A Front Seat to Hitler’s Rise

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June 11, 2023

The Problem Child of Europe

By Dorothy Thompson

Each Sunday this summer, we’re sharing an essay from the archives that provides a rare first-person account of history as it unfolded. This week, we’re sharing Dorothy Thompson’s 1940 essay on the rise of the Nazi regime in Germany.

In 1934, Thompson became the first American journalist to be expelled from Germany on Adolf Hitler’s order. Six years later, in an essay for Foreign Affairs, she drew on her years reporting in Berlin to try to make sense of the seemingly incomprehensible ascent of the Nazi regime—and the ways in which it had distorted German society. “I was in Germany when the 1933 Nazi revolution occurred. I remember standing with a fellow-journalist on the Grosse Stern in Berlin in April of 1933, watching a regiment of Storm Troopers march by,” she wrote. “One thought, ‘Where, in heaven’s name, did these people come from?’”

Her essay appeared in the pages of Foreign Affairs just weeks before German troops began their invasion of western Europe. At that point in time, the Nazis were reaching the peak of their powers, but Thompson recalled they hadn’t always appeared so formidable. As parts of German society were radicalized by Hitler, she remembered feeling a sense of pity. “A madman is a sad spectacle,” she wrote. She didn’t take Hitler very seriously, either. “One dismissed him, still clinging to the concept of ‘normal,’ not wondering what might happen if such a man, surrounded by others with a capacity for organization, should come to the surface in a society which shared his own symptoms, a society which was also frustrated and sick.”

Thompson recounted the roots of the societal trauma and upheaval that paved the way for Hitler’s rule, from Germany’s loss in World War I to the hyperinflation of the 1920s, in which money “simply vanished.” The Nazi regime, she warned, had emerged from “a kind of psychological vacuum from which all values had been obliterated,” a “belief in nothing” that posed the greatest danger the West had ever faced. ”

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