Saul Kussiel Padover

Saul Kussiel Padover (mostly Saul K. Padover ; born April 13, 1905 in Vienna, † February 22, 1982 in New York ) was an American historian, political scientist and intelligence officer.

Life

Saul Kussiel Padover emigrated to the USA in 1920 at the age of 15 with his parents Keva Padover and Frumet Goldmann Padover. His father was an American.

He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan in 1928 . He then studied history at Yale University and graduated from the University of Chicago in 1932 with a Ph.D. for history. From 1933 to 1936 Padover conducted research at the University of California and published, among other things, the biographies of Emperor Joseph II , King Louis XVI. of France, James Madison , Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson .

From 1938 to 1944 he worked in the Ministry of the Interior , most recently as an advisor to the Interior Minister Harold L. Ickes .

In 1944 Padover came to London as a political analyst for the Federal Communications Commission . In the same year he became an intelligence officer in the Office of Strategic Services and the US Army . He was a captain of the Psychological Warfare Division (PWD), the department for psychological warfare of the US armed forces. This division had the task of assessing the reaction of the German population to the war and delivering realistic prognoses for their behavior. In 1944/45, Padover traveled immediately behind the American front through France, Belgium, West and Central Germany and interviewed numerous German prisoners of war and other people. His expertise served as a guide for the American military administration. Even Dwight D. Eisenhower pulled as commander for help.

In 1949 he became a member of the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York City , where he taught political science. He was the founder of the Karl Marx Library , which was published from 1971-1977 by McGraw-Hill Books , and in 1978 published a biography of Karl Marx as a late work .

Experiment in Germany

Padover's best-known work is Experiment in Germany , an autobiographical, popularly written report on his work as a secret service officer in Europe during the Second World War and in the immediate post-war phase. His job was to record the psychological situation in the areas still dominated by Germany and to assess how the population would behave towards the Allies. He followed with a small team of his employees Captain Lewis F. Gittler and Captain Paul Sweet and a driver named Joe immediately the advancing front of the US Army .

At the end of 1944 he reached Aachen , the first German city to be occupied by the Americans, and conducted numerous interviews there, among others with the communist Anna Braun-Sittarz , the senior government councilor Josef Burens, the city treasurer Kurt Pfeiffer , the mayor Franz Oppenhoff and the Catholic bishop Johannes Joseph van der Velden . His interlocutor, the Social Democratic printer Heinrich Holland , received permission from the Psychological Warfare Division in January 1945 to publish the Aachener Nachrichten , the first German daily newspaper in the liberated part of Germany.

In 1945, Padover followed the front through Germany and conducted many more interviews, including with Wilhelm Elfes and Kurt Dittmar . He also interviewed forced laborers and prisoners of war from the countries invaded by the Germans.

The work was published in the USA in 1946. An abbreviated German translation was only published in 1999 under the title Liegendetektor - Vernehmungen im Besiegte Deutschland 1944/45 . Excerpts from the Aachen interviews were published in 1985 in Aachen in German translation as a brochure of the Seniorat History of the Student Council 7/1 at the RWTH Aachen and the Aachen VVN-BdA .

Works (selection)

• Experiment in Germany: the story of an American intelligence officer . Duell, Sloan and Pearce, New York 1946. The book was published in England under the title Psychologist in Germany. The Story of an American Intelligence Officer . Phoenix House, London 1946.
• Joseph II , the revolutionary on the imperial throne ("The Revolutionary Emperor. Joseph the Second, 1741-1790"). Diederichs, Düsseldorf 1969.
• The Life and Death of Louis XVI. Redman Books, London 1965 (reprint of the New York edition 1939).
• Jefferson . The New American Library, New York 1964 (reprint of the London 1942 edition).
• Lie detector. Interrogations in defeated Germany 1944/45 ("Experiment in Germany. The Story of an American Intelligence Officer"). Ullstein, Frankfurt / M. 2001, ISBN 3-548-75006-0 (translated from the American by Matthias Fienborck), first German edition Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn 1999, series Die Other Bibliothek , ISBN 978-3-8218-4478-7 .
• Karl Marx . An Intimate Biography . McGraw-Hill, New York 1978, ISBN 0-07-048072-9 .

literature

• Winfried B. Lerg : Allied Psychological War on the Lower Rhine, 1944/45. From the memories of an interrogator. (...) . In: Kurt Koszyk, Volker Schulze (Hrsg.): The newspaper as personality. Festschrift for Karl Bringmann . Droste Verlag, Düsseldorf 1982, ISBN 3-7700-4036-8 , pp. 195-230.

Movie

• The two-part ZDF docu-drama The Search for Hitler's People by Alexander Berkel and Peter Hartel deals with Padover and his activities in Germany in 1945. The actor Markus Brandl portrays the scientist in some scenes of the game . Conversations that Padover recorded are reconstructed on the scene. Georg Stefan Troller , who as an American soldier also conducted surveys, tells from his memories. The film was first broadcast on television in March 2015, the two parts are each 45 minutes in length.

swell

1. ^ Earl Frederick Ziemke: The US Army in the occupation of Germany, 1944-1946, Washington DC. 1975, p. 183.

Web links

Wikiquote: Saul Kussiel Padover  - Quotes

• Saul K. Padover Papers 1947-1972 at University of Albany
• Saul K. Padover papers 1944-1945 in The New York Public Library
• Literature by and about Saul Kussiel Padover in the catalog of the German National Library