Brooke Gladstone: This is On The Media's midweek podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone. For these last couple of weeks of August, we've been airing a miniseries from our friends at Radio Diaries, profiles of three controversial radio personalities who had huge audiences in their day, but today are largely forgotten. The third and final part is about a woman named Dorothy Thompson. In 1939, Time magazine called her a woman who "thinks, talks, and sleeps world problems and scares men half to death." They weren't wrong. Thompson was a foreign correspondent in Germany in the years leading up to the Second World War, and she broadcast to millions of listeners around the world. She became known for her bold commentaries on the rise of Hitler. The Nazis even created a Dorothy Thompson emergency squad to monitor her work. She was an eloquent and opinionated advocate for the principles of democracy. But by the end of the war, those strong opinions put her career in jeopardy.

News clip: The National Broadcasting Company brings you at this time a talk by the noted woman commentator, Dorothy Thompson. Ms. Thompson.

Dorothy Thompson: I don't know how you feel, but I feel as though I'd like to take a little time off to think over and digest what's happened in these last days.

Lesley Dorothy Lewis: My name is Lesley Dorothy Lewis. I'm 63, and I'm hearing my grandmother's voice for the first time. It almost makes me cry.

Dorothy Thompson: The reports from Poland today are that the Germans are attacking fiercely on all fronts, the victims of which are wholly civilian.

Lesley Dorothy Lewis: She was saying some very dark things because it was a very dark subject she was addressing, but it was done in a feminine style. No one had ever heard it done like that before at that time. They had to always hear about a man like Edward R. Morrow or somebody like that.

Dorothy Thompson: I have an idea this war is going to go on being surprising. Let us wait with calmness and see. Good night.

Peter Kurth: I'm Peter Kurth, and I am the author of American Cassandra: The Life of Dorothy Thompson. Dorothy Thompson lived in Berlin, and she first encountered the Nazi movement in the early '20s. No one was taking them all that seriously in terms of their taking power, but she kept her eye on them.

Karine Walther: My name is Karine Walther. I am a professor of history at Georgetown University in Qatar. She comes to interview Hitler in 1931. She writes, "He is formless, almost faceless. He is ill poised, insecure. He is the very prototype of the little man." There's that expression, "Men's greatest fear is to be laughed at by a woman."

News clip: Adolf Hitler, the indomitable Nazi leader, is now Chancellor of Germany. The Nazi movement he created in 1920 has grown into a mighty army.

Peter Kurth: Hitler's first task as Chancellor was to get rid of his rivals. Dorothy was at her hotel in Berlin, and the Gestapo knocked on the hotel door room and handed her papers saying she had 24 hours to leave the country.

Dorothy Thompson: My expulsion from Germany is only interesting insofar as it throws some light upon the position of the foreign correspondent in Germany. It's the business of journalism to report everything that happens.

Peter Kurth: After Dorothy came back to the United States, she was on the airwaves night and day practically.

News clip: Ms. Thompson, whose former position as a foreign correspondent gives her a well defined background for her discussions, will this evening analyze latest developments in Europe.

Peter Kurth: She became identified as the sort of immediate opponent of Hitler. Dorothy versus Hitler. Hitler versus Dorothy Thompson.

Dorothy Thompson: I am an American woman and mother, and I speak for the women of my country. To Adolf Hitler. Shall we congratulate you, Adolf Hitler, that Europe is a shambles.

Peter Kurth: Her broadcast ended up being often appeals to rally and to strengthen in opposition to fascism internationally.

Dorothy Thompson: There are three and a half million Jews in Poland. They know that they won't even be citizens of the Third Reich, but will be treated as citizens of the second class.

Karine Walther: She really understood what Hitler wanted to do, his attack against Jews as a race. That's one of the things that makes her so wonderful at this time because there were clearly so many Americans who were fine with it.

News clip: Ladies and gentlemen, it is my very great privilege to to welcome you to another mass demonstration by the German American Bund.

Peter Kurth: In 1939 there was a huge rally of the German American Bund, an organization of American Nazis gathering at the Madison Square Garden. Dorothy came in and she sat in the front row of the press box, and while these speeches were being made, all she did was burst out laughing and crying things like, "Nonsense," and, "Oh please." The police had to come in because the American Brown Shirts were about to rough her up.

Karine Walther: She made the cover of Time magazine and they said that she and Eleanor Roosevelt were the two most influential women in the United States.

News clip: The war against Germany is won. President Truman announced the official surrender.

President Truman: This is a solemn but glorious hour.

Peter Kurth: After the Second World War, there was a refugee crisis around the Jewish population of Europe.

News clip: These are the final blows of a long persecution which has been forcing Jews out of Germany by tens of thousands. 6,000 to America. 23,000 to Palestine.

Peter Kurth: Dorothy was an avid, convinced, devoted Zionist, but she hadn't been there.

Karine Walther: She goes to visit Palestine. In the summer of 1945.

Peter Kurth: She saw nothing but internment camps, refugees of the Palestinian population being forced off their own land and put into other lands that had been designated for them.

Karine Walther: It reminded her of the kind of hatred and violence that she had seen in Germany. She comes back and she says this, "The Zionist project is not what I was led to believe. It is not going to grant equal rights for Arabs."

Peter Kurth: She basically switched sides on that issue. She said, an establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine was a recipe for perpetual war.

Dorothy Thompson: I am Dorothy Thompson. I have recently returned from visiting the scenes of the [unintelligible 00:07:26] you are about to see.

Karine Walther: She participates in a documentary that is made to raise funds for Palestinian refugees called the Sands of Sorrow.

News clip: Today in the Near East, a suffering people, the Palestine Arab refugees, are struggling for survival.

Dorothy Thompson: Financial assistance is urgently needed. I greatly hope you will want to give what you can.

Peter Kurth: This made her terribly unpopular.

Karine Walther: She faces really immediate pushback from American Zionist organizations as well as newspaper editors who had been publishing her columns, and they accused her of Anti-Semitism.

Peter Kurth: That got her dropped from the New York Post, and she did in fact struggle to find her place after that.

Lesley Dorothy Lewis: I think her opinion cost her career 100%.

Karine Walther: There's a great quote which she makes at the end of her life. "I had to speak out about this, meaning attacks on Palestinian civilians, for the same reason I had to speak out about Hitler. But my Zionist friends do not seem to understand the universality of simple moral principles."

Dorothy Thompson: All of us must ask ourselves what it is that we live by. We must pledge renewed allegiance to a great liberal idea. The idea that men of many races and religions can live together in peace with each other.

Brooke Gladstone: Dorothy Thompson died in 1961. She was 67 years old. This story was produced by Mycah Hazel and the Radio Diaries Team. Radio Diaries is a Peabody Award-winning podcast that's been around for nearly 30 years, making first-person non-narrated work about everyday life and hidden histories. Go to their website, radiodiaries.org, and you can listen to more of their stories, decades of them, on the Radio Diaries podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

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