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Florida State University Libraries )ORULGD6WDWH8QLYHUVLW\/LEUDULHV 2019 Franz Neumann, Otto Kirchheimer, and Herbert Marcuse's Reports for the OSS: A Strange Chapter of Intellectual History Del Martin Herman Follow this and additional works at DigiNole: FSU's Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected] Herman 1 FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENT OF ARTS AND SCIENCES “Franz Neumann, Otto Kirchheimer, and Herbert Marcuse’s Reports for the OSS: A Strange Partnership in Intellectual History” By: Del Herman A Thesis Submitted to the Department of History in Partial Fulfillment of the requirements for graduation with Honors in the Major Herman 3 Acknowledgements I would like to thank Dr. George Williamson first for his course “Fascism and Modern European Thought” which got me interested in the social, cultural, and ideological analyses of fascism that many great 20th century European intellectuals pursued. I would also like to show my gratitude to him for all the sturdy mentorship, smart advice, and patient editing that he provided as the thesis director on this project. Lastly, I want to thank him for all the enlightening conversations he was nice enough to have with me on both the Frankfurt School and the history of ideas more generally. The intellectual impact of these conversations have inspired and informed the author in ways that go beyond the content of this thesis. I would also like to thank Drs. G. Kurt Piehler and Martin Kavka for their patient and helpful work as committee members. Special thanks goes to Dr. Piehler for his course “United States: 1920 –1945” which got me interested in that time period of American history and about the unusual alliances that developed as a result of the Second World War. Special credit must also go to Dr. Kavka for his insightful questions and careful, patient proofreading which have helped make this thesis a much better project. I truly could not have asked for a better committee. Finally, I want to thank Megan Gillman and the team at the Honors Program for their help in procuring funding for me to visit the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. The archival sources made this thesis a much better product and their help and advocacy for my research was the direct cause of that. Such funding also allowed me to visit an archive for the first time, an experience that is invaluable for any scholar of History. Herman 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Introduction…………………………………………………………………….. 5 2. Franz Neumann…………………………………………………………………. 17 3. Otto Kirchheimer……………………………………………………………….. 37 4. Herbert Marcuse………………………………………………………………… 56 5. Conclusion………………………………………………………………………. 75 6. Bibliography…………………………………………………………………….. 82 Herman 5 INTRODUCTION I. Office of Strategic Services The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) evolved out of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s appointment of the energetic William J. Donovan (a civilian) to Coordinator of Information (COI) in July 1941. The purpose of that position was to organize intelligence related to national security concerns as the world situation grew increasingly more intense in the lead-up to the United States’ involvement in World War II beginning in December of that year. After war actually broke out, however, a larger intelligence agency was needed. The OSS was officially created on June 13, 1942 by virtue of a wartime order from President Roosevelt meant to bolster the quality of American intelligence during the pressing situation of World War II. The OSS was moved under the auspices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff with William Donovan as chief.1 The organization was meant to gather information about the enemy for various military operations. Its primary role in the American war effort was its unprecedented ability to handle intelligence in a systematic way for military operations. Along with those functions, the organization also helped with the espionage, subversion, and propaganda operations that the executive branch of the American government wanted completed. Its dissolution on September 20, 1945 by President Harry Truman would lead to much of its institutional structure being carried over in a replacement organization: the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).2 The Research & Analysis Branch (R&A) was one of the main divisions of the OSS. Its principal task was to gather strong and credible data about various subjects of interest, both for the immediate American war effort and the federal government as a whole. Its purpose was not 1 Central Intelligence Agency, “What was OSS?,” Accessed April 3, 2019, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/intelligence-history/oss/art03.htm 2 “Office of Strategic Services,” in Encyclopedia Brittanica. Accessed April 3, 2019. