Franz Leopold Neumann (23 May 1900 – 2 September 1954) was a German political activist, Western Marxist theorist, and labor lawyer who became a political scientist in exile and is best known for his theoretical analyses of Nazism. He studied in Germany and the United Kingdom, and spent the last phase of his career in the United States, where he worked for the Office of Strategic Services from 1943 to 1945 writing the Secret Reports on Nazi Germany. During the Second World War, Neumann spied for the Soviet Union under the code-name "Ruff". Together with Ernst Fraenkel and Arnold Bergstraesser, Neumann is considered to be among the founders of modern political science in Germany.
Neumann was born in to a Jewish family on May 23, 1900, in Kattowitz (Katowice), Silesia, German Empire (present-day Poland). As a student, Neumann supported the German revolution of 1918–1919 and joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). Neumann was instrumental in organizing the Socialist Students Society in Frankfurt am Main, where in 1918 he met Leo Löwenthal, a future colleague in the Institute for Social Research in New York under Max Horkheimer.
At Breslau (the present-day Wrocław in Poland), Leipzig, Rostock, and Frankfurt am Main, Neumann studied law and earned a doctorate in 1923 with a thesis on method in the theory of punishment. His main aim was to explain the socialist acceptance of liberal individualism in this sphere. In the academic exercise that earned his degree, he did not attempt the sociological study he saw as necessary but addressed preliminary philosophical issues in the neo-Kantian debates of the day; however, his treatment of value philosophy led him to the conclusion that the liberal and socialist arguments were equally valid, and that the socialist deviations from consistency in the matter of punishment was politically justifiable and subject only to political management. This foretold his lifelong reliance on negotiated settlements even if they involved exceptions from theoretical consistency. The goal was to ensure that the effects of such deviations are not cumulative, as he came to conclude about the socialist movement's compromises in the Weimar Republic.
Labor law and social democracy
Neumann was active from 1925 to 1927 as law clerk and assistant of Hugo Sinzheimer, the foremost reformist labor law theorist, who also engaged him as a teacher at the trade union academy affiliated with the University of Frankfurt. Throughout the Weimar years, Neumann's political commitment was to the labor wing of the Social Democratic Party. From 1928 to 1933, he worked in Berlin in partnership with Ernst Fraenkel as an attorney specializing in labor law, representing unions and publishing briefs and articles, and a technical book in this innovative field. In 1932–1933, he became lead attorney for the SPD and published a brief, itself suppressed by the Nazis, against the suppression of the principal Social Democratic newspaper.
In the weeks after the assumption of power by the Nazis, Neumann was warned of his imminent arrest and he fled to England, where he studied under Harold Laski at the London School of Economics, and with the former Frankfurt sociology professor, Karl Mannheim. He earned a second doctorate with a study of the rise and fall of the historical epoch of the rule of law. On Laski's recommendation, Neumann was employed by the University of Frankfurt Institute for Social Research (in exile at Columbia University in New York City after some years in Geneva and Paris) in 1936, initially as administrator and legal advisor, and later as research associate, although he was never as well established in the group led by the director Max Horkheimer, as Friedrich Pollock and Theodor Adorno. He participated in the Institute's debates about Nazism in the New York years. By the time the second edition of Behemoth was published in 1944, he rejected the idea that the Nazis were merely using Jews as scapegoats for the ills of German society. Instead what he called a "spearhead theory" arguing that Nazi antisemitism was a test run leading towards the goal of replacing democratic norms with a totalitarian government. This well-known study of the Nazi regime was written without the scrutiny of review procedures. Neumann played an important part in helping the Institute for Social Research to secure the backing of the American Jewish Committee for its well-known study of antisemitism.
Neumann achieved his academic reputation among American scholars with the publication of Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism in 1942. The thesis is that Nazi rule is a function of struggles among power groups united only by their hatred of the labor movement and that Nazi Germany consequently lacks a state in the sense of the modern political formation oriented to order and predictability. Within this framework, Neumann applied many Marxist tools of analysis to characterize the prime social component in the inner struggle. Behemoth made a major impact on the young sociologist C. Wright Mills. While opinions differed about his theses, his mastery of German sources and rich empirical documentation drew applause from established American political scientists and the book prepared the way for his later university career.
The reception of Behemoth laid the foundation for Neumann's wartime career in Washington, D.C., after the Institute's leadership declared itself financially unable to retain his services. Until the first months of 1943, Neumann served as a part-time consultant to the Board of Economic Warfare, staffing routine studies of trade patterns. He then became deputy head of the Central European Section of the Research and Analysis Branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), amid numerous younger American professors, seconded to Washington for the duration. The position also allowed him to place a number of his Institute associates, who had been made redundant by the core group around Horkheimer. Neumann was instrumental in producing intelligence reports on the Nazis for the OSS, later published in a single volume Secret Reports on Nazi Germany: The Frankfurt School Contribution to the War Effort.
Neumann's friend, Paul Massing, a Soviet spy, reported to Moscow that Neumann had told him that he had produced a study of the Soviet economy for the OSS's Russian Department. In April 1943, Elizabeth Zarubina, a Soviet spy in the United States, and the wife of Vassily Zarubin, met with Neumann. According to Spartacus Educational, "[Zarubina] met for the first time with [Neumann] who promised to pass us all the data coming through his hands. According to [Neumann], he is getting many copies of reports from American ambassadors ... and has access to materials referring to Germany." Neumann's code name was "Ruff". Neumann promised to cooperate fully during his initial meeting with Zarubina, after becoming a naturalized American citizen later that year he appeared to become reluctant to pass secret information. One memorandum sent to Moscow in early January 1944 described a conversation between Neumann and his friends Paul and Hede Massing, in which they "directly asked him about the reasons for his ability to work" and tried to determine whether he had changed his mind. Neumann responded: "I did not change my mind. If there is something really important, I will inform you without hesitation."
Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, and Otto Kirchheimer worked on numerous projects, including the analysis of political tendencies in Germany. They were "specifically assigned to the identification of Nazi and anti-Nazi groups and individuals; the former were to be held accountable in the war crimes adjudication then being negotiated between the four Great Powers, and the latter were to be called upon for cooperation in post-war reconstruction. For his source materials he drew upon official and military intelligence reports, extensive OSS interviews with refugees, and special OSS agents and contacts in occupied Europe; it was his duty to evaluate the reliability of each of the items of intelligence that reached him, and assemble them all into a coherent analysis of points of strength and weakness in the Reich." (Katz, 1980:116). At the end of 1944, Neumann, Marcuse, and Kirchheimer were involved in preparing materials for use by eventual occupation authorities, including a de-Nazification guide. Most of this effort was rendered irrelevant by the priorities of the incipient Cold War policy at the end of the war. Neumann was detached from Washington Service until September 1945 to assist the head of OSS in preparing for the war crimes prosecution. Just before the beginning of the trials, Neumann returned to Washington, to take up a position on the Central European Desk of the Department of State.