Note from Andrew Malcolm. One day while I was running the Akme Expression shop in Oxford in 2002 I overheard a tour guide proudly explaining to a group of German tourists that during the war Hitler spared Oxford the attentions of the Luftwaffe because he was intending to make the city his British headquarters. I can still hear their laughter echoing around Radcliffe Square.
Oxford University yesterday agreed to return the £350,000 endowment from Dr Gert-Rudolf Flick, grandson of the Nazi sympathiser Friedrich Flick, after a fierce campaign from dons and the Jewish community.
Protesters argued that the cash was "tainted" because its original source was the estate of Flick, who was sentenced as a war criminal at Nuremberg. It was returned to his grandson at his request "with regret".
The decision will be seen as an embarrassing climbdown five years after the university accepted the money without referring it to its ethical committee, which screens controversial donations. Dr Flick asked for his donation to be returned after months of damaging publicity and amid concern that there would be demonstrations when the holder of the chair, Professor John Burrow, gave his inaugural lecture next month.
Dr Flick, a millionaire who lives in London, earlier described his regret at the controversy, which he said had brought embarrassment to the university and himself. In a letter to Dr Peter North, the Vice-Chancellor, last month, he said he had always felt that the fact he bore the name of Flick "should not preclude me from attempting, in a small way, to help improve things for my own and subsequent generations".
The university will continue to fund the Flick chair of European Thought, which is attached to Balliol College, but it will remove Flick's name. The college declined to comment last night, stating: "It is a matter for the university."
Oxford had changed the title of the professorship to make clear the benefactor was Dr Flick and not his late grandfather. Friedrich Flick was an adviser to Heinrich Himmler and used 48,000 slave labourers, mostly Jewish, to help him build Germany's richest industrial empire. About 40,000 slaves whom he obtained from concentration camps, died in appalling conditions. He was jailed for seven years in 1947 but freed in 1950.
The decision follows a letter from Dr Flick to Dr North last Friday in which he said: "I write today to express my wish that my name be removed from the chair and that the endowment money be returned to me."
Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, whose article in The Times last November initiated the debate, said there could now be greater scrutiny of other sources of university funding. He said Oxford had also accepted money from the late Hermann Abs, a financier, who was on the board that provided money for Auschwitz. He added: "I think there will be some fairly far-reaching questions about the way universities raise their money as a result of this."
The decision was applauded by the Jewish community. Ned Temko, editor of the Jewish Chronicle, said: "The issue of compensation to the relatively few survivors of the slave-labour camps, which the donor's grandfather operated in Nazi Germany, has never really been addressed fully. As long as that issue is outstanding, the acceptance of an endowment for a chair was inappropriate."