In October 1933, the Hoover War Library at Stanford University unveiled an exhibit of books that had recently been placed on the official censorship list by Nazi officials. The display included works by some of the most notable names in the literary world—Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Mann, and Erich Maria Remarque were all represented—and the Stanford Daily noted that it had attracted “considerable attention” since being set up. Political science professor Edwin A. Cottrell explained that the censorship was “useless” because recent book burnings in the country had only destroyed a few thousand copies and was “merely a gesture.”1 Earlier in the year, the Daily’s editors had facetiously condemned the “over-zealous” mass burning of books as “the work of German freshmen, or junior college transfers, if there are such individuals in the German school system.”2
Such public condemnations did little to temper the university community’s general enthusiasm for German culture and the country itself. Throughout the 1930s, Stanford maintained an active German club, put on German-language plays, and sent its students to study at German universities.3 One such student wrote just months before the outbreak of war in Europe that his counterparts from the United States could “help greatly clarify the international differences of opinion through their conversation and writing. Things can be explained as they really are.… Friendship, not hate, between two peoples may be an idealistic, but not impossible contribution to peace.”4 This was a noble ideal, and for many American university administrators there seemed to be good reasons for sending students to study at German institutions. A number of German universities had, after all, been considered world-leading, at least until they expelled their Jewish faculty members at the behest of the Nazis. There was no obvious reason to shut down the German club that encouraged learning a foreign language (one that, after all, would be critical if there were another war with Germany) or to stop producing German plays. Perhaps conflict could indeed be avoided by building international connections between young people.
The reality of the German university system was far different than what its American defenders believed, however. Just a few years after Hitler seized power, German universities were almost completely imbued with Nazi ideology. American students studying at the great instructions of Heidelberg and Göttingen were fed a steady diet of Nazi propaganda, stiff-armed salutes, and anti-Semitism. Some American young people undoubtedly chose to study there out of genuine academic interest or to master the German language. Others were seemingly ideologically attracted to Nazism and spent their time studying the words of Hitler more than the words of Goethe. Every student who spent time in Nazi Germany certainly did not count themselves among Hitler’s American friends, but the German study-abroad experience in the 1930s exerted untold influence on thousands of young Americans.
In turn, American universities did little to curtail the influence of pro-German speakers on campus. Throughout the decade, German exchange students, some of whom were Nazi Party members and were likely operating as propaganda agents, and other speakers were given mostly unchallenged platforms on university campuses. American universities therefore offered the German government a remarkable level of establishment legitimacy in the United States, even after the violently anti-Semitic nature of the regime had become clear. Just as Hitler’s corporate friends had showed little reluctance doing business with Reich, his friends in academia maintained their own relationships with the Reich.
Both the Nazis and the US government were aware of the propaganda potential provided by American universities. Testifying before the Dies Committee, John C. Metcalfe argued that the German government had a particular interest in American students. “The purpose of the ‘exchange students’ to universities has long been to foster good will and peace among the nations.… The result is greater understanding,” Metcalfe testified. “But this worthwhile aim has been neglected in the exchange of German students for American. Now American students are being indoctrinated with the aims of fascism in Germany both abroad and at home to the detriment of democratic institutions in America.”5 The Bund’s youth camps were a key part of this indoctrination, he continued, but the Nazis were making efforts to indoctrinate older American students as well.
Some of this rhetoric served as the intellectual precursor of 1950s McCarthyism, when the fear of communist infiltration led to repression of academic freedom and free speech rights in American universities and elsewhere. Yet, as in those later years, there was some element of truth in these claims. The Nazis did indeed benefit from a dedicated propaganda network within the American academic establishment. Historian Stephen Norwood has expertly documented the extent to which American university administrations systematically appeased the Nazis throughout the decade, often over the vocal objections of faculty members and their own students.6 Academic freedom was heavily curtailed by administrators, who in this period generally only allowed professors latitude to freely speak on their areas of expertise. This meant faculty members could effectively be fired for commenting on anything beyond their immediate field of study. Students were, by extension, presumed to have no scholarly expertise and were given even fewer rights.7 As Norwood notes, this set the stage for the “most sustained free-speech fight until the 1960s” as both students and faculty faced administrative sanctions.8
Around the country, students and faculty alike increasingly became embroiled in unfolding international tensions as the 1930s progressed. Most often, it was the vocally anti-Nazi professors, some of whom were themselves Jewish refugees from Nazi oppression, who faced the brunt of administrative repression. At one point it was even rumored that the German consul general in New Orleans was offering cash to universities that dismissed anti-Nazi professors.9 The same was much less often the case for openly pro-Nazi professors unless student or public pressure demanded action. There were apparently no sanctions leveled, for instance, when University of Idaho mechanical engineering department head Henry Gauss traveled to a controversial Göttingen University celebration in 1937, declared himself to be the representative of “American universities west of the Mississippi” despite having no official remit to do so, and then gave “the Hitler salute to the rector.” He remained department head until 1952, and a building on campus bears his name today.10 Faculty members and administrators could have made a major impact by denouncing the open prejudice of Nazism and protecting dissenting voices. Too often, they let their students down by failing to do so.
