Secret Reports on Nazi Germany: The Frankfurt School Contribution to the War Effort

by Franz Leopold Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, Otto Kirchheimer

A groundbreaking book that gathers key wartime intelligence reportsDuring the Second World War, three prominent members of the Frankfurt School--Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, and Otto Kirchheimer--worked as intelligence analysts for the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime forerunner of the CIA. This book brings together their most important intelligence reports on Nazi Germany, most of them published here for the first time.These reports provide a fresh perspective on Hitler's regime and the Second World War, and a fascinating window on Frankfurt School critical theory. They develop a detailed analysis of Nazism as a social and economic system and the role of anti-Semitism in Nazism, as well as a coherent plan for the reconstruction of postwar Germany as a democratic political system with a socialist economy. These reports played a significant role in the development of postwar Allied policy, including denazification and the preparation of the Nuremberg Trials. They also reveal how wartime intelligence analysis shaped the intellectual agendas of these three important German-Jewish scholars who fled Nazi persecution prior to the war.Secret Reports on Nazi Germany features a foreword by Raymond Geuss as well as a comprehensive general introduction by Raffaele Laudani that puts these writings in historical and intellectual context.

Genres: History, Germany, World War II, Philosophy, Politics, World History, Nonfiction

704 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Franz Leopold Neumann was a German-Jewish left-wing political activist, Marxist theorist and labor lawyer, who became a political scientist in exile and is best known for his theoretical analyses of National Socialism. He studied in Germany and the United Kingdom, and spent the last phase of his career in the United States. Together with Ernst Fraenkel and Arnold Bergstraesser, Neumann is considered to be among the founders of modern political science in the Federal Republic of Germany.

Reviews

[Andrew Davis · Rating 2 out of 5]

A set of the intelligence reports produced for the American government on the Nazi party ideology, its long term strategy, its leadership, the German population and the prospects of de-nazification campaign to be conducted following the war. The authors are three philosophers who belonged to, so called, Frankfurt school, who managed to escape Nazi Germany. The book is of value to the professional historians, but perhaps not too much to the amateurs like myself.

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely fascinating. Chilling. As someone familiar with the Frankfurt School, I already had great respect for their brilliance and originality. Reading their reports on Nazi Germany, written in real time, takes it to a whole new level. Their ability of these Jewish refugees to be clear eyed, almost clinical, in describing, analyzing, strategizing about, and anticipating the moves of the Third Reich, is almost surreal.

It helped me to contextualize their later work.

I also learned plenty content-wise about what was going on at the time. Bone chilling and fascinating.