WEBVTT - Hitler’s Olympics, Part 1: The Blue-Eyed Tornado 0:00:08.360 --> 0:00:20.680 Pushkin, I think that Hitler is appreciably nearer shooting us, 0:00:21.000 --> 0:00:23.840 and therefore I think we're appreciably nearer replying. 0:00:26.960 --> 0:00:29.760 It's the beginning of the Sycamore War. Just before the 0:00:29.840 --> 0:00:33.800 United States joins the fight. The journalist named Dorothy Thompson 0:00:34.159 --> 0:00:38.760 is speaking to a British television crew. She's standing behind 0:00:38.760 --> 0:00:41.839 a dark wood table, wearing a nipped way suit and blouse, 0:00:42.159 --> 0:00:46.560 one hand perched in her pocket, perfect posture, shoulder length 0:00:46.560 --> 0:00:49.600 hair with a strand of premature white. You can see 0:00:49.600 --> 0:00:51.320 her thinking while she's talking. 0:00:52.159 --> 0:00:54.960 We're very much interested in the part East, We're interested 0:00:54.960 --> 0:00:57.000 in the Pacific, and we're interested in the Atlantic. 0:00:58.680 --> 0:01:03.880 Thompson was a foreign cars despondent in the nineteen twenties Vienna, Berlin, Dublin, Paris. 0:01:04.280 --> 0:01:08.200 This is the heyday of newspapers. Every paper of consequence 0:01:08.440 --> 0:01:11.400 across the Western world had somewhere in Europe, and they 0:01:11.400 --> 0:01:15.480 all knew each other, drank together, descended on war zones together, 0:01:16.200 --> 0:01:18.240 and Dorothy Thompson was the star. 0:01:19.560 --> 0:01:22.800 And as this war becomes more and more becomes more 0:01:22.800 --> 0:01:24.360 and more clear that this war is going to be 0:01:24.400 --> 0:01:27.640 a world war, we come nearer to being actively involved. 0:01:29.760 --> 0:01:32.600 Because these were different times. There was always discussion of 0:01:32.640 --> 0:01:36.760 Thompson's physical beauty, the flawless skin, her radiance. One of 0:01:36.800 --> 0:01:41.800 her nicknames was the blue eyed Tornado. She was brilliant, indefatigable, 0:01:42.240 --> 0:01:45.840 unshakably self assured, and that voice. 0:01:46.920 --> 0:01:49.280 But after all, the ideological basis of this war was 0:01:49.400 --> 0:01:51.400 very well set by mister Nevill Chamberlain at the very 0:01:51.440 --> 0:01:53.960 beginning of it when he said, if I remember correctly, 0:01:54.520 --> 0:01:57.320 if I should think that one man and one nation 0:01:57.640 --> 0:01:59.960 should wish to dominate the world, I should think he 0:02:00.080 --> 0:02:03.120 ought to be stopped. That's the way America feels about. 0:02:02.960 --> 0:02:03.280 It, too. 0:02:04.640 --> 0:02:08.200 Remember that voice. Over the course of the next eight episodes, 0:02:08.560 --> 0:02:09.960 you're going to hear the voices of a lot of 0:02:10.000 --> 0:02:13.280 people from that same era, the long years before the 0:02:13.320 --> 0:02:17.120 Second World War, some more powerful than Dorothy Thompson, more 0:02:17.160 --> 0:02:21.120 self important, more strident, but none who saw the world 0:02:21.120 --> 0:02:30.600 so clearly. Dorothy Thompson is our north star. One of 0:02:30.600 --> 0:02:34.200 my strongest childhood memories was the nineteen seventy six Olympics 0:02:34.240 --> 0:02:39.360 in Montreal, my homeland's first Olympic Games. I was a kid. 0:02:39.800 --> 0:02:42.520 My family didn't have a television, but we rented one 0:02:42.600 --> 0:02:46.000 just for the occasion two rabbit ears on top of 0:02:46.000 --> 0:02:48.640 a grainy black and white set. We put the TV 0:02:48.720 --> 0:02:51.359 in the fireplace because there was no other place for it, 0:02:51.800 --> 0:02:57.520 and I watched everything. The Romanian Nadya Komenitch bewitching the world. 