Occasionally, student pressure demanded a response from administrators. In 1939, University of California, Los Angeles, students rose to the defense of Germanic languages professor Rolf Hoffman when he found himself embroiled in controversy. The German-born Hoffman had reputedly made it known he “did not think so much of the goose-stepping” among his pro-Nazi colleagues within the department, and consequently they “made it so unpleasant for him that he offered his resignation.” Ironically, Hoffman had previously been accused of being pro-Nazi after the student-run California Daily Bruin published an interview in which he recounted a lengthy trip to Germany, described seeing Hitler in a Munich wine shop, and bizarrely described the Führer’s “light skin and baby blue eyes … He seemed like a jovial human being. His laughter came heartily from the inside—like anyone.”11
Evidently his views toward Hitler had changed and he now found himself in trouble with his colleagues, one of whom was reported to “return with great solemnity a ‘Heil Hitler’ salute derisively directed at him on the campus by a student.”12 Given the large German American Bund and Silver Shirt presence in Southern California, the presence of Nazi sympathizers on the UCLA campus was perhaps not a great shock. Faced with a hostile work environment, Hoffman offered his resignation, only to then change his mind and try to retract it. University administrators refused to reconsider the case and insisted that Hoffman had properly resigned. Hoffman hired an attorney and the story made it into the national press with dark rumors that “the move to oust Dr. Hoffman was initiated by Nazis in Germany” (the university firmly denied this allegation).13
Outraged by Hoffman’s ouster, the student editors of the Bruin contacted the university president on his behalf, leading to hearings and Hoffman’s negotiated exit, with a severance package, from the university. The university president denied that politics had played any role in the case, but a student committee vocally claimed to have uncovered evidence of never-revealed unethical behavior in the German department. The Bruin praised the student body’s involvement in championing Hoffman’s cause as “the first step in the evolution of true academic democracy.”14 It was a small victory given that Hoffman still lost his job, but it was at least something in an era that was often devoid of such successes.
These campus conflicts were directly fed by the surprising degree to which American universities and faculty members remained willing to send their students to study in the Third Reich, even after the anti-Semitic and violent nature of Nazism were clear. There were, of course, still some legitimate reasons to sponsor student study at German institutions. Before 1933, German universities were among the best in the world and boasted an impressive number of Nobel Prize winners. German remained a popular language to study in American universities, with an estimated sixty-seven thousand students nationwide taking courses in the 1933–1934 academic year. While many students were reported to have merely “scientific” interest in the language—German was an international language of scientific publication and seen as essential for aspiring researchers and physicians—a sizable number were simply learning it out of personal interest.15 Studying in a German-speaking country would be essential for any student wanting to become fluent. As a result, German universities and language institutes offered short-term summer courses for students wanting to improve their language skills, most of which also included courses along the lines of “studies concerning contemporary Germany” that were undoubtedly ideological.16 In the overall scheme of things, this was probably fairly innocuous: Summer language students were only in the country for a month or two, and some of them were already practicing doctors or teachers who probably had well-formed political views and were less vulnerable to propaganda.
The experience of longer-term students at German universities was far different. Elite American universities had a long tradition of sending students to foreign countries, usually in Europe, for a junior year overseas that was designed to broaden their horizons before graduation. Pre-Nazi Germany had been a popular destination before 1933 not only because of the quality of its universities but also because of its avant-garde reputation and the sheer amount of fun on offer. Students in late 1920s Berlin encountered the cultural scene immortalized in the 1972 Liza Minnelli film Cabaret, full of freely available booze, sex, and drugs. American educationists W. H. Cowley and Willard Waller argued in 1935 that German beer halls “flourished as informal educational agencies of considerable value” similar to “coca cola [sic] sipping in the campus hangout to the tune of jazz” in the United States.17
Perhaps, but for American students used to living under Prohibition at home, at least until its repeal in 1933, the beer hall had certain other benefits as well. So too did access to the hard-drinking and often Nazi-leaning dueling fraternities that existed in every German university town and included nearly half the male student population in 1933.18 No doubt equally exciting for American men were the seventeen thousand German women enrolled at universities in 1933 when many of their home universities were still gender segregated.19 A Berlin University graduate student studying at Stanford in 1932 sang the praises of the “German fraulein, flaxen-haired and buxom” who would not hesitate to join a male companion on a weekend trip without a chaperone. World War I, he continued, had done away with “false modesty” and made German women “free.”20
This all abruptly changed when Hitler took power. The Nazis swiftly began to pull German universities under their control at all levels. The right to appoint the highest position in the university, the rector, was taken from faculty members and centralized by the government. Hiring, firing, and transferring faculty members became the responsibility of rectors and government officials, with no faculty consultation. Just as all Germans were expected to follow the dictates of the Führer, all members of the university were expected to abide by the decisions of the rector. The main rival to the rector’s power came not from faculty members but the Nazi Students’ League, a national union of students with branches at every university. Members were given a seat on every faculty senate in the country and vocally denounced professors who failed to toe the Nazi Party line. Hundreds of faculty members were driven from their posts, including leading academics who were expelled for being Jewish. This latter group included a host of current and future Nobel Prize winners. Their replacements were chosen for political reliability rather than academic accomplishments.21 Academic freedom all but ceased to exist in Germany in a matter of months.
