Raffaele Laudani's new edited volume, Secret Reports on Nazi Germany, is a collection of reports written during World War II by three central philosophers of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory—Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, and Otto Kirchheimer—for use by the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (the OSS, precursor to the CIA). Recruited by William “Wild Bill” Donovan, head of the OSS and a dedicated Republican, these neo-Marxist German-Jewish émigrés were certainly imaginative hires. Yet, as the book suggests, the partnership worked for the most part. While the reports, written between 1943 and 1949, exhibit the pithy, cold, and objective tone we have come to expect from political analyses, they also display an extraordinary application of the ethical and conceptual frameworks of the Frankfurt School in the service of unraveling the behemoth Nazi regime and fighting the spread of fascism.
Certainly, the political predilections of the philosophers led them to get some things wrong. In one report, for instance, Neumann misinterprets the nature of Nazi anti-Semitism, conceptualizing it as a “testing ground” for evil methods to be perpetrated against all groups not subservient to the Nazi system. Other times, the extreme nature of the prescriptions led the Frankfurt fellows' plans to be dismissed outright. For example, their postwar plans for de-Nazification centered upon a socialist overhaul of the country's economy as a way to revitalize German democracy, though the reports display considerable uncertainty regarding how this might come about.
More often than not, however, the assessments made by the Frankfurt fellows were shrewd and accurate, challenging some important, widely-held assumptions about Nazism at the time. Marcuse's report on German social stratification, for example, corroborates his earlier claims about the perversely classist nature of the Nazi regime with statistical data, and features cold, hard number-crunching—an analysis sure to impress those who doubt the Frankfurt theorists' often anti-positivist methodologies.
Felix Gilbert and Herbert Marcuse's debunking of the myth of Prussian militarism provided another important challenge to entrenched American political wisdom at the time. In contrast to Churchill's anachronistic interpretation of National Socialism as a new manifestation of the old Prussian militarism, Marcuse emphasized that the Nazi state was designed to make a repetition of the humiliation of World War I impossible. A negotiated peace, the theorists predicted, was therefore unimaginable, and so the United States had to aim for a total defeat of Germany.
These insights, and many others, suggest that the Frankfurt School's OSS reports helped shape the U.S. approach to war-fighting and postwar justice in World War II. Yet the reports are not only a political and strategic triumph but also a philosophical one: at the center of the Critical Theory enterprise is an emphatically normative effort to change the world for the better; and as Laudani's volume suggests, the analysis provided by the scholars in the service of the OSS is perhaps the most extraordinary example of the school's attempts at praxis to date.
