In the summer of 1935, an exchange programme between leading American academies and German schools, set up by the International Schoolboy Fellowship (ISF), was hijacked by the Nazi government. The organization had been set up in 1927 by Walter Huston Lillard, the principal of Tabor Academy in Marion, Massachusetts. Its aim was to foster better relations between all nations through the medium of schoolboy exchange.
However, the authorities at the National Political Education Institutes (aka Napolas), the Third Reich’s most prominent elite schools, had other plans. Lillard and the ISF were informed on 12 February 1935 that they would be exchanging ten American boys for ten Napola pupils. However, the American organizers were wholly unaware that the German pupils and staff were charged with an explicitly propagandistic mission. Their aim: to counteract and neutralize the effect of anti-Nazi accounts in the American media; to form opinions, and influence future foreign views of the Third Reich.
To ensure the effectiveness of this pro-Nazi propaganda campaign at the highest level, one of the first German boys to be selected for the program was Reinhard Pfundtner, the son of a high-ranking civil servant in the Third Reich’s Interior Ministry. In his role as ‘state secretary,’ Hans Pfundtner was one of the key architects of the Nuremberg Laws, which demoted Jews, Sinti, and Roma to a pariah status within Nazi Germany, and which were instrumental in the genesis of the Holocaust. He was also a member of the Olympic Committee, and was keen to use the exchange as an opportunity to persuade Lillard, Reinhard’s American headmaster, to lobby in favour of U.S. participation at the upcoming 1936 Winter Olympic Games in Garmisch-Partenkirchen.
Surviving letters between Pfundtner and Lillard, now preserved in the German Federal Archives in Berlin, show that the principal of Tabor Academy was completely taken in by the Pfundtners’ pretense of friendship. In one letter from 23 November 1935, Lillard even assured Pfundtner that his ‘excellent letter replying to…questions about the Olympic Games’ had been ‘quoted by several of our good newspapers, and was included in the Associated Press service throughout the country… Undoubtedly, this message of yours will be very helpful in submerging some of the false propaganda.’