Franz Neumann

Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism 1933–1944 is the book Neumann wrote in American exile between 1941 and 1944. It first appeared in 1942, with an enlarged edition in 1944; a German translation followed only in 1977. It is counted a standard work of political sociology and state theory, the first structural analysis of the Nazi regime and a pioneering work of power structure research.

The title is itself an argument. Jewish apocalyptic writing tells of three monsters that rule chaos: Behemoth on land, Leviathan in the sea and Ziz in the air. The seventeenth-century English thinker Thomas Hobbes used Leviathan as a metaphor for the state, a system of coercion that retains a remnant of the rule of law, and Behemoth for the lawlessness of the English Civil War, a non-state. Neumann called Nazi Germany Behemoth. His thesis was that Nazi rule was the product of struggles among power groups united only by their hatred of the labour movement, so that Nazi Germany lacked a state in the modern sense of a political order oriented to order and predictability.

The book first asks why the Weimar Republic collapsed. The Weimar constitution put class cooperation in place of class struggle and relied on a pluralism that treated the state as one association among many. But this pluralism presupposed a social harmony that concealed the actual inequality of power. Social Democracy and the trade unions, the main supports of the system, proved helpless against the attacks of industry, the judiciary and the army, while war and inflation concentrated the economy in giant trusts.

Neumann rejected the view that the Nazi economy was “state capitalism.” The system remained capitalist: the cartel system endangered by the depression was in fact saved and strengthened under Nazism through compulsory cartelization and the seizure of Jewish property (“Aryanization”). He called it “totalitarian monopoly capitalism.” He also distanced himself from the “agent theory,” according to which the Nazi party was a servile tool of big business: industry and party shared the same goal of imperialist expansion, and while the profit motive still drove the economic apparatus, its driving force was the aggressive, imperialist, expansionist spirit of German big business. The ruling class was formed together by the ministerial bureaucracy, the party hierarchy, the armed forces, and the leaders of industry and agriculture. The book’s central aim was to show that Nazi Germany too was a class society in which a ruling class used every socio-economic mechanism to steer and exploit the masses.

On antisemitism, by the 1944 edition Neumann had rejected the idea that the Nazis merely used the Jews as scapegoats for the ills of German society, and put forward a “spearhead theory”: Nazi antisemitism was a test run on the way to replacing democratic norms with totalitarian rule. Opinions about his theses differed, but his mastery of German sources and rich empirical documentation won applause from American political scientists. The book made a major impact on the young sociologist C. Wright Mills, and Ian Kershaw placed a quotation from Neumann at the head of his biography of Hitler.

Made famous by Behemoth, Neumann went to Washington in 1942 after the Institute’s leadership declared itself financially unable to keep him. After serving until early 1943 as a part-time consultant to the Board of Economic Warfare, he became deputy head of the Central European Section of the Research and Analysis Branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the American wartime intelligence agency. He used the position to bring in Institute colleagues who had been made redundant by the core group around Horkheimer. With Herbert Marcuse and Otto Kirchheimer he analysed political tendencies in Germany, and the group was specifically assigned to identify Nazi groups and individuals to be held accountable in war-crimes trials and anti-Nazi ones to be called on for post-war reconstruction. Drawing on official and military intelligence reports, interviews with refugees and agents in occupied Europe, they weighed the reliability of each item and assembled them into an analysis of the Reich’s strengths and weaknesses. At the end of 1944 they prepared material for the future occupation authorities, including a de-Nazification guide, but most of it was made irrelevant by the priorities of the incipient Cold War. The reports were later published as Secret Reports on Nazi Germany: The Frankfurt School Contribution to the War Effort.

In 1945 he was detached to help William Donovan, head of the OSS, prepare the war-crimes prosecution. Under the Chief Prosecutor, Justice Robert H. Jackson, his team prepared analyses of the twenty-two defendants and of various Nazi organizations, and from mid-September 1945 prepared and supervised material for the indictments. Donovan first directed him to examine religious persecution other than against Jews. The report pointed out that key articles of the Weimar constitution had never been formally abrogated under the Nazis and that the regime itself had repeatedly professed respect for religious freedom, in order to show that the persecution of the churches was criminal under German as well as international law. This material formed part of the evidence on which Nazi agencies were judged to be criminal organizations. Putting the persecution of the Christian churches ahead of the far more destructive actions against Jews was a strategic and political decision of the four-power prosecution. He also revised the first draft of the brief on the personal responsibility of Hermann Göring, the most senior defendant, and in 1946 took part in the trials for the United States. Neumann himself believed that German war criminals should be tried before German courts under Weimar law as part of the wider de-Nazification effort. Ian Buruma has called him “the most important mind behind de-Nazification” in Germany.

This period also carries a controversy. English-language sources record that in 1943 he met the Soviet intelligence officer Elizabeth Zarubina, promised to pass on material that came through his hands, and was given the code name “Ruff.” The same sources say that after becoming a US citizen later that year he appeared reluctant to pass on secret information, and add that although he was quite possibly the person named in the Venona papers, no one has suggested any connection between those actions and his writings or public acts, and that he probably acted for political reasons that had little to do with Soviet designs.