On July 13, the California State University Board of Trustees voted to remove the name of Henry Miller Madden from Fresno State’s campus library after 42 years. The building’s signage is now simply “Library,” and the website has been updated as well.

These changes are the result of a monthslong investigation by a campus task force into Madden’s unapologetically antisemitic views.

My 2018 book “Hitler’s American Friends” first exposed some of Madden’s views, and I had the privilege of serving on the task force. We released our initial report in April and our 74-page final report in May.

The material I had already uncovered about Madden was appalling. Throughout the 1930s, he ranted in private letters about his growing hatred of Jews, especially during his time as a graduate student in New York.

He even expressed genocidal fantasies in a 1935 letter to a friend, imagining Jews being “driven barefoot to some remote spot in Texas” where they would be “closed in by electrically charged barbed wire, with imported SA men stationed every ten yards apart, three men to each machine gun emplacement.”

He continued: “Target practice will be permitted twice weekly, with explosive bullets to be used on Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah, Purim, etc.”

Fresno State University President Saúl Jiménez-Sandoval tasked our committee with one major objective: to determine whether Madden’s prejudiced views from the 1930s had ever changed.

After months of painstaking work — with the help of students, our team pored over an estimated 100,000 documents and other items in Madden’s archival collection — we reached two key conclusions. We confirmed that Madden had expressed antisemitic and pro-Nazi views repeatedly before, during and after World War II. We also found no evidence that he ever changed or expressed remorse for those views.

In fact, we found quite the opposite. Throughout his life, Madden engaged in antisemitic discussions and indulged antisemitic tropes.

This self-proclaimed expert on Central European history also never truly backed away from his support for Hitler or the Third Reich.

This was particularly shocking given that Madden worked as a resettlement officer for the International Refugee Organization in 1948-49 in Austria. In that role, he came face-to-face with Holocaust survivors and was obligated by his professional responsibilities to assist them.

Madden was neither a casual observer of history or ill-informed about the nature of Nazism. In fact, he was a firsthand witness.

Yet in a 1949 letter to his mother, Madden lamented: “We have a transport out almost every week — but, alas, about 60% of those who are going are the most undesirable type of Jew.”

In contrast, he was sympathetic toward ethnic Germans and complained that “the German refugees from Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia” were the ones living in “absolute misery.”

So Madden was neither a casual observer of history nor ill-informed about the nature of Nazism. In fact, he was a firsthand witness who encountered the survivors of Nazi tyranny. Not only did he have no sympathy for them, he appears to have detested them.

In contrast, we uncovered a 1982 letter — just months before Madden’s death — in which he discussed how he had sponsored the immigration to the United States of “a young Saxon” from Transylvania who was “probably a member of the SS during the war.” This man, Madden wrote, was now “retired — the owner of a large walnut orchard, warehouses, and apartment houses — and appreciative of his good fortune.”

This deeply troubling letter made it clear where Madden’s sympathies lay even at the end of his life.

Our task force had clearly answered President Jiménez-Sandoval’s question. Madden had never changed his views, and in fact reveled in them until the end of his life.

Our full report is available online here, and digital versions of critical documents are available here. The full Madden archive is available by appointment; my hope is that it will become an important resource for scholars studying this period.

The removal of Madden’s name from our campus is a critical moment in the history of Fresno State, which was founded in 1911. From 1949 to 1979, Madden was the university librarian, and from 1980 to 2022, the library carried his name.

Madden’s presence here spanned 73 years, nearly two-thirds of FSU’s existence. For 42 of those years, the specter of this hateful man remained through the presence of his name on a campus building.

But when the new semester starts in a few weeks, students will no longer confront the memorialization of a man who hated others and sympathized with a genocidal regime.

Uncovering this history provided an important moment for our campus community to reinforce its commitment to our values. It allowed us to right a historic wrong, and begin walking the road to building an inclusive and respectful community.

My hope now is that other institutions will be inspired to examine their own histories and evaluate how the events and prejudices of the past continue to shape the world we are building today.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of J.