Konrad Kellen

Konrad Kellen (born Konrad Moritz Adolf Katzenellenbogen; December 14, 1913 – April 8, 2007) was a German-born American political scientist, intelligence analyst, and author.

At different points in his career, Kellen analyzed postwar German soldiers, defectors from behind the Iron Curtain, Viet Cong who had been captured, and terrorists. He was among the first intelligence analysts to conclude that, contrary to prevailing U.S. administration assessments, enemy morale in the Vietnam War was, in fact high and the war was not winnable. While at the RAND Corporation, he co-authored an open letter to the U.S. government urging withdrawal of troops.

Early life

Kellen was a member of a prominent Jewish family in Berlin, the son of Ludwig Katzenellenbogen. He was a distant relative of Albert Einstein and a cousin of economist Albert Otto Hirschman. He studied law in Munich before fleeing Germany with his family in March 1933 at age 19 to escape Nazi persecution. After living in France, the Netherlands, and Yugoslavia, Kellen traveled to the United States. He arrived in New York in 1935 and moved to Los Angeles, becoming an American citizen under the name Konrad Kellen. From 1941-1943, Kellen was the private secretary to author Thomas Mann.

Career

During World War II, Kellen trained at Camp Ritchie where he trained to become one of the Ritchie Boys. In the U.S. Army, he served as an intelligence NCO with 2nd Mobile Radio Broadcasting Company [1] in Europe, specializing in psychological warfare, and being awarded the Legion of Merit. After the war, Kellen remained in Germany as a political intelligence officer with the occupation forces as part of the denazification initiative, his duties including interviewing German soldiers to find out why they kept fighting for Hitler long after it was clear that their war was lost. Kellen also worked for Radio Free Europe, interviewing defectors from behind the Iron Curtain to study life under the Soviet regime.

In 1945, a stranger, who turned out to be painter Marc Chagall's daughter, approached Kellen in a Paris café and asked him to help save a stack of her father's canvases from the chaos of postwar Europe by bringing them to the United States, which he ultimately agreed to do. That significant challenge took Kellen over a month to accomplish.[2] For his compensation, he received one of the Chagall paintings, which he sold in the 1950s.[2]

In the early 1960s, he worked at the

External links

• List of reports prepared for RAND Corporation