Three of the professors, William Alpha Cooper, Karl Frederick Geiser and Frederick K. Krueger, received the order in the first degree. Professor Ralph Haswell Lutz, Fritz Hailer, a lawyer amd F.W. Elven received it in the second degree and E.C. Miller in the third.
Dr. William Alpha Cooper is professor Emeritus of Germanic Languages of Stanford University, California, having retired in 1934. He was born in Batesville, Ohio, in 1868. He studied at some point at the University of Bonn in Germany, the University of Leipzig and the University of Berlin. In 1934 he received an honorary degree from the University of Cologne.
He was for many years on the Stanford faculty and is a member of a number of American and German philological associations. In 1908 he translated Bielschowky's "Life of Goethe".
Dr Karl Frederick Geiser, a native of Iowa, has been a Professor of Political Science at Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio, where he resides since 1908. He has been teaching since 1893. He was a lecturer in Berlin, Marburg, Goettingen, Muenster, Danzig and Koenigsberg Universities in Germany during 1936 and 1937.
His "Democracy Versus Autocracy" was published in 1918 and in 1934 he published "American political ideals" in the German language.
Dr. Frederick Konrad Krueger, Professor of Political Science since 1923 at Wittenberg College in Springfield, Ohio, was born in Kottbus, Germany, in 1887. He studied at the University of Berlin and Tubingen University in Germany. He was naturalized as an American citizen in 1930.
He has been an exchange professor at Goettingen, Germany. He is the author of works in German and English, including "Government and Politics of the German Empire" (1915), and is a contributor to the encyclopedias of articles on Germany.
Dr. Ralph Haswell Lutz, a well-known historian is chairman of the Hoover War Library of Stanford University and dean of graduate study at Stanford. He is a native of Ohio and took his PhD at Heidelberg, Germany in 1910.
He served with the American Forces during the World War as first lieutenant of infantry, and was later in the American Military Mission in Berlin, the Supreme Economic Council in Paris and the special mission to Poland.
In a speech in Berlin in 1934, Dr. Krueger attacked the American press for making "no effort to understnad the new German soul or to play fair". He described the boycott of German goods as "a crime against America". He further went on to say that "[s]ome day America will be forced to deal with the problem presented by the Jew". He was then lecturing at the Nazi Academy for Political Sciences.
