Research Project on Totalitarian Communication

The Research Project on Totalitarian Communication began work on April 1, 1941, in the Research Center of the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science at the New School for Social Research, under the co-directorship of Ernst Kris and Hans Speier. It was financed by the Rockefeller Foundation, analyzed German domestic radio from material supplied by the BBC, and issued its papers to government agencies in Washington, London and Ottawa. Its 1944 book, German Radio Propaganda, was published by Oxford University Press.¹²

Funding

The preface to the 1944 book says the project was "supported by one of the large foundations" and was assigned to develop methods of studying enemy propaganda and "to train American social scientists for prospective government work in this field." The Rockefeller Foundation's records list a "Study of Totalitarian Communication in Wartime" by Kris and Speier among its communications grants (Series 200R), with funding ending in 1943. Speier's biographer gives the grants as $15,960 in March 1941 and $19,000 in 1942, the second made because Speier took the project's methods to the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service. Speier's own chronology describes the project as financed for two years "for training of Rockefeller Research Fellows and study of classified British materials." The foundation's other funded communication projects in the same years included Paul Lazarsfeld's Princeton Radio Research Project, Harold Graves's Princeton Shortwave Listening Center, which the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service absorbed in June 1941, and Harold Lasswell's Experimental Division for the Study of Wartime Communications at the Library of Congress. A Rockefeller Foundation correspondence file for 1940 to 1952 and the project's research papers for 1941 to 1944 are in the Ernst Kris Papers at the Library of Congress.²³⁴⁵

BBC and British Links

Kris had previously directed a research unit that produced weekly analyses of German broadcasts for the BBC, and had briefly worked on a similar task at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in Montreal. The project depended on the BBC Monitoring Service and its restricted Daily Digest of Foreign Broadcasts, and John Salt, formerly director of BBC European Services and then deputy director of the BBC's New York office, made documents accessible. Kris's papers include correspondence with Mark A. Abrams for 1940 to 1943 and with John Scarlett Alexander Salt and his wife Olive for 1940 to 1956. In May 1944 Walter Adams, acting head of the British Political Warfare Mission in Washington, wrote to Kris that the book was "a magnificent piece of work."²⁴

Staff

The twenty-four staff members named in the project's records were Sidney Axelrad, Joe Carmichael, Rose M. Chayes, Henry Elkin, Erik Estorik, Jacob Goldstein, Hans Herma, George Hilton, Eleanor Horn, Gertrud M. Kurth, Stanley Lipkin, Janice Loeb, Rita Lowe, Margaret P. Mascret, Alexander Mintz, George A. Nelson Jr., Margaret Otis, Heinz Paechter, Thomas Rubinstein, Dorothy L. Sandler, Joseph Shor, Ursula Wasserman, Florence Weil and Howard B. White. Axelrad, Loeb, Herma, Paechter and White are credited in association on the book's title page; Paechter's glossary Nazi-Deutsch was issued by the Office of European Economic Research in 1942 and published by Frederick Ungar in 1944.²⁴

Research Papers

The book's Appendix III lists eight research papers (Speier's biographer counts five reports and five published articles): German Radio News Bulletins (December 1941, 83 pages); A Study of War Communiques (January 1942, 137 pages); German Freedom Stations Broadcasting to Great Britain (January 1942, 177 pages); German Radio Propaganda to France during the Battle of France (Speier and M. Otis, in Lazarsfeld and Stanton, Radio Research 1942-1943); Data on a German Defeat Situation (June 1942, 82 pages); Topics of the Day: A German Radio Program (August 1942, 125 pages); A Typological Analysis of Stereotypes Used in German News Broadcasts (J. Goldstein, December 1942, 112 pages); and German Front Reports in the Russian Campaign (Sidney Axelrad, unpublished).²

Washington Relocation

In March 1942 the project was reorganized when Speier went to Washington as Senior Political Analyst, head of the Central European Section, of the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service while remaining co-director.⁶ The book was begun in November 1942 and the manuscript completed on July 30, 1943. The project ended in January 1943 according to Speier's biographer, and many researchers entered federal service. A Foundation memo of June 3, 1947 warned that supporting persuasion of Europeans would look like propaganda, and the trustee John Foster Dulles urged postwar activity of this kind.²⁴⁷