CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Nov. 30 (UPI) -- A U.S. historian is challenging Harvard University about what he says is the prestigious school's history of coddling Nazis.
Stephen Norwood of the University of Oklahoma, told a recent Holocaust conference in Boston: "Harvard University helped enhance the prestige of Hitler's regime in the West in the 1930s. This was at a critical period when the Nazis were intensifying the persecution of Jews."
Norwood reported finding evidence in Harvard's archives of footsie-playing with Nazi luminaries, including sending a representative to a "Nazified" German university and alumni "goose-stepping" at a reunion, the Chicago Tribune reported Tuesday.
In 1934 Harvard's student newspaper supported an honorary degree for Ernst Hanfstaengl, a Harvard alumnus who had become a close confidant and foreign press secretary of Adolf Hitler, Norwood said. Hanfstaengl was an outspoken anti-Semite.
Harvard President Lawrence Summers said in an e-mail, "It has long been recognized that there were deplorable anti-Semitic practices at Harvard in the 1930s, but Professor Norwood's specific allegations appear to be very much open to debate."
