She Saw Hitler II

The Overlook

By Tom Clavin

“The Overlook” appears every Thursday at tomclavin.substack.com. An overlook is a place from which one can see in several if not all directions, including where one has been and where one is going. If you enjoy the column, please "like" it and let me know what you think by commenting (check out previous ones while you're at it).  Likes, comments, and shares help with author “discoverability” on Substack.com, and all support is appreciated. Don't forget to hit the ‘Subscribe’ button – it’s free!

          Last week I began the true tale of when the trailblazing journalist Dorothy Thompson arranged to interview Adolf Hitler and at Berlin hotel 90 years ago this month, in December 1931. We resume with the rising German politician arriving at the hotel, though he had taken his time about it.

          There is nothing to suggest that Hitler had any keen interest in Thompson in particular, and probably knew no more about her than what his press aide, Putzi, had confided. And he was still reeling from the apparent suicide of his 23-year-old niece, Geli Raubal, in September. She had lived with him and accompanied him to social and political functions. She had been the one exception, as the biographer Ian Kershaw writes, “Women were for Hitler an object, an adornment in a ‘men’s world.’” Most likely, this was his view of Thompson too.

          Other than being persuaded by Putzi to do the interview, Hitler did see an opportunity. In five months, President Paul von Hindenburg’s seven-year term of office was due to expire. An effort was already underway to get the 84-year-old’s term extended. Hitler had not yet committed to support or oppose a required change to Germany’s constitution. It would expand his profile even further, and internationally, to be seen in an even more powerful position to determine the future of Germany.

          Or as Thompson explained it simply, “Hitler is coming into power, now he is prepared to address the world. And so he granted me an interview.”

          One string attached was that she would be limited to just three questions, and they had to be submitted 24 hours in advance: (1) When you come to power, as I take it you will, what will you do for the working masses of Germany? (2) When you come to power will you abolish the constitution of the German Republic? (3) What will you do for international disarmament, and how will you handle France?

          Finally, the time came when Thompson sat across from Hitler in his rooms at the Berlin hotel. She was both fascinated and taken aback by the man before her. She found the interview “difficult” to conduct because instead of it being a conversation, “He speaks always as though he were addressing a mass meeting. In every question he seeks a theme that will set him off. Then his eyes focus on some far corner of the room; a hysterical note creeps into his voice which rises sometimes to a scream. He gives the impression of a man in a trance. He bangs the table.”

          What struck her most, though, and had an impact on fully recognizing the threat to order he posed, was how physically unimpressive Hitler was. It took less than a minute, she later wrote, “to measure the startling insignificance of this man who has set the world agog. He is formless, almost faceless, a man whose countenance is a caricature, a man whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones. He is inconsequent and voluble, ill-poised, insecure.” Thompson was especially taken by Hitler’s eyes. They were “Dark grey and hyperthyroid – they have the peculiar shine which often distinguishes geniuses, alcoholics, and hysterics.”

She continued: “Do you wonder that millions follow him? Listening to him they feel themselves exalted. Better times are coming. Just around the corner is the era of Race, when all good Teutons, just by reason of their being Teutons, will come into their own.” And, “What Hitler says is magic.”

          Once Hitler had run out of oratory steam, Thompson was dismissed. After leaving the hotel, she reflected that her impression of Hitler physically had left her underwhelmed. She would sneer, “A Little Man has arisen in Germany,” and see his ultimate goal as farfetched: “To sway the crowds he has a tenor voice, considerable histrionic gifts, and an hysterical belief in his mission. And that mission he conceives to be the dissolution of the German Republic, the establishment of a dictatorship, and the organization of a new – or is it old? – militant Germany.” She added, “Imagine a would-be dictator setting out to persuade a sovereign people to vote away their rights.”

Thompson had two Achilles’ heels. One was her estimation of Hitler’s prospects being influenced by his unappealing physical presence. The other was she had long admired the German people and it was difficult to believe the majority of them would allow themselves to be under Hitler’s spell.

          And yet, she warned, “He has an audience – a vast audience.” The more she thought about it – and this did not have to be very long – the more Thompson believed that the threat of Hitler was genuine and dangerous. “The Nazis,” she concluded, “have become by all odds the strongest single party in the Reich. They are ripe for power.” Now to tell America, and the world.

          In early 1932, she and her husband, the writer Sinclair Lewis, were back in the U.S. Thompson set right to work at warning readers and American officials that Adolf Hitler may well be more than a bellowing madman. According to the Lewis biographer Richard Lingeman, beginning in 1932, Thompson “was becoming the most prominent anti-Nazi voice in American journalism.” She embarked on what would be a series of 15 lengthy articles for The Saturday Evening Post and other publications through 1934 on the rise of Hitler, conditions in Germany, and the mistreatment of Jews.

          Most prominently, Thompson had a book published in 1932 titled plainly I Saw Hitler. It reflected her conflict after having conducted the interview -- a warning about him and his supporters yet not quite believing the German people would elect him their leader and fully embrace Nazism. But the few people who bothered to read her book scoffed at it. Who cares about some obscure former corporal in Germany when there was no lack of crises at home? In 1932, America was in the depth of the Depression. It was a presidential election year, with the tarnished Herbert Hoover hoping to overcome the challenge of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Crime sprees were producing big headlines, and soon Public Enemies 1, 2, and 3 would be John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, and Pretty Boy Floyd.

But Thompson was undaunted and became more convinced that Hitler should not be regarded as a political sideshow. The following year, she returned to Germany as a reporter. As the Thompson biographer Peter Kurth points out, “From the moment of Hitler’s rise to power until his death in a bunker twelve years later, there was no one in journalism, anywhere in the world, who spoke louder than Dorothy in the fight against Nazism.”

Hitler may have felt he had dodged a bullet when Thompson’s articles and especially I Saw Hitler did not fully awaken the world while he continued to navigate German politics. On August 19, 1934, having already ascended to the position of chancellor. Hitler became president, thus consolidating the republic’s power into one supreme ruler. After Hindenburg’s death earlier that year, the German army and other reactionary forces called for Hitler to replace him, and he became the commander of the army too. The national referendum that day gave Hitler a 90-percent majority and hence ultimate power.

Soon after, a defiant Dorothy Thompson became the first American journalist Hitler expelled from Germany.

She returned to Red Lewis and their son, Michael, in the U.S. and plunged into work. She wrote for newspapers and magazines and was a pioneer at NBC too, as a radio news broadcaster. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, she was on the air for 15 days straight. Also that year, Thompson was on the cover of Life magazine. In his massive The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer reports how Thompson, during 1942, gave “a series of short-wave radio broadcasts from New York City” that begged opponents of Hitler to try to depose him, but to no avail.

          That same year, Thompson achieved celluloid fame. Released in February was the feature film Woman of the Year, with Spencer Tracy as a sportswriter and Katharine Hepburn as the international affairs correspondent Tess Harding, the character based on Dorothy Thompson. Lauren Bacall would play her in the stage musical version that opened on Broadway in 1981.

Also in 1942, she and Red Lewis divorced. He died nine years later in Rome at age 65 of alcohol-related causes. Thompson had married Maxim Kopf in 1945 and he died in 1958, three years before Thompson did, in Lisbon, age 67, of a heart attack. She was buried in Vermont.

Tom Clavin is the bestselling author/co-author of 18 books, including Tombstone, Blood and Treasure (the latest with Bob Drury), and Lightning Down: A World War II Story of Survival, just published by St. Martin’s Press. To purchase any of these titles, please go to your local bookstore or to Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, or BN.com.