The Harvard Nazi [:Ernst “Putzi” Franz Sedgwick Hanfstaengl]

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Nazi In Our Midst
by Michael M. Grynbaum
thecrimson.com
February 10, 2005

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There’s bound to be many a skeleton in Harvard’s closets, but the possibility of links to Hitler rattle a little louder than others. Last October, the media came running when a University of Oklahoma professor, Stephen Norwood, announced that he had found evidence tying Harvard to Nazi Germany. Speaking at an academic conference at Boston University, Norwood declared that Harvard had warmly received Nazi officers in the 1930s, formally recognized German universities taken over by Hitler, and voiced support for the Third Reich.

These were serious accusations—so how come we haven’t heard anything about them since? Norwood has returned to obscurity, and Harvard has declined to issue any apology or acknowledgement of wrongdoing in connection with the historian’s claims. What happened?

Norwood’s research was legitimate—it was the spin he placed on his findings that appears shaky. Central to his claims is the tale of Ernst “Putzi” F.S. Hanfstaengl, a popular member of the Harvard Class of 1909 who, when he returned as a class officer at his 25th reunion in 1934, was a chief Nazi press officer and personal acquaintance of Adolf Hitler. Norwood argued that by inviting the prominent Nazi sympathizer to an official event, Harvard missed a chance to criticize Hitler’s regime and ignored reports of Jewish persecution trickling in from across the Atlantic.

Harvard—which did not send a representative to Norwood’s talk—responded in a November 2004 press release that College tradition calls for inviting all alumni back for their reunions. University spokesman Joseph Wrinn noted that James B. Conant ’14, Harvard’s president at the time, had refused to accept contributions from Hanfstaengl. “Harvard University and President Conant did not support the Nazis,” Wrinn wrote.

Harvard never explicitly condoned Nazism, but it subscribed to the genteel anti-Semitism that pervaded the elite institutions of the country in the early years of the 20th century. The Hanfstaengl incident reveals a campus divided over the rising fascist regimes of the 1930s, but an administration that ultimately refrained from confronting the Nazi in their midst.

HEIL HARVARD

Son of a prominent New York art dealer and a well-known figure in the city’s social circles, Hanfstaengl was the quintessential Harvard man of his time: as an undergraduate, he rowed crew, enjoyed personal visits with President Charles W. Eliot, Class of 1853, and entertained students and faculty with his renowned piano skills. In an unfortunate bit of foreshadowing, he was particularly fond of reciting Wagner’s compositions.

Decades after his time in Cambridge, this blueblood remained a legend among Harvard students.

“In the early 1960s, we knew about this man,” said Jeffrey S. Mehlman ’65, professor of French Literature at Boston University, who attended Norwood’s lecture. “He was known as a good musician, and the big story was that Harvard was so powerful it had friends all over the world on all sides of every issue.”

Hanfstaengl traveled to Europe after World War I. “I returned to Germany, finding the country ‘flourishing’ under the blessings of the Versailles treaty,” he wrote in his reunion class book. “A year later I ran into the man who has saved Germany and civilization—Adolf Hitler.”

Always a bombastic self-promoter, Hanfstaengl soon became a close friend of the Fuhrer, reportedly delighting the rising politician with his Wagner renditions. By 1934, Hanfstaengl was supervising the Nazi Party’s foreign press office. He even acquired a nickname from his boss—“Putzi”—a moniker that would stick.

When Hanfstaengl’s 25th class reunion approached, he was invited by class marshal Elliott Carr Cutler, Class of 1909, to act as a vice marshal at the reunion. His reputation as a consummate Ivy Leaguer superseded concerns about anti-Semitism among students and faculty.

“He was an international celebrity, a good musician, and that was enough for his classmates,” Mehlman said.

But not all Harvard affiliates were happy to see their institution warmly welcoming a prominent Nazi. News of Hanfstaengl’s invitation spurred a flurry of protests from Jewish alumni and anti-Nazi student groups.

Harvard administrators initially responded with a shrug: the decision to offer the position was made by the independent reunion committee—it was out of their hands.

But as criticism mounted, Hanfstaengl was pressured into resigning his marshal position. The New York Times reported on June 12, 1934, that he would remain in Germany, but two days later ran a banner headline on page one announcing his decision to attend the reunion anyway.

