Neumann was instrumental in organizing the Socialist Students Society in Frankfurt am Main, where in 1918 he met Leo Löwenthal, a future colleague in the Institute for Social Research in New York under Max Horkheimer.
At Breslau (the present-day Wrocław in Poland), Leipzig, Rostock, and Frankfurt am Main, Neumann studied law and earned a doctorate in 1923 with a thesis on method in the theory of punishment.
From 1928 to 1933 he worked in Berlin in partnership with Ernst Fraenkel as an attorney specializing in labor law, representing trade unions and publishing briefs and articles, and a technical book in this innovative field.
The thesis is that National Socialist rule is a function of struggles among power groups united only by their hatred of the labor movement and that Nazi Germany consequently lacks a state in the sense of the modern political formation oriented to order and predictability.
While opinions differed about his theses, his mastery of German sources and rich empirical documentation drew applause from established American political scientists and the book prepared the way for his later university career.
He then became deputy head of the Central European Section of the Research and Analysis Branch of the OSS, amid numerous younger American professors, seconded to Washington for the duration.
[8] Franz Neumann promised to cooperate fully during his initial meeting with Zarubina, after becoming a naturalized American citizen later that year he appeared to become reluctant to pass secret information.
One memorandum sent to Moscow in early January 1944 described a conversation between Neumann and his friends Paul and Hede Massing, in which they "directly asked him about the reasons for his ability to work" and tried to determine whether he had changed his mind.
They were "specifically assigned to the identification of Nazi and anti-Nazi groups and individuals; the former were to be held accountable in the war crimes adjudication then being negotiated between the four Great Powers, and the latter were to be called upon for cooperation in post-war reconstruction.
The report claimed key articles of the Weimar Constitution "were never formally abrogated by the National Socialist regime, … were left untouched and still remain theoretically in force."
Furthermore, "respect for the principle of religious freedom" continued to be reiterated in various official policy statements of the Nazi regime, and in various "enactments of the National Socialist state, particularly the Concordat of 20 July 1933."
The material on religious persecution is placed in the wider context of how these agencies committed crimes against humanity as an integral part of the Nazi's master plan, its conspiracy to seize and consolidate ideological control and totalitarian power within Germany by eradicating sources of actual and potential opposition.
Neumann's group wrote, The Nazi conspirators, by promoting beliefs and practices incompatible with Christian teaching, sought to subvert the influence of the Churches over the people and in particular over the youth of Germany.
No one has ever suggested that there was any connection between the actions that led to his being quite possibly the person mentioned in the well-known Venona Papers as a Soviet "spy" for some months during 1944 and any of his writings or public acts.
The study of modern dictatorships, he contended, revealed the dangers to democracy arising from the pervasive anxiety incident to modern society and showed the need, first, to approach the problem of power from the positive standpoint he thought implicit in the tradition of Rousseau (not liberal fears), and, second, to recognize that freedom entailed rational knowledge of social realities and a mental sense of empowerment (what the older moral philosophy called 'active virtue'), as well as a sphere of protected personal, social (communications), and political (status activus) rights.
Michael Neumann, his younger son, is a logician and radical political philosopher, and is a professor emeritus of philosophy at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario.