The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses (review)

Contributing to a large body of scholarship on the actions (or inactions) of American and American-Jewish organizations during the rise of Hitler and Nazism, Stephen H. Norwood focuses on the American university to explore the attitudes—often sympathetic—of administrators, faculty members, and students toward Germany and its Nazi regime. In the author’s words, this is “the first systematic exploration” of the subject. Norwood reveals a paradoxical relationship between institutions meant to advance knowledge and (by extension) humanity, and the emerging Nazi ideologies that enjoyed considerable university acceptability even as they foreshadowed war and countered any conception of the university’s mission of enlightenment.

Norwood has organized The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower into eight chapters and an epilogue, surveying Harvard, Columbia, the University of Virginia, the Seven Sisters colleges, and Catholic universities. The author details national trends among departments of German and closes his study with a discussion of how events in 1938, especially Kristallnacht, revealed the limitations of the effectiveness of campus protests.

In a powerful opening chapter focusing on anti-Nazi protests in the early years of Hitler’s rule, Norwood demonstrates that many Americans understood the threat posed by Nazism, engaged the challenge, and drew public attention to events in Germany as early as 1933. Given the university’s mandate as a place for open dialogue, it might seem that administrators and faculty should have been ahead of the curve, critiquing Germany’s burgeoning antisemitic laws and offering platforms for spirited discussion if not outright condemnation of Germany. Instead, the universities reversed this logic to emerge as centers of empathy, if not sympathy, for the Nazis’ cause.

In the book’s first case study, Norwood lambasts Harvard University and its president James Bryant Conant for ignoring “numerous opportunities to take a principled stand against the Hitler regime and its anti-Semitic outrages.” The leadership, according to this critique, “contributed to Nazi Germany’s efforts to improve its image in the West” (p. 36). At the very time of the American Jewish community’s anti-Nazi boycott (launched in response to German anti-Jewish boycotts), President Norwood welcomed Nazi leader Ernst (Putzi) Hanfstaengl to campus. Until November 1938 and Kristallnacht, Conant “remained publicly indifferent” to the plight of the European Jews. In an October 1934 undergraduate mock debate on Hitler, a panel of judges comprised mostly of Harvard professors “ruled out as irrelevant” the question of Hitler’s persecution of Jews, and acquitted Hitler of “invading the sanctity of homes without warrant.” When a group of Jewish organizations enacted its own mock trial of Hitler several months earlier, the Harvard student newspaper condemned them for finding the defendant guilty of “a crime against civilization” (p. 41).

At Columbia, the subject of Chapter 3, undergraduates did join protests against Nazism, and the editors of the Columbia Spectator printed an article by Franz Boas on Nazi book-burning. As early as March 1933, Jewish students at Columbia had organized to denounce Hitler, gaining the support of both Protestant and Catholic faculty leaders. When students protested the welcome that Columbia University president Nicholas Murray Butler extended Germany’s ambassador to the US, Butler responded that he held the diplomat in high esteem, considered Germans “a friendly people,” and demanded that Columbia offer “the greatest courtesy and respect” to its guest (p. 77).

In the next two chapters, Norwood examines student exchange programs at the Seven Sisters Colleges and at the Institute of Public Affairs of the University of Virginia. Echoing themes developed in the treatment of Harvard and Columbia, Chapters 4 and 5 document widespread indifference to, or even support for, Nazism. The focus on women’s colleges highlights the paradox that women “shared a sanguine view” of a regime that limited the rights of women (as did American institutions of higher learning), and “enthusiastically participated in academic and cultural exchanges with the Third Reich” (p. 105...