Thompson, Dorothy b.July 9, 1893; Lancaster, New York d. January 31, 1961; Lisbon, Portugal
Most knowledgeable and influential American public commentator on German affairs in the middle of the twentieth century. She was the first prominent American journalist to warn of developments in Germany during the final phase of the Weimar Republic.
Her syndicated column, alternating with that of Walter Lippmann, reached the largest audience among early anti-Nazi reporters and quickly gained her the reputation of a “Cassandra”—subsequently also of being a warmonger due to her relentless calls for U.S. intervention in Europe. Even though she was best known as a vocal and persistent critic of the Third Reich, she was also a tireless advocate of the “other Germany,” a great admirer of German culture, and during the later part of World War II a forceful proponent of a constructive peace with defeated Germany. In addition to her regular column, Thompson wrote for a wide range of American newspapers and magazines, including the New York Herald Tribune and the New York Post, the Saturday Evening Post, the Ladies’ Home Journal, and Foreign Affairs. She was an untiring public speaker, radio commentator, and organizer of several public interest groups, among them the wartime American Association for a Democratic Germany, which she chaired together with Reinhold Niebuhr, advocating American support for the democratic elements in Germany. Thompson shaped several central interpretations that characterized American reactions to Nazism: the dictator as buffoon, the masses as the problem, the early recognition that Nazism meant war, the need for outside intervention, the faith in “the other Germany,” the concern over antisemitism at home.Thompson’s first contacts with Germany and its people dated back to her early days as a foreign correspondent in central Europe soon after World War I. A curious and vivacious young woman, she quickly established herself as one of the best- known foreign journalists in Berlin with excellent sources in high places, but also deeply immersed in the Weimar Republic’s literary and cultural life.
During this time she formed lasting friendships with Carl Zuckmayer, Helmuth James Count von Moltke, and Heinrich Bruning. Thompson originally sympathized with German grievances over the Versailles Treaty, but then became increasingly troubled by a German obsession with “injustices” perpetrated by Germany’s alleged enemies, including Jews, Communists, and the Allies. This notion of German victimhood gained prominence long before the Nazi seizure of power, but clearly prepared the ground for it. In the first half of the 1930s her articles focused on internal reasons for the collapse of democracy and the Nazis’ success at forceful coordination, which included deep- seated authoritarianism and militarism as well as democratic cowardice. She denied that the Germans had Hitler thrust upon them—he recommended himself and they bought him.Her 1931 interview with Adolf Hitler (I Saw Hitler!) was a somewhat sensational lapse—Thompson emerged convinced of the insignificance and ridiculousness of the fuhrer—but she also introduced him as the “apotheosis of the little man,” thus shifting attention to the sociopolitical problem of the masses that would continue to cheer and support him. By the time the Nazis expelled Thompson from the Third Reich in 1934 she had grown convinced that Nazism meant war and divided her efforts back home between educating her countrymen about this threat and organizing rescue operations for European refugees. She was among the first to grasp and publicize the murderous intentions that awaited the Jews of Europe.
Her intense firsthand experiences and wide-ranging personal contacts in prewar Germany might account for a central difference between her views on the Third Reich and those of most of her professional colleagues. Thompson never characterized Germans as a people apart, counting many of her closest friends among them. During the war the notion of “the other Ger- many”—highly cultured, democratically oriented, and open minded—was for her a reality she knew and understood personally.
Thompson defined Nazism as an ideology with universal implications and challenges. Her second husband, the author Sinclair Lewis, further expanded on this theme in his popular novel, later turned into a play, It Cant Happen Here (1935), which transposed an increasingly successful Fascist organization and its policies into the American heartland. To Thompson Nazism was a break with Western civilization and a stateof mind not limited to Germany. Her fight against it was two pronged: it had a foreign policy as much as a domestic dimension.
In spite of her own conservative political preferences, Thompson advised the Roosevelt administration in particular from 1940 on. There was a noticeable change in her public message after the Germans started World War II: she began to characterize the same people she had earlier held responsible for facilitating the establishment of a cruel dictatorship as its helpless victims. Closely related to this new interpretation was the job that the journalist outlined for her fellow countrymen: intervention and liberation. Her mission now was to rally American support for a democratic revolution in Germany, even in the near absence of evidence for such an outcome. By 1943 and 1944 Thompson found herself again on the unpopular side of the “German problem.” She criticized the Roosevelt administration for its policy of unconditional surrender, Lord Vansittart for his unforgiving stance against Germany, and Henry Morgenthau for his dire postwar plans. After the war she liberally offered her advice to Allan Dulles and Lucius D. Clay during the early part of the military occupation of Germany where she saw little cause for praise or self-satisfaction. During the cold war, as Thompson’s focus as a political journalist shifted to new areas such as the Middle East, she kept her personal interest in Germany and worked at promoting the memory of the resisters against Hitler, in particular of Moltke.
Michaela Hoenicke Moore
See also Bruning, Heinrich; Lewis, Sinclair; Morgenthau Plan; Treaty of Versailles; Vansittartism; World War II; Zuckmayer, Carl
References and Further Reading
Hoenicke Moore, Michaela. “Know Your Enemy”: American Responses to Nazism. New York: Cambridge University, 2006.
Kurth, Peter. American Cassandra: The Life of Dorothy Thompson. Boston: Little, Brown, 1990.
Sanders, Marion K. Dorothy Thompson: A Legend in Her Time. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973.
Thompson, Dorothy. Let the Record Speak. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1939.
------. Listen, Hans! Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1942.