In the American imagination, there are generally two views of the Nazis: that of the terrifying, sinister, and efficient perpetrators of the Holocaust, and that of the bumbling, inept, overconfident clowns depicted in the films of Mel Brooks and Indiana Jones. Aaron Gillette’s Nazis in the New Word: German Students in the United States, 1933–1941 provides amble evidence for the latter view. Between 1933 and 1939, the Nazi regime recruited, screened, trained, and sent 270 college coeds to the United States as exchange students. Their task was to spread antisemitism and pro-German propaganda, denounce the evils of the Treaty of Versailles, and serve as attractive and charismatic examples of the New Germany. By the latter years of the 1930s, they were even asked to perform amateur acts of espionage. Undertrained, poorly screened, and generally open-mined and curious about their host nation, these German exchange students failed miserably in nearly every task they were asked to perform.

First, the screening and selection process was botched. Many of the German exchange students arrived in the United States seeking escape from the Nazi regime, whereas others who came with sincere pro-German intensions soon grew to love their host country. Nearly 15 percent the students stayed in the United States after their year-long experience, and many of them ended up marrying Americans and becoming US citizens. Some students who returned to Germany after their stay parlayed their American experience into safe desk jobs far from the front lines, whereas other served in the Nazi resistance or later aided the Americans during the post-war occupation. Second, the amateurish attempts by German students to spread Nazi propaganda were immediately identified and squashed, inspiring the host colleges to cancel their exchange programs. Nearly all the student attempts at espionage were discovered and thwarted by the US authorities. As the FBI reported in 1941, “Most of these spies are petty, unintelligent busybodies who sometimes used conspicuous and clumsy methods and had already been under surveillance” (p. 167). As Gillette concludes, the Nazi’s espionage and propaganda efforts ultimately did little to benefit the Nazis, “but did a great deal to worsen US-German relations” (p. 77).

Despite the potentially popular nature of the subject matter, Gillette’s book is an academic history. As such, it draws upon published and archival evidence in US and Germany to construct a narrative that moves chronologically and thematic through chapters addressing the stages of recruitment, training, the experiences at German students at US colleges, their lives afterwards, and their failed attempts at propaganda and espionage. As explained in a somewhat awkward introduction, Gillette is mainly speaking to a small historiography on Nazis infiltration of the US during the pre-war and World War II years and thus has little to say about higher education in the US. He has more to say about higher education in Germany. To this end, he uses the German exchange program to demonstrate how the German University and class systems operated in ways that undermined and circumvented escalating attempts by the Nazis to provide oversight of German universities during the 1930s. Part of reason why the German exchange students were so ineffective was because the old guard of German elites who selected the students valued the their intellect, physical attractiveness, and family pedigree over their loyalty to the Nazi regime or potential skill at propaganda and espionage. In general, the selected students tended to more open-minded and cosmopolitan than the average German or Nazi. For this reason, the Nazi program that was launched to spread propaganda in the US ended up undermining the German effort, due to the lack of commitment and ineptitude of the students that were chosen to carry it out.

American students did not come off well in Gillette’s account either. For example, the German exchange students were trained to engage Americans in intellectual discussions over the merits of fascism, Jewish control of the media, and the unjust nature of the Treaty of Versailles. However, the German students soon discovered that the American college students had little to no interest in world events and were far more interested in partying and finding their future spouses then they were in debating politics. Beyond a smirking curiosity about Hitler, they cared little about Nazi Germany. Furthermore, the prejudices of the American authorities often mirrored that of the Nazis. For example, Ruth Hubbard, the American administrator of the German exchange program, only wanted to select students who were “really representative” of the US, so she rejected the immigrant and first-generation students from Newark and Paterson who attended the New Jersey State Teachers College at Montclair because they represented “anything but a class of people from whom good American representatives can be drawn” (p. 49).

Overall, Nazi’s in the New Word is fascinating account of a little-known experiment in Nazi infiltration that avoids the sensationalism and over-generalization that the topic potentially invites. Working with a wide range of sources and following the selected students through their entire careers, Gillette is careful to survey the wide variety of responses and experiences of the 270 students and their supervisors. However, with its nuanced and academic perspective, the book will appeal more to historians of Germany than to historians of higher education in the US.