Practice of National Socialism—which was itself the fruit of a memorandum prepared at the request of Assistant Attorney General Thurman W. Ar- nold and a significant contribution to the American war effort.

In 1941 Marcuse had published Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory in the hopes of securing an academic position. Re- luctantly abandoning the Institute for Social Research, he joined the Office of War Information (OWI) with the goal of formulating “sugges- tions on ‘how to present the enemy to the American people’, in the press, movies, propaganda, etc.”!” In March of 1943 Marcuse joined Neumann in R&A’s Central European Section as senior analyst and rapidly estab- lished himself as “the leading analyst on Germany.”

By adapting Critical Theory to the American cultural and bureaucratic machine, the Frankfurt group was rapidly able to impose their own “intellectual guidance” on the Central European Section, which despite being staffed by over forty analysts of different cultural and political backgrounds, ended up producing a cohesive interpretation of the Nazi “enemy” with a clear Frankfurt imprint. “The ablest persons to be found

drafted by Charles Irwing Dwork (director of R&A’s Jewish Desk) in collaboration with the Institute of Jewish Studies in New York in the series dedicated to the Nazi plans for dominating Germany and Europe, “to demonstrate the existence of a common plan or enterprise of the German Government, the Nazi Party and the German military, indus- trial, and financial leaders to achieve world domination by war. The destruction of the Jewish people as a whole, although an end in itself, was at the same time linked to and closely tied up with this aim of world conquest.”

Secret Reports on Nazi Germany: The Frankfurt School Contribution to the War Effort Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, and Otto Kirchheimer