10/12/2025
I’ll be adding “I Saw Hi**er” to my reading list, right at the top. What a fascinating woman, and terrifying similarity to our current situation…
In 1931, American journalist Dorothy Thompson secured what many considered an impossible interview -- a rare audience with Adolf Hi**er, the leader of Germany's rapidly ascending N**i party, at the Kaiserhof Hotel in Berlin. For one of her three permitted questions, Thompson asked Hi**er a direct challenge: "When you come to power, will you abolish the constitution of the German Republic?"
Hi**er's response was shockingly direct: "I will get into power legally. I will abolish this parliament and the Weimar constitution afterward. I will found an authority-state, from the lowest cell to the highest instance; everywhere there will be responsibility and authority above, discipline and obedience below." Thompson believed he was telling the truth about his dictatorial ambitions, yet she couldn't fathom that he would be successful. The very idea struck her as absurd: "Imagine a would-be dictator setting out to persuade a sovereign people to vote away their rights."
Thompson, one of America’s most respected foreign correspondents and the first female head of a European news bureau, had been tracking the N**i movement since 1923. At the time of the interview, she was deeply familiar with Hi**er, having watched his speeches, read Mein Kampf, and interviewed numerous German politicians and N**i supporters.
"When I walked into Adolph Hi**er's salon in the Kaiserhof hotel, I was convinced that I was meeting the future dictator of Germany," Thompson later reflected. "In something like fifty seconds I was quite sure that I was not. It took just about that time to measure the startling insignificance of this man who has set the world agog."
She recognized that Hi**er was a masterful propagandist and orator in front of a crowd but she wasn't prepared for how pathetic he appeared one on one. "He is inconsequent and voluble, ill-poised, insecure. He is the very prototype of the Little Man," she wrote after their meeting. Thompson found the interview nearly impossible to conduct: "One cannot carry on a conversation with Adolph Hi**er... In every question, he seeks for a theme that will set him off. Then his eyes focus in some far corner of the room; a hysterical note creeps into his voice, which rises sometimes almost to a scream. He gives the impression of a man in a trance. He bangs the table."
Following the interview, in numerous articles and her book "I Saw Hi**er," she warned about the threat Hi**er represented to democracy and highlighted Hi**er's embrace of racial prejudice, noting that persecution of the Jewish people was among the first planks in his program. But ultimately, she viewed an outright N**i victory in the upcoming election as "unlikely," not believing that German citizens would embrace such an extremist demagogue in an election.
Within a year, Thompson learned the devastating lesson of how easily democratic citizens could be persuaded to relinquish their rights to a would-be dictator who channeled their anxieties into hatred of a demonized 'other' while promising national greatness. After he came to power in 1933, Hi**er began to crush his political opponents, rapidly militarize German society, and persecute targeted groups. Thompson quickly became one of the most vocal chroniclers of Hi**er's growing brutality, warning a world that was largely oblivious. “It must be said, it must be re-iterated,” she wrote, “that there has been and still is a widespread terror, which extends throughout the whole of Germany.”
Hi**er was sufficiently threatened by Thompson's work that he reportedly demanded the creation of a "Dorothy Thompson Emergency Squad" to rush translations of her articles to him. In August 1934, the N**i government expelled Thompson from the country, making her the first American journalist banned from N**i Germany.
Thompson turned her expulsion into a rallying cry, writing in The New York Times: "My offense was to think that Hi**er is just an ordinary man... That is a crime against the reigning cult in Germany, which says Mr. Hi**er is a Messiah sent by God to save the German people... To question this mystic mission is so heinous that, if you are a German, you can be sent to jail. I, fortunately, am an American, so I merely was sent to Paris."
Returning to America, Thompson embarked on what became a phenomenon in itself -- a one-woman crusade determined to awaken America and the Western world to the real and present menace of the rise of far-right fascism and the terrible war that might be needed to stop its spread throughout the entire West. Thompson was one of the most widely read and heard journalists in America at the time, reaching millions through her influential "On the Record" column and nightly NBC radio broadcasts. In her broadcasts and columns, she often championed Jewish refugees and consistently emphasized Hi**er's attack on Jewish people as central to understanding the N**i threat.
