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Letters They Wouldn't Publish

June 29, 2005

Letters to the Editor
Commentary

Dear Editor:

According to Regina Herzlinger (Letters, July-August), "James Conant, Harvard's president from 1933 to 1952, was flayed during his tenure for his failure to damn the Nazis..." She is correct that Conant was conspicuously silent in regard to Hitler's persecution of the Jews. But in fact, what Conant did was worse than failing to condemn the Nazis and, sadly, few "flayed" him for his actions.

At a recent Boston University conference sponsored by the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, Prof. Stephen Norwood revealed how Conant actively pursued friendly relations with senior Nazi officials.

He welcomed Ernst "Putzi" Hanfstaengl, a Harvard alumnus who had become Hitler's foreign press chief, to the 1934 Harvard commencement and invited him to tea at Conant's home. Only a handful of Harvard faculty and alumni objected; the student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, praised Hanfstanegl and urged Conant to give him an honorary degree.

Prof. Norwood described how Conant did not object when some Harvard faculty, alumni, and student leaders warmly welcomed and entertained the crew of the Nazi warship Karlsruhe when it visited Boston in 1934. The following year, Conant allowed the local Nazi German consul to place a laurel wreath bearing the swastika in Harvard's memorial chapel (to honor Harvard alumni who died fighting for Germany in World War I). In 1936, Conant (again, with The Crimson's blessing) sent an official Harvard delegate to the celebration of the 550th anniversary of the University of Heidelberg, which had purged its Jewish faculty members, adopted a Nazi curriculum, and was under the Hitler regime's control. Conant invited Nazi academics to Harvard's 1936 Tercentenary celebration, prompting Albert Einstein to boycott the event. In 1937, Conant sent warm greetings to the Nazi-controlled University of Goettingen on its 200th anniversary; the Harvard Alumni Bulletin and The Crimson expressed their disappointment that an actual delegate had not been sent instead of a mere telegram.

Prof. Norwood noted that unlike some American university presidents, Conant refused to offer faculty positions to European Jewish refugee scholars to shield them from persecution. Moreover, when an official of the DuPont corporation privately asked Conant, a chemist, for his advice about hiring the German Jewish refugee scientist Max Bergmann (who was later described by the New York Times as "one of the leading organic chemists in the world"), Conant urged him not to hire Bergmann, deriding him as "very definitely of the Jewish type--very heavy."

Prof. Norwood's research --to be published shortly in the scholarly journal American Jewish History-- demonstrates unequivocally that James Conant contributed to Hitler's efforts to improve his image in the West. Tragically, only a handful of Harvard faculty and alumni spoke out against Conant's actions, while Harvard's student newspaper, alumni publication, and numerous faculty members took his side.

Sincerely,

Dr. Rafael Medoff
Director
The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies
Melrose Park, PA

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