supremacy in Europe. Germany's military buildup was "a kind of peace insurance" for all of Europe, because it would prevent other countries from starting a war. [18] That same month, Tansill denounced the U.S. ambassador to Germany, William E. Dodd, for holding what he called a "completely unsympathetic attitude" toward the Nazi government. [19]
When American University Chancellor Joseph M. M. Gray dismissed Tansill from the faculty in 1937, he denied press speculation that he had done so because of Tansill's public support for Nazi Germany. Chancellor Gray, of course, after a trip to Germany in 1936, had also highly praised the Third Reich in the press. When Fordham University wrote expressing interest in hiring Tansill, Chancellor Gray described him as "a sound scholar and a brilliant teacher" who deserved a university faculty position. He explained that he had discharged Tansill only because he had become overly concerned with "maintaining his popularity" with students. As a result, Tansill had become "indiscriminate in awarding high grades." [20] Professor Howard K. Beale confirmed to Ambassador Dodd that Tansill's pro-Nazi speeches had not been the cause of his dismissal. Beale explained that Tansill had been "let out for several reasons of personal conduct, one of which was refusal to make any efforts to pay a considerable amount of debts owed to other members of the faculty from whom Mrs. Tansill had borrowed money." [21]
The University of Virginia Institute of Public Affairs Roundtables, 1933-1941: Helping Germany Make Its Case
The University of Virginia Institute of Public Affairs, from 1933 until U.S. intervention in World War II in 1941, provided a major platform and an aura of academic legitimacy for Nazi Germany's supporters and for the propagation of antisemitism. The university established the Institute of Public Affairs in 1927 to answer "sundry charges that the South is backward and provincial." Every year in July the Institute sponsored several days of roundtable conferences on selected topics in national and international affairs. Each roundtable was composed of academics, diplomats, politicians, or other authorities on the subject under consideration, whom the Institute invited to present papers and to participate in discussion. Dr. Charles Gilmore Maphis, dean of the University of Virginia Summer School, was the Institute's director from 1927 until his death in May 1938. The Institute's initial Board of Advisors included four university presidents: Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia; Harry Woodburn Chase, then of the University of North Carolina; Glenn Frank of the University of Wisconsin; and A. A. Murphree of the University of Florida. [22] Many of the roundtables received national and foreign press coverage.
The Institute's approach was to present "both sides of questions" at conferences, and it gave German Nazis and their American sympathizers considerable opportunity to propagandize for the Third Reich. [23] To secure these speakers, the University of Virginia administration worked closely with Nazi Germany's embassy in Washington, D.C., and with the Carl Schurz Foundation, an organization devoted to promoting friendly relations between the United States and Germany. [24] Institute Director Charles G. Maphis and other University of Virginia administrators accorded great respect to the Nazi spokespersons, some of whom the U.S. government later arrested as seditionists, as unregistered German agents, or for disseminating Nazi propaganda.
Papers by American academic apologists for Hitler at conferences devoted to Nazi Germany in 1934 and 1935 received prominent coverage in the press. Professor Francis W. Coker of the Yale University Political Science Department, chairman of the Institute roundtable on "Dictatorship and Democracy," held July 3-7, 1934, implied that the Nazi position had not received a proper hearing because representatives of the Hitler regime feared that if they accepted his invitation to speak, U.S. representative Samuel Dickstein's committee investigating subversive activities would charge them with disseminating Nazi propaganda. [25] Nonetheless, two of the principal papers were presented by Americans who sympathized with Nazi Germany: Karl F. Geiser, professor of political science at Oberlin College, and W. W. Cumberland of New York. More than 200 Institute members and guests, a particularly large audience for a roundtable, gathered for the first morning's session to hear their addresses.
