ABSTRACT
Hitler's professors were the first to make antisemitism both academically respectable and complicit in murder. Harvard president James Conant invited and warmly welcomed Ernst Hanfstaengl, a Nazi leader and close friend of Hitler, to attend his class twenty-fifth reunion at the Harvard commencement of June 1934. One of the book's striking photos shows this worthy demonstrating the Hitler salute while standing in the reception line; apparently he had developed it during his cheerleader days back in 1909. Columbia, located in New York City, had more trouble than Harvard with student opposition to antisemitism because, despite its quota system, it had a large body of Jewish students; at Harvard, student opinion, for example, in the Harvard Crimson was decidedly welcoming to spokesmen for the new Germany. Norwood's final chapter centers on the ways in which universities responded to the nationwide Nazi pogrom of November 10, 1938, carried out against the entire Jewish population of Germany.
