Editors Note: In honor of Women’s History Month, we’re sharing profiles of influential women in journalism.
In 1931, journalist Dorothy Thompson became the first American to interview Adolf Hitler. The resulting article she later published, I Saw Hitler, was scathing. She described him as “formless, almost faceless…a man whose countenance is a caricature, a man whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, her work also resulted in her becoming the first American journalist to be expelled from Germany. However, her warnings to the rest of the world about the rise of fascism would solidify her status as one of the most influential journalists of the 20th century.
Thompson was born on July 9, 1893, in Lancaster, New York, the daughter of a Methodist minister. She attended the Lewis Institute in Chicago and then enrolled at Syracuse University, where she studied politics and graduated in 1914 – a time when relatively few women completed four‑year degrees.
After university, Thompson became involved with the women’s suffrage movement and contributed op‑eds on social justice issues to major newspapers. This early activism set the tone for how she would write and report for the rest of her career: She had a fundamental conviction that politics were inseparable from questions of justice.
After the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920, Thompson sailed to Europe to make her way as a foreign correspondent. She was drawn to stories about nationalist movements, reporting on events like the Irish struggle for independence, even securing a final interview with Sinn Féin leader Terence MacSwiney before his arrest and death on hunger strike.
By 1925, she was the head of the Berlin bureau for the New York Evening Post, a rare position for a woman journalist in that era. There, Thompson became a close observer of the rise of Nazism. In 1931, she managed to secure a one‑on‑one interview with Hitler—at that point a rising but not yet dominant political figure—that would become her famous interview (for Cosmopolitan, then a general-interest magazine) and later a book.
During their interview, Thompson asked Hitler, “When you come to power will you abolish the constitution of the German Republic?” To which he responded, “I will get into power legally…I will abolish this parliament and the Weimar [German Reich] 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, who clearly recognized the threat Hitler posed to the German Republic, would later write a warning to Americans, of the possibility of something similar occurring in the States:
“No people ever recognize their dictator in advance…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.”
Her reporting was sharp, critical and filled with contempt for the “very prototype of the Little Man.” The vehemence and reach of her writing angered Nazi leadership and in 1934, by Hitler’s personal orders, Thompson was expelled from Germany, becoming the first American journalist formally forced out of the Third Reich, according to the New York Times and the Holocaust Memorial Museum
Back in the United States, Thompson transformed her exile into a powerful platform. She began writing “On the Record,” a thrice‑weekly political column, syndicated to as many as 150 newspapers during its 22-year run, reaching up to 10 million readers. She also regularly appeared live on air for NBC radio, reporting for 15 straight days after the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939. Time magazine put Thompson on its cover that year, calling her the second most influential woman in America – after Eleanor Roosevelt, of course.
During the war, Thompson became a high-profile advocate for Zionism, sympathizing with Jews who sought a homeland. However, after visiting Palestine in 1945, and witnessing Palestinian refugees forced off their land, she began to criticize aspects of Israeli policy, calling it a ‘recipe for perpetual war,’ according to historians.
Thompson married three times, most famously to novelist Sinclair Lewis, whom she met in Europe and married in 1928; the two apparently shared an intense, often stormy relationship and had a son, Michael. Their marriage, marked by Lewis’s alcoholism and the strains of two demanding careers, ended in divorce
She continued writing and speaking into the 1950s, though her prominence gradually waned as the political landscape shifted from anti‑fascism to Cold War debates. Thompson died of a heart attack in 1961 at the age of 66, her career standing as a landmark example for future generations of female journalists. As one of her contemporaries once said of her: “Not only does she cross the ice but [she] breaks it as she goes.” ◼