The government’s changes to student life were even more dramatic. Male students were encouraged to join the Sturmabteilung (SA) and spent so much time in paramilitary training that academic standards began to fall. Dueling fraternities and other organizations were gradually banned as the party began to fear their potential as an alternative organization commanding student loyalties.22 The truth was that Hitler and his lieutenants cared little for higher education at all, and were far more interested in preparing young men to serve the Reich militarily. In early 1934, the number of students entering university was capped at just 15,000 nationwide, meaning that the vast majority of secondary school students would not find a place. By 1939, fewer than 41,000 students would be enrolled at German universities from a high of more than 100,000 before Hitler’s assumption of power.23 The number of women in higher education declined even more precipitously: In 1934, legislation restricted the number of spots for female students to just 10 percent of the number reserved for men, or a mere 1,500 nationwide. Just 6,000 were still enrolled in 1939.24 Women were expected to focus on childbearing and home life, not higher education and careers.
Education in the Third Reich was thus a combination of Nazi ideological indoctrination and whatever legitimate scholarship managed to survive the regime’s oppressive measures. Those who managed to get spots at universities were still expected to take part in rigorous physical service, leaving little time or energy for studies. Professors were likewise required to take part in labor service before being appointed and were required to have clean political records.25 Many faculty members already in their posts retreated into a narrow field of specialization or technocratic administrative functions to avoid politics. While only a small minority of PhD dissertations completed under the Third Reich demonstrated obvious Nazi ideological themes, producing research openly contrary to the interests of the party was inviting trouble.26 As prominent American historian Charles Beard summarized it in 1936, “Turned in upon themselves, nourishing deep resentments and lashed to fury by a militant system of education, the German people are conditioned for that day when Hitler, his technicians, and the army, are ready and are reasonably sure of the prospects of success in a sudden and devastating attack, East or West.”27
All this was designed to push Germany’s young people to view themselves first and foremost as warriors for the Reich rather than as aspiring professionals or intellectuals. As education minister Bernhard Rust put it in a 1936 speech, “The great body of German youth have torn themselves free from the overpowering influence of a culture not their own; they have turned again toward the life of manly discipline and glorified once more the spirit that leads one to sacrifice his own good for the good of all. In so doing they have found their eyes opened and they know themselves closely akin to the heroic youth of ancient Sparta.”28 The “old of idea of learning,” he concluded, “is gone.” Education would now prepare the country to “release its vital spiritual forces and fulfill its historic destiny.”29
American students in the Reich could therefore expect to encounter a combination of direct indoctrination through compulsory Nazi salutes, marches, and the labor service of their fellow students, even if they were exempted from the more onerous of these by their nationality. Open discussion of politics, unless obviously supportive of the regime, was dangerous if not out of the question. Escape from official ideology might be possible in the classrooms of professors who carefully resisted the inclusion of propaganda themes, but was impossible in the wider confines of German society and the university environment. US Foreign Service officer Cyrus Follmer, who served in the Berlin embassy from 1935 to 1940, later recalled American students being “propagandized to the utmost by special societies which practically swept them off their feet by showering them with conveniences, showing off the beauty, the cleanliness, and the impressive marble edifices of Germany.” The effect, Follmer told the FBI, was that the young Americans “‘ate it up’ and became imbued with the superiorities of Germany.”30
On many US campuses, there seems to have been little if any concern about the conditions students would encounter in the country. The prestigious all-women Seven Sisters colleges continued to send dozens of students to the country through their Junior Year Abroad program. Many were sent to Munich, the birthplace of the Nazi movement. When Vassar College’s student newspaper questioned whether it was suitable to send students into such a climate, a German department professor commented that no student was forced to accept the opportunity if they did not want to.31 With a few minor disruptions in periods of international tension or outbreaks of violence in Germany, many study-abroad programs functioned more or less normally until the war.32 In 1937, the professor in charge of Mount Holyoke’s exchange program reported to the university president that the exchange was becoming more popular as time went on.33
Similarly, Stanford University continued to send its students to Germany and host German exchange students in turn.34 German instructor Stanley L. Sharp continued to take students on summertime tours of Europe that included a tour through Germany. Highlights of the group’s 1937 trip included a visit to the Zeppelin construction facility in Friedrichshafen and the famous Hofbräuhaus in Munich, where the students led drinkers in the Stanford fight song “Come Join the Band.”35
No doubt many exchange students and summer visitors were simply taking advantage of the opportunity to travel in Europe and improve their language skills. In retrospect, they would be among the last Americans to see Europe prior to the destruction of World War II. For some, however, travel to Germany had ideological as well as touristic objectives. In 1933, American writer and magazine editor Malcolm Letts attended a summer session at Heidelberg University. Letts had served in the US Navy during World War I and, now in his mid thirties, leapt at the chance to “fulfill a boyhood desire” and “see history in the making in the country of his former enemy.”36
