Franz Leopold Neumann

Who was Franz Leopold Neumann?

Franz Leopold Neumann was a German-Jewish left-wing political activist, Marxist theorist and labor lawyer, who became a political scientist in exile and is best known for his theoretical analyses of National Socialism. He studied in Germany and the United Kingdom, and spent the last phase of his career in the United States. Together with Ernst Fraenkel and Arnold Bergstraesser, Neumann is considered to be among the founders of modern political science in the Federal Republic of Germany. In the literature arising out of the Verona papers, Franz L. Neumann is named as the figure behind a code word for a singularly distrusted and very short-term "spy." The political design that may have led Neumann to the actions that earned him this classification are unknown, but until his death he enjoyed and repaid the full trust of American authorities.