What the Press Got Wrong About Hitler
Journalists accurately reported that the führer was a “Little Man” whom the whole world was laughing at. It didn’t matter.
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March 21, 2025
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One of the greatest journalistic misapprehensions of all time was made by one of the greatest journalists of all time. In December 1931, the legendary American reporter Dorothy Thompson secured an interview with Adolf Hitler, whose National Socialist party had recently surged in the polls, bringing him from the fringe of German politics to the cusp of political power.
“When I walked into Adolf Hitler’s room, I was convinced that I was meeting the future dictator of Germany,” Thompson recalled afterward. “In something like 50 seconds, I was quite sure he was not. It took just about that time to measure the startling insignificance of this man who has set the world agog.” Within a year, Hitler was chancellor.
We have come to view Hitler’s path to the chancellorship, and ultimately to dictatorship, as inexorable, and Hitler himself as a demonic force of human nature who defied every law of political gravity—not as the man of “startling insignificance” Thompson encountered in the second-floor corner office of the Brown House, the Nazi Party headquarters in Munich, that day. But Thompson was hardly alone in her assessment. Much of the German press, most international correspondents, and many political observers—along with a majority of ordinary Germans—drew similar conclusions about the Nazi leader. Which brings up the question: How did so many reporters and other contemporary observers get Hitler so wrong?
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About the Author
Timothy W. Ryback is a historian and director of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation in The Hague. He is the author of several books on Hitler’s Germany, most recently Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power. (Author photo by Anne de Henning)
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