It was a matter of priorities. Most of this generation of German Jewish intellectuals had no particular interest in Jewish affairs and anti-Semitism. Furthermore, since there were so many Jews in the Frankfurt School they made an effort to play down this fact so as not to harm the influence of the school and the message it tried to convey. In the publications of the Frankfurt School the Jews and anti-Semitism figured for the first time only in 1939 in an essay by Max Horkheimer. And their bosses in OSS had made it clear that the Jewish issue was not to be among the important ones to be covered in their work. Towards the end of the war they were involved in the preparation of the Nuremberg trials. Again, they were told that they should concentrate on Nazism as the enemy of Christianity rather than the persecutor of the Jews.

As the war went on Neumann began to modify his views on anti-Semitism to a certain extent; his friend Marcuse (as appears from private correspondence) had always had doubts about the "spearhead theory" and other leaders of the Frankfurt school seem not to have been too happy with it either. It simply did not make sense. Even with all these mitigating circumstances the attitude of Neumann, and to a lesser extent those of his colleagues, seems quite strange. 

Anti-Semitism, after all, was not an abstract issue: it affected the life (and death) of so many of their friends and close relations. Did they really fail to understand the difference between a concentration camp and gas chambers? Did they really think that the Nazis were about to carry out far more horrible massacres than Auschwitz among the Dutch or the German middle class?

Poor Frankfurt School: posterity has been dealing with it in strange ways. The documents now presented in this book are recommended by the school's admirers as indispensable, outstanding, of exceptional force, coolly objective insights of relevance and power, illuminating and of excellent scholarly service. Such loyalty is touching, and it is of course true that not all these disinterred documents are as misleading and indeed nonsensical as the spearhead theory. But it is not easy after all that is known to whitewash some of their wartime attitudes. Some of those trying now to make sense of these publications tend to underrate the element of naivety involved; surely such sophisticated and deep thinkers must have known better? But naivety did apparently play a major role — and not just as far as the theory of anti-Semitism was concerned. 

Those roaming the internet will encounter websites promoting "Smash Cultural Marxism" in which the critical thinkers of the 1930s appear as the grandchildren of the Elders of Zion, engaged in a giant, nefarious conspiracy dating back centuries, villains committing crimes too sinister to put into words. The current slogan of the discoverers of this megacrime is: Marxist socialism is supercapitalism.