Hans Speier; Sociologist and Author Fled Nazis to Teach in U.S.

Hans Speier, a sociologist and author who was the last surviving founder of the University in Exile of New York’s New School for Social Research, has died of heart failure while vacationing in Sarasota, Fla. He was 85.

Speier, who died last Saturday, had lectured on political sociology at the College of Politics in Berlin before coming to the United States in 1933.

Here he joined a handful of European artists and scholars who escaped Europe at the dawn of the era of Nazism.

Those refugees and others including Albert Einstein, Edward Teller, film director Billy Wilder and author Thomas Mann were the subject of a documentary called “The Exiles,” released last year and shown on television.

Speier joined the faculty of the New School for Social Research as a professor of sociology and served from 1933 to 1942. He returned in 1974 as professor emeritus.

During World War II, Speier was section chief and later acting chief of the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service. He also served as a propaganda adviser to the overseas branch of the Office of War Information.

After the war, he worked for the State Department’s Occupied Areas Division and in 1948 joined the Santa Monica-based RAND Corp., where he was in charge of the social science division until 1960.

He was the author of several works devoted to both his old and new countries. Among them were “German White-Collar Workers and the Rise of Hitler,” which was suppressed by Hitler and not published until after the war. In 1989, he published his final book, “The Truth in Hell and Other Essays.”

Other books included “From the Ashes of Disgrace,” “Divided Berlin” and “Force and Folly: Essays on Foreign Affairs and the History of Ideas.”

In 1945, he returned to his native Berlin for a visit, but found that he could no longer find his way “because of the rubble.”

“Watching West Berlin develop,” he said many years later, “was like watching a child growing up, but not as a parent, as a visitor.”

Speier was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the World Academy of Art and Sciences.

He is survived by his wife, a son and daughter and four grandchildren.