Letts immediately found Germany to be full of “patriotic fervor,” with the average person walking with “a spring in their step” reminiscent of marching SA men who were “seen everywhere throughout the country, singing with an enthusiasm that was contagious.”37 Letts admitted feeling conflicted about giving the Hitler salute as a foreigner, but compromised by doing so when he was walking with Germans but not doing so when he was on the streets alone. Despite widespread press reports about incidents of anti-Semitic violence, he claimed, there was no “outward evidences of them,” and “no one had even heard of these alleged persecutions we read so much of in our American press.”38
Much of Letts’s account described nights of heavy drinking and pursuing women, followed by daytime lectures and weekends of exploring the German countryside. Ultimately, he concluded, Nazism was nothing like how it had been presented in the American press:
Who are the Nazis? The Nazis are the people with whom I broke bread; with whom I swam; the ones who sat around me at the concerts in the castle courtyard; the students in the University; the musicians and waiters in the cafes; the policemen on their beats; the citizens who raised their steins in the bierstube with a friendly “Zum Woll” [Cheers]; the tobacconist who sold me my daily cigars; the mailman riding his motorcycle; the white-bearded man on the bicycle; the porter who carried my bags; in fact, the German people are the Nazis.39
The ubiquitous German use of “Heil Hitler,” he continued, “impressed me with their sincerity and unanimity of purpose.”40
The following year, Canada-based physiologist E. W. H. Cruickshank published an account of his visit to an international student conference that had taken place in Bavaria around the same time of Letts’s visit. Despite some elements of “unreasonable” anti-Semitism, Cruickshank reported that the “freedom of speech permitted was remarkable” and included discussion “on subjects as far apart as Fascism and extreme Communism.” At the same time, “It was clear that the Germans were eagerly endeavouring to place in as fair a light as possible the whole purpose of the new Government. It was also clear that many Scottish and English, Italian and French students were just as eager to put the whole Nazi system under the withering fire of a searching criticism.” A similar level of intellectual freedom, he continued, “has been allowed exchange students at certain German universities.”41
Accounts such as these served to normalize Nazism in the American popular imagination and academic circles. The claim that Nazism might contain some anti-Semitic elements, but was also open to intellectual critique, was at best naive. The suggestion that Nazi students were so eager to defend their new government in part because of the withering criticisms of foreigners gave their arguments an unwarranted intellectual legitimacy at the same time their government was expelling Jewish academics. As a result of these semisympathetic accounts from respectable academics and commentators, Nazi ideology began to exert a corrupting influence on American university campuses. There were also soon dark rumors that the Nazis had more direct plans for America’s students.
In 1934, left-wing muckraker John L. Spivak published a salacious exposé entitled Plotting America’s Pogroms that purported to expose Nazi plots in the United States. Based on a series of articles originally published in the radical newspaper the New Masses, its seventh chapter was dedicated to exposing the “Hate the Jew Campaign in the Colleges.” The allegations contained in it were explosive. After Hitler’s rise to power, Spivak claimed, the German government set in motion a plan to spread Nazism and anti-Semitism in American universities. German exchange students would play one role in the plot, but the real threat lay in the use of domestic fifth columnists:
What the vast majority of students and professors do not know is that in our universities and colleges there is a secret anti-semitic [sic] organization directed by German exchange students to carry on pro-Hitler propaganda and develop the “Hate-the-Jew” creed for the sake of “pure Aryan culture.” Working with this secret organization are Nazi agents who came here ostensibly to study, and one hundred percent Americans in the “patriotic” organizations which are distributing anti-semitic propaganda in cooperation with secret Hitler agents in the United States.42
Spivak claimed one such “patriotic” organization, called the Paul Reveres, specialized in “espionage and propaganda” in American schools and universities. Most of its impact was felt in the greater New York area and centered around cells based at New York University, the City College of New York, and Columbia University. Spivak even named the alleged Nazi “contact man” at Columbia as Pelham St. George Bissell III, the son of a prominent New York judge, and claimed his efforts were being assisted by Professor Thomas Alexander, dean of the experimental New College for the Education of Teachers.43 These Nazi-backed groups, he claimed, were responsible for the development of “open race hatred” on American university campuses. More insidiously, the Germans had also corrupted a substantial number of university professors and other educators by offering them free trips across the Atlantic and giving them tours of the country in which they were “filled with Nazi propaganda and many of them came back to deliver enthusiastic lectures about the fine conditions in Germany, especially the way the Jews are treated over there.”44
The Paul Reveres were founded by Elizabeth Dilling, one of the most viciously anti-communist and anti-Roosevelt demagogues of the decade. In 1934, she published The Red Network, a salacious tract purporting to reveal the existence of a vast communist conspiracy in the United States. Among the “Reds” listed were Roosevelt and New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia.45 Dilling’s main associate in the Paul Reveres was Edwin Hadley, a World War I veteran and businessman. He similarly published a series of anti-communist books in the 1930s before founding the Paul Reveres.46 Unlike Dilling, however, Hadley insisted that it be “kept strictly a gentile organization.”47 Dilling was viciously anti-communist but not particularly anti-Semitic, and resigned from her own organization. The Paul Reveres would become the primary anti-Semitic group on American university campuses. Branches sprung up on campuses across the country, though they often remained underground to avoid public criticism. Regardless, Dilling would continue her opposition to Roosevelt and end up indicted for sedition.