In his paper, "The German Nazi State," Professor Geiser portrayed Hitler as Germany's savior, "a Siegfried slaying the dragon of communism." Drawing on the more polemical revisionist writings on the World War, Geiser strongly condemned the Allied wartime blockade of German ports, which he claimed had caused 750,000 to 900,000 Germans to starve to death, and what he called unreasonably harsh peace terms. Geiser charged that the Western democracies drew up the Treaty of Versailles in a "mental frame of madness." They forced on Germany "the harshest treaty ever imposed upon a people in modern times." It consigned Germany to "perpetual economic slavery" and impoverished her. [26]
Geiser declared that as a political scientist he admired how Hitler had ended the chaos of Weimar democracy "with its 32 parties," uniting Germans "into one party, for the first time in a thousand years," an achievement impossible without massive popular support. Geiser declared that Germany's "years in bondage" had only strengthened her "discipline and organizing powers," which he hoped would "give her the final victory over the forces of injustice." The New York Times reported that the audience applauded Geiser's address. [27]
Delighted with his reception at the University of Virginia, Geiser left immediately after his presentation for Nazi Germany, where he spent the rest of the summer. That fall, he wrote to Institute Director Charles Maphis that he "was charmed ... by the courtesy of your Southern hospitality." [28]
W. W. Cumberland, who followed Geiser, feared that Nazi Germany, in building up her ground and air forces, was preparing for war, but he found many similarities between her economic programs and those of President Roosevelt. He declared, " Nazi Germany is a counterpart of the United States under the New Deal." [29]
Another member of the roundtable, Dr. Beniamino de Ritis of New York, special correspondent for the Corriere delta Sera of Milan, described Italy's Fascist regime "in glowing terms," according to the New York Times. Mussolini had rescued a nation "on the verge of bolshevism and bankruptcy." For the first time in centuries, a long-divided nation fixated only on vanished ancient glory could look to the future. Mussolini's genius was to create in Italy a new form of state, conceived of "not as an aggregate of groups and individuals" but as "a spiritual entity," in which the individual is "subordinated to society." [30]
During the evening session, Harry Elmer Barnes, then an editor with the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain, presented his revisionist interpretation of the origins of the World War, absolving Germany of "unique blame" for the conflict. Barnes accused the Allies of deceiving the United States in order to draw it into the war, and with having "exacted by fraud vast sums from Germany" in reparations after the Armistice.
Barnes argued at the symposium that democracy had become outmoded as a form of government, making Nazi authoritarianism appear more legitimate. In his view, democracy assumed a "real intellectual equality of men" and an electorate that "carefully scrutinize[d] candidates and platforms." It was designed for a "simple and unchanging rural society" whose political problems were "few and elementary." Yet Barnes claimed that modern psychological research proved that most men were unqualified either to vote or to hold office. The population did not share an approximate mental equality. In fact, "a clear majority range[d] from stupidity (dull normals) to imbecility." Barnes concluded that science and the record of American politics over the previous century had "blown sky-high" the "whole body of assumptions upon which the old democracy rested." What was necessary was a weighted suffrage. Intelligence tests administered to the entire population would allow the government to accord greater voting power to a more intelligent citizen than to one determined to be less intelligent. The government should also require that candidates for political office possess a certain level of "scientific and professional training." [31]
The next year's Institute conference on "American-German Relations" was highlighted by the roundtable chair's dismissal of Nazi oppression of Jews as insignificant; a blatantly antisemitic address by one of the principal speakers, Professor Frederick K. Krueger of Wittenberg College; and defenses of the Nazi government by several other participants. Roundtable chairman Friedrich Auhagen of Columbia University's Seth Low College began the conference by vigorously defending the Third Reich, and he continued to do so at each session. He claimed that Germany could "no longer afford democracy." When roundtable member Dr. Morris Lazaron, a reform rabbi from Baltimore, asked why Auhagen had "so lightly dismissed ... the religious question in Germany," meaning persecution of Jews, Professor Auhagen replied that "the religious problem" in the Third Reich was not really any different than in any other country. [32]
In a later session, Auhagen announced that the Germans wanted order, which could only be brought about by inflicting suffering on "some" people. Fellow panelist Dr. H. F. Simon of Northwestern University agreed, declaring that "one can not have change without suffering," and that restoring unity to Germany was a worthy goal. [33] Addressing Rabbi Lazaron, who had criticized the Hitler regime, Dr. Simon asked, "Can Dr. Lazaron ... understand what the German people have gone through since 1914? .. Hitler is an expression of the proudness of Germany which can not bow to the conditions imposed upon her." [34]