0:02:57.560 --> 0:03:02.840 In gymnastics, my running hero John Walker powering away around 0:03:02.840 --> 0:03:05.359 the final curve to win the men's fifteen hundred meters. 0:03:05.919 --> 0:03:10.400 I still get nervous thinking about that race, Lassie Van's 0:03:10.520 --> 0:03:14.399 improbable double in the five thousand meters and the ten 0:03:14.440 --> 0:03:18.400 thousand meters. Alberto want to rena Cornelia ender don Qurey 0:03:19.120 --> 0:03:23.440 on the women's forby one hundred freestyle relay, maybe the 0:03:23.480 --> 0:03:31.800 greatest swimming race ever. I was a little kid and 0:03:31.840 --> 0:03:33.960 I fell in love with the Olympics, and I've been 0:03:34.000 --> 0:03:38.280 in love ever since. This summer in Paris, I will 0:03:38.320 --> 0:03:43.000 be glued to my television again, and this thing that 0:03:43.080 --> 0:03:45.960 I love and that so many millions of people around 0:03:45.960 --> 0:03:49.520 the world love, would not exist if the Olympics had 0:03:49.520 --> 0:03:54.600 not been held in nineteen thirty six in Adolf Hitler's Germany. 0:03:58.200 --> 0:04:01.400 The modern Olympics started in eighteen ninety six, and if 0:04:01.440 --> 0:04:03.960 you've gone to any of those early games, you'd think 0:04:04.000 --> 0:04:06.320 you were at some kind of side show. They never 0:04:06.360 --> 0:04:09.320 really took off. Forty six countries showed up for the 0:04:09.400 --> 0:04:12.920 nineteen twenty eight Games, Thirty seven showed up with the 0:04:12.960 --> 0:04:16.560 next Games. Only one country applied to hosts the nineteen 0:04:16.600 --> 0:04:19.960 thirty two Games. No one else wanted it. The Olympic 0:04:20.040 --> 0:04:25.320 dream was fading, but then came Berlin. It was the 0:04:25.400 --> 0:04:28.240 Nazis who gave us the Olympics we have today. They 0:04:28.240 --> 0:04:30.480 were really really good at putting on a big show. 0:04:30.800 --> 0:04:34.400 Berlin was the first Olympics to be televised, the first 0:04:34.480 --> 0:04:37.359 to have a torch relay at the opening ceremony, the 0:04:37.440 --> 0:04:41.440 first to create a genuine international star Jesse Owens, the 0:04:41.480 --> 0:04:44.480 first to understand that the Games were a spectacle. 0:04:45.120 --> 0:04:49.000 At first, Hitler himself was opposed to the Olympics. 0:04:49.480 --> 0:04:51.800 The historian David Walachinski. 0:04:51.440 --> 0:04:54.320 It didn't interest in him. It was an international event 0:04:54.720 --> 0:04:59.520 people from all over. But Joseph Gerbels said, no, we 0:04:59.520 --> 0:05:03.320 can use this. This will be good propaganda for us, 0:05:04.000 --> 0:05:07.000 and so they began promoting the Olympics. 0:05:07.720 --> 0:05:11.160 Hitler used the Games to demonstrate his theories of Aryan supremacy, 0:05:11.360 --> 0:05:14.359 to rally the German people to give legitimacy to the 0:05:14.360 --> 0:05:16.960 band of thugs he had gathered about him to make 0:05:17.000 --> 0:05:21.080 the case that Germany was a true world power, and 0:05:21.160 --> 0:05:27.680 the United States went along with all of it. Why 0:05:28.600 --> 0:05:35.360 that's the story of Hitler's Olympics. H I'm Malcolm Gladwell. 0:05:35.520 --> 0:05:39.560 You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked 0:05:39.880 --> 0:05:44.880 and misunderstood. Welcome to Hitler's Olympics, the story of how 0:05:44.880 --> 0:05:49.800 we ended up with the Nazi Olympics. Over the next 0:05:49.800 --> 0:05:52.359 eight weeks, my colleague bend At A. F. Haffrey and 0:05:52.400 --> 0:05:55.520 I will tell the story of the games behind the 0:05:55.520 --> 0:05:59.200 greatest of all Olympic Games. Not who won what, not 0:05:59.240 --> 0:06:01.880 what's stirring? Come from behind, burst of effort led to 0:06:01.920 --> 0:06:05.840 