A Rising Star

After graduating from Syracuse University, Thompson took a job with the New York State Woman Suffrage Party. When the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote was ratified in 1920, she decided to become a journalist and set off for Europe to look for a good story.

In 1921, Thompson posed as a Red Cross nurse and infiltrated the castle of the former King Karl I, a Hapsburg (German royal family) who was rumored to be seeking to reclaim the Hungarian throne. She was the only journalist to report from the inside. “It scooped the world, of course, that story. The only interview with Karl. The other correspondents were—well, you can imagine,” she later recalled.

Now known as a journalist willing to take great risk, she soon accepted a full-time job as the Vienna correspondent and central European bureau chief for the Philadelphia Public Ledger.

Early Warnings Against Nazism

In 1924, Thompson’s newspaper began to share foreign coverage with the New York Evening Post, exposing Thompson’s stories to many more readers. She wrote sharply insightful articles about the volatile political situation on the continent, especially the rise of an emerging agitator of the National Socialist German Workers’ (Nazi) Party named Adolf Hitler.

In May 1928, Thompson married novelist Sinclair Lewis. For the next several years, she whipsawed between a pastoral life with him at a farmhouse in Vermont and international reporting assignments. The situation in Germany fascinated her, and she spent much of 1931 writing extensively researched, incisive articles about the explosive rise of national socialism in Germany.

Later in 1931, the Nazi Party invited Thompson to interview Hitler for Cosmopolitan magazine. She expanded the interview, publishing it along with her impressions in a book, I Saw Hitler!, which was released before Hitler was appointed German chancellor in 1933.

“The interview was difficult, because one cannot carry on a conversation with Adolf Hitler,” she wrote in Cosmopolitan . “He speaks always as though he were addressing a mass meeting . . . a hysterical note creeps into his voice, which rises sometimes almost to a scream. He gives the impression of a man in a trance.”

Thompson’s searing criticism angered Hitler, who personally ordered her to leave Nazi Germany in 1934. She was the first American journalist to be expelled from the country by the Nazi regime. "As far as I can see, I was really put out of Germany for the crime of blasphemy,” she said upon disembarking in the United States. “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.”

Back in America, Thompson devoted herself to publicly opposing the Nazis, and continued to take risks to oppose Nazism. In 1939, she disrupted a Madison Square Garden rally of American Nazi sympathizers, the German-American Bund, laughing during their speeches. She eventually had to be rescued by police.

Thompson also toured the country, lecturing the American public about the situation in Europe and passionately denouncing fascism in her popular radio broadcasts. She wrote a hugely popular political column, “On The Record,” three times each week from 1936 until 1958, and established herself as what one biographer has called “the leading American voice in the war against fascism.”

Thompson’s tireless work opposing Hitler was likely one of the inspirations for It Can’t Happen Here, a 1935 dystopian novel by Sinclair Lewis (Thompson’s husband) which imagines the rise of a fascist demagogue in America.

Refugee Activism

Thompson also tried to open Americans’ hearts to European refugees who were fleeing war and persecution. Her 1938 book Refugees: Anarchy or Organization? laid out the challenges facing refugees from the Spanish Civil War and the Nazi regime, and urged Americans to see that immigrants “could bring to a new country resources of skill which would increase its wealth and trade.”

In November 1938, Herschel Grynszpan, a German Jewish student whose family had been deported by the Nazis, shot and killed a German diplomat in Paris. In response to the assassination, the Nazi government and its supporters unleashed a violent pogrom, known as Kristallnacht, burning synagogues, destroying Jewish homes and businesses, and arresting Jewish men. Thompson threw herself into reporting the story.

“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,” she explained in a 1938 broadcast. “Herschel Grynzspan was one of the hundreds of thousands of refugees whom the terror east of the Rhine has turned loose in the world.”

The American public responded to Thompson’s passionate pleas with an outpouring of donations for Gryznspan’s legal defense. After raising about $40,000, the Journalists’ Defense Fund was able to hire a famous French criminal attorney to argue his case. However, Gryznspan’s trial was never held, and his fate remains unknown.

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

Dorothy Thompson was one of America’s most urgent, eloquent voices against Nazism. Her writing and radio broadcasts alerted millions of people to Nazi Germany’s persecution of Jews as well as the threat it posed to democracy and international peace.