GERMANY: Little Man

“He is a little man . . . whose countenance is a caricature of a drummer boy risen too high.”— I Saw Hitler by Dorothy Thompson, 1932.

When hoarse ecstatic Ernst Franz Sedgwick Hanfstaengl goes to his bed at night, one of the things that sets his large ears tingling is the thought that it was due to his persistent efforts that the sharp-eyed wife of Novelist Sinclair Lewis was given a personal interview by the still unrecognized Adolf Hitler in 1931. The thin booklet that resulted from that interview has made Brownshirts see red ever since.

Last week Mrs. Dorothy Thompson Lewis arrived in Berlin, and as a representative of the Saturday Evening Post put up at the Adlon. Her registration blank went from the hotel to the police, from the police to the secret service. In a few hours a very polite young man in civilian clothes arrived with his hat in one hand and an official letter in the other. It might or might not have been signed by Paul Joseph Goebbels, but it did ask Mrs. Lewis to leave Germany within 24 hours. If she desired, she might have an additional 24 hours leeway. At the end of that time she would be escorted to the frontier by the police.

This was the first time that an accredited U. S. correspondent had been officially ordered out of the country since Nazis came to power. Mrs. Lewis packed her belongings, summoned all her confreres of the U. S. Press to her hotel, announced:

“I should like to point out that [the book on Hitler] was written some time before Mr. Hitler became Chancellor. It is difficult to see how an adverse impression at that time could be interpreted as an attack on Germany.”

Down to the railway station next clay to see Mrs. Lewis off on the Etoile du Nord went practically every foreign correspondent in Berlin. There they filled her arms with great sheaves of American Beauty roses.