an improbable victory. Instead, I want to talk about the 0:06:05.880 --> 0:06:10.279 furious machinations leading up to the Olympics and the genuinely 0:06:10.360 --> 0:06:14.960 difficult moral questions that surrounded the Berlin Games, questions that 0:06:15.080 --> 0:06:18.400 I think we're still trying to make sense of. And 0:06:18.480 --> 0:06:20.800 along the way, we're going to introduce you to an 0:06:20.800 --> 0:06:25.040 oddcast of characters, people who tried and largely failed to 0:06:25.080 --> 0:06:29.719 resolve those questions. Heroes and villains, the clear eyed and 0:06:29.760 --> 0:06:35.680 the deluded, the forgotten, and the misunderstood. But we have 0:06:35.760 --> 0:06:38.160 to begin with the person who may have seen the 0:06:38.200 --> 0:06:41.760 problem of nineteen thirty six more clearly than anyone else. 0:06:43.120 --> 0:06:56.160 Dorothy Thompson. Thompson was born in western New York in 0:06:56.200 --> 0:06:59.320 eighteen ninety three, just outside of Buffalo. Her mother died 0:06:59.320 --> 0:07:02.279 when she was Her father was a Methodist minister, but 0:07:02.320 --> 0:07:05.240 a bad one who drifted from church to church. Her 0:07:05.320 --> 0:07:09.240 childhood was hand in mouth. She hated her stepmother. Somehow, 0:07:09.320 --> 0:07:11.960 she ended up at Syracuse University at a time when 0:07:12.000 --> 0:07:14.840 not a lot of women were going to college. After graduation, 0:07:15.200 --> 0:07:18.200 she threw herself into the women's suffrage movement, the great 0:07:18.240 --> 0:07:20.840 social cause of progressives of that generation. 0:07:21.400 --> 0:07:24.840 She was committed, passionate advocate of women getting the vote, 0:07:25.080 --> 0:07:27.600 and when they got the vote in nineteen twenty, soon 0:07:27.640 --> 0:07:30.400 afterwards she wanted to pursue a career as a journalist. 0:07:30.760 --> 0:07:34.400 The historian Sarah church Well, she sailed for Europe, didn't 0:07:34.440 --> 0:07:36.920 have anything lined up in advance. She just packed up 0:07:36.920 --> 0:07:38.240 her bags one day and left. 0:07:38.720 --> 0:07:40.880 Suddenly, here she is exposed to this whole host of 0:07:40.920 --> 0:07:43.400 international and global projects and initiatives. 0:07:45.560 --> 0:07:48.520 She makes her mark right away, goes to Ireland, tracks 0:07:48.520 --> 0:07:51.440 down a leader of the Irish independence movement and gets 0:07:51.480 --> 0:07:53.880 the last interview with him before he dies of a 0:07:53.960 --> 0:07:57.760 hunger strike. Next, she goes to Vienna, where she convinces 0:07:57.840 --> 0:08:01.320 the Philadelphia Public Ledger to highire her as a correspondent. 0:08:01.920 --> 0:08:05.680 Dorothy learns German gets promoted to Berlin bureau chief. Then 0:08:05.720 --> 0:08:08.280 comes another step, and another step, and by the end 0:08:08.320 --> 0:08:11.360 of the nineteen thirties, Thompson's column was read by eight 0:08:11.440 --> 0:08:15.080 to ten million people a day, at a time when 0:08:15.120 --> 0:08:17.520 the population of the United States was one hundred and 0:08:17.520 --> 0:08:20.040 thirty million. She was a fixture on the radio, too, 0:08:20.160 --> 0:08:23.160 toured the country the way rock bands to today. During 0:08:23.200 --> 0:08:26.720 one week in nineteen thirty seven, she turned down seven 0:08:27.000 --> 0:08:29.679 hundred speaking requests seven hundred. 0:08:31.520 --> 0:08:35.120 She was so famous that Catherine Hepburn played her in 0:08:35.160 --> 0:08:38.880 the effectively in the first movie that Hepburn made with 0:08:38.920 --> 0:08:41.200 Spencer Tracy, called Woman of the Year is basically the 0:08:41.240 --> 0:08:44.240 story of a Hollywood version of Dorothy Thompson. 