Spivak’s articles and book caused a predictable sensation. Alexander and Bissell both denied the allegations, though the latter admitted to having attended meetings that included anti-Semitic discussions.48 The university briefly investigated Alexander, who had arranged for a delegation of Columbia students to visit Germany the summer after Hitler’s ascension. No action was taken, and he continued to act as a conduit for students who wanted to study in Nazi Germany. In 1936, he would be among three faculty members to organize a student trip to the Berlin Olympics.49 Spivak’s claims were undoubtedly overstated. There was little evidence to support his broad claim that a vast conspiracy of German exchange students were plotting against their host country, or that the Paul Reveres were recruiting a network of saboteurs and propagandists. At the same time, there were some elements of truth. Anti-Semitism was indeed on the rise across the country, especially on college campuses. Harvard had already limited the number of Jewish students it admitted, in part because administrators feared an influx of refugees. Other universities followed suit, often fearing a backlash from donors if they admitted too many Jews or refugees.50
At the same time, pro-German voices were consistently given public platforms on American college campuses throughout the decade. In late 1938, for instance, one of the approximately seventy remaining German exchange students in the United States addressed a crowd at Stanford to defend his country’s foreign policy (Stanford was host to four of the seventy exchange students, highlighting the closeness of connections between the university and Germany). Hitler sought only the return of Germany’s prewar colonies, the student claimed, and any suggestion to the contrary was propaganda from “American newspapers.” To ensure peace, he advised Americans to visit Germany or “obtain true information about my country, which is a land of peace and work and no more unemployment.”51 The following year, Stanford’s American Student Union hosted a debate between another German exchange student, Adolf Bode, and the daughter of a refugee professor. The event was designed to present a “complete and objective” discussion about Nazism but evidently became a platform for Bode to defend Hitler’s government.52 Bode’s name was later discovered by the US Army on a captured list of active Nazi Party members who returned to the country shortly before the war, suggesting that his presence at Stanford may have involved more than just academic pursuits.53
Spivak was also correct that the universities based in the New York area were particularly imbued with anti-Semitism and Nazi influence. Columbia was the most prominent example. Self-proclaimed American fascist Lawrence Dennis was invited to speak at the university throughout the decade and made numerous appearances before student groups.54 Dennis was a somewhat bizarre figure and unapologetic in his support for fascism. He also concealed a secret throughout his life: he was half African American and had “passed” as white for most of his life.55 As a child, he had been a celebrated “Negro” preacher who traveled the world giving prodigious sermons before the age of 10.56 Realizing that being identified as African American would have major consequences for him in the Jim Crow South, Dennis decided to change his identity. Carefully concealing the color of his mother’s skin, he attended an elite prep school before getting into Harvard and obtaining a position in the State Department.57
After leaving government employment Dennis became an investment banker and worked on Wall Street until the crash.58 Around the same time, he became obsessed with Mussolini and began praising fascism in rousing public speeches no doubt influenced by his past career as a preacher. With his undeniable intellect and powerful stage presence, Lawrence soon became the intellectual face of American fascism, publicly heiling Hitler when he appeared on movie theater screens but also writing sophisticated tracts criticizing the American capitalist system and predicting the rise of a Hitler figure in the United States.59 In 1936 he attended the Nuremberg Rally and, after returning to the United States, began meeting with George Sylvester Viereck and his embassy paymaster Heribert von Strempel. Dennis increasingly appeared to be acting as a Nazi agent.60 He became a frequent visitor to the German embassy in Washington and bragged about his chats with Nazi bigwigs including Goebbels and Göring.61
Following George Sylvester Viereck’s playbook, Dennis launched a newsletter called Weekly Foreign Letter focusing on foreign affairs and economics. It was closely read at the German embassy, and Berlin suggested that he might be able to launch a larger publication to further Nazi aims among American intellectuals and business leaders. “Berlin insisted that, America being a country of business affairs of great importance and their leaders being politically influential we should publish magazines which would deal with international economic problems,” Strempel recalled after the war.62 Dennis would be their chosen man to take on this task. “Dennis’ [sic] opinion was that it is very important to explain to leaders of business and finance the economical consequences of the second world war and to commence regularly on international events in order to demonstrate where the real economical interests of the United States were at stake,” Strempel remembered.63 Viereck himself forwarded German money to Dennis to subsidize such a publication, though the project never actually made it to print.
