Stephen Norwood, a professor at the University of Oklahoma, spoke of his findings, published in a research paper titled “Legitimating Nazism: Harvard University and the Hitler Regime,” at a Boston University conference on the Holocaust, the Boston Globe reported Sunday.Harvard’s official records portray the school as anti-Nazi, but Norwood said Harvard had an ambiguous relationship with Germany in the mid-1930s. Norwood said Harvard welcomed one of Hitler’s closest deputies to campus for his reunion in 1934, sent delegates to celebrate the University of Heidelberg’s anniversary in 1936 — after the German university had purged all its Jewish professors and students — and declined numerous opportunities to help Jewish refugees.
“Harvard was involved in active steps that helped legitimate the Nazi regime in the West,” Norwood said. “Harvard was among the worst [universities], and its record was shameful and unjustifiable.”
However, Harvard officials dispute Norwood’s conclusions. “The university was then and is now repulsed by everything that Hitler represents,” a Harvard spokesman said in a statement.
It looks as if Harvard has the Goebbelsian concept of the Big Lie down. The truth is that the university wasn’t repulsed then and it isn’t now, because the current Harvard faculty supports more than two-thirds of the National Socialist program, being socialists themselves. Their hatred for Israelis may not have quite risen to the level of their ideological cousins’ feelings about Jews, but give them enough time and they’ll get there.