0:08:44.640 --> 0:08:48.000 Dorothy Thompson became such a public figure that quips about 0:08:48.000 --> 0:08:50.680 her were part of the culture. She snips her nails 0:08:50.679 --> 0:08:55.600 with indignation. She's discovered the secret of perpetual emotion, and 0:08:55.920 --> 0:09:00.640 most famously this from Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Ted Bell's daughter, 0:09:00.760 --> 0:09:03.120 who said that Thompson is quote the only woman in 0:09:03.200 --> 0:09:05.840 history who has had her menopause in public and made 0:09:05.840 --> 0:09:10.720 it pay, a line, incidentally that Dorothy Thompson found hilarious. 0:09:11.880 --> 0:09:14.880 This is my favorite Dorothy Thompson's story. One night in 0:09:14.920 --> 0:09:17.640 nineteen twenty six, She's coming back from the opera in 0:09:17.720 --> 0:09:20.640 Vienna when she hears there's been a coup in Poland, 0:09:21.080 --> 0:09:23.760 there's a knight trained to warsaw, and the whole foreign 0:09:23.800 --> 0:09:27.560 correspondent crew is racing niked on it. Dorothy doesn't have 0:09:27.600 --> 0:09:29.679 time to get back to her apartment, so she has 0:09:29.720 --> 0:09:33.280 her secretary fetch her typewriter and a traveling bag. The 0:09:33.320 --> 0:09:35.679 bigger problem is she doesn't have any money for the 0:09:35.760 --> 0:09:40.400 journey and the banks are closed. So who does she call, Remember, 0:09:40.800 --> 0:09:44.920 it's Vienna in nineteen twenty six. Sigmund Freud. Of course, 0:09:45.600 --> 0:09:48.080 he's a good friend. And by the way, everyone who 0:09:48.120 --> 0:09:51.200 is anyone was friends with Dorothy Thompson. So Freud pulls 0:09:51.320 --> 0:09:53.679 a stack of cash out of his safe and sends 0:09:53.679 --> 0:09:56.800 his driver to the train station. Dorothy jumps on the 0:09:56.840 --> 0:09:59.000 train biqu She's made it. 0:10:00.080 --> 0:10:00.160 Oh. 0:10:00.760 --> 0:10:03.600 They crossed the border into Poland and the train tracks 0:10:03.600 --> 0:10:06.880 are blown out. Dorothy jumps out, Hell's a big damler. 0:10:07.160 --> 0:10:10.240 The driver demands a king's ransom, so Dorothy jumps in 0:10:10.280 --> 0:10:13.600 a ford. The second driver refuses to enter Warsaw when 0:10:13.600 --> 0:10:17.319 he hears the gunfire. Meanwhile, the driver of the first car, 0:10:17.520 --> 0:10:21.240 the Damler, runs into heavy gunfire. His car is riddled 0:10:21.240 --> 0:10:25.559 with bullets. The other correspondents witness the attack and they're inconsolable. 0:10:25.920 --> 0:10:30.400 Dorothy's dead. They wire her obituary back to Vienna, but 0:10:31.160 --> 0:10:34.920 Dorothy is not dead. She's left the ford behind and 0:10:35.080 --> 0:10:38.720 is walking the final few miles into Warsaw, still in 0:10:38.760 --> 0:10:44.000 her ball gown and slippers, and legend has it swearing 0:10:44.040 --> 0:10:50.400 like a sailor. Dorothy had everyone's attention. And what was 0:10:50.480 --> 0:10:53.240 she talking and riding about? Over and over again? In 0:10:53.280 --> 0:10:57.520 the nineteen thirties Adolf Hitler. Long before the world became 0:10:57.559 --> 0:11:01.400 obsessed with Hitler, Dorothy Thompson was obsessed with Hitler. 0:11:01.800 --> 0:11:03.720 So yeah, she always saw that Hitler was a thing 0:11:04.360 --> 0:11:05.720 and that he was the one to watch, and that 0:11:05.760 --> 0:11:08.240 you needed to understand where that was going is. She 0:11:08.280 --> 0:11:10.880 read a lot of history, She read a lot of politics. 