Sunday Pages: "Who Goes Nazi?"

An essay by Dorothy Thompson.

Dear Reader,

No American was more vociferously opposed to fascism than the foreign correspondent turned columnist and radio broadcaster Dorothy Thompson. She was the original head of Antifa—the O.G. “Auntie Fa.”

From her press-box seat in Berlin, she watched as Adolf Hitler consolidated power in Germany. When, after years of futile trying, she was finally able to pin down the leader of the burgeoning Nazi Party for an interview in 1931, the article she wrote about the experience for Cosmopolitan, and the expansion of that article that became her 1932 book I Saw Hitler!, so thoroughly humiliated her subject that Hitler personally ordered her expelled from the country—the 1930s equivalent of being blocked on Twitter by Donald Trump. Talk about a badge of honor!

Here is a snippet of what she wrote about Hitler:

So I went to see not a little political leader, but a probable dictator “as certain to come to power as that I stand here,” he had told some newspaper men a few days before. A man who owns an army. A man who terrorizes the streets. A man who predicts the constitution of a new dangerous, and awakened Germany.

I was a little nervous. I considered taking smelling salts.

And Hitler was late. An hour late. Waiting in the upstairs foyer of the Kaiserhof Hotel I saw him shoot by, on the way to his rooms, accompanied by a body-guard who looked rather like Al Capone. Minutes passed. Half an hour....

When finally I walked into Adolf Hitler’s salon in the Kaiserhof Hotel, I was convinced that I was meeting the future dictator of Germany. In something less than fifty seconds I was quite sure that I was not.

It took just about that time to measure the startling insignificance of this man who has set the world agog.

He is formless, almost faceless, a man whose countenance is a caricature, a man whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones. He is inconsequent and voluble, ill-poised, insecure. He is the very prototype of the Little Man.

And, later: “Adolf Hitler’s tragedy is that he has risen too high. In the seats of the mighty, the Little Man, lusty for power, nevertheless feels insecure.”

It’s almost like Adolf was triggered by a woman calling him small!

And by eighty-sixing her from Germany, he was essentially proving her assessment of his gaping insecurity correct. “As far as I can see, I was really put out of Germany for the crime of blasphemy,” Thompson remarked when she made it back to the States. “My offense was to think that Hitler is just an ordinary man, after all. That is a crime in the reigning cult in Germany, which says Mr. Hitler is a Messiah sent of God to save the German people.”

Once home, Thompson became even louder in her antifascist advocacy. Example: She attended the February 1939 rally of the German American Bund at Madison Square Garden—the precursor to Trump’s recent Nazi rally at the same venue. She sat up close to the stage and ruthlessly heckled the speakers, until security escorted her out. Nowadays this would be filmed on an iPhone and blasted all over social media under some clickbait title like “Watch this famous reporter EVISCERATE Nazis,” but she had to make due with some photographs and newspaper coverage.

I should add that Thompson was, at the time, probably the most influential woman in the country, excepting Eleanor Roosevelt. She had great sway. Her words mattered. She inspired, and probably cajoled, her then-husband Sinclair Lewis to write It Can’t Happen Here, his 1936 bestseller about a strongman taking power in the United States. She never let the fight go.

In August 1941—almost two full years after Hitler invaded Poland but four months before Pearl Harbor compelled the United States to enter the war—Thompson published a famous piece in Harper’s Magazine called “Who Goes Nazi?” It’s been making the social-media rounds again this week, for obvious reasons. She is an incredible writer. Her work is smart, insightful, and beautifully composed; her voice distinct. This is someone you wish you could go have drinks with and talk to about the world. As a frame for analyzing who goes to the Dark Side and why, she concocts in her piece “an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi.”

What’s so incredible about this piece written over eight decades ago is how on the nose it still is. Thompson constructs a dinner party, and takes us around the room, introducing us to the various attendees, and explains why they would or would not “go Nazi.” Macabre, indeed.

“Nazism,” she argues,

has nothing to do with race and nationality. It appeals to a certain type of mind. . . Sometimes I think there are direct biological factors at work—a type of education, feeding, and physical training which has produced a new kind of human being with an imbalance in his nature. He has been fed vitamins and filled with energies that are beyond the capacity of his intellect to discipline. He has been treated to forms of education which have released him from inhibitions. His body is vigorous. His mind is childish. His soul has been almost completely neglected.

