The university offered to evacuate children of Oxford University staff in 1940, but it appears there could have been a sinister motive behind their seemingly kind offer.
There are now concerns that leaders of the eugenics movement at Yale University may have extended the invitation because they planned to repopulate a devastated Britain with a race of intellectually superior children.
Dr John Fulton of Yale Medical School was a driving force behind the rescue and said the committee 'hoped to save some of the children of intellectuals before the storm breaks.'
In the pre-war period, the idea that society should aim to breed a better quality of human stock was popular - those who were deemed intellectually superior were encouraged to have more children, and those with a lesser intellect were urged to have less offspring.
Charles Darwin's son Leonard, saw the human race as no different to animals and similarly, 'weak' humans should not be encourage to breed.
This suggest that that pre-war Yale was captured by an idea which seems comfortably close to Nazism.