You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones. My guest today is my colleague Deborah Friedel, a contributing editor at the LRB,

who has a piece in the current issue on Dorothy Thompson, the first American journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany. The piece is a response to two books, the newspaper access,

six press barons who enabled Hitler by Catherine Olmsted, and last call at the Hotel Imperial,

the reporters who took on a world at war by Deborah Cohen.

Hello, Deborah.

Thank you very much for joining me again.

Hello, Tom.

So shall we begin with that moment in 34 when Dorothy Thompson was expelled by the Nazis?

How did that come about?

So in 1931, when Dorothy Thompson's a reporter from America, mostly based in Central Europe, she gets a coup.

After more than seven years of trying to get an interview with Hitler, she's granted an audience.

And this is rare.

Hitler doesn't usually let foreign reporters talk to him. And she's told she has to submit questions in advance, only three. She's very nervous. She goes to talk to him. And immediately she just thinks, this man's a busted flesh. No way. He's hysterical. She says he pounds the table. She can't get a coherent answer out of him.

And she writes an article that then becomes a book that pretty much says, not to worry. This man isn't going anywhere.

And she also implies that he's homosexual, which might well be the bit that annoys the Nazis more than anything else. It's vague so we can conjecture. There's another theory that the Nazis didn't like that she had sometimes contributed to Jewish publications. But almost certainly it's because of this book that she published.

And how had she got to this position to be the one reporter who was able to get an interview with Hitler?

So she's born in 1893 in upstate New York. Her father's a Methodist minister from Durham. He moved to New York State to

minister to English and German immigrants. Her mother dies when she's very young, almost certainly

from septicemia caused by a botched illegal abortion. The father remarries, Dorothy Thompson doesn't get along with

her stepmother. She's sent to Chicago to live with relatives. She's one of very few women at the time

to go to university. And when she graduates, she works for the women's suffrage movement.

American women aren't granted the right to vote

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