Neumann Comes to the Office of Strategic Services

Franz L. Neumann commenced full- time work with the US government on February 22, 1943, thereby dedicating himself fully to the official war effort against Nazi Germany. Although he had already divided his time between the Institute for Social Research and the US Board of Economic Warfare through the summer and fall of 1942, his outright termination by Max Horkheimer and Frederick Pollock at the end of 1942 led him into more direct and permanent employment with the US government. While it would be tempting to see this move from scholarly research to the official war effort as a moment in which Neumann voluntarily recommitted himself to a more activist role as a political intellectual, his choice of public employment presents a more complex picture. Although Neumann had always been one of the most explicitly political intellectuals in the nominally nonaligned Institute, he went to extraordinary lengths to preserve his research- centered job at the Institute, notwithstanding the political discretion it required. He only made his move to Washington after his position with Max Horkheimer had become no longer negotiable and thus impossible. Therefore, the decision to enter fulltime government service, where his political effectiveness could well be subject to more formal limitations, was made in important part because more desirable options had been foreclosed. In a sense, the leaders of the Institute made the decision for him.

Confronted with no other attractive professional opportunities, he followed up on overtures to join the Office for Strategic Services (hereafter referred to as OSS) made by Walter Dorn and Eugene Anderson, academic historians he'd come to know during his Institute years and who had been drawn earlier into government service. This would allow him to continue with the people who had joined him during his last years working on the Institute's failed grant proposals on Nazi Germany.

Neumann had made himself the natural candidate for an OSS leadership role, because he had then separately begun a book project under contract with Oxford University Press entitled “National Socialism and European Reconstruction.” By the end of 1940, Neumann's role with the Institute's Germany project had also led to his collaboration and friendship with Eugene Anderson, who would later become Neumann's supervisor at OSS.