But seen from a perspective of more than 70 years, were their insights accurate or rather naive? Were their predictions born out by subsequent events? It is all too often forgotten these days that in the 1930s and '40s there were political observers outside university campuses who had not been trained in Hegel's ontology and, were unfamiliar with Marx's early writings (the Frühschriften had been rediscovered in 1932) and yet, one way or another, perhaps instinctively, perhaps for the wrong reasons, understood Nazism better than the academics. They realised almost immediately that Hitler meant war. 

One of them was Sir Horace Rumbold, British ambassador in Berlin. Like his father a career diplomat, he was an educated man, and a gifted linguist; one of his pre-1914 dispatches to the Foreign Secretary was in the form of a poem. In a seven-page farewell cable (it became known as the Mein Kampf telegram) dispatched from Berlin in April 1933 he argued persuasively that Hitler, while disguising his foreign political aims until Germany was strong enough to expand and conquer, aimed at the suppression of all parties but his own, that there would be intensive militarisation and racial domination, and that a return to sanity and moderation in Germany seemed impossible in the foreseeable future. This at a time when Adorno, a pillar of the Frankfurt School, still lived under the illusion that Nazism would not last long, and that he had to remain in Germany at any price. Adorno went on to publish musical reviews and much to his later embarrassment even quoted Goebbels favourably. 

Rumbold was not a philo-Semite — he detected among Jews more than among others a proclivity towards pacifism which in the context of the need to combat Nazism was a wrong and very dangerous attribute. But he considered anti-Semitism a far more essential (and deadly) factor in Nazi ideology and practice than the Frankfurters in OSS. Neumann had somehow persuaded himself that  for the Nazis anti-Semitism was just a substitute for the class struggle. It was no more than an ideological instrument to the attainment of the ultimate objective: the destruction of free institutions, beliefs and groups. This half-baked idea became known as the "spearhead theory".

Secret Reports on Nazi Germany is a collection of period pieces. They cover a wide range of topics dealing with the economic situation, social stratification, the likely effects on the German people of air raids and (in the last part) proposals for de-Nazification and the impending Nuremberg trials. The language is mercifully free of the Frankfurt School idiom. But altogether there is very little secret about these reports apart from the fact that their distribution was quite restricted. Most could have been written by educated Germans with some knowledge of politics, some training in philosophy and sociology, the ownership of a short-wave radio and access to German newspapers and periodicals — something that could have been arranged even in wartime, albeit with a certain delay. In other words, they were based on open sources and not, it would appear, on secret material.

There is a distinct unevenness to Secret Reports. There is a competent report on National Bolshevism, an issue which apparently became of interest to the Allies in 1943. Franz Neumann, who advanced to acting head of the central European section of the OSS, provides an accurate historical survey of this trend in German left-wing politics, but when it comes to identifying the leading thinkers and actors, he picks Heinz Neumann, Hermann Remmele, and Max Hoelz who had little or nothing to do with National Bolshevism. Since none was alive any longer in 1943-two, possibly all, had perished in the Moscow purges — this was not a matter of great practical importance. But Neumann and his colleagues should have known better and mistakes like this make one doubt their competence.