Secret reports on Nazi Germany: the Frankfurt School contribution to the war effort

Picking up from chapter one, this chapter focuses chiefly on 1941, and the height of church–state conflict that year witnessed in Nazi Germany. It devotes special attention to Bishop Galen of Münster’s three sermons of protest of July and August 1941, attacking the Nazi regime’s murder of Germany’s disabled population and its seizures of church property. The chapter analyses these famous sermons, and their attitudes towards the German war effort. Its most novel contribution, however, is to analyse lay Catholics’ responses to these famous protests. The chapter demonstrates that Catholics in the Rhineland and Westphalia displayed a wide range of attitudes towards Galen’s arguments, which received criticism as well as vocal support. The chapter demonstrates that the divided and contested nature of Catholic opinion in late 1941 is key to understanding the mutual attempts at church–state rapprochement undertaken by Galen and the Nazi regime as of that autumn.

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Introduction

Secret Reports on Nazi Germany ◽

10.23943/princeton/9780691134130.003.0001 ◽

2013 ◽

Author(s):

Franz Neumann ◽

Herbert Marcuse ◽

Otto Kircheimer ◽

Raymond Geuss

Keyword(s):

World War Ii ◽

Frankfurt School ◽

The United States ◽

Nazi Germany ◽

Herbert Marcuse ◽

World War ◽

Intelligence Agency ◽

Central European ◽

European Section ◽

Office Of Strategic Services

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).

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Secret Reports on Nazi Germany

10.23943/princeton/9780691134130.001.0001 ◽

2013 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Franz Neumann ◽

Herbert Marcuse ◽

Otto Kirchheimer ◽

Raymond Geuss

Keyword(s):

World War Ii ◽

Frankfurt School ◽

Nazi Germany ◽

Herbert Marcuse ◽

Socialist Economy ◽

Intelligence Analysis ◽

World War ◽

Anti Semitism ◽

Office Of Strategic Services ◽

German Jewish

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.

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Foreign Correspondent (1940)

Hitchcock and the Censors ◽

10.5810/kentucky/9780813177427.003.0008 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 71-80

Author(s):

John Billheimer

Keyword(s):

Source Material ◽

Personal History ◽

Nazi Germany ◽

Original Source ◽

Production Code ◽

Final Scene ◽

War Effort ◽

Foreign Correspondent ◽

Radio Broadcast

This chapter examines the changes in the source material, script, and film of Foreign Correspondent wrought by the Production Code censors. The original source material was a memoir, Personal History, by Vincent Sheean, which was purchased by producer Walter Wanger. The Production Code office advised Wanger that the property would be unsuitable for filming, since it depicted incidents that might offend Nazi Germany and thus would violate the Neutrality Act. Wanger took the idea of a foreign correspondent, and little else, from the Sheean book and created an espionage thriller in which the country served by the villainous spies is unnamed. Alfred Hitchcock was hired on loan-out from Selznick, and before the film was completed, war had broken out in Europe. Siding with Britain, screenwriter Ben Hecht wrote a final scene in which star Joel McCrea pleaded in a radio broadcast for American involvement in the war effort.

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