In 1936, Dennis published a hefty volume entitled The Coming American Fascism. As the title suggests, it argued that the American political and financial systems, especially Wall Street speculation, had become unworkable and should be replaced with a version of European fascism that would solve the country’s ills and avert “a bitter class war.”64 Dennis predicted that this would take place in the next five years. The book was taken seriously in the American academic community. University of Wisconsin, Madison, economist John R. Commons—certainly no fascist himself—called the book “the leading theory of American fascism” and praised Dennis’s analysis of business cycles and investment banking. The “popular indications in America,” Commons continued, “are that the prospects are better for fascism than for communism.”65
Dennis’s support for fascism did not go unnoticed among the students he was repeatedly invited to address. The Columbia Daily Spectator denounced him as a fascist and “one of America’s more artful sophists.”66 Yet despite his obvious connections to the Third Reich, he remained on the university speaking circuit and used his platform to argue for fascist revolution in the United States. He was embraced by the American academic establishment as an intellectual leader despite his obvious Nazi sympathies and increasing anti-Semitism. He would end up as a confidant of Charles Lindbergh and the America First movement, and on trial for sedition.
Columbia also turned out to have at least one actual German agent on its payroll. In 1928, Friedrich Ernest Auhagen arrived at Columbia as a master’s student and then progressed to begin his doctorate. He simultaneously served as an instructor of German. “We thought he was a fine man, a promising young man,” Auhagen’s department chair recalled later.67 By 1936, however, Auhagen’s interests changed and he began “neglecting his University duties.”68 This change was undoubtedly caused by the fact that he had become a paid Nazi propaganda agent. Until his eventual arrest in 1940, Auhagen ran a “lecture bureau” called the American Fellowship Forum that was paid for by the German embassy and spread Nazi propaganda on American university campuses. He gave some speeches personally and subsidized others to do the same, including Dennis. Auhagen also sent Berlin lists of names and addresses belonging to prominent Americans so they could be bombarded by pro-Nazi and isolationist mailings from Viereck and others. Despite these efforts, the Germans were not particularly impressed with Auhagen, in part because he cut a high public profile and attracted the attention of the Dies Committee. “His behavior in the United States was stupid,” Strempel told interrogators after the war. “He was not to be trusted with a political mission. He was a very unreliable man.”69 Auhagen would end up sitting out the war in prison for failing to register as a German agent under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
Dennis and Auhagen were not Columbia’s only connections to the Third Reich. As Stephen Norwood has noted, Columbia president Nicholas Murray Butler was well-known for cozying up to the German embassy and controversially invited the German ambassador, Hans Luther, to speak on campus over extensive protests.70 Butler had previously attempted to limit the number of Jewish students at Columbia by imposing discriminatory admissions tests, though this proved difficult to accomplish in a city with such a large and well-established Jewish community.71 Over the course of the decade, Butler was involved in the dismissal of an anti-Nazi (and Jewish) faculty member, established an Italian cultural institute that was accused of supporting fascism, and oversaw the expulsion of a student who led a protest against Nazi book burning in front of his house.72 Butler’s administration was essentially an ongoing contribution to Nazi propaganda efforts. It took him until 1938 to start denouncing the German government’s anti-Semitic measures.73
This febrile dynamic had a real impact on Columbia’s student body. While some students were vocal in their protests of the administration’s pro-German policies, others were quietly supportive or even wished their campus leaders would go further in supporting the Reich. Among this latter group was Henry Miller Madden, a doctoral student studying European history at Columbia under the supervision of Carlton J. H. Hayes, future US ambassador to fascist Spain. Madden was, and would remain through his life, an enigmatic figure. As a young man growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area he maintained a network of German pen pals and developed a general affection for the country. “Germany to me has always been a land that is about as ideal as a country could be: I have a deep admiration of all things German,” he told a correspondent at the age of seventeen.74 After completing junior college he transferred to Stanford to study history, where he also mastered the German language and founded a short-lived campus nudist group. (The club abruptly shut down when itching powder was deliberately sprinkled on its usual sunbathing spot).75
In 1934, Madden began his doctoral studies in Manhattan. He was unimpressed with New York and bemoaned it as a “second Jerusalem” with Jews who “monopolize all the profession [sic] in New York; they control finance; they own the press; they dictate all the amusements. They are genuinely alarmed for fear that some day the Americans will follow the example of Germany and put them in their place.”76 A year later, he violently summarized his views to a friend:
The Jews: I am developing a violent and almost uncontrollable phobia against them. Whenever I see one of those predatory noses, or those roving and leering eyes, or those slobbering lips, or those flat feet, or those nasal and whiny voices I tremble with rage and hatred. They are the oppressors.… Whom do I hate more than the Jews? They have oppressed my mother, stolen her savings from her, chained her with interest servitude, made a Via Dolorosa of her life. They must go!77
As Madden’s anti-Semitism grew, so did his open admiration for Hitler. “Whenever I see him in the newsreels, I do my best to drown out with my applause the Bronx cheers and hisses which usually greet his inflammatory orations,” he told a German friend in 1935. “Heil Hitler! Heil Deutschland!”78 Madden soon found colleagues at Columbia who shared his favorable views toward the Reich. Among them was William Oswald Shanahan, a fellow history PhD student who had done his undergraduate work at UCLA, another hotbed of pro-German sentiment. Shanahan soon began sending Madden letters that included doodled swastikas and closed with “Heil Hitler” or similar sentiments.79 The two men ranted about Jews and plotted how they could best spread their views to the wider student body.