His arrival in New York was marked by angry encounters with over 1,500 anti-Nazi demonstrators. In Cambridge, anxious state troopers assigned him a security detail for the course of reunion week. Nevertheless, Putzi insisted on attending several receptions at the homes of prominent alumni, including a tea party at Conant’s residence. The president later wrote in his autobiography that his response to Hanfstaengl was “cold; I did not return the greetings.”

Not one to surrender the spotlight, Hanfstaengl held several press conferences throughout the week, entertaining questions from the pack of journalists hounding his path around Boston. On a stroll through Harvard Yard with reporters, Hanfstaengl was asked by a rabbi about concerns over treatment of German Jews. “I will say that the Jews’ situation in Germany is going to be normal before long,” he responded.

Tension came to a head at the commencement exercises on June 21, 1934. Two female undergraduates chained themselves to benches in the Yard and interrupted Conant’s commencement speech, chanting “Down With Hanfstaengl!” and “Down With Hitler!” The women were arrested for breach of peace, along with seven other undergraduates who protested in Harvard Square among nearly 2,000 others. Despite pleas for clemency on the part of Conant and the university, seven students were eventually sentenced to six months of hard labor.

For all the tumult, Hanfstaengl appeared nonplussed by the attention. “It has been the most enjoyable and successful vacation that I have had in years,” he wrote several months later.

LASTING LEGACY?

While Norwood has focused on the Hanfstaengl incident as an example of what he says were “deliberate ties” formed by Harvard and Nazi Germany, the decision to invite Putzi appears to have been motivated more by Harvard tradition than politics.

“I think it was a time when it would have been unusual to refuse entrance to a Harvard graduate to his class,” said Richard M. Hunt, retired University marshal and co-author of Harvard A to Z. “Harvard has all kinds of heroes and also all kinds of rogues who come back all the time. I think this was something [Hanfstaengl] was entitled to.”

Mehlman, the Harvard alum, said that while Hanfstaengl was “no portrait in moral courage,” Professor Norwood “may have been naïve to be that shocked, given the sense that Jews had been systematically excluded from Harvard in the 1930s.”

Some students spoke out in favor of Hanfstaengl’s appearance, notably the editorial staff of The Crimson. In a June 13, 1934 editorial, Crimson editors argued that “if Herr Hanfstaengl is to be received at all, it should be with the marks of honor appropriate to his high position in the government of a friendly country.” The Crimson also referred to Nazi Germany in an editorial as a “great and proud nation.”

“There certainly was a strain of anti-Semitism that was quite pervasive, although not talked about very much,” said John T. Bethell ’54, author of Harvard Observed and former editor of Harvard Magazine. Indeed, Hanfstaengl’s invitation wasn’t the only nod to Nazism on display at the commencement: the Class of 1924 celebrated their tenth reunion by goose-stepping into Harvard Stadium for the playful Class Day exercises, holding their hands in a mock Nazi salute. The incident was blithely described by The New York Times in its account of the event and spectators did not seem perturbed.

“There was a lot of pretty tasteless stuff that went on then. There’s a lot of pretty tasteless stuff that goes on in the early 2000s,” Bethell said. “I’m afraid it’s not a great tribute to the younger generation of those years. Some of them were taken by Hitler, which they shouldn’t have been. ”While Harvard hosted Putzi for the week, his attempt to leave a longer-lasting legacy was blocked. Months after the reunion, Conant rejected a $1,000 scholarship offer from Hanfstaengl, who hoped to endow a traveling fellowship to Germany for interested students.

Hunt said Conant showed “courage and conviction” in refusing to accept the gift. “It showed that there was in Conant and in the administration’s mind a clear awareness that this was an unacceptable gift from an unacceptable regime,” Hunt said.

Bethell takes issue with Norwood’s take on the scandal. “The university’s handling of it was much more responsible” than Norwood describes it, Bethell said. “He’s really got it in for Harvard I think.”

For all the hubbub, Hanfstaengl may not have been as substantial a figure as he’s been made out.

Hunt met Hanfstaengl in 1959 for his 50th reunion. “There was no publicity about him,” Hunt said. “While he was a rather imposing-looking man, he was unable to convince me that he was more than a lightweight.” Hunt maintains that many Harvardians saw Hanfstaengl as a bit of a “buffoon,” a social butterfly who had little tangible influence on Hitler aside from his skills at the keyboard.

