The Nazi Skeletons in Wesleyan U.’s Closet by Rafael Medoff
https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/opinion/380765/the-nazi-skeletons-in-wesleyan-u-s-closet/
The president of Wesleyan University claimed, in a recent New York Times op-ed, that the Trump administration and the Republican Party are teeming with secret or aspiring Nazis. But how did the Wesleyan administration relate to the actual Nazis and Nazi supporters on its Connecticut campus in the 1930s?
In February 1934, Wesleyan invited Dr. Friedrich Auhagen, a representative of Nazi Germany’s consulate in New York City, to address the student body. That was more a year after Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany. A year of the Nazi regime boycotting Jewish-owned businesses, of nationwide book-burnings, of Nazi takeovers of German universities, of mass firings of Jews from most professions, and of sporadic anti-Jewish violence. Yet none of that deterred the Wesleyan administration from inviting a Nazi official to campus.
In his remarks to the Wesleyan students, Auhagen railed against “excessive Jewish control” in Germany, claimed that reports of antisemitism were “widely exaggerated,” and declared that Jews who did not like living under Nazism should “go settle in certain regions of Russia.”
Hitler had some fans on the Wesleyan campus. The most enthusiastic was Paul H. Curts, a longtime professor of German. He was so sympathetic to the Nazis that he was cheering for them even before they rose to power. In a May 1932 speech, eight months before Hitler became chancellor of Germany, Prof. Curts declared that supporters of the Nazi Party generally were “staid, sober Germans.”
After Hitler and the Nazis became Germany’s rulers, Prof. Curts served as their lead apologist at Wesleyan. He made multiple trips to Germany in the 1930s, each time returning brimming with enthusiasm. After one such trip in 1934, Prof. Curts addressed the entire student body and told them Hitler was “the only man who could offer to Germany what it needed at present.”
Curts had been visiting Hamburg during the infamous “Night of the Long of Knives,” in which Hitler ordered the murder of hundreds of Nazis whom he suspected of disloyalty. The Wesleyan professor justified the killings on the grounds that “there had been a radical conspiracy on foot against Hitler” and “Germany must show a united front, and Hitler is the only man behind whom the people can be unified.”
In another address a few weeks later, Prof. Curtis accused the American news media of publishing “exaggerated” reports of “incidents” in Germany. He praised Hitler for maintaining “quiet, order and discipline,” and insisted the Nazis were not “trying to extend their doctrine throughout the world.” They merely wanted “Germany for the Germans,” the Wesleyan professor asserted.
Not only did the Wesleyan administration never restrict Curts’s pro-Nazi apologetics, it continued to give him platforms on campus to spread pro-Hitler propaganda among the students and faculty. Speaking on campus after yet another friendly visit to Nazi Germany, in 1936, Curts defended “the sincerity of Hitler’s offer of non-aggression and peace,” and described Germany as “a peaceful place” where “security and order prevail.” Regarding Hitler’s anti-Jewish policies, Curts said “some action [against the Jews] was possibly justified,” that Nazi policies which Americans saw as anti-Jewish discrimination “are not really discriminations”; and “whether Germany has gone too far [concerning the Jews] remains for the future to decide.” That same year, Curts was named president of Wesleyan’s Publications Board.
Prof. Curtis was not the only Nazi sympathizer on the Wesleyan faculty. His German Department colleague, Prof. John Blankenagel, chose to spend his sabbatical year, 1938-1939, in Nazi Germany. That was the year of the nationwide Kristallnacht pogrom, the German conquest of Czechoslovakia, and, in September 1939, Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Speaking to Wesleyan’s assembled students the following month—after seven weeks of widely-reported Nazi atrocities in Poland—Prof. Blankenagel praised the Nazi regime, saying it had “accomplished a great many things, such as the elimination of unemployment, the successful housing program, the outlawing of strikes, the construction of highways, and the program of socialized medicine.”
The Wesleyan University administration took part in an exchange program with the University of the Berlin and other German institutions in the 1930s, despite the Nazi regime’s purging of Jewish faculty, implementation of a Nazi curriculum, and mass book-burnings at German universities. Hitler regarded student exchanges with American universities as a way to soften the Nazis’ image abroad. The Nazi official in charge of sending German students to American universities was quoted, in the New York Times, describing the German students in such exchanges as “political soldiers of the Reich.” But that did not dissuade Wesleyan from participating in the program.