0:11:10.920 --> 0:11:13.400 She interviewed everybody to try to get a sense of 0:11:13.440 --> 0:11:15.160 what it was that was going on, and so she 0:11:15.160 --> 0:11:18.120 got to the heart of it in a way that few, 0:11:18.280 --> 0:11:20.880 if any, of her of her contemporaries did. 0:11:21.280 --> 0:11:23.960 A journalist once calculated that by the spring of nineteen 0:11:24.040 --> 0:11:25.920 forty she had written a total of two hundred and 0:11:25.920 --> 0:11:28.520 thirty eight thousand words for her column in the Herald Tribune, 0:11:28.840 --> 0:11:32.040 and one hundred and forty seven thousand of those were 0:11:32.040 --> 0:11:36.800 about Hitler. If I ever divorced Dorothy, her husband, once said, 0:11:37.040 --> 0:11:44.160 I'll name Adolf Hitler as correspondent. Hitler Hitler, Hitler. She 0:11:44.280 --> 0:11:51.400 had to meet the man coming up, the first of 0:11:51.400 --> 0:11:54.160 what will be many meetings with Hitler over the course 0:11:54.200 --> 0:12:04.720 of this series. Before we go any further, I want 0:12:04.720 --> 0:12:07.360 to present an idea that will be useful over the 0:12:07.400 --> 0:12:10.880 next nine episodes. It's one of the most famous psychological 0:12:10.960 --> 0:12:16.240 theories of the twentieth century, Leon Festinger's cognitive dissonance. We've 0:12:16.280 --> 0:12:19.199 talked about it before in the show. It's a psychological 0:12:19.720 --> 0:12:22.960 state of discomfort that occurs when a person holds two 0:12:23.040 --> 0:12:28.600 or more conflicting thoughts, beliefs, or behaviors. Chocolate cake is 0:12:28.640 --> 0:12:31.360 bad for me. I desperately want a piece of chocolate cake. 0:12:31.880 --> 0:12:35.840 That's cognitive dissonance. It's a contradiction between what I believe 0:12:36.000 --> 0:12:39.960 and how I behave infesting and believed that cognitive dissonance 0:12:40.000 --> 0:12:43.800 makes us so uncomfortable that we are compelled to resolve it. 0:12:44.480 --> 0:12:47.360 So you change your behavior to align with your belief 0:12:47.400 --> 0:12:49.360 You say, I'm just not going to eat the cake, 0:12:49.600 --> 0:12:51.719 or I'm going to take just one bite, or I'm 0:12:51.760 --> 0:12:54.040 going to go to the gym afterwards, or you change 0:12:54.080 --> 0:12:57.360 your beliefs to align with your behavior. You tell yourself 0:12:57.559 --> 0:13:01.520 I read somewhere that chocolate cake isn't that fattening. Or 0:13:01.559 --> 0:13:03.800 maybe you try and make the world change its mind 0:13:03.960 --> 0:13:06.320 so they can't judge you. You stand up and say, 0:13:06.440 --> 0:13:09.800 this looks like cake, but it's not actually cake. It's 0:13:09.840 --> 0:13:15.480 cocopatter and sweetener and whipped low calorie cream cheese. If 0:13:15.520 --> 0:13:17.440 you go online, you could find a ton of old, 0:13:17.440 --> 0:13:21.000 black and white videos of psychologists working through the implications 0:13:21.000 --> 0:13:23.240 of Festinger's idea. 0:13:23.480 --> 0:13:27.320 Psychological story of decision making doesn't end, however, when a 0:13:27.360 --> 0:13:28.320 decision has been made. 0:13:28.520 --> 0:13:33.160 That's Philip Simbardo, one of the many psychologists inspired by Festinger's. 0:13:32.520 --> 0:13:36.120 Work, the act of making a decision can trigger a 0:13:36.120 --> 0:13:41.080 flood of other prophecies. According to psychologists Leon Festinger, whenever 0:13:41.120 --> 0:13:44.920 we choose to do something that conflicts with our prior beliefs, feelings, 0:13:45.000 --> 0:13:48.480 or values, a state of cognitive dissonance is created in 0:13:48.640 --> 0:13:51.959 us attention. You change what we think and what we do. 0:13:53.960 --> 0:13:59.239 The Berlin Olympics created cognitive dissonance on a grand geopolitical scale. 0:14:00.320 --> 0:14:04.840 Were an ideal, pure competition, unencumbered by politics, high minded, 0:14:05.080 --> 0:14:08.440 an event created for cross cultural understanding, young men and 0:14:08.480 --> 0:14:12.720 women in perfect physical condition coming together from around the world. 