But Thompson's warnings extended beyond Europe and she often warned about the growing rise of fascism within America. In 1939, she made headlines for attending a rally of the German American Bund -- an organization of American N**is -- at Madison Square Garden, where she was seated in the press box and began to laugh loudly and disruptively during speeches. After being escorted out by police, she returned to her seat where she was surrounded by a dozen Bund stormtroopers, then proceeded to cause a second scene by shouting 'bunk!' at the stage.
"I was amazed to see a duplicate of what I saw seven years ago in Germany," she told a reporter after leaving the event. "Tonight I listened to words taken out of the mouth of Adolf Hi**er." It was precisely those words' utterance at home that alarmed her most. She had spent a good part of her career watching how fascism could, improbable as it might first have seemed, sweep over a nation.
"Her point was this can happen anywhere," University of London professor Sarah Churchwell, who has studied Thompson's work, explained. "You have to strengthen your Democratic guardrails. You have to ensure that you don't let this happen to you because complacency is the enemy. And that is what she wrote about over and over and over again, banging the drum. Warning people, take this seriously. This isn't a joke. And nobody is immune to it."
Thompson's most enduring warning came in a 1937 column that resonates with chilling relevance today. "No people ever recognize their dictator in advance," she wrote. "He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument for expressing the Incorporated National Will. When Americans think of dictators they always think of some foreign model. If anyone turned up here in a fur hat, boots and a grim look he would be recognized and shunned... But when our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American... through whose leadership alone democracy can be realized. And nobody will ever say Heil to him or Ave Caesar, nor will they call him Führer or Duce. But they will greet him with one great big, universal, democratic, sheeplike bleat of O.K., Chief! Fix it like you wanna, Chief! Oh Kaaaay!"
Thompson saw no conflict between her roles as a journalist and a staunch anti-fascist voice. "The function of journalism and a free press is not confined to the presentation of news," she wrote. "Their function is to create continual debate, to provide a forum, to give opportunity for the expression of opinion."
By 1939, Time magazine recognized Thompson and Eleanor Roosevelt as the two most influential women in America -- a testament to how her relentless warnings about the threat of fascism had broken through American complacency. Yet her warnings about authoritarianism cloaked in the language of patriotism echo across the decades with haunting clarity, reminding us that the defense of democracy demands not a single victory but eternal vigilance from each generation wishing to remain free.
To learn more about Dorothy Thompson's extraordinary life, the definitive biography "American Cassandra: The Life of Dorothy Thompson" is out of print but available on Kindle at https://amzn.to/3L7a8ag
For a powerful book for adult readers about the fight against fascism in America prior to WWII -- which prominently features Dorothy Thompson -- we recommend "Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism" at https://amzn.to/3KQV3JU (Amazon) and https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9780593444535 (Bookshop)
For books for tweens and teens about girls living under real-life authoritarian regimes throughout history that will help them appreciate how precious democracy truly is, visit our blog post "The Fragility of Freedom: Mighty Girl Books About Life Under Authoritarianism" at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=32426
For books about kids who heroically resisted the N**is, we recommend "The Whispering Town" for ages 6 to 9 (https://www.amightygirl.com/the-whispering-town), "Making Bombs for Hi**er" for ages 10 and up (https://www.amightygirl.com/making-bombs-for-hitler), and "I Am Defiance: A Novel of World War II" for ages 10 and up (https://www.amightygirl.com/i-am-defiance)
For two books about the courageous German students who organized a resistance movement at the height of N**i power, recommend "We Will Not Be Silent" for ages 10 and up (https://www.amightygirl.com/we-will-not-be-silent) and "White Rose" for ages 13 and up (https://www.amightygirl.com/white-rose)
For books for children and teens about girls and women who lived during the Holocaust period, visit our blog post, "60 Mighty Girl Books About The Holocaust" at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=11586
For many books for adults about heroic women of WWII, check out our blog post "Telling Her Story: 40 Books for Adult Readers About Women Heroes of WWII," at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=24501
