Paul Massing

Paul Wilhelm Massing, also Paul Massing, ( born August 30, 1902 in Grumbach, † April 30, 1979 in Tübingen ) was a German - American social scientists.

Life

The son of a land inspector attended the Gymnasium in Bad Kreuznach, then studied from 1923 economics and sociology at the University of Frankfurt, in addition to the Cologne Business School and graduated there in 1926 with a degree in Business Administration. In 1927 he studied for a semester at the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1928 he returned to Frankfurt and received his doctorate under Wilhelm Gerloff on the agricultural conditions of France in the 19th century and the agrarian program of the French Socialists.

He then worked until 1931 in Moscow at the city's International Agricultural Institute. After his return to Germany in 1931, he was until 1933 active member of the illegal M- apparatus of the Communist Party in Berlin and employees of the Central Committee. After enabling law, he was arrested by the Nazis, tortured in Columbia House and then five months detained in a solitary cell in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. In addition he wrote after his release in 1935 under the pseudonym Karl Billinger the autobiographical novel protective custody 880, which he dedicated to all former inmates. After he was initially traveling across Paris to the U.S., he returned temporarily illegally to Germany and was active in resistance structures of the KPD. From the Communist Party he broke up internally during the Moscow Trials. In 1939 he emigrated to the USA where he for a time with his wife Hede operated a farm in Quakertown. Paul Massing married in 1954, the social and communication researcher Herta Herzog.

After the beginning of World War II Massing wrote about Adolf Hitler, the book Hitler is no fool ( " Hitler is not an idiot " ), in which he pointed out the dangerous destruction plans of the dictator. In 1942 he taught at the Institute for Social Research at Columbia University in New York City, from 1948 he taught political sociology at Rutgers University in New Jersey. 1949b published his major work: Rehearsal for Destruction: A Study Of Political Anti -Semitism in Imperial Germany. It was published in 1959 in German, translated and edited, as the prehistory of political anti-Semitism, with a foreword by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno by Felix Weil. The political anti-Semitism 1871-1914 is the spiritual condition for the Industrial-scale extermination of Jews by the German authorities for Massing.

1977 returned Massing and Herta Herzog- Massing back to Grumbach, 1978, he moved to a retirement home in Tübingen, where he died the following year.