“He played this all up,” Hunt said. “He was very adept at making himself appear greater and more important than he really was.”

During Hitler’s rise to power, Hansfstaengl helped finance the publication of Mein Kampf as well as the purchase of the Völkischer Beobachter, which became the Nazi Party’s official newspaper. While a Boston rabbi mobilized a Jewish protest, the Harvard Crimson pooh-poohed the critics and called for Hansfstaengl, a Harvard alumnus, to be awarded an honorary degree “appropriate to his high position” in the government of “a great and profound nation.” 10

That same year prominent Harvard faculty, administrators, and student leaders visited the Nazi warship Karlsruhe when it docked in Boston harbor, flying the swastika flag. The Harvard group also attended a gala reception at which the warship captain praised Hitler. And in 1936 Harvard sent an academic delegation to celebrate the anniversary of Heidelberg University. The event was boycotted by British universities because it was highly politicized to feature Nazism in a positive light. In attendance, mingling with the Harvard delegation, were Nazi theorist Alfred Rosenberg, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, and SS chief Heinrich Himmler. 11

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Notes:

10. Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1880-1936: Hubris (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 261; John Sedgwick,
“The Harvard Nazi,” March 2005, Boston, http://www.bostonmagazine.com/2006/05/the-harvardnazi/;
Michael Grynbaum, “Nazi in Our Midst,” February 10, 2005, Harvard Crimson,
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2005/ ... res-bound/.

11. Paul Hollander, From Benito Mussolini to Hugo Chavez (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 109.

-- The Big Lie, by Dinesh D'Souza

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Columbia Defends Its Nazi Links: “Everyone Was Doing It”
The Jewish Press
Dec. 8, 2006

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NEW YORK — Columbia University is coming under increasing criticism over revelations that it built friendly relations with Nazi Germany in the 1930’s. Now Columbia’s provost is firing back – but he may have shot himself in the foot.

The controversy began last month when the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies publicized research by one of its scholars, Professor Stephen Norwood of the University of Oklahoma, revealing a series of steps taken by Columbia president Nicholas Murray Butler during 1933-1937 to forge ties with the Hitler regime.

After first trying to avoid the issue, Columbia officials are now defending Butler’s actions on the grounds that many other prominent individuals behaved similarly.

In 1933, Nazi Germany’s ambassador to the United States, Hans Luther, was invited to speak on the Columbia campus.

Butler hosted a reception for the Nazi ambassador, whose remarks were devoted to defending Hitler’s “peaceful intentions” toward the rest of Europe. Butler said that as a representative of “the government of a friendly people,” Luther was “entitled to be received with the greatest courtesy and respect.”

Columbia, like many American universities, continued its program of student exchanges with Germany even after the Nazis came to power.

Norwood points out that a top Nazi official at the time described German exchange students as “political soldiers of the Reich” who were doing Hitler’s work abroad.

In 1936, President Butler sent a delegate to take part in anniversary celebrations at the Nazi-controlled University of Heidelberg. He did so even though the university had already fired all of its Jewish instructors, implemented a curriculum based on Nazi ideology, and even was host to a mass book-burning.

Butler defended his decision on the grounds that “academic relationships have no political implications.” But Columbia students disputing that claim at the time held a mock book-burning on campus and a peaceful rally in front of Butler’s residence.

In an episode that seems to have been unique in the history of American academia’s responses to Nazism, Columbia expelled a student, Robert Burke, for leading that rally.

The administration’s official charge against Burke was that he “spoke disrespectfully” about President Butler, which at that time was grounds for expulsion. Despite his excellent grades, Burke was never readmitted to the university.

In a series of articles in the Columbia student newspaper, The Spectator, and elsewhere, Wyman Institute director Dr. Rafael Medoff has urged Columbia to apologize for its actions regarding the Nazis, and award an honorary degree to Burke “as an acknowledgment that Columbia was wrong, and that Burke was treated unjustly.”

Professor Norwood, who is working on a book about how American universities responded to Hitler, described Columbia’s actions in the 1930’s as “shameful” and said they “helped legitimize the Nazi regime” in the West. Norwood earned his Ph.D. in history at Columbia.

