In 1934, the Harvard class of 1909 held its 25th reunion—then as now an occasion for members of the American elite to parade in public and celebrate their achievements. But this year the star attraction was a German: Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, the son of a Munich art dealer and publisher who had joined the Nazi movement and enjoyed personal access to Hitler (Hitler liked hearing him play the piano, as had his Harvard classmates, for whom he composed football fight songs). In the early 1930s he served as foreign press chief for the Nazi party.

When Hanfstaengl’s plan to attend the reunion became known, a scandal blew up. He declined to serve as an officer of his class, but he came, visited the estates of wealthy Harvard men around Boston, and took tea at the house of the current president, James Conant, who would later serve as American high commissioner, and still later ambassador, in postwar Germany.

Liberal journalists and politicians, especially in New York, denounced the Nazis and dwelled on Hanfstaengl’s support of their policies. A rabbi confronted him, two girls chained themselves to railings in Harvard Yard, and a few students from MIT protested and were arrested. But Harvard’s members, old and young, responded to such critics with striking solidarity. The Crimson denounced the demonstrators as “extremely childish.” Conant went ahead with plans to send the mathematics professor George Birkhoff, a staunch anti-Semite, as an official representative of the university to the 1936 anniversary celebration at the University of Heidelberg—an institution that, purged of its Jews, taught “German physics.”

Stephen Norwood, a distinguished American Jewish historian, tells these grim stories in a lucid, well-informed book: The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower. Many of the richest and oldest colleges and universities in the United States showed less understanding of Nazism than newspaper columnists like Heywood Broun (who, to be fair, also attended Harvard, where he met John Reed and Alan Seeger).

In some cases, university presidents did more than send greetings to the odd dictator. Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia went back and forth to Europe on German ships, sent representatives to the big German university festivals—and expelled students and fired professors who protested. Worse still, he allowed Columbia’s Italian Academy to become a center of Fascist propaganda. Meanwhile the Seven Sisters welcomed Nazi exchange students and sent their own young women off to witness the wonders of German prosperity and order at the University of Munich.

At times, Norwood offers an indictment—a justified indictment—rather than a history. In his first chapter, he argues at length that any sentient American should have known what the Nazis stood for. He has a point. But it’s one thing to show that Conant and Butler came late to the war against Fascism, as they surely did (in 1940, Conant was appointed Chairman of the National Defense Research Committee, which oversaw the Manhattan project); quite another to explain why they were so blind and deaf.

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In 1938, after the Kristallnacht pogroms in Germany, where rampaging Nazis assaulted thousands of Jews, ransacked synagogues, and wrecked thousands of businesses, a poll revealed that almost 70 percent of students in colleges and universities in the United States opposed offering their country as a haven for Jewish refugees in Central Europe.

This response, according to Stephen Norwood, a professor of history and Judaic studies at the University of Oklahoma, was symptomatic of the callous indifference among America’s college administrators, students, and faculty to the plight of German Jews throughout the 1930s. In “The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower,’’ Norwood draws on incidents at Harvard, Columbia, the Seven Sisters women’s colleges, state universities, and Catholic institutions to excoriate the nation’s educational elite for its “truly shameful’’ appeasement of Hitler’s Germany and for suppressing protests against fascist atrocities.

When Nazis burned 20,000 Jewish and other “un-German’’ books in 1933, Norwood points out, college and university officials remained silent. Or worse. Although he had led a campaign to rebuild the library at the University of Louvain in Belgium after it was burned during World War I, Nicholas Murray Butler, the president of Columbia University, did not join efforts to establish an American Library of Nazi Banned Books. Butler expelled Robert Burke, a student leader of a mock book burning on campus. And he approved the decision of the chairman of the art history department not to reappoint Jerome Klein, a popular instructor, two months after Klein circulated a petition protesting a visit to Columbia by Hans Luther, Germany’s ambassador to the United States.

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In an interview, Norwood describes university leaders as indifferent to evidence of a barbaric regime rising abroad in part because of their own polices of anti-Semitism and exclusion back home. “They just didn’t care very deeply about Jews and anti-Semitism because they were themselves involved in maintaining quota barriers against Jewish students. There were very, very few Jews on the faculties of American universities throughout the entire inter-war period. And there are whole fields that were basically off-limits to Jews,” he says.

Norwood’s book begins by laying out the evidence of Germany’s “unprecedented relapse into barbarism” in the months immediately following Hitler’s ascent to power: “The Nazis’ anti-Semitic terror in 1933 precipitated demonstrations and boycotts on an unprecedented scale, often initiated at the grassroots level,” Norwood writes.

“But although academicians were the Americans most conversant with European affairs, few engaged in public anti-Nazi protest. As many working and lower-middle-class Americans marched in the streets and struggled to organize a nationwide boycott of German goods and services, American universities maintained amicable relations with the Third Reich, sending their students to study at Nazified universities while welcoming Nazi exchange students to their own campuses. American’s most distinguished university presidents willingly crossed the Atlantic in ships flying the swastika flag, openly defying the anti-Nazi boycott, to the benefit of the Third Reich’s economy. By warmly receiving Nazi diplomats and propagandists on campus, they helped Nazi Germany present itself to the American public as a civilized nation, unfairly maligned in the press.”

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