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Office-of-Strategic-Services. Herman 6 just the acquisition of facts, but also the analysis of those facts by a corps of experts in different fields. This meant that the analysts were primarily scholars, recruited from various areas of academia (mainly the social sciences). These scholars provided the academic rigor and intellectual insight necessary to synthesize all available credible information about whatever they happened to be studying into a cogent analysis of the subject at hand, providing specific policy recommendations in their reporting. This need for clear research and serious, cogent analysis demanded a high standard of objectivity with little room for intellectual experimentation but a lot of room for sincere scholarly opinion.3 These analysts in total produced over two thousand reports during the OSS’s time of operation, on subjects as disparate as the conditions of railways along the Russian front to the attitudes of the Roman Catholic Church in Hungary to the relationship between business and aggression in Weimar Germany.4 In order to accomplish these increasingly disparate and specialized tasks, R&A divided the analysts into distinct groups: examples of these included the Europe-Africa Division and the Far-East Division among many others. These divisions were then be further split into sections addressing even more specific areas; among these was the Central European Section—a distinguished group of analysts who focused specifically on Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland.5 The corps members who were staffed in the Central European Section therefore needed to be social scientists who were familiar with Central Europe and who could provide expert scholarly analysis of it. By 1943, the R&A leadership became desperate for researchers who could provide this kind of in-depth scholarly analysis and began to look for refugee scholars 3 See Barry Katz, “Military Discipline,” in Foreign Intelligence: Research and Analysis in the Office of Strategic Services, 1942-1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 1–29. 4 See Katz, Foreign Intelligence, 18. 5 See Katz, Foreign Intelligence, 23, 34. Herman 7 across the political and linguistic spectrum. Naturally, one of the first to catch their eye was the Marxist legal expert Franz Neumann, who was at that time employed at Columbia University. Neumann’s dense scholarly analysis of Nazi Germany, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, showed his unique expertise. He was therefore one of the first analysts to be brought aboard, followed in May by his friend and colleague Herbert Marcuse and in June by Otto Kirchheimer.6 Both of these men were also Marxists who were affiliated with the Frankfurt School, an intellectual movement which will be addressed below. In total, there were at least 16 scholars working within the section, including some others such as Sinclair Armstrong, Felix Gilbert, and Edgar Johnson.7 Their job as a section was to provide their unique scholarly insight based on the most reliable information of what was happening in Central Europe at that time; this could include reports in the European press, radio broadcasts from the Third Reich, cables from OSS outposts all over friendly areas of Europe which could be utilized to produce even newer information, prisoner of war interrogations, and even materials from the Library of Congress.8 With this great wealth of resources, the scholars applied their own intellectual insight and credentials to top-quality analysis of whatever needed to be reviewed. The topics of analysis could be dictated within the section itself but could (and often were) dictated by the needs of the OSS as well as both the State and War Departments. Work was dealt out to particular analysts based on their academic credentials and much of the intellectual labor was handled collaboratively between the various scholars. A history of the Central European Section as a unit, written by the section chief Eugene N. Anderson, is very helpful in piecing back the environment that each of the Central Europeanists worked in. First of all, the section was run in a democratic fashion. Each analyst, 6 See Katz, Foreign Intelligence, 32–33. 7 See Katz, Foreign Intelligence, 34. 8 See Katz, Foreign Intelligence, 34. Herman 8 according to Anderson, “has not had views or judgments imposed upon him.” The analysts worked together in a cooperative fashion, had very little “hostility” or “backbiting” between any of them, and each were able to express their opinions fully. This environment was encouraged by both Neumann and Marcuse, who did a good job of encouraging democratic cooperation among the various scholars. Secondly, their work program was actually quite successful in mapping out a wide array of relevant social patterns in the Third Reich as they were able to prepare a number of Civil Affairs Guides for the War Department on various aspects of the Nazi regime, in addition to the individual reports. As Anderson put it, what made the work of the section unique was their “background analyses in terms of the total social setting” of whatever they happened to be analyzing. None of this is to say that there were not problems. Anderson described these in full detail as well. One was simply the fact that the section did not have enough hands to do all of the work that the government was asking of them.
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