Dorothy
Thompson was born in Lancaster, New York, in 1894. While studying
at Syracuse University she became a suffragist
and was involved in the campaign to obtain the vote for women.
After
the First World War Thompson went to Europe
to become a freelance writer. After working for the Philadelphia
Public Ledger the New
York Post appointed
her head of its Berlin bureau in Germany.
In
1928 Thompson married novelist Sinclair
Lewis.
After interviewing Adolf Hitler in 1931
she wrote about the dangers of him winning power in Germany. A strong
opponent of Hitler and his government, in 1934 Thompson became the
first American correspondent to be expelled from Nazi
Germany.
On
her return to the United States Thompson joined
the New York Tribune and in
1936 began writing a newspaper column, On
the Record. The following year she began broadcasting for
the NBC. Thompson also wrote for the Ladies'
Home Journal and
developed such a large following that Time
Magazine called her the second most popular woman in America,
after Eleanor
Roosevelt.
Thompson
lost her job with the New York Tribune
after endorsing Franklin
D. Roosevelt for
a third term. Books by Thompson included New
Russia, (1928), I Saw Hitler!
(1932), Anarchy or Organization
(1938), Let the Record Speak (1939),
and The Courage to be Happy (1957).
Dorothy Thompson died in 1961.
(1)
Dorothy Thompson, radio broadcast
on Herschel
Grynzspan (14th November,
1938)
A week ago today an anaemic-looking boy with brooding black eyes walked
quietly into the German embassy in the rue de Lille in Paris, asked
to see the ambassador, was shown into the office of the third secretary,
Herr von Rath, and shot him. Herr von Rath died on Wednesday.
I want to talk about that
boy I feel as though I knew him, for in the past five years I have
met so many whose story is the same - the same except for this unique
desperate act. Herschel Grynzspan was one of the hundreds of thousands
of refugees whom the terror east of the Rhine has turned loose in
the world. His permit to stay in Paris had expired. He could not leave
France, for no country would take him in. He could not work because
no country would give him a work permit. So he moved about, hoping
he would not be picked up and deported, only to be deported again,
and yet again.
Sometimes he found a bed with another refugee. Sometimes he huddled
away from the wind under the bridges of the Seine.
He got letters from his
father, who was in Hanover, in Germany. His father was all right.
He still had a little tailoring shop and managed honorably to earn
enough for food and shelter. Maybe he would have sent his son money,
but he was not allowed to send any out of Germany.
Herschel read the newspapers,
and all that he could read filled him with dark anxiety and wild despair.
He read how men, women and children, driven out of the Sudentenland
by a conquering army - conquering with the consent of Great Britain
and France - had been forced to cross the border into Czechoslovakia
on their hands and knees - and then had been ordered out of that dismembered
country, that, shorn of her richest lands and factories, did not know
how to feed the mouths that were left.
He read that Jewish children
had been stood on platforms in front of classes of German children
and had had their features pointed to and described by the teacher
as marks of a criminal race. He read
that men and women of his race, amongst them scholars and a general
decorated for his bravery had been forced to wash the streets, while
the mob laughed. There were men of his race, whom he had been taught
to venerate - scientists and educators and scholars who once had been
honored by their country. He read that they had been driven from their
posts. He heard that the Nazi government had started all this because
they said the Jews had made them lose the World War. But Herschel
had not even been born when the World War ended. He was seventeen
years old.
Herschel had a pistol.
I don't know why he had it. Maybe he had bought it somewhere thinking
to use it on himself, if the worst came to the worst. Thousands of
men and women of his race had killed themselves in the last years,
rather than live like hunted animals. Still, he lived on.
Then, a few days ago,
he got a letter from his father. His father told him that he had been
summoned from his bed, and herded with thousands of others into a
train of box cars, and shipped over the border, into Poland. He had
not been allowed to take any of his meager savings with him. Just
fifty cents. "I am penniless," he wrote to his son.
This was the end. Herschel
fingered his pistol and thought: "Why doesn't someone do something!
Why must we be chased around the earth like animals!" Herschel
was wrong. Animals are not chased around the world like this. In every
country there are societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals.
But there are none for the prevention of cruelty to people. Herschel
thought of the people responsible for this terror. Right in Paris
were some, who were the official representatives of these responsible
people. Maybe he thought that assassination is an honorable profession
in these days. He knew, no doubt, that the youths who murdered the
Austrian Chancellor Dollfuss are heroes in Nazi Germany, as are the
murderers of Rathenau. Maybe he remembered that only four years ago
the Nazi Leader himself had caused scores of men to be assassinated
without a trial, and had justified it simply by saying that he was
the law. And so Herschel walked into the German embassy and shot Herr
von Rath. Herschel made no attempt to escape. Escape was out of the
question anyhow.
Available from Amazon Books
(order below)
