Paul Massing

Paul Wilhelm Massing (30 August 1902 – 30 April 1979) was a German sociologist.

Biography
Born in the Westphalian town of Grumbach, he attended school in Cologne, and later studied economics and social sciences at the Frankfurt School about the same time Franz Neumann was there. He graduated in 1926 as a political economist. A year later he studied for one term at the Sorbonne in Paris and prepared his thesis on agrarian conditions of France in 19th century and the agrarian program of the French socialist parties. In 1928 he returned to the Frankfurt School and studied with Dr. W. Gerloff, attaining a doctorate.

Afterwards Massing went to Moscow, where he worked until 1931 at the International Agrarian Institute. When he returned to Germany, Massing was active from 1931 to 1933 with the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in Berlin. In 1933 Massing was arrested by the National Socialists under the Enabling Act. After five-month solitary confinement in Oranienburg, Massing wrote his autobiographic novel Schutzhäftling 880, published 1935 under his pseudonym Karl Billinger, dedicated to all comrades in concentration camps.

After his release by an amnesty, he left Germany for Paris and then into the United States. He returned again to Germany and continued work in the Comintern underground. In the late 1930s he finally emigrated to the US and lived for a time with his wife Hede Massing in an old farmhouse Quakertown, Pennsylvania.

In the United States Massing continued writing about Adolf Hitler, Nazism, and Anti-Semitism. In 1942 he took a job at the Institute of Social Research at Columbia University in New York. Beginning in 1948 he taught political sociology for many years at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

The probably most meaningful work of Massings is, Rehearsal for Destruction: A Study Of Political Anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany, which appeared in 1949. Under the title The Prehistory of Political Anti-Semitism, with a preface of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, it appeared again in 1959. His wife's book This Deception, was first released in 1951: it deals with the hardships they had to endure during their work first for the GRU but later the KGB.

In 1977 Massing returned to his homeland and lived there for the remaining two years of his life, being buried in the family plot at Grumbach.

Selected bibliography

 * Paul Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction: A Study of Political Antisemitism in Imperial Germany. (New York, 1949).