Max Mosley, Oxford and the corrosion of academic integrity

What if… a major British political party were shown to have received contributions amounting to nearly £12.4 million from the country’s leading fascist dynasty? What if… the same political party had received hundreds of thousands of pounds from the heir of a Nazi industrial mogul who had refused to compensate his former slave labourers after he emerged from prison following his sentence for war crimes? What if… that same party had been involved in its development programme with the German banker mainly responsible for Hitler’s financial exploitation of Nazi-occupied Europe and had represented the bank when it funded the construction of a vital part of Auschwitz?

One can only imagine the huge scandal that would have arisen. But when the same gifts and associations have involved the University of Oxford, there has rarely been the same sense of horror.

Evidently, our leading universities are expected to live in a lesser moral universe.

Thankfully, there are signs — so far too weak to be effective — that the growing furore over the late Max Mosley’s multi-million pound donations to Oxford may oblige the university to take morality more seriously.

Amid the scandal over Mosley’s endowments, it is easy to forget that this is not the first time in recent years that the university and some of its colleges have accepted and, when challenged, have strongly defended gifts linked in various ways with the far-Right or the Hitler regime.

Based on past experience, the explanations and justifications now emerging for accepting the largesse of Britain’s premier fascist dynasty are not at all surprising. University administrators are nothing if not avid and determined in finding moral justifications — some of which occasionally may be valid — for not looking gift horses in the mouth. There is every sign that the objectors to the recently deceased Max Mosley’s gifts of over £12 million still have a mountain to climb, because the main decision-makers and much of the Oxford community are firmly in a damage limitation mode, but determined to find ways to keep the money while minimising reputational damage.

What is missing is any sense that accepting money from highly dubious sources has deep moral effects or that it risks corroding academic integrity. In this respect, Oxford probably is no different from most other major institutions of higher education either in past or modern times.

In one case in the mid-1990s, a secret study commissioned by the university authorities reportedly gave an ingenious reason for accepting money to endow a professorship in European thought from an heir of Friedrich Flick. He had been a war criminal sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment by a US court in Nuremberg for his use of slave labour under the Nazis — a crime involving the death of thousands. After serving his time (reduced to three years), Flick was one of the richest and most corrupt figures in West Germany. However, the anonymous Oxford expert(s) who gave the endowment a clean bill of moral health suggested that it came not from slave labour-derived riches but from the war criminal’s profits made after the war. His grandson inherited clean as well as dirty money. So his gift to Oxford, which the university eventually and reluctantly returned under public pressure, came from the clean money.

My main worries are that Oxford’s record of accepting arguably Nazi-linked donations or grants indirectly serves to give a measure of respectability to odious, dangerous doctrines. In addition, however strongly academics benefiting from such money may object, I believe it then becomes harder to research and teach the history of the Holocaust.

Apart from the Flick chair, there is the still unresolved matter of Oxford’s and Cambridge’s acceptance of postgraduate grants tenable in Hamburg from the Alfred Toepfer Foundation. The issue here is not the size of the grants but of the accounts given by the foundation of Toepfer’s active record of promoting international subversion by the Hitler regime and aiding top Nazis and extremist intellectuals in postwar Europe.

I must acknowledge a personal stake here. As an infant, I narrowly escaped deportation to Auschwitz in 1944, both from the ghetto in Munkacs, then part of Hungary, and shortly afterwards from the environs of Budapest. The German plenipotentiary in Hungary following the entry of Nazi troops in March 1944 was Edmund Veesenmayer, his assistant was Kurt Haller and his secretary was Barbara Hacke.

After the war, Haller and the still unashamed Nazi, Hacke, were two of Toepfer’s most important employees. Not surprisingly, Veesenmayer joined the Toepfer payroll for a time after his premature release from his imprisonment as a war criminal. The studies of Toepfer’s record commissioned by his foundation and accepted by a panel set up by Oxford in 2010 are an alarming example of carefully calculated rehabilitation, masked by limited admissions, which is so typical of much German and German-influenced writing on the Nazi period.

