The Journalist Who Stood Up to Hitler

In 1931, Dorothy Thompson, an American journalist stationed in Europe, was writing a profile piece on a new leader emerging in Germany: Adolf Hitler. This was two years before he was to be elected chancellor of Germany, become a dictator, start World War II and eventually murder 6 million Jews in the Holocaust.

When Thompson first met Hitler to write the profile, she said she “was convinced that I was meeting the future dictator of Germany.” But after less than a minute of talking to Hitler – the man who failed to rise to power during the Beer Hall Putsch and then wrote the hateful “Mein Kampf” in prison – she determined that he was a nobody.

Dorothy Thompson, testifying to Congress in support of repealing the Neutrality Acts, April 1939. US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

“It took just about that time to measure the startling insignificance of this man who has set the world agog,” she wrote.

During the interview, Hitler admitted that if he did come to power, he would establish an authority-state: “Everywhere there will be responsibility and authority above, discipline and obedience below,” he said.

The profile piece turned into a hit piece; Thompson, a former women’s rights activist with the suffrage movement, said this “magnificent propagandist” was “inconsequent and voluble, ill-poised, insecure. He is the very prototype of the Little Man.”

Thompson’s profile, titled “I Saw Hitler!” appeared in a 1932 issue of Cosmopolitan and then was reprinted into a book of the same title.

Several months after the article was published, Hitler came to power. Realizing that she had woefully underestimated this evil man, Thompson wrote a number of negative articles about him, which caught his eye – and ultimately losing her position as a foreign correspondent.

In 1934, the secret police visited Thompson in her hotel room, and she was given an order to leave Germany within 48 hours. She was the first foreign journalist expelled from the country, and she landed on the front page of papers around the globe.

“As far as I can see, I was really put out of Germany for the crime of blasphemy,” she said. “My offense was to think that Hitler is just an ordinary man, after all. That is a crime in the reigning cult in Germany, which says Mr. Hitler is a messiah sent of God to save the German people.”

Trying to take down Hitler – and fighting for Jews

Though Thompson had to leave Germany, due to her expulsion, her career skyrocketed. She started writing a column for the New York Herald Tribune that was syndicated to more than 100 different newspapers, and she was a guest on NBC radio and wrote a regular column for Ladies’ Home Journal. In her writing and radio work, Thompson constantly criticized Hitler and the Nazis and advocated for the Jewish people to establish their own state..

In 1938, the journalist released a book called “Refugees: Anarchy or Organization?” where she fought on behalf of refugees from both the Spanish Civil War and Germany, saying, they “could bring to a new country resources of skill which would increase its wealth and trade.”

When Herschel Grynszpan, a Jewish German student, killed a German diplomat – which led to Kristallnacht – Thompson broadcasted, “I want to talk about that boy. I feel as though I knew him, for in the past five years I have met so many whose story is the same — the same except for this unique desperate act. Herschel Grynzspan was one of the hundreds of thousands of refugees whom the terror east of the Rhine has turned loose in the world.”

Americans heard Thompson’s broadcast and raised $40,000 for Grynszpan’s legal defense. Unfortunately, the trial never ended up being held. The Gestapo seized him and he was presumed to have been killed; what really happened still remains a mystery.

The next year, when Nazi sympathizers hosted a rally at Madison Square Garden in 1939, Thompson disrupted it by laughing during the speeches, and the police had to remove her for her own safety.

At the February 1939 German American Bund rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City, Dorothy Thompson heckled the pro-Nazi speakers, and had to be escorted out of the arena for her own safety.

She repeatedly brought up the horrific atrocities Nazis were inflicting onto the Jews and urged the American government to take action.

In a broadcast, she stated, “They are holding every Jew in Germany as a hostage. Therefore, we who are not Jews must speak, speak our sorrow and indignation and disgust in so many voices that they will be heard.”

Thompson’s legacy in the world of journalism and beyond

Thompson was not afraid to speak out against Hitler in a time when others were. She was dubbed the “First Lady of American Journalism” and became almost as influential as First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. One biographer wrote that Thompson became “the leading American voice in the war against fascism.”

Though the journalist quickly rose to fame, after the war, she did not retain her celebrity status. She also had opinions that landed her in hot water with her publishers and she changed her views on Zionism.

However, her influence cannot be understated. She risked her own safety to stand up to pure evil – and will forever be remembered for her bravery.

As Thompson herself wrote, “There is nothing to fear except the persistent refusal to find out the truth.”