Paul Massing

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

Born in Grumbach in the Rhine Province, he attended school in Cologne, and later studied economics and social sciences at Frankfurt University, when Franz Neumann was there and at Cologne Handelshochschule (a business college). He graduated in 1926 as a Diplom-Kaufmann (MBA). A year later he studied for one term at the Sorbonne in Paris and prepared his dissertation on agrarian conditions of France in 19th century and the agrarian program of the French socialist parties. In 1928, he returned to Frankfurt University to study with Dr. Wilhelm Gerloff and attained a doctorate with his thesis.

In January 1928 Paul Massing met Julian Gumperz and his wife Hede Gumperz. It was not long before Hede had fallen in love with Massing: "My relationship with Paul grew like something so natural and so completely uncontrollable that it is almost impossible to recall how it started. Its beginning is clouded and veiled, as is, I suppose, the beginning of all great passions; something that should not be probed or searched for, but left complete and untouched as in sacred keeping."

From Frankfurt Massing, followed by his future wife Hede (then, Hede Gumperz), a longtime communist and recently recruited Soviet spy, went to Moscow, where he worked until 1931 at the International Agrarian Institute. When he returned to Germany in 1931, Paul Massing was active with the illegal M-section of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in Berlin. He also helped his later wife with her GRU work. In 1933 Massing was arrested by the National Socialists under the Enabling Act. Freed by an amnesty after five-month solitary confinement in Sachsenhausen, Massing wrote his autobiographic novel Schutzhäftling 880, published in 1935 under his pseudonym Karl Billinger, dedicated to all comrades in concentration camps. In the United States, this book was published in part in the New Masses. Massing continued to write about Hitler insisting that Hitler is no Fool!.

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