Such rehabilitation applies no less to an earlier example of Oxford’s links with prominent figures from the Nazi regime. After the Second World War, West Germany’s most prominent banker, Deutsche Bank’s chairman Hermann Josef Abs, was involved with Oxford funding in a way which merits greater notice. Clearly a person of notable charm, Abs spun his own story successfully. He improbably explained away the fact that he had been the member of the Deutsche Bank’s wartime board mainly responsible for the firm’s foreign dealings at a time when one of its largest investments had been in I. G. Farben’s massive Buna Monowitz plant at Auschwitz. Abs claimed that he had not known of it. Indeed, like so many others, if their histories are to be believed, he was involved in — or, at least, in touch with — the anti-Hitler resistance.

As a student of political financing, I have come to conclude that funding of elections and political parties may in the long run be no more important than gifts to institutions such as universities, since it is they who do much to shape agendas and assumptions. The influence of funding bodies on academics usually is less direct than a straight deal, in which the funder demands a particular research outcome or publication. Nevertheless, it is striking that recipients of money tend to adopt approaches and attitudes favourable to the interests of their benefactors.

According to reports for the five most recent years (ending in April 2020) for which accounts of Max Mosley’s foundation are listed by the Charity Commission, it gave grants for all purposes between 2015 and 2020 amounting to just under £29.6 million. Created in 2011 following the tragic, drug-induced death of his son Alexander, the foundation is recorded as giving Oxford and two of its colleges just under £12.4 million during this period and almost £3.2 million to four other universities in London: Imperial, UCL, Westminster and Kingston.

For Oxford, £12.4 million is a handy sum but considerably smaller than mega-gifts such as the £155 million from the Vietnamese billionaire Nguyen Thi Phuong Thao, £80 million from the Reuben brothers, £75 million from the former Russian billionaire Leonid Blavatnik, £75 million from Sir Michael Moritz and his wife Harriet Heyman, and £70 million from Wafic Said.

News of the Mosley donations has led to a series of serious accusations from four Nobel prizewinners, several members of the House of Lords. They include the Government’s Anti-Semitism tsar Lord (John) Mann and the former Thatcher cabinet member and chair of University College London’s council Lord (David) Young, as well as an emeritus fellow of St Peter’s College — the main college-level recipient of Mosley money — and former editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, Professor Lawrence Goldman. A further attack on the Mosley money has come from Black Lives Matter UK.

A coalition of Jewish organisations has sent a protest to the Oxford Vice-Chancellor and to the Master of St Peter’s. This marks a significant development, since Jewish students and representative bodies did not intervene in 2010 during my complaint about the Toepfer grants and had intervened only belatedly to support my case against the Flick donation in 1995. This protest, incidentally, was not on the ground that the war criminal’s grandson who funded the Flick professorship somehow inherited his grandfather’s guilt, but rather that he had used money inherited from his notorious grandfather to fund Oxford at a time when his former slave labourers had been ignored.

The current readiness in Jewish circles to voice serious concern about Mosley money tainted by the family’s record as the UK’s leading anti-Semites is to be welcomed. It is realistic to argue that accepting Mosley money has the side-effect of providing respectability to the thuggery and racist extremism organised by Sir Oswald Mosley in the 1930s and, in Max Mosley’s youth, in the early 1960s, with his active political support for his father’s attempted neo-fascist revival.

Moreover, Mosley’s fascists were responsible in the 1930s not only for ugly marches and rallies in the UK — their activities caused countless Jewish deaths in Nazi Europe. Fear of provoking Mosley’s pro-Hitler legions contributed significantly to the actions of the British Government in increasing the severity of restrictions on Jewish asylum-seekers. A high proportion of Jews who waited in vain in Nazi-threatened and Nazi-occupied Europe for life-giving visas ended up in ghettos and death camps.