German students at Wesleyan were given platforms to spew Nazi apologetics. Exchange student Paul Jahn was invited to address the students on “Student Life the Modern German University” in 1936. Jahn’s sympathies were no secret; the student newspaper, The Wesleyan Argus, matter-of-factly reported that Jahn had been “active in undergraduate Nazi activities” at the University of Berlin. Jahn assured the Wesleyan students that Nazi fraternities at German universities were “quite similar to Wesleyan fraternities.” He said “American undergraduates resemble more closely German students than either the French or English.” They “have almost identical attitudes towards general good fellowship and athletics,” he asserted. Sure, there might be a few “overzealous students” in Germany, Jahn said, but “much of what is said in America about Nazism is ‘bunk’.”
One of the German exchange students who attended Wesleyan in 1938-1939 was Gerhard Hess, nephew of the number three leader in the Nazi regime, Rudolf Hess, a relationship that was known on campus at the time. The younger Hess gave at least two lectures to the campus German club. When Connecticut news media in 1941 broke the news that Hess had spent a year at Wesleyan, Prof. Curts acknowledged recently receiving a postcard from Hess in which he reported that he was “serving my country.” Prof. Curts speculated that young Hess “probably was disqualified for combat duty” because of his eyesight; but another faculty member reported, more ominously, that Hess had written friends at Wesleyan that he was serving “fifth column” duty in Rumania. That phrase was widely used by the Nazis to justify atrocities against Jews in German-occupied countries, including Rumania.
Some American students in Germany also spread pro-Nazi messages. The Wesleyan Argus in 1933 printed—0n its front page—a letter from American students in Berlin denying there had been any “persecution of Jews and Catholics, or the demolition of Jewish places of business.” The “German revolution” was “orderly throughout,” the students declared, announcing that they “promise their German hosts to do everything in their power to enlighten their fellow countrymen concerning the real, peaceable conditions in Germany.”
The Wesleyan Argus also published advertisements from the Nazi regime encouraging student tourism to Germany. One excursion promoted in its pages in the summer of 1934 offered Wesleyan students reduced fares on German railways to attend the infamous antisemitic Passion Play at Oberammergau. Four years later, The Argus was still running ads from the Nazi regime.
Where was Wesleyan president James L. McConaughy during all of this? His administration never interfered with the pro-Nazi propaganda activities by professors Curts and Blankenagel, or the pro-Nazi statements by the German students on campus, or the decision of The Argus to publish ads promoting student tourism to Nazi Germany.
Not only that, but President McConaughy at one point even actively sought to discourage Wesleyan’s Jewish students from pursuing medical careers. In December 1934, he sent a letter to the twelve Jewish students enrolled in pre-med courses, “advising” them that it would be “difficult for Wesleyan to place her graduates of the Jewish race in medical schools,” because Jews were already “overcrowding” those institutions. McConaughy insisted that “medical schools are not anti-Semitic” and were even “leaning over backward” to avoid antisemitism, “but the Jewish boys who are interested in medicine ought to know the facts early in their college course.” He was just giving them helpful “vocational guidance,” he said.
Wesleyan was far from the only American university to welcome Nazi representatives to campus, tolerate pro-Nazi faculty members, sponsor student exchanges with Nazified German universities, or in other ways maintain friendly relations with the Hitler regime. Stephen Norwood documented in his book, The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower, how Harvard, Columbia and other prominent American educational institutions did likewise.
But that does not make Wesleyan’s record any more palatable—especially considering that its current president, Michael Roth, not only has accused U.S. government officials of being Nazi wannabes (in his recent New York Times op-ed), but has responded meekly when extremist students at Wesleyan openly cheer for Hamas, the perpetrators of Nazi-like murder, torture, and sexual atrocities against Israeli Jews.
Wesleyan’s code of student conduct prohibits “disturbance of the peace” (clause 1) and “the unauthorized use, or the abuse, destruction or theft of University property” (clause 3). Yet President Roth tolerated disruptive pro-Hamas tent protests for more than three weeks last year, despite their unauthorized occupation of part of the campus and vandalism by some protesters. Roth then agreed to let the extremists have a say in university investment policy in exchange for folding up their tents. Making concessions to the pro-Hamas students “only incentivizes more serious escalation in the future,” the Anti-Defamation League warned.
History matters. In recent years, President Roth has appropriately devoted some university resources to the preservation and promotion of the Beman Triangle, a historic African-American neighborhood near the university. Of course, that project cannot make up for the fact that some of Wesleyan’s early presidents advocated the mass migration of blacks from the United States to Africa, or the fact that the university implemented a whites-only admissions policy for many years. But the Beman project indicates that the university is sensitive to the feelings of the African-American community.
Wesleyan should show a similar sensitivity for the concerns of the Jewish community. President Roth should publicly acknowledge that his university was wrong to invite a Nazi representative to campus, to tolerate pro-Nazi propaganda on campus by faculty members and exchange students, and to maintain friendly relations with Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
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