Documents project studying totalitarian propaganda during World War II. Led by Hans Speier and Ernst Kris for the Research Center of the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science (IWA's predecessor). Funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.

After fleeing Nazi Germany, sociologist Hans Speier joined the faculty of the New School for Social Research. During World War II, Speier worked with the United States government as a specialist on propaganda and Germany. He would go on to become the director of the Social Science Department of the RAND Corporation.

Trained as a psychoanalyst and art historian, Ernst Kris emigrated from Germany to London in 1938, where he began analyzing Nazi radio broadcasts for the BBC. Moving to New York in 1940, Kris lectured at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and the College of the City of New York.