The controversy at Columbia has attracted additional attention in recent weeks because another major institution, Brown University in Rhode Island, has been facing up to its own skeletons. A Brown University committee recently completed a three-year study of Brown’s links to slave-holders. The committee urged the university to make amends by building a memorial to the slaves, establishing a center for the study of slavery, and recruiting more black students.

“We cannot change the past, but an institution can hold itself accountable for the past, accepting its burdens and responsibilities along with its benefits and privileges,” Brown University president Ruth Simmons said. The Wyman Institute is urging Columbia “to follow Brown’s example and face its own troubling past.”

Columbia at first tried to duck the controversy. A Columbia spokesman told the New York Post last month that “the university was aware of the accusations, but the administration hasn’t decided whether it will investigate them.”

But in recent weeks, the controversy has snowballed, including a feature story in the online journal “Inside Higher Ed,” a widely respected voice in the academic community.

Columbia provost Alan Brinkley has now responded, telling Inside Higher Ed, “If the events that Professor Norwood describes are examples of ‘collaboration,’ then the collaborators include many thousands of leaders and citizens of the United States, Britain, and many other nations.”

“That kind of everyone-was-doing-it attitude is appalling,” said Medoff. “Is that the kind of message that one of the most prominent universities in America wants to send to its students – that if many people are doing something, it can’t be so bad…?”

An associate dean at Columbia, Professor Michael Rosenthal, has also jumped into the fray. But his defense of Columbia and Butler is raising some eyebrows. Rosenthal is the author of a recent biography of President Butler, called “Nicholas Miraculous.”

In an interview with a Columbia students’ website earlier this year, Rosenthal said that Butler “was in the forefront” of limiting the admission of Jews to Columbia, “but he was doing nothing that the other schools didn’t do.” Rosenthal said Butler “was anti-Semitic, but not in a rabid way.” Rosenthal also said that Butler “supported Italian fascism” in the 1930’s, but it was “a time when many people did … the notion that he was a Fascist is absurd.”

Regarding the current controversy over Butler and the Nazis, Rosenthal told Inside Higher Ed that Robert Burke was “expelled not for the anti-Nazi substance of his protest, but for the fact of the disturbance.” He said “Butler was not necessarily one of those who appreciated students’ expressions of views. Butler was an autocratic guy.”

“More circling of the wagons,” Medoff says. “Instead of just coming clean and admitting that Columbia was wrong to expel Burke, Professor Rosenthal offers what sounds like an attempt to rationalize the expulsion. I understand that this is embarrassing for Columbia, but after seventy years, one would have expected a more mature response.”

“One of the reasons for writing the book is to develop more public awareness in these institutions, to get universities to address their pasts,” Norwood told Inside Higher Ed.

“I think that universities should look at their pasts and examine them carefully and take steps when they can to acknowledge past injustices, and not give such priority to protecting their own reputations.”

The Wyman Institute has initiated several successful efforts to persuade prominent institutions to acknowledge mistakes they made during the Hitler era.

Earlier this year, another Wyman-affiliated scholar, Professor Laurel Leff of Northeastern University, completed a study which found that America’s top journalism schools and newspaper publishers refused to assist German Jewish refugee journalists who were trying to come to America to escape Hitler in the 1930’s.

The Wyman Institute organized a petition signed by more than 80 prominent journalist, editors, and journalism school faculty members urging the Newspaper Association of America to express remorse for those actions.

The NAA issued a public apology, published Leff’s findings in its journal, and invited her to address its board of directors.

In 2003, a leading British publisher, IPC Media, became embroiled in controversy when it tried to restrict public access to a pro-Hitler article that had appeared in one of its magazines, Homes & Gardens, in 1938.

After the Wyman Institute organized a petition by 75 Holocaust scholars from around the world, IPC Media publicly apologized, made the article accessible to the public, and even assigned its researchers to investigate whether its magazines had published any other articles sympathetic to Hitler. They found one: a 1936 article in Country Life magazine glorifying Hitler’s summer home.

In 2004, Norwood was the keynote speaker at a Wyman Institute conference at Boston University, where he unveiled research concerning Harvard’s relations with the Nazis. He revealed that Harvard president James Conant gave a friendly reception to Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstangl, Hitler’s foreign press chief, when Hanfstangl visited the campus to attend his 25th class reunion in 1934. The Harvard student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, urged that Hanfstangl be awarded an honorary degree.

