"I saw Hitler!"

In 1931, American journalist Dorothy Thompson secured a rare interview with Adolf Hitler at Berlin’s Kaiserhof Hotel, during the rise of Germany’s Nazi Party. During the meeting she asked a pointed question: “When you come to power, will you abolish the constitution of the German Republic?” His answer was stark: “I will get into power legally. I will abolish this parliament and the Weimar constitution afterward. I will found an authority-state… everywhere there will be responsibility above, discipline and obedience below.” Thompson, who had been tracking the Nazi movement since the early 1920s, was deeply familiar with Hitler’s speeches, his book Mein Kampf, and the political networks around him. After the interview she reflected on how her first impression—“I was convinced that I was meeting the future dictator of Germany… in something like fifty seconds I was quite sure that I was not” —other sources quote her describing him as “inconsequent and voluble, ill-poised, insecure—the very prototype of the Little Man.” Although she recognised Hitler’s propaganda skills and oratory, she underestimated the speed and scale of his rise: she later warned how easily democracies can be persuaded to surrender rights to a leader who channels people’s anxieties into hatred and promises greatness. After Hitler came to power in 1933 and began to suppress his opponents and persecute targeted groups, Thompson’s reporting became a clarion call. The Nazi regime eventually expelled her in August 1934 — she became the first American journalist banned from Nazi Germany. Back in the United States, she used her syndicated column and radio broadcasts to alert readers to the danger of fascism, at home and abroad.