As I don’t even need to point out, that accurately characterizes a healthy percentage of MAGA. Speaking of which, two of the gone-Nazi partygoers Thompson describes leapt out at me. First up, this jerkoff:

I think young D over there is the only born Nazi in the room. Young D is the spoiled only son of a doting mother. He has never been crossed in his life. He spends his time at the game of seeing what he can get away with. He is constantly arrested for speeding and his mother pays the fines. He has been ruthless toward two wives and his mother pays the alimony. His life is spent in sensation-seeking and theatricality. He is utterly inconsiderate of everybody. He is very good-looking, in a vacuous, cavalier way, and inordinately vain. He would certainly fancy himself in a uniform that gave him a chance to swagger and lord it over others.

I mean, she even gets the letter right—the “D” here is clearly short for “Donald.” And yes, there are trace details that aren’t the same—Trump is not an only child; he was ruthless to three wives, not two—but it’s still a spot-on description of the Orange Grover Cleveland.

But wait! Thompson also tells us about Trump’s running mate, JD Vance:

The saturnine man over there talking with a lovely French emigree is already a Nazi. Mr. C is a brilliant and embittered intellectual. He was a poor white-trash Southern boy, a scholarship student at two universities where he took all the scholastic honors but was never invited to join a fraternity. His brilliant gifts won for him successively government positions, partnership in a prominent law firm, and eventually a highly paid job as a Wall Street adviser. He has always moved among important people and always been socially on the periphery. . .

He is a snob, loathing his own snobbery. He despises the men about him. . . But his contempt is inextricably mingled with envy. Even more than he hates the class into which he has insecurely risen, does he hate the people from whom he came. . . .

Pity he has utterly erased from his nature, and joy he has never known. He has an ambition, bitter and burning. It is to rise to such an eminence that no one can ever again humiliate him. Not to rule but to be the secret ruler, pulling the strings of puppets created by his brains. Already some of them are talking his language—though they have never met him.

There he sits: he talks awkwardly rather than glibly; he is courteous. He commands a distant and cold respect. But he is a very dangerous man. Were he primitive and brutal he would be a criminal—a murderer. But he is subtle and cruel. He would rise high in a Nazi regime. It would need men just like him—intellectual and ruthless. But Mr. C is not a born Nazi. He is the product of a democracy hypocritically preaching social equality and practicing a carelessly brutal snobbery. He is a sensitive, gifted man who has been humiliated into nihilism. He would laugh to see heads roll.

But inflation, amirite?

I remember the first time I read the piece, a few years ago, worrying that Thompson might classify me as a potential Nazi. (She has a way of writing that makes one want to meet her approval, even from beyond the grave.) As it turns out, irrational concern that a long-dead writer would peg you for a fascist is a strong indicator that you aren’t one. “Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi,” she assures us. “Believe me, nice people don’t go Nazi.”

That sums it up perfectly, right? The MAGA ethos, the entire Trump movement, can be distilled to those two words: NOT NICE. (What’s the Greek for “rule by jerks?” Assholocracy?)

When I decided to write about Thompson for this week’s “Sunday Pages,” I knew nothing about her. The more I read about this marvel of a human being, the more I liked her—and the more I wish, frankly, that she were still alive. What a role model! Would that we were all as clear-eyed, as resolute, as unafraid.

I Saw Hitler! is only 35 pages long. It’s of particular interest at this precise moment in U.S. history because the interview took place in 1931—before Hitler came to power, before the Enabling Act, before the invasion of Poland and Belgium and France, before the Holocaust. She doesn’t view him as a monster, as we do (well, as those of us who aren’t Nazis do). She views him as a twerp.

I encourage you to read the whole thing—again, the relevance of what she’s writing about here cannot be understated—but here are some interesting takeaways.

First, the derivation of the party’s name:

The German nationalists were too reactionary. Their politics were those of the great landlord. The Nazis were aiming at the man who was like Hitler himself, the small middle-class voter. Socialism was international, and therefore, for them, anathema. But it had elements which he could use. Hence he called his plan national socialism.

And her accurate conclusion that the party’s platforms are built on lies and nonsensical bullshit. Hitler’s “social and economic theory is, to a halfway educated person, a tale told by an idiot. Compare it with Lenin’s consequent communism and revolutionary program, glittering with intellect!” Thompson continues:

But reason never yet swept a world off its feet, and Hitler, an agitator of genius, knows this. Self-interest, expressed in the most pathetic terms, does. Hitler is the most golden tongued of demagogues. Don’t bother about the fact that what he says, read next day in cold newsprints, is usually plain nonsense. . .

