Why read Secret Reports on Nazi Germany?

Book cover of Secret Reports on Nazi Germany: The Frankfurt School Contribution to the War Effort

Book description

During the Second World War, three prominent members of the Frankfurt School--Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, and Otto Kirchheimer--worked as intelligence analysts for the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime forerunner of the CIA. This book brings together their most important intelligence reports on Nazi Germany, most of them published here…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Secret Reports on Nazi Germany as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Zachary Shore

Author

This is certainly the nerdiest of my selections. It is simply a collection of analytical assessments from the sharpest minds to study Nazi Germany during WWII. The authors of these reports, most of them Jewish intellectual academics who fled the Third Reich, joined America’s embryonic intelligence community before the CIA existed. The documents show how their deep knowledge of German social forces enabled them to counter the more superficial analysis of military and political officials about Germany’s likely course. As I wrote in my own book, if America had only had comparable experts on Afghanistan, the war there might…

From Zachary's list on The best books on knowing your enemy.