Issues now confronting Oxford's Committee to Review Donations and a special Oxford-Cambridge sub-committee set up to decide whether to end the association with the Alfred Toepfer Foundation include how far Toepfer was involved in Nazi activities and whether the foundation bearing his name today misrepresents his record. If so, do either the source of the money or the legend that accompanies it matter? Is the way in which the Holocaust is taught — or, more accurately, is relatively little taught — at Oxford affected by the university's sources of funding?

 
Alfred Toepfer (right) and his wife with Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess (left) in June 1939 

But the most important underlying issue is the trivialisation of the Holocaust implicit in the foundation's accounts of its founder's career. This is what has most angered a number of German and French historians.

Grimm's Oxford counterpart, Professor Hermann Fiedler, was the mainstay of the Taylorian and his bust still presides over its entrance. Fiedler was valuable to the Hitler regime. As former Oxford tutor of the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VIII, Fiedler had good connections. The fact that he was an Aryan with close family in Germany provided a useful lever. It was Fiedler who wrote to the editor of The Times in May 1937 that he was "appalled" that Oxford had refused to send an official representative to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Göttingen University, by then purged of Jews. Fiedler added that he had accepted Göttingen's invitation to him to be present. 

Death camp supremo Odilo Globocnik, whom Toepfer entertained at his country mansion; SS Lieutenant-General and Sudeten German leader Konrad Henlein, a board member of Toepfer's foundations before the war 

Oxford was a priority target of Nazi cultural diplomacy. The presence of so many Jewish refugee academics provided daily reminders to the dons of Nazi racism. However, active appeasers, such as the Marquis of Lothian, were also associated with the university and with the Rhodes Scholarships. So it was not surprising that Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler's ambassador-at-large who headed the Nazi radicals within the German Foreign Office, took a personal interest in the project of scholarships to Germany for British graduates. Ribbentrop corresponded with Toepfer, addressed the Anglo-German Fellowship about the proposed Hanseatic Scholarships and became their patron. The British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, was persuaded to issue a statement welcoming the first awards, an event publicised worldwide.