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German. The subsequent ideological and military successes had led
refugee intellectuals such as Hannah Arendt, Franz Neumann, and
the other Frankfurt scholars to corroborate the notion of the unbeat–
able Nazi behemoth. Had the Germans won the war, the superiority
derived from pure "Aryan" blood, it was believed, would have been
imposed on the rest of the world. To some extent, these ideas were
bound to guide the policies of the victors: American soldiers were
warned not to fraternize because "every German is Hitler," and an
elaborate network of organizations was being set up that would carry
out programs of "denazification" and of general reeducation . Given
their insuperable task, the American authorities quickly had to iden–
tify "trustworthy" Germans: already in July 1945, Dr. Zeise, a
psychotherapist , informed his colleagues in Munich that he had
been requested by the American authorities to submit a plan for the
reeducation of the German people, and he asked them all to co–
operate. (There is no transcript of the conversations in which he con–
vinced the Americans of his own reliability .)
Inevitably, Zeise's colleagues were eager to participate. And
the few former Freudians who had remained in Berlin also had ini–
tiated activities that would allow them to resume their work. To that
end, they all got in touch with former Jewish friends who, for the
most part, were now in London or New York . In their letters, the
Germans now complained of their own victimization after theJewish
colleagues had "voluntarily" withdrawn and left the county between
1933 and 1938 and asserted how, at great peril, they secretly had
continued to fan the flames of Freudianism. A good many of the
refugee analysts, of course, did not want to have anything to do with
those who had benefitted from their own misfortunes, and who had
stood by while many of their relatives were sent to the gas chambers .
But, enough of them responded, and professional contacts were
resumed. Now, the recounting of various acts of courage, such as
Alexander Mitscherlich's early arrest and later denunciation of the
Nazi doctors , and his accusations of collective guilt in Nazi crimes,
or the execution of John Rittmeister in 1943 (he and his wife had
been involved in a Soviet espionage network), went a long way to
show that not every German had been a Nazi.
The American authorities had been working with refugee psy–
choanalysts for some time . Because the latter had proven that psy–
choanalysis could get some people to change their behavior they had
been asked to advise a number of American government agencies on
conditions of wartime stress, on group dynamics, and on the reedu-
