A dispute over her Nazi past is threatening to overshadow the achievements of one of the world's most successful opinion pollsters, 80-year-old Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann. A close friend of Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Dr Noelle-Neumann has correctly predicted the outcome of every German general election since 1957. She has headed the Allensbach polling institute for half a century and her books have become standard texts for sociology students throughout the world.
But she now stands accused of attempting to destroy the career of an American academic who has traced the origins of Dr Noelle-Neumann's communication theories back to her Nazi past.
Dr Noelle-Neumann admitted six years ago that, between 1940 and 1942, she wrote for a magazine called Das Reich, which was controlled by the Nazi Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels. She also acted as a "cell leader" within a Nazi student organisation but she insists that she was never a member of the Nazi party.
The veteran pollster may have hoped that her admission would soon be forgotten. But Dr Christopher Simpson, a professor of communication at American University in Washington, decided to take a closer look at Dr Noelle-Neumann's writings and to search for traces of Nazi ideology within them.
He concluded that Dr Noelle-Neumann's work was characterised by a thorough distrust of racial and cultural diversity, a contempt for the judgement of the electorate and a tendency to defend the interests of the strong against the weak at all times.
"She takes ambiguous poll data, politicises it and then presents it as scientific truth. When that's published, naturally people are influenced by it, so she goes back and takes a second poll and gets the result she wants," Dr Simpson said.
Dr Noelle-Neumann was accused by some German critics of talking up the prospects of the tiny Liberal Free Democrats during the 1994 election campaign to make sure that her friend Dr Kohl would have enough allies in the Bundestag to retain power.
Dr Simpson claimed that most of the ideas in Dr Noelle-Neumann's most famous book, The Spiral of Silence, published in 1984, were already present in her doctoral thesis published under the Nazis in 1940.
The Spiral of Silence argues that majorities are cowed into silence by vociferous minorities who command more influence than their numbers justify.
Her friends rushed to her defence and Dr Simpson claims that some of the German pollster's allies mounted a campaign to block his appointment as a tenured professor. Dr Noelle-Neumann's successor as professor of communications at the University of Mainz wrote a withering critique of Dr Simpson's work, questioning his integrity as an academic. The manuscript was mysteriously sent to Dr Sanford Ungar, dean of the American University and one of the key figures in the decision to appoint Dr Simpson.
"I've never come across such a disgrace in my entire career. Simpson is a first-class academic and a wonderful teacher. I'm not going to let a former Nazi journalist and her friends mess that up," Dr Ungar said.
Such remarks may wound Dr Noelle-Neumann but she can console herself with the certain knowledge that when Germany's next general election campaign begins next autumn, the country's politicians and journalists will again beat a path to her door.