New attention shined on a decades old program at Stanford University this week, when a political writer raised questions about an internship named for a long-dead industrialist who used slave labor to support the Nazi regime and was convicted of war crimes.
The Krupp Internship Program at Stanford University allows students to immerse themselves in Germany, working and receiving invaluable international experience. According to the university’s website, “more than 1,300 Stanford students have completed full-time, paid internships at over 590 German host companies and institutions after studying at Stanford in Berlin” through the program.
While the program intends to give students “deeper immersion into German language and culture,” its namesake is a part of the broader issue of “deception by omission,” according to a recent New York Times opinion piece from political writer Lev Golinkin. In the article, titled “Why Do Stanford, Harvard and NASA Still Honor a Nazi Past?", Golinkin, a Jewish Ukrainian-born journalist, discusses the American legacies of institutions and programs named for Nazi rocket scientists Wernher von Braun and Kurt Debus, as well as the influence of Krupp’s fortune long after his death.
