THE FIRST TO GO: DOROTHY THOMPSON EXPELLED FROM NAZI BERLIN
This week in Berlin: 26 August 1934
In the early hours of August 26, 1934 the first foreign correspondent - the fearless and outspoken Dorothy Thompson - left Berlin after a day earlier the Nazi secret police, the Gestapo, paid her a visit at the city’s noble hotel, the “Adlon”.
They delivered a letter advising the popular US journalist to go within 24 hours or face forced public expulsion. The Third Reich authorities "for reasons of national self-respect were unable to extend their hospitality".
Dorothy Thompson, reporting from Berlin for the US press in the 1920s and the early 1930s (first for the "Philadelphia Public Ledger" and later for “The New York Times”) was the first American and foreign reporter to have been expelled from Nazi Germany. Her "crime"?
She not only had criticised the Third Reich but she also described Hitler - the freshly crowned deity of the Nazi movement - as "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 and insecure. He is the very prototype of the little man."
Her book "I Saw Hitler", in which in above quote (originally written for the “Harpers Bazaar”) appears, is one of the best accounts and analyses of the Hitler phenomenon and the Nazi politics in Germany ever written.
Thompson, later jokingly referred to as the “American Cassandra” (also the title of her gripping biography), continued to write about the Führer and Germany as such, never easing on any of them.
But it is her “I Saw Hitler"!” that should be considered a must-read for everyone, especially the young - it is as valid and chilling today as it was back then. There are enough inconsequent and voluble, ill poised and insecure men of power out there.
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