In 1930, Dorothy Thompson joined her husband, Sinclair Lewis, in Sweden, where he was accepting his Nobel Prize in literature. While Lewis was famous for becoming the first American to receive the honor, Thompson was a lesser-known writer. At the time, Thompson was vigorously trying to reignite her career as a foreign correspondent in Berlin, which she'd paused since becoming a mother. And within a few years, she would be personally banished from Nazi Germany by Adolf Hitler and become a stalwart presence for millions of radio listeners during World War II.
Thompson first encountered the Nazi movement in the early 1920s when she was a Berlin-based correspondent for Philadelphia's Public Ledger. Hitler made headlines in 1923 for his failed coup attempt in Munich, known as the Beer Hall Putsch. Thompson immediately sought to interview Hitler about the growing Nazi party.
"No one was taking them all that seriously in terms of their taking power," Peter Kurth, author of American Cassandra: The Life of Dorothy Thompson, told Radio Diaries. "But she kept her eye on them."
In 1931, Hitler's press secretary organized an interview between the two at the Kaiserhof Hotel in Berlin. In an article that Thompson wrote for Cosmopolitan magazine, which became a book a year later titled I Saw Hitler!, she said that meeting him was unimpressive.
"He is inconsequent and voluble, ill-poised, insecure," Thompson wrote. "He is the very prototype of the Little Man."
In addition to mocking Hitler's demeanor, Thompson sounded the alarm on the Nazi party's discriminatory policies. She highlighted his penchant for "the old racial prejudice" and wrote that "'down with the Jews!' was one of the first planks in his program."
"You know, there's that expression: 'Man's greatest fear is to be laughed at by a woman,'" says Karine Walther, associate professor of history at Georgetown University in Qatar and author of "Dorothy Thompson and American Zionism." "This is a man who is so concerned with power and his image. She is able to say things about him that are humiliating. And I think this is why she gets kicked out of the country."
Thompson didn't predict that Hitler would become chancellor in 1933. According to Kurth, in an attempt to get rid of his rivals, Hitler promptly expelled Thompson from Nazi Germany in the summer of 1934.
"Dorothy was at her hotel in Berlin, and the Gestapo knocked on the hotel door and handed her papers saying she had 24 hours to leave the country," Kurth says.
Thompson returned to the United States in September 1934 to fanfare from reporters, according to a New York Times article. Her expulsion, combined with the outbreak of World War II, brought Thompson recognition in her own right, not just as the wife of Sinclair Lewis. She began a column with the New York Herald Tribune called "On the Record" in 1936. By August 1939, just before the start of WWII, she was broadcasting on NBC. She broadcast every night during the beginning of the war, before transitioning to Sunday nights.
"She was saying some very dark things because it was a very dark subject she was addressing, but it was done in a feminine style," says granddaughter Lesley Dorothy Lewis. At 63 years old, she is the only living grandchild of Thompson. "No one had ever heard it done like that before at that time. They had to always hear about a man like Edward R. Murrow or somebody like that."
Thompson used her position on the airwaves to call attention to the Jewish refugee crisis. She even authored the book Refugees: Anarchy or Organization? in 1938, in which she called on the isolationist United States to accept Jewish refugees.
"She really understood what Hitler wanted to do, his attack against Jews as a race," says Walther. "That's one of the things that makes her so wonderful at this time, because there were clearly so many Americans who were fine with it."
Thompson's antifascist activism wasn't limited to the media. In 1939, she made headlines for protesting a rally of the German American Bund — an organization of American Nazis — at Madison Square Garden. Thompson heckled and jeered during speeches and ultimately had to be escorted out by police. The same year, she was on the cover of Time magazine, which had declared Thompson and Eleanor Roosevelt the two most influential women in the United States.
Questioning Zionism
Thompson's advocacy for Jewish refugees was inseparable from her advocacy for Zionism, the idea that Jewish people should have a nation in their ancestral homeland. By the end of the war, she hailed the World Zionist movement and was being honored by prominent Zionist agencies, according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
"Dorothy was an avid, convinced, devoted Zionist, but she hadn't been [to Palestine]," Kurth says.
Walther says that Thompson visited Palestine in the summer of 1945, days before Germany's surrender from World War II.
"Dorothy went to Palestine and saw refugees of the Palestinian population being forced off their own land," says Kurth. "She saw a people uprooted."
Walther adds that it reminded Thompson of "the kind of hatred and violence that she'd seen in Germany."
"She said that the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine was a 'recipe for perpetual war,'" says Kurth.
Thompson returned to the United States and began to ask questions about the Zionist movement.
"The situation there is not the way it has been presented by many of the Zionists," Thompson wrote in a 1946 letter to Ted Thackrey, editor at the New York Post.
In 1947, the Post promptly dropped her column. In the aftermath, Thompson wrote of being targeted by "radical Zionists."
"She faces really immediate pushback from American Zionist organizations, as well as newspaper editors, and they accused her of antisemitism," says Walther.
In "Dorothy Thompson and American Zionism," Walther writes that Thompson's advocacy for Palestinian refugees even extended to lending her voice to relief films. She participated in one called Sands of Sorrow, calling on the United States to intervene in the Palestinian refugee crisis. She also founded the American Friends of the Middle East, to encourage dignified relations between the U.S. and Middle Eastern countries. However, she found her job prospects decreasing.
The New York Herald Tribune had dropped her column in 1940, and she had not been able to get a radio contract after 1945.
"She really did struggle to find her place after that," Kurth says. Toward the end of her life, Thompson turned inward and started working on a memoir. But in 1961, she died of a heart attack before she could finish it. She was 67 years old.
"There is a great quote, which she makes at the end of her life," says Walther. "She says, 'I had to speak out about this' — meaning attacks on Palestinian civilians — 'for the same reason I had to speak out about Hitler. But my Zionist friends do not seem to understand the universality of simple moral principles.'"
This story was produced by Mycah Hazel and the team at Radio Diaries. It was edited by Deborah George, Joe Richman and Ben Shapiro. You can find more stories on the Radio Diaries podcast.
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