0:14:13.440 --> 0:14:17.040 The founder of the modern Olympic movement was Pierre de Coubertin, 0:14:17.240 --> 0:14:20.480 who would always say, the important thing in life is 0:14:20.520 --> 0:14:23.800 not the triumph of the struggle. The essential thing is 0:14:23.880 --> 0:14:27.360 not to have conquered, but to have fought well. That 0:14:27.560 --> 0:14:30.880 was the belief. But in nineteen thirty six, what was 0:14:30.920 --> 0:14:36.640 the action to participate in the Berlin Games meant? Going 0:14:36.680 --> 0:14:40.760 to Germany, competing in a stadium built by Nazi architects, 0:14:41.160 --> 0:14:45.840 being fodder for Hitler's propaganda chief Joseph Goebels, and helping 0:14:45.840 --> 0:14:49.040 to legitimize a regime that had already started on the 0:14:49.120 --> 0:14:52.400 long anti Semitic path that would end in the Holocaust. 0:14:53.760 --> 0:14:57.280 The Berlin Olympics were brutally dissonant, and in each of 0:14:57.320 --> 0:15:00.080 these episodes, Ben and I will follow how a a 0:15:00.080 --> 0:15:04.560 different person resolved the contradiction, starting with someone who pretty 0:15:04.600 --> 0:15:07.280 much said, if there's a problem with the cake, then 0:15:07.360 --> 0:15:13.560 don't eat the cake. Dorothy Thompson. As early as nineteen 0:15:13.600 --> 0:15:17.040 twenty three, Dorothy Thompson had her sight set on an 0:15:17.040 --> 0:15:20.120 interview with Hitler. This was a decade before he'd come 0:15:20.160 --> 0:15:23.160 to power. Early days in Munich after the so called 0:15:23.200 --> 0:15:26.320 beerhal Putsch, when the young Hitler tried to launch a 0:15:26.360 --> 0:15:30.080 coup against the German government. When that failed, he escaped 0:15:30.080 --> 0:15:33.640 to a hideaway in the Bavarian Alps. Thompson followed him there, 0:15:33.840 --> 0:15:36.280 arriving only two hours after Hitler did, but he had 0:15:36.320 --> 0:15:40.120 already moved on. For the next seven years, she pursued 0:15:40.200 --> 0:15:44.040 him to no avail, but then Hitler's party started gaining 0:15:44.080 --> 0:15:47.560 traction his movement grew. He set up office in the 0:15:47.640 --> 0:15:50.520 Kaiserhaf Hotel in Berlin, right across the street from the 0:15:50.520 --> 0:15:53.760 Reich Chancellery. The state of power in Germany. All the 0:15:53.760 --> 0:15:56.800 top Nazis hung out at the Kaiseraff with his grand 0:15:56.840 --> 0:16:00.600 awning wrought iron balconies. They ate in the three story 0:16:00.680 --> 0:16:04.280 dining room under its great glass ceiling. It was luxurious, 0:16:04.640 --> 0:16:07.640 It felt like power. Hitler could look out his window 0:16:07.880 --> 0:16:12.560 at the Reich Chancellery and dream. Hitler had a press 0:16:12.560 --> 0:16:16.960 officer named Ernst Hampstengel. Everyone called him Putsy, which meant 0:16:17.160 --> 0:16:22.320 little fellow, though it translates literally as cute. Putsy was 0:16:22.360 --> 0:16:25.800 half German, half American. His mother was a Sedgewick, one 0:16:25.800 --> 0:16:28.200 of the grand old New England families. He grew up 0:16:28.200 --> 0:16:31.000 in Germany, but went to Harvard, where he was classmates 0:16:31.000 --> 0:16:34.600 with T. S. Eliot and with Theodore Roosevelt's son. One day, 0:16:34.600 --> 0:16:37.280 Putsy ran into Hitler in a bar in Munich, holding 0:16:37.320 --> 0:16:41.240 the crowd's spellbound, and he fell in love. Putsy was 0:16:41.280 --> 0:16:44.200 a great musician, and whenever Hitler got a little lonesome, 0:16:44.400 --> 0:16:46.840 he would have Putsy bang out some Wagner on the 0:16:46.880 --> