amp.cnn.com Open in urlscan Pro
2a04:4e42::773  Public Scan

Form analysis
0 forms found in the DOM

Text Content

Close icon
 * US
   * Crime + Justice
   * Energy + Environment
   * Extreme Weather
   * Space + Science
 * World
   * Africa
   * Americas
   * Asia
   * Australia
   * China
   * Europe
   * India
   * Middle East
   * United Kingdom
 * Politics
   * SCOTUS
   * Congress
   * Facts First
   * 2024 Election
 * Business
   * Tech
   * Media
   * Calculators
   * Video
 * Markets
   * Pre-markets
   * After-Hours
   * Market Movers
   * Fear & Greed
   * World Markets
   * Investing
   * Markets Now
   * Before the Bell
   * Nightcap
 * Opinion
   * Political Op-Eds
   * Social Commentary
 * Health
   * Life, But Better
   * Fitness
   * Food
   * Sleep
   * Mindfulness
   * Relationships
 * Entertainment
   * Movies
   * Television
   * Celebrity
 * Tech
   * Innovate
   * Gadget
   * Foreseeable Future
   * Mission: Ahead
   * Upstarts
   * Work Transformed
   * Innovative Cities
 * Style
   * Arts
   * Design
   * Fashion
   * Architecture
   * Luxury
   * Beauty
   * Video
 * Travel
   * Destinations
   * Food & Drink
   * Stay
   * Videos
 * Sports
   * Pro Football
   * College Football
   * Basketball
   * Baseball
   * Soccer
   * Olympics
   * Hockey
 * Videos
   * Live TV
   * CNN Headlines
   * CNN Max
   * Digital Studios
   * CNN Films
   * HLN
   * TV Schedule
   * TV Shows A-Z
   * CNNVR
 * Audio
 * CNN Underscored
   * Electronics
   * Fashion
   * Beauty
   * Health & Fitness
   * Home
   * Reviews
   * Deals
   * Money
   * Gifts
   * Travel
   * Outdoors
   * Pets
   * CNN Store
 * Coupons
 * Weather
   * Climate
   * Storm Tracker
   * Wildfire Tracker
   * Video
 * About CNN
   * Photos
   * Investigations
   * CNN Profiles
   * CNN Leadership
   * CNN Newsletters
   * Work for CNN


Live TV



OPINION: THIS UNPALATABLE REALITY ABOUT ANTISEMITISM AT HARVARD

Opinion by Lev Golinkin
Updated 4:31 PM EST, Tue December 12, 2023

Faith Ninivaggi/Reuters
Harvard University faces controversy after three college presidents, including
Claudine Gay of Harvard, came under fire for congressional testimony about
antisemitism on campus.

Editor’s Note: Lev Golinkin writes on refugee and immigrant identity, as well as
Ukraine, Russia and the far right. He is the author of the memoir “A Backpack, a
Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are
his own. View more opinion on CNN.

CNN  — 

Harvard University recently issued the latest in an ongoing string
of attempts to underscore its commitment to combatting antisemitism, which has
grown more evident in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war. The scandal over the
school’s failure to address antisemitism on campus began this October, when a
group of student organizations released a letter blaming Hamas’ massacres of
Jews on Israel (a letter from which several signatory groups later retracted
their support).

courtesy of Lev Golinkin
Lev Golinkin

At first, the backlash was focused on the students; following a controversial
public congressional hearing, the furor has swelled into calls for Harvard’s
president Claudine Gay to resign. In an interview with the university’s student
newspaper following her testimony, Gay apologized; “I am sorry,” she told the
Harvard Crimson. “Words matter.” Harvard’s board has released a
statement affirming their support for Gay.

But these calls for punishment and resignation overlook a critical point about
history. In order to hold itself institutionally accountable for fighting
antisemitism, Harvard must examine dark decisions made long before the students
who had signed the Israel-Hamas letter were born — indeed, long before Gay
herself graduated college. Certainly, Harvard has much to grapple with. This is
an institution that once had explicitly antisemitic admissions policies, and one
that still gives preference to legacy applicants — which some argue ensures the
persistence of inequality.

See more
See more


A less known but deeply unpalatable reality when it comes to antisemitism at
Harvard is that one of the top universities in America is an institution that
honors a man convicted of crimes against humanity in Nuremberg; whitewashes a
Nazi collaborator who organized the ethnic cleansing of tens of thousands of
Jews and Poles; and celebrates an alumnus infamous for freeing Holocaust
perpetrators and orchestrating the internment of Japanese Americans during World
War II.

During the war, industrialist Alfried Krupp had an estimated 100,000 enslaved
people working at his factory in Auschwitz. Today, a fellowship and a chair at
Harvard bear his name. His foundation gave Harvard money. Harvard helps
whitewash his legacy.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Prisoners at forced labor are pictured constructing the Krupp factory at
Auschwitz.

The concentration camp inmates, prisoners of war and hundreds of children who
were enslaved under Krupp were subjected to abhorrent conditions and abuses. A
Nuremberg prosecutor summed up the savagery by saying “When they could no longer
work, the SS took them away to be gassed.”

After the war, the US held a set of 12 trials for war crimes committed by
concentration camp doctors, death squad commandos and other facets of the Third
Reich genocide apparatus. Krupp’s steel empire, which formed the cornerstone of
Germany’s war industry, played a role so extensive that one of the 12 trials was
devoted to it alone.

But Krupp only spent a few years in prison before his sentence was commuted by
US High Commissioner for Germany John J. McCloy, a Harvard Law graduate
who freed over two dozen convicted Nazis, including men directly involved in
perpetrating the Holocaust.

McCloy’s shameful history doesn’t end there. The man played a pivotal
role in blocking America from bombing Auschwitz, which many historians and
observers (including Deborah Lipstadt, current US Special Envoy to Monitor and
Combat Antisemitism, and Israel’s Yad Vashem) argue was a damning failure to act
by the Allies. He also championed Japanese American internment; according to
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Kai Bird in his book “The Chairman,” McCloy was
responsible “more than any other official” in convincing President Franklin
Roosevelt to greenlight the internment.

Harvard’s profile of McCloy, which celebrates him as “very active and successful
in a variety of fields,” mentions none of this.

National Archives
Alfried Krupp's mugshot, taken by US forces.

Thanks to McCloy, Krupp was returned the assets that had been seized from him.
Upon his death in 1967, the Nazi industrialist left that fortune to a foundation
bearing his name; in 1974, that foundation gave $2 million to Harvard, which
created the Krupp Foundation Dissertation Research Fellowship and the Krupp
Foundation Professor of European Studies. (The Krupp fellowships are
also awarded to students at multiple other universities, including MIT, whose
president also currently faces calls for resignation due to her congressional
testimony about antisemitism on campus.)

In marked contrast to October’s student letter, which sought to justify Hamas’
massacres, the sole documented protest I’ve found to Harvard accepting Krupp’s
money in 1974 came from the Harvard Crimson. Harvard’s sites for the Krupp
fellowships and the Krupp professorship fail to disclose that their honoree was
a convicted war criminal or that the money came from arming Nazi Germany and
participating in genocide.

Indeed, in a bit of grim irony, the mother of Gay’s predecessor, Lawrence Bacow
— who was Harvard’s president until this July — was an inmate at Auschwitz. In
an impressive feat of separating business and personal, Harvard celebrated the
son of a Holocaust survivor becoming president while continuing to use funds
gained from slave labor at the very same concentration camp where Bacow’s mother
was imprisoned.

See more

Brian Snyder/Reuters
President of Harvard University Claudine Gay

Opinion: Harvard is right to back its president

And Krupp isn’t the only Third Reich war criminal whitewashed by Harvard. The
school’s Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI) features the archives of Mykola
Lebed, described as “an important figure for Ukrainian history,” and a leader in
WWII-era Ukrainian organizations that “were engaged at various times in
struggles against occupying forces.”

HURI’s biography of Lebed goes on to portray him as an immigrant who became a
scholar of the Soviet Union. A professorial photo of Lebed smoking a pipe
accompanies the description.

Missing is the fact that the supposed freedom-fighter-turned-scholar was a Nazi
collaborator and mass murderer trained by the German secret police the Gestapo,
and later protected from prosecution by the CIA.

Lebed was a leader in the antisemitic and fascist Organization of Ukrainian
Nationalists (OUN), which allied itself with the Nazis and whose
men participated in liquidating Jews. In 1943, Lebed became one of the
commanders of an OUN paramilitary offshoot, where he was responsible for
orchestrating the slaughter of 70,000 to 100,000 Poles in what’s called the
Volyn massacres.

When it comes to sheer barbarity, photographs of what Lebed’s forces did to
Polish villagers, including children, give Hamas’ most gruesome acts a run for
their money. Even US Army Intelligence, which isn’t known for
squeamishness, stressed Lebed was a “well-known sadist.”

The transformation of a butcher of Jews and Poles into the placid pipe-smoking
professor on HURI’s site is telling, considering it’s done by an institution
whose motto is the Latin word for “Truth.”


GET OUR FREE WEEKLY NEWSLETTER


 * Sign up for CNN Opinion’s newsletter
 * Join us on Twitter and Facebook

Indeed, in 2011, HURI’s Mykola Lebed Archive Research Fellow was Volodymyr
Viatrovych who, shortly after leaving Harvard, became director of Ukraine’s
Institute of National Memory — a governmental body that sets the country’s
policy on interpreting historical narratives.

While there, Viatrovych became notorious for whitewashing Nazi collaborators,
including Lebed’s organizations. This included drafting laws that made it
illegal to deny their status as freedom fighters. Ukraine’s celebration of these
collaborators was repeatedly condemned by the US Holocaust Memorial
Museum and Israel.

If Harvard is serious about working to eradicate antisemitism on campus, it can
start by ridding itself of its Nazi stains, not just for Jews but for the
nearly 700 Harvard students killed fighting against the Third Reich. Otherwise,
the notion of combatting antisemitism at a university that offers scholarships
tainted by Nazi money will be little more than an obscene farce.

View on CNN



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

© 2023 Cable News Network. A Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All Rights
Reserved.
CNN Sans ™ & © 2016 Cable News Network.

Terms of Use | Privacy Policy | Ad Choices | Accessibility & CC | About |
Newsletters | Transcripts | Do Not Sell Or Share My Personal Information |
Cookie Settings | Manage cookies+