Secrets no longer

Declassified insights about morale in Germany, de-Nazification, and the legal, political and ethical context in which members of the Third Reich could be brought to justice are now available to the wider public

By GLENN C. ALTSCHULER
Nuremberg Trial521 (photo credit: Reuters)
Nuremberg Trial521
(photo credit: Reuters)
Between 1943 and 1949, Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse and Otto Kirchheimer – three left-wing German-Jewish émigrés associated with the “Frankfurt School” of social research and critical theory, which rejected the dogmatic historicism and materialism of orthodox Marxism – concentrated instead on understanding the “superstructure” of society and analyzed developments in Nazi Germany for the Research and Analysis Branch of the Office of Strategic Services (the forerunner of the US Central Intelligence Agency).
Their essays, which originally circulated anonymously with a title, date of publication, and catalogue number, were declassified in 1975 and 1976.
Informative and full of arresting, provocative and prescient insights about morale in Germany, de-Nazification, and the legal, political and ethic context in which members of the Third Reich could be brought to justice, they are now available in Secret Reports on Nazi Germany: The Frankfurt School Contribution to the War Effort, edited by Raffaele Laudani, a professor of political science at the University of Bologna.
Morale was a “Nazi expendable,” Neumann wrote in June 1943. Having constructed a society that rendered individual feelings negligible – “to force the industrialist to produce, the soldier to fight, no matter how much they hate the regime and desire to end the war” – the Nazis had, to an extent, insulated themselves from psychological warfare. “Totalitarian morale” could be attacked “only by smashing the structure for the management of morale” – which means smashing the Nazi system itself.
Writing that same year, Marcuse agreed that morale was a “democratic luxury.” Convinced, like his colleagues, that “a majority of the masses are not Nazis,” he suggested that they had been domesticated, caring most about private sorrows, food, shelter and safety.
Their weariness and distrust, Marcuse insisted, played into the hands of Nazi leaders, who consequently needed “less coercive measures and a smaller terroristic machinery than they would need if the masses were politically active or even awake.”
And, Neumann noted in 1944, the intensified air war, which might have undermined the standing of the Nazis with the German people, actually made them more dependent on the regime (in the short run) to provide the necessities of life, thus “absorbing all political issues into personal issues.”
The three men made detailed – and incisive – recommendations about de- Nazification. In 1944, Marcuse listed the Nazi officials he thought should be apprehended, incarcerated and “kept in concentration camps wherever the prisons are filled.” He suggested that political life be revived first at local levels and then integrated into national parties, and that Nazi business, professional and political organizations “under the camouflage of new slogans and groupings” not be permitted to “firmly entrench themselves in post-war Germany.”
Kirchheimer counseled against replacing higher officials in the civil service with middle-rank bureaucrats because “the clerical service contained a greater proportion of convinced Nazis than did upper levels” and barring anyone who was a Nazi party member before February 1, 1933.
Neumann worried that the collapse of Hitler’s government might be “the signal for revolutionary outbursts from below, for strikes, for acts of bloodshed and violence,” and that the presence of foreign troops in Germany might “stimulate an aggressive nationalism.”
Given these scenarios, and an apathetic public that might cede the field to minorities, elections were risky, he pointed out.
“The elimination of the Nazi Party and of the power of militaristic Junkers, industrialists, and bankers will thus not automatically transform the masses Germans into peace-loving and democratically- minded people,” Neumann wrote pessimistically; many years of education would be necessary, as would a radical change in the social structure of the country.
Neumann, Marcuse and Kirchheimer also did some of the hard thinking that paved the way for the Nuremberg Trials.
Neumann granted some legitimacy to the claim of acting under orders, but seemed to favor accepting it “only under narrowly defined conditions.”
He supported bringing defendants before an inter-Allied political agency instead of an international court, because the former “would avoid the intricate and difficult question of what law should be applied in the treatment of criminals.”
Kirchheimer agreed that personal responsibility should be broadly construed and attributed to “leaders and subleaders” who were aware of general policies such as the elimination of all Jews from European life “once and for all.”
Whether or not they were aware “of the particular details of execution in specific cases, appears immaterial,” he wrote.
Although their recommendations were occasionally accepted by American military and political authorities, the three analysts were disappointed that the Americans established a privileged relationship with the centrist party in Germany instead of working-class organizations and unions, and they felt increasingly marginalized in an OSS concerned about their “communist tendencies.”
By the 1960s, Laudani reminds us, Marcuse, having left government service, indicted Western democracies for transforming the liberty they insisted they were defending into a “powerful instrument of domination” of societies around the world – and became a darling of the New Left. ■
The writer is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin professor of American studies at Cornell University.