The current managing editor of the Harvard Crimson, Elisabeth Theodore, spoke at the Wyman Institute’s conference and acknowledged that the Crimson’s articles about Hanfstangl were “regrettable and abhorrent.”

Harvard also hosted visits by Nazi ambassador Hans Luther in 1934 and the Nazi consul-general in Boston, Baron Kurt Von Tippelskirch, in 1935; sent a delegate to the 1936 Heidelberg event, and built relations with another Nazi-controlled university, Gottingen.

The current Harvard administration declined the Wyman Institute’s invitation to send a representative to the conference to respond to Norwood’s findings.

(With reporting by Jason Maoz, Yaakov Kenner and Elliot Resnick)

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1974: A Giant of Punditry Who Never Admitted Being a Jew Dies: To the extent that he commented on Jewish matters at all, Walter Lippmann suggested that Jews bore a lot of responsibility for anti-Semitism.
by David B. Green
Haaretz
Dec 14, 2016 3:24 PM

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Walter Lippmann, 1914.

On December 14, 1974, the journalist and political thinker Walter Lippmann died at the age of 85. As the author of a syndicated column that ran for more than three decades, Lippmann was one of the most influential political commentators of the 20th century, and he used his considerable intelligence to contemplate serious questions regarding, for example, the way to strike a balance between democracy and the public good, with insight that continues to be relevant today.

From the Jewish perspective, however, Lippmann doesnt come off so well. Even within the familiar context of assimilationist New York German Jewish society, whose leading members often feared being perceived as too Jewish, Lippmann was an extreme case.

Not only did he never acknowledge publicly his Jewish heritage – one friend who played Scrabble with him regularly said she knew better than to even use the word Jew in the game – but he never spoke out about the fate of European Jewry, neither in the period of the 1930s when the U.S. could still have saved lives by accepting refugees, nor even after the war, when he never commented on the Nazi crimes discovered with the liberation of the concentration camps.

Walter Lippmann was born on September 23, 1889 in New York City. He was the only child of Jacob Lippmann and the former Daisy Baum, both of them the children of Jewish immigrants from Germany. Jacob worked in his family's garment manufacturing business until Daisy's inheritance of her father's substantial estate allowed him to semi-retire, while continuing to support the family in comfort, including a trip to Europe each summer.

He attended Sachs School for Boys, followed by the Sachs Collegiate Institute, private schools for well-off Jewish children, and in 1904 he underwent confirmation at Reform Temple Emanu-El, which preferred that coming-of-age ritual to the bar mitzvah.

After high school graduation in 1907, Walter entered Harvard University, where he studied philosophy and languages, and completed his coursework for a degree in three years. During his sophomore year, he was sought out by philosopher William James, after the latter read an article Walter had written in a student journal, and the two began meeting weekly for conversation. In his fourth year, he worked as an assistant to the historian George Santayana.

Young socialist

Lippmann was part of a group that organized a socialist discussion workshop at Harvard, but by the time he left Cambridge, Massachusetts and moved to New York, where he became an assistant to the muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens, he had moved from being a revolutionary to a social reformer. In fact, over his life, Lippmann was all over much of the political map, though never on the far right.

In 1913, Lippman was one of the founding editors of The New Republic magazine, though he left that in 1920 to become an editorial writer for the New York World, and the following year began his column Today and Tomorrow for the New York Herald Tribune.

During World War I, he had a position in Army Intelligence, and then helped President Woodrow Wilson in the drafting of the Fourteen Points, as part of the U.S. delegation to the Paris Peace Conference.

Lippmann wrote more than 20 books, many of them concerned with the problems inherent in democracy, and the role of the press in creating an informed public. Nearly a century ago, he warned about the dangers of the press falling down on the job, and about the human tendency to be influenced by shallow thinking and slogans.

To the extent that he commented on Jewish matters at all, Lippmann suggested that Jews bore a lot of responsibility for anti-Semitism, with their tribalism and ostentation. His biographer Ronald Steel found a 1921 review he wrote of a book about Zionism. He did not condemn Zionism, just said it didn't interest him, being one of those assimilated creatures to whom the Jewish past has no very peculiar intimate appeal have no sense of belonging to the Chosen People, and tremble at the suggestion that God has put all his best eggs in one tribal basket. He withdrew it after submitting it to the Menorah Journal, and it was never published.