The University of Virginia administration invited Professor Frederick K. Krueger to deliver a major address at the conference fully aware that he had publicly made inflammatory pro- Nazi and antisemitic statements. The New York Times reported in early December 1934 that Krueger, who was then lecturing at the National Socialist Academy for Political Sciences in Berlin, had declared: "Some day America will be forced to deal with the problem presented by the Jew." The Times noted that the National Socialist Academy for Political Sciences was a "party institution devoted to the inculcation of Nazi theories." Krueger labeled the boycott of German goods "a crime against America," claiming that it harmed U.S. foreign trade. He denounced the American press for misrepresenting what had transpired in Nazi Germany. Krueger declared that American newspapers gave "no sign of an effort to understand the new German soul or to play fair." In his opening lecture at the ational Socialist Academy Krueger had offered Germans advice on how to conduct efficient propaganda in the United States. He explained that "only thoroughgoing National Socialists should be sent to America." [35]
Professor Frederick K. Krueger's address combined vigorous praise of Nazi government policies with a vicious antisemitic diatribe designed to discredit its American critics. Krueger began by declaring that Americans and Germans were "basically of the same racial stock [and] culture." He dismissed the view that liberal democracy was always the most desirable form of government. Krueger claimed that the United States itself had conferred dictatorial powers on its president when confronted with emergencies, "as for instance during the Civil War and the World War." Germany, facing economic crisis and threatened by Communism, had not acted any differently in according Chancellor Hitler such powers. Besides, every nation had the right to choose its own form of government. Americans were also wrong to criticize "so-called German militarism." All Germany wanted was equality in armaments with the nations that surrounded it. The Allies, after all, had violated their pledge at Versailles to reduce their own armaments. [36]
Professor Krueger invoked hoary antisemitic stereotypes to explain why much of American public opinion had turned against the Hitler regime. He claimed that "[t]he American Jews are financially very powerful." They largely controlled the metropolitan press and wielded great power in the movie industry and in radio. Jewish influence over "the organs of public opinion" allowed them to sow hostility to the Nazi government among non-Jewish Americans. Krueger insisted that Nazi Germany's "racial policy" was "its own affair," and that Americans had no right to protest against it. American Jews should "think of the country of their adoption first" and stop "sowing the seed of discord in the United States for the benefit of international Judaism." [37]
Professor H. F. Simon of Northwestern in his address declared that the harsh provisions of the Treaty of Versailles justified what he called "[t]he German Revolution of 1933," which he claimed Americans had very much misjudged. Simon asserted that no nation "would stand the dishonoring and impossible burdens" the "despotic" Allies had imposed on Germany. The Treaty's war guilt provision blaming Germany for starting the war was unfair. Germany was not permitted to rearm, despite being surrounded by "highly armed neighbors." The vindictive Treaty of Versailles had caused the German people to "close ranks" and take refuge "under the strong hands of a trusted and beloved leader," Adolf Hitler. Britain, France, and the United States, "rich in space," smugly preached the status quo, failing to comprehend overpopulated Germany's need to expand. [38]
Still another participant in the roundtable, Ernst Schmidt, in charge of tourist information and promotion for the German Railroads Company in New York, marveled over Nazi Germany's dynamism and modernity. He urged American travelers to see the Third Reich's "sparkling great cities with their stirring business, spotless cleanliness, and efficient administration." Nor should Americans neglect to visit the suburbs and smaller cities, where they could "wonder at the modern architecture and city planning" and "visit the roaring workshops of industry." Any visitor to the Third Reich would have to acknowledge "the rightful eminence of the German people as the most progressive and modern in Europe." [39]
Schmidt portrayed Nazi Germany's "new generation" as far more appealing than their decadent Western counterparts. The young women of the Third Reich combined "good looks" with "genuine culture" and provided "a distinct relief from flappers." The conversation of Germany's young men, who were "full of ideas," contrasted sharply with American youths' "college chatter." [40]
Dr. Henry G. Hodges, associate professor of political science at the University of Cincinnati, criticized American press coverage of Nazi Germany as prejudiced and sensationalistic, ridiculing "hair-trigger editorials whose predictions ... are belied a week later." He condemned the Jewish-led boycott of German products and services as motivated by a desire for revenge and therefore "contrary to ... Christian principle." Hodges believed that most Americans considered the Versailles Treaty unjust to Germany. Americans "overwhelmingly" supported Germany's right to rearm. There was also "general sentiment" in the United States that Adolf Hitler had "done as much (and perhaps more) as any of the other European nations to prevent war." Hodges noted that Americans who had traveled to the Third Reich were "more tolerant of her actions, and favorable to her conditions," than those who had not, implying that an "on-the-spot view" would change a person's opinions of Nazi Germany. He quoted one American traveler as commenting that Germany was "courageously facing the problems that we are side-stepping." [41]