November 14: Defending Herschel Grynszpan

Dorothy Thompson, known as “The First Lady of American Journalism,” offered an impassioned defense on NBC radio of Herschel Grynszpan, the Polish-German Jewish assassin of Nazi diplomat Ernst vom Rath, on this date in 1938. Grynszpan’s crime was in retaliation for the suffering and deportation from Germany of his parents (among thousands of other Polish Jews); the Nazis used the assassination as their pretext for launching Kristallnacht, a two-day nationwide pogrom in which 30,000 Jewish men were arrested. Thompson’s broadcast, only four days after Kristallnacht, was heard by millions of Americans and helped to mobilize public opinion against the Nazi regime. Thompson, who was not Jewish, had interviewed Hitler in 1931 and described him as “inconsequent and voluble, ill poised and insecure. He is the very prototype of the little man.” The Nazis ejected her from Germany three years later. After the war, she renounced the pro-Zionist opinions of her younger days, became a sharp critic of Israel, and wrote and made a film about the plight of Palestinian refugees.

“Peace is not the absence of conflict, but the presence of creative alternatives for responding to conflict.” —Dorothy Thompson