In late 1936, as student protests against the administration’s seemingly pro-German stances were escalating, Shanahan warned Madden that changing circumstances required a “strategic retreat” from open anti-Semitism. “It is a retreat of front rather than of principle.… It is unfortunate that the only aberrations that are tolerated are those related to the radical-socialistic-Marxist-non-Aryan variety, but we must adapt ourselves to the university system as it is, sans academic freedom of mind and freedom of choice. And don’t be too optimistic about converting our friends in the College.” In other words, Shanahan warned him, “in the future don’t shoot off your bazoo so god damn much—either in relation to the university or in relation to ideologies.”80
Madden himself was already in Central Europe by the time his Columbia friends began feeling the heat. In summer 1936, he departed for an extended trip to Germany and Hungary, ostensibly to continue his research but seemingly to immerse himself in the atmosphere of the Reich as well. In detailed letters to his mother in California, Madden recounted his adventures traveling the Continent and highlighted his fascination with Hitler and Nazism. “Germany really appears to be prosperous—building a new subway in Berlin, new buildings, no begging on the streets, no bums and tramps as in U.S.,” he told her. “And the Jews aren’t hanging from the lamp-posts, either.”81 Along the way, he perfected both his German and Hungarian language skills. Returning to the United States in 1937 and dreading a return to Columbia, he took a teaching position at Stanford that would occupy him until the war. “Half of Columbia this year is Jew,” Shanahan warned him darkly during the trip.82
Madden, Shanahan, and their circle of Hitler sympathizers reflected the depth of the political extremism and anti-Semitism that was virtually unchallenged on American university campuses in this critical period. The fact that Columbia’s president did little to argue against Nazi racial views created an environment in which these views could go largely unchallenged. “If you’re really a Fascist, Nicholas Murray Butler at Columbia will be a very interesting chap to talk with.…” a friend challenged Madden in 1937. “Are you a Fascist because you come from Teutonic forebears, or because you reconcile it better with the Spirit of ’76?”83 The fact that American university leaders refused to take a stand on behalf of their Jewish students and faculty created an atmosphere in which extremism could flourish unchecked and with an aura of respectability.
As the Second World War approached, this position became increasingly untenable. Violence against German Jews was routinely reported in American newspapers, creating concern over the physical safety of students studying there. It also became increasingly difficult to give pro-German speakers a platform to spout their views while relations between the countries were plummeting. There was, however, no immediate cessation of academic relations. There were still dozens of German students studying in the United States in 1939, at least some of whom were almost certainly working for the German embassy as propaganda agents. At the same time, American students continued their visits to the Reich. In mid-1938, Lafayette College student Walter W. Williamson accepted a fellowship to study at the University of Frankfurt. Williamson intended to use the opportunity to perfect his German and vowed not to let politics “interfere with achieving my purpose.”84 This proved more easily said than done. The “Heil Hitler” greeting was expected in all contexts, and Williamson was warned that Gestapo informants were sitting in on his classes and listening in on private conversations.85 Williamson subsequently witnessed the anti-Semitic violence of the Kristallnacht and was so appalled that he cycled to the American consulate and asked if there was any way he could help the affected Jews. He was warned that even approaching a Jewish household would result in immediate arrest and deportation.86
Williamson later ended up visiting Prague on the day German troops entered the city in March 1939. Sensing that the international situation was deteriorating, he decided to cut his trip short in June and return to the United States. During his goodbye party in Frankfurt, Williamson’s group got into a verbal altercation with a group of Germans in a tavern. Angry that his farewell celebration was being ruined, the departing Williamson turned around in the doorway, gave a Nazi salute to the barroom, and shouted “Heil Roosevelt!” An outraged mob rushed after them and accused Williamson of shouting the more provocative “Heil Moscow!” A physical altercation followed and Williamson’s face was pummeled by a German brawler. His group was eventually rescued by an elderly World War I veteran who led them out of the angry crowd and to safety. The frightened group ended up telling their story in a German police station. Fortunately for them, the officers on duty found the “Heil Roosevelt” remark hilarious and apologized for the resulting violence. Williamson left the Reich two days later, disturbed by what he had seen and experienced in the country.87 The war broke out just two months after his ship docked in New York.