It doesn’t, you see, makes sense.

But if you want to gauge the strength of the Hitler movement, imagine that in America, an orator with the tongue of the late Mr. Bryan and the histrionic powers of Aimee MacPherson, combined with the publicity gifts of Edward Bernays and Ivy Lee should manage to unite all the farmers, with all the white collar unemployed, all the people with salaries under $3000 a year who have lost their savings in bank collapses and the stock market and are being pressed for payments on the icebox and the radio, the louder evangelical preachers, the American Legion, the D.A.R., the Ku Klux Klan, the W.C.T.U. [Woman’s Christian Temperance Union], [anti-regulatory union leader] Matthew Woll, [the isolationist] Senator Borah, and Henry Ford—imagine that, and you will have some idea of what the Hitler movement in Germany means.

I don’t need to tell you that Trump has done what Hitler did, in the same way Hitler did it, by cultivating the same constituencies that Hitler cultivated. And I shall be so bold as to predict that when he takes power this time, Donald will fully channel his inner Adolf, like so:

On the subject of the constitution Hitler was more explicit, though there again, I had to interrupt and address to an unseen gallery. “I will get into power legally. I will abolish this parliament and the Weimar constitution afterward. I will found an authority-state, from the lowest cell to the highest instance; everywhere there will be responsibility and authority above, discipline and obedience below.”

So that’s that for the Republic.

In Words of Warning, the biographer Peter Kurth writes: “Later, when the full force of Nazism had crashed over Europe, Thompson was asked to defend her ‘Little Man’ remark. ‘I still believe he is a Little Man,’ she replied. ‘He is the apotheosis of the Little Man.’ Nazism itself was ‘the apotheosis of collective mediocrity in all its forms.’”

As Hitler, so Trump; as Nazi, so MAGA.

Thompson was right about Hitler being a Little Man, right about his insecurity, right about how he hated Vienna and socialists because the socialists he worked with in Vienna thought he was a weirdo and laughed at him, right about how the humiliation he felt at their laughter was the catalyst for everything evil that came later—rather like how thin-skinned Donald being brutally roasted by Obama at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner activated the darkness inside him.

But she got stuff wrong, too. In the 1932 book, Thompson underestimated Hitler. She can see, plain as the (terrible mustache under the) nose on his face, that he was cipher, a loser, a weirdo. He was the Great Depression version of a creepy rightwing podcaster, a proto-Nick Fuentes. She saw it, and she assumed that because she could see it, everyone else could, too. Ach, leider nein, too many people could not see the Mark of the Beast in the Magic Eye picture.

Dorothy Thompson made the same mistake many of us, myself very much included, made in her assessment of the resident strongman: she believed the German people would be sophisticated enough to see through Hitler’s grotesque lies, just like we all believed the American people would be sophisticated enough to see through Trump’s. So confident was she in her conviction that the Germans would reject this little twerp that, as she sat in Hitler’s salon at the Kaiserhof Hotel, she was practically laughing in his face.

In the end, things weren’t so funny.

By 1932, Adolf had, like Donald, already attempted a coup and failed; unlike Donald, Adolf went to prison for it. Thompson writes:

Mr. Hitler “sat” for a few months. As I recall it, he got a fifteen year sentence. But assassination and political conspiracy have been cheap in Germany during the past twelve years. He was out in a short time.

Out, but somehow a changed man. Gone “legal.” No longer was there to be a march on Berlin. The people were to “awaken” and Hitler’s movement was going to vote dictatorship in! In itself a fascinating idea. Imagine a would-be dictator setting out to persuade a sovereign people to vote away their rights.

Ah, but Dorothy, we don’t need to imagine it. We just did it. We voted away our rights. And very soon, “Who Goes Nazi?” will become more than just a parlor game.

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PROGRAMMING NOTES

Thanks to all the new subscribers, and welcome! As a bit of context: “Sunday Pages” is a weekly segment at PREVAIL where I write about, usually, poetry, literature, art, film, TV, and other artistic things I find beautiful and moving.

Tonight, LB and I will be in New York’s East Village at out first-ever Five 8 live event. There are still tickets available, so please come out if you’re around. It’s going to be a special evening centered on community, with great guests lined up.

And while I was hoping that my book, Rough Beast, would be rendered obsolete on November 5th, now, alas, the middle chapters about Project 2025 and what Trump plans to do when he re-takes the White House are especially relevant.

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Photo credit: NARA. Dorothy Thompson making the Victory sign in 1940.