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The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses. By Stephen H. Norwood. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xi + 337 pp.
The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower depicts in stunning detail how, in the 1930s, when the Nazi regime was intent on winning international legitimacy, it received a significant boost from America's leading academic institutions, including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Cornell, Rutgers, MIT, the University of Virginia, and the Seven Sisters. The leaders of these institutions-presidents, provosts, and professors-did not just look the other way as Germany persecuted those it deemed its "enemies." They reached out to the new regime, hosting its professors and diplomats, engaging in student exchanges, welcoming German diplomats to their campuses, and even allowing some of them to lay swastika-bedecked floral wreaths in their central quadrangles.
Even as they reached out to the Third Reich, many universities were less than hospitable to refugees. In May 1933, the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced German Scholars asked Harvard's President Lawrence A. Lowell to hire a German displaced refugee scholar. The Committee offered to cover half the scholar's salary and another foundation offered to pay the remainder of the university's costs. Lowell refused because he believed that providing a place for a refugee scholar was serving the interests of propaganda.
Lowell's successor James Bryant Conant welcomed Ernst Hanfstaengl, a high-ranking Nazi official and Harvard alumnus, to the 1934 commencement, where he was treated as an honored guest despite the fact that Hanfstaengl had opined that the "Jews must be crushed"...