Secret Reports on Nazi Germany: The Frankfurt School Contribution to the War Effort, Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, and Otto Kirchheimer, Raffaele Laudani, eds. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2013), 704 pp., $45 cloth.

2014 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 271-272
Author(s):  
Franz Neumann ◽  
Herbert Marcuse ◽  
Otto Kircheimer ◽  
Raymond Geuss

This introduction discusses the Frankfurt School's contribution to the United States' World War II effort. In particular, it examines the role played by three German scholars and prominent members of the Frankfurt School: Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, and Otto Kirchheimer. As political analysts at the Research and Analysis Branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the first American intelligence agency, Neumann, Marcuse, and Kirchheimer prepared intelligence reports on Nazi Germany. The chapter considers how, by adapting Critical Theory to the American cultural and bureaucratic machine, the Frankfurt group was rapidly able to impose their own “intellectual guidance” on the Central European Section, a Research and Analysis Branch subdivision charged with analyzing and studying Nazi Germany (as well as Austria and the other Central European countries).


Author(s):  
Franz Neumann ◽  
Herbert Marcuse ◽  
Otto Kirchheimer ◽  
Raymond Geuss

During World War II, 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 Adolf 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. The book features a foreword and a comprehensive general introduction that puts these writings in historical and intellectual context.


2002 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 151-158
Author(s):  
Rachel T. Greenwald

Guenter Lewy, The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000)Robert Gellately and Nathan Stolzfus, ed., Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001)


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