Williamson was not the only American student still in Germany in the last days of the Reich. Stanford University still had a student at the University of Heidelberg in May 1939 who openly expressed a desire to build “mutual friendship channels” as the international situation deteriorated. (Tellingly, the fraternity scholarship committee that funded his studies had already announced that the 1940 recipient would be studying in Oslo rather than Heidelberg.)88 Twenty-two Stanford students were in Europe when Hitler invaded Poland, including several who were still studying in the country through exchange programs. A female student on vacation with her family narrowly escaped being killed in aerial bombing, while the others quickly embarked on the treacherous ship journey home.89 At Columbia, Madden and his circle of Germanophiles were devastated by the news from Europe. “For you and me this war will be a double tragedy—our memories of happy days in Germany, our hopes, our fears—all dashed to pieces.…” Shanahan wrote Madden days after Hitler’s invasion of Poland. “Nothing but a complete destruction can result.… But the task is clear; strict neutrality. Maintenance of peace and our own task of building the national well being.”90
Shanahan’s prediction came true as previously pro-German student and faculty sentiment rapidly shifted to supporting nonintervention and America First. Yale University would become the birthplace of America First and the center of its early activities. Chapters sprung up across the country and attracted thousands of interested students and faculty. In April 1941, Columbia hosted a forum on American foreign policy that included America First speakers and was expected to attract two thousand student participants.91 A month later, Stanford hosted a raucous debate over intervention that attracted seven hundred students and community members.92 The debate on American college campuses now revolved less around whether Hitler’s ideas had merits and more on whether the United States could avoid entering the war he had started. Just months later, Pearl Harbor and the US declaration of war meant the young men who had been sympathetic to Hitler in the 1930s now faced conscription. Madden himself attempted to find a way out of military service, at least initially. “I have been opposed to war and violence in international relations ever since I have been able to give thought to the matter.… I am therefore, I suppose a conscientious objector,” he told an Army Medical Corps officer in 1942.93 Madden’s undeniable linguistic skills were too valuable for the military to pass up, however, and he ended up in the navy. He would go on to a successful career in both the US military and academia after the war, as would his friend Shanahan. Whether both men’s anti-Semitic, pro-Hitler stances were a mere youthful indiscretion or an indicator of deeply held views remains uncertain, but both were seemingly successful in keeping them out of the public eye for the rest of their lives.
Madden and his circle of Hitler enthusiasts at Columbia provide a powerful example of how American students were influenced by wider international politics and the policies of their own universities. From 1933 to the end of the decade, American campuses provided an important platform for Hitler’s American friends to spread their views to the young. University administrators systematically refused to confront the consequences of continuing to send students on study-abroad trips to Germany. An unknown number of American students—assuredly in the thousands—visited Germany on ostensibly academic visits during the decade. While for some this was merely a way to expand their language skills and intellectual horizons, it still placed them in an environment where “Heil Hitler” and unceasing anti-Semitism were omnipresent. Some, like Madden, were already sympathetic toward Germany and embarked on their studies there for at least partially ideological reasons. Others, like Williamson, had their eyes opened to the inhumanity of Nazism by their time in the Reich. “The lack of freedom in Germany troubled me greatly,” he recalled decades later. “Having lived all my life in a democracy, usually I took freedom for granted.… Now I recognized fully how important is it not to lose it.”94 The exact proportion of students that fell into each category will never be truly known.
More significantly, however, it is undeniable that American universities provided important legitimacy for pro-German speakers and propagandists before the war. The continued presence of German exchange students, at least some of whom were probably Nazi Party members acting as foreign agents, provided a seemingly authentic voice for peace and friendship. Interviews and public appearances by German students nearly always highlighted these themes and strongly suggested that young people would be the ones to build international understanding and avoid war. It hardly needs to be said that this rhetoric directly served Hitler’s foreign policy aims. Tellingly, many of those who had supported friendship with Germany earlier in the decade quickly pivoted to advocating nonintervention after 1939. “The attitude of American youth is an aspect which rightfully worries interventionist leaders,” British intelligence concluded in 1941. “For years pacifist and communist propaganda had been concentrated on colleges throughout the States. The combination of communist propaganda and the isolationist influence of the wealthy (anti–New Dealers whose influence is important because most United States college subsist on contributions from the wealthy) has produced a situation in the American Universities which justifies concern.”95
More insidiously, the notion that speakers such as Lawrence Dennis should be given high-profile platforms by universities to spread their views authoritatively was questionable at best. Certainly, these speakers should have been afforded their academic freedom and First Amendment rights, as they were. The same could be argued for the professors who attended the controversial celebrations at Göttingen and other German universities. On the other hand, American university administrators consistently denied those same rights to anti-Nazi students and faculty members. Madden and his circle at Columbia may have felt themselves to be the victims of a left-wing plot, but they still recognized that their views were shared by much of the administration, if not their fellow students. American universities essentially allowed anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi views to go virtually unchallenged on their campuses while working overtime to suppress opposing stances until public and student pressure nearly reached a breaking point late in the decade. A more courageous stand would have gone far to discredit Nazism and prejudice among the next generation of Americans. Instead, the country’s intellectual leaders chose a path of engagement, legitimization, and tacit support that would carry long-term consequences.