The objections by the Campaign Against Antisemitism, Community Security Trust, Oxford Jewish Society, Union of Jewish Students, Jewish Leadership Trust, Holocaust Educational Trust, Oxford Chabad and other Jewish bodies therefore deserve careful attention and respect from the Oxford authorities.

To complicate matters, the vital objections expressed by this coalition, headed by the Campaign Against Antisemitism, are themselves subject to criticism and amendment even by those who back their basic case against accepting the Mosley money.

First, it may be wise to distinguish between the £6 million donated to the central funds of the university for a professorship and the approximately equal sum to St Peter’s College for a block of student rooms.

At the university level, it will be a simple matter to return the Mosley grant and to fund the professorship from its ample resources. For St Peter’s College, the consequences will be more serious, especially as construction of the building to be funded by his foundation before Max Mosley’s recent death has already begun.

Added to this, the funding of the student building was intended as a memorial for Max Mosley’s son, who had been an undergraduate at the college, who had been a brilliant, reportedly non-political mathematician, who gained a doctorate at a young age but whose life had been fatally blighted by depression and heroin addiction. There is a case for deciding that this particular part of the Mosley endowment may be seen more as a matter of personal love than as political whitewash.

In order to strengthen this view, the surviving trustees of the Mosley foundation have issued a strong statement finally disavowing the thuggery of Sir Oswald Mosley, as well as agreeing that, if students at St Peter’s so wish, all mention of the Mosley family including the unfortunate Alex Mosley, the former St Peter’s undergraduate, may be omitted. Against this approach, the bitter objections expressed by a historian of Professor Goldman’s distinction and by an honorary fellow and major St Peter’s benefactor, Sir Lloyd Dorfman, have greater weight.

A far more modest gift by Alex Mosley’s family, perhaps the funding of a single room, would be more sincere as an act of remembrance without the deeply damaging symbolic and political encumbrance of funding an entire building, which would remain, irrespective of the name assigned to a block, financed from such a dubious source.

Second, the important, fully justified appeal to the Oxford authorities by the Jewish coalition would have been even stronger, in my opinion, had it omitted a trivialising, counter-productive suggestion. The Jewish groups suggest that part of the Mosley money in question should be diverted to Jewish organisations (such as themselves?) involved in teaching about anti-Semitism and in supporting Jewish life in the university and St Peter’s College. If Mosley money is dirty, it is dirty for Jewish users too.

The most positive outcome of this affair will happen if it leads to the reconsideration by Oxford historians and by Jewish organisations, as well as German ones, of the role of Holocaust research and education at the university level. Anglo-Jewish leaders have concentrated too much on popular national memory projects, such as the proposed Holocaust memorial centre by the House of Lords and ceremonies such as Holocaust Memorial Day each January 27th, the day when Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz in 1945. The grand scheme for siting the proposed new Holocaust memorial and visitor centre by Parliament is itself controversial within the Jewish community, though strongly backed by organisational leaders.

More important, the focus on projects to preserve popular memory of the Holocaust have diverted attention from crucial, ongoing battles for historical accuracy and balance — something which can only be achieved by in-depth scholarship at university level.

Yet it is at this higher level that German funding sources have become too important, thereby tending to put a spin on the terrible events of 1933-1945. We are not speaking here of Holocaust denial, but of what Christopher Simpson calls apologetic “ contextualisation ” and the historian Michael Burleigh has referred to as “soft core” denial. In Oxford, when the Holocaust has been taught at all, it has tended to be from a German-influenced viewpoint. This has not been entirely because of the sources of funding of the subject, but at least partly so.

Within Oxford’s German and history departments, the university’s long record of accepting arguably tainted money has had a corrosive effect. The tragedy is that few of those closely involved realise this.

As for the university as a whole, perhaps its senior decision-makers should ask themselves the simple question with which this article began: would it have been deemed appropriate for a political party — the Conservatives, for example — to have accepted a large donation from a figure like Max Mosley? If the answer to that is no, then what makes them think that it is any more appropriate for Oxford to take his money?