In 1991,
Leo Bogart criticized Noelle-Neumann, accusing her of anti-Semitic passages in her dissertation and articles she wrote for Nazi newspapers. As a young woman, she had "superb credentials as an activist and leader" of Nazi youth and students' organizations, he wrote. In fact, when she published her 1940 dissertation in Germany, entitled "Opinion and mass research in the USA", having spent a year at the
University of Missouri researching
George Gallup's methodology,
Joseph Goebbels called the 24-year-old woman as an adjutant and intended her to build up, for the ministry of propaganda, Germany's first public opinion research organization. She declined, having fallen ill, which angered Goebbels; she later became a newspaper journalist with Nazi publications where she wrote some articles on Jewish influence over U.S. news and elite opinion. Bogart's article appeared just weeks before Noelle-Neumann took up a visiting position in the Political Science Department at the
University of Chicago, where she had held similar appointments since 1978.
Michael S. Kochin, then a graduate student at the university, noticed the article and circulated it on campus prior to her arrival, igniting a vigorous debate on Noelle-Neumann's past. While the administration and students at the university, the local Jewish defense groups, and Chicago newspapers remained disengaged from the issue,
John J. Mearsheimer, then chairman of the university's political science department, spoke with Bogart, met for over three hours with Noelle-Neumann, and called a departmental meeting about her on 16 October. Some at the university claimed Noelle-Neumann was being slandered, and Mearsheimer's colleagues were not of one opinion about the case. Mearsheimer, however, widely publicized his views concerning the allegations themselves and as they related to academic freedom and opposition to bigotry. "I believe Noelle-Neumann was an anti-Semite," Mearsheimer stated, "and was not forced to write the anti-Semitic words she published. Moreover, I believe that the anti-Semitic writers and publicists of Germany – to include Noelle-Neumann – jointly share some responsibility for the Holocaust. For this, she owes an apology." "The thing to remember about the killing of the Jews," he said, "is that it was not done by a handful of people. … It was also a result of the Reich of normal – or of average – German citizens. Like Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann." In private letters and in written responses, Noelle-Neumann acknowledged being in a Nazi student organization but denied being a Nazi. "I am anguished by the suffering of Jews in Nazi Germany," she wrote. Bogart, Mearsheimer and others remained dissatisfied with her response. Noelle-Neumann completed her visiting position in Chicago in mid-December 1991 and returned to Germany. When some University of Chicago students learned that she was to return there on 13 March 1992, they called a rally to protest against her return. Reached by telephone at her office in Allensbach am Bodensee, Germany, on 10 March, Noelle-Neumann told a reporter she was unaware of the proposed rally but intended on coming to the university as planned. That day, her hosts at the
National Opinion Research Center announced that she had cancelled her appearance "in light of serious threats". Several years later, Noelle-Neumann's Nazi connection came under scrutiny from another American academic, but she never explicitly apologized for her past. Interviewed on the subject in 1997, she said, "I did my duty and would do my duty again in a second life. I'd even say I was proud of what I did back then because I opposed the Nazis by working from within." In a letter to the Editor, Mearsheimer wrote in
The New York Times on 16 December 1991:She has admitted she was not hostile to the Nazis before 1940. She says she was anti-Nazi after 1940, but has produced no evidence that she criticized the Nazis then. She wrote anti-Semitic words in 1938–41, and there is no evidence she was compelled to write them. Queried on her anti-Semitic writings, she told me: "I have never written anything in my life that I did not believe to be true." ==Personal life==