When the United States entered World War II Friedrich helped found the School of Overseas Administration to train officers in military government work. Between 1943 to 1946 Friedrich served as the director of the School and was a member of the Executive Committee of the Council for Democracy, which worked to convince the American people of the necessity for fighting totalitarianism and published pamphlets on liberal democracy. In 1946 the Military Governor of Germany, General Lucius D. Clay, appointed Friedrich as Constitutional and Governmental Affairs Adviser, a position Friedrich held until 1949. Friedrich traveled to Allied-occupied Germany and helped to draft the constitutions of the German federal states Bavaria, Baden, and Hesse. In 1948 Friedrich helped draft the German constitution, known as Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany. Friedrich enshrined in these constitutions the teachings of Johannes Althusius on federalism and local autonomy in an effort to create a decentralized regime where federal states had authority over taxation, education, and cultural policy. To this end, Friedrich also enshrined in the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany that the members of the upper house (Bundesrat would be appointed by the parliaments of the federal states (Landtag). Friedrich's constitutional vision for a new German identity was based on active participation in democratic institutions, where citizens invested in democracy to secure their own liberty. Friedrich deeply believed that a stable democracy required an elite that was committed to democracy and responsible bureaucracy. He therefore intervened in the ongoing reforms of German universities in the US occupied areas. He traveled between Heidelberg, Munich, and Berlin to organize meetings on the role of a university in a constitutional democracy. In 1948 he helped to establish the Free University of Berlin for which he designed a course program on political theory, democracy, and communism. This course program was in 1949 adopted by the University of Marburg, the University of Cologne, and the University of Hamburg. In 1947 Friedrich and his Harvard colleagues launched a course program on Russian and the Soviet Union which in 1948 became the Russian Research Center. In the same year, communists gained control over Czechoslovakia and Allied-occupied Germany was divided into West Germany and East Germany in 1949. These rapid developments prompted Friedrich to orchestrate the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) project, which was started in 1948 by Clellan S. Ford at Yale University. The HRAF collected and analyzed