Max Horkheimer's and Theodor Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) is often read as the definitive statement of the Frankfurt School in exile—a Flaschenpost, sent from faraway Los Angeles during the darkest days of World War II, which detailed the terrifying consequences of modern rationality for the contemporary world. It tackles such hallmarks of fascism as the loss of privacy, the return of myth, and the omnipresence of antisemitism, as well as the rise of totalitarianism and the “culture industry.” With the publication of Secret Reports on Nazi Germany, we have before us a very different—but perhaps no less definitive—document of Critical Theory's exile years. Meticulously edited by Raffaele Laudani, Secret Reports collects work that Frankfurt-School affiliates Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, and Otto Kirchheimer prepared for the Research and Analysis Branch of the Office of Strategic Services in Washington, D.C. during World War II. Taken together, these reports might just represent, as Laudani describes them, “one of the few attempts to make the Frankfurt School's Critical Theory a practical tool in the fight against fascism” (1). The age-old debate between theory and praxis resumes, this time with a twist: to serve or not to serve the war effort.

Having done a fair amount of detective work to track down the details of their authorship and provenance, Laudani divides the reports–which reflect their authors' respective expertise in political theory, philosophy, and jurisprudence–into five main groupings. Part I, “The Analysis of the Enemy,” opens with Franz Neumann's interpretation of Nazi antisemitism, which he described as the “spearhead of universal terror” (the title of the essay). His May 18, 1943 report dismissed the idea that National Socialist ideology could be boiled down to antisemitism alone; it was merely “a prologue of more horrible things to come” (27). In a similar vein, a report cowritten by Herbert Marcuse and the historian Felix Gilbert downplayed the idea that Nazi aggression could be attributed to Prussian militarism, which had “lost its danger” (70).

The true danger, as Neumann and Marcuse stressed, was the totalitarian nature of Nazi rule. Nazi ideology and policy had total control of the German economy, military, and social structure. And given the “terroristic apparatus of the Nazi machine,” as Marcuse argued in a report on “German Social Stratification,” there could be no hope for “political opposition” to Nazism beyond the work of “small underground groups” and limited “acts of sabotage” (85). This, of course, made predicting and planning for the eventual overthrow of National Socialism difficult business.

Part II of Secret Reports is devoted to “Patterns of Collapse,” and its five papers point to the impossibility of revolt within Nazi Germany. A report by Neumann, Marcuse, and Gilbert put it bluntly: “The objective conditions do not favor a revolution” (115). There would be no repeat of the final months of World War I. As Marcuse and his coauthor, the philosopher Hans Meyerhoff, astutely summarized in another report composed around the same time, “the system of National Socialism has been devised for the very purpose of making a repetition of 1918 impossible—that is, to make morale dispensable” (101). Neumann agreed: “Only invasion and the destruction of the Wehrmacht” could be expected to “crack the Nazi system” (99).

Despite its inability to bring about the downfall of Nazism, Neumann and Marcuse nevertheless provided sketches of the “political opposition” to Nazism. These pieces are collected in Part III, and they provide political history lessons. Neumann tackled the legacy of national bolshevism, while Marcuse sketched the contours of the Communist and Social Democratic Parties, laying particular blame for the success of Nazism at the feet of the latter because of its “abandonment of revolutionary socialist tactics and maintenance of the labor movement” in favor of the gradualist techniques of “legalism and parliamentarism” (205).

Otto Kirchheimer's more nuanced juridical knowledge comes into play in Part IV of Secret Reports, which is devoted to issues of denazification and military government. Kirchheimer carefully parsed Nazi legislation and outlined the many ways in which it deliberately eroded German criminal justice traditions. He argued that the “concentration camps are the epitome of all that is shameful in Nazism, and should be immediately investigated and closed” (337). But he also recommended “a system of limited abrogation” when it came to overhauling Nazi law because he felt that the “revision of the criminal system is an issue for the German people” (327). In fact, Neumann, Marcuse, and Kirchheimer each felt that Nazism could only be eradicated by “indigenous” or “native” elements (286, 306).

Postwar themes of reconstruction and justice are addressed in Parts V and VI of Secret Reports. “The task of governing Germany,” as Neumann explained in a report on “The Revival of German Political and Constitutional Life under Military Government,” was “tremendous,” and it meant that a “way must be found to strengthen the democratic forces without seriously compromising them” (420, 427). Neumann recommended a long-term plan of political reeducation: “Many years of education under an operating democracy will be necessary to demilitarize the spirit of the masses” (441). But even this might not be enough. If reeducation did not prove successful, it would be necessary to consider “the destruction of Germany as a political and economic power” (447).

Denazification demanded the administration of justice, but this required devising a legal and political framework in which, and with which, to do so. Kirchheimer's reports on these issues worked toward fulfilling President Roosevelt's demand for “just and sure punishment” (456). He ingeniously recommended turning the “leadership principle” so central to Nazi ideology on its head, thus transforming it into a “theory of incrimination” (465) that could be used to document criminal responsibility. For his part, Marcuse, in an August 7, 1945 report, provided a forty-five page compendium of evidence that documented the “comprehensive Nazi plan for aggression, conquest, and domination of Europe and even beyond Europe” (475). Marcuse indicted dubious theories of Lebensraum and condemned Nazi antisemitism, which for him was not merely “the spearhead” of worse things to come—as it was for Neumann—but rather the very cornerstone of Nazi ideology: “To the Nazi mind, the Jew is the racial, political, religious, ideological, and economic archenemy,” Marcuse explained. “He is the embodiment of everything that, by its very nature, is hostile to Nazism” (499).

The concluding part of Secret Reports is composed of two postwar papers written by Marcuse. The first surveys the divergent developments of the labor movement during this period, pulled as it was between competing Western and Eastern (i.e., Soviet) influences. In the second paper, on “The Potentials for World Communism,” Marcuse argued that communism was in no danger of losing popular support, and for good reason: “The major appeal of Communism stems from the paradoxical situation of the coexistence of immense social wealth, technological mastery of the productive forces, and widespread want, toil, and injustice” (601). For Marcuse, the dialectic continued–but, as one might expect given such remarks, his time working for the U.S. government did not.

It is tempting to read these fascinating essays and analyses as evidence of how Critical Theory benefited from exposure to the more empirical tools and methods of Anglo-American social science. Laudani himself floats this idea, and there is some truth to it. Yet, there is more to Secret Reports than Hegelians learning how to use charts and graphs. Not only do these papers offer us a glimpse of Critical Theory in action, but they also provide a fascinating behind-the-scenes account of how ideas respond to real-world actualities. These reports interpreted and changed the world simultaneously, and for that reason alone, they should remain required reading for a long time to come.