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.”