Germans and Americans could look back in 1945 to a long tradition of cultural exchange. Germany's intellectual life and renowned universities had drawn nearly 10,000 American students to the country in the second half of the nineteenth century. The German-American exchange of professors between Harvard and Columbia and the Friedrich-Wilhelm University of Berlin from 1904 to the outbreak of World War I was an important element of cultural and educational policy. The exchange of professors attests to the German Empire's rather late start in the field of international cultural and educational policy. At the same time, it illustrates the tendency in the period before World War I to use international academic ties as political instruments for cultural self-representation, active cultural propaganda, and international understanding.

In 1930, the Academic Exchange Service (Akademische Austauschdienst, founded 1923-4), the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (founded 1925), and the German Academic Foreign Office of the Association of German Universities (Deutsche Akademische Auslandsstelle des Verbandes der deutschen Hochschulen, founded 1927) united to form the German Academic Exchange Service (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, or DAAD). Together with the Institute of International Education, founded in New York in 1919, DAAD organized a German-American student exchange during the Weimar era. Although they were successful in securing this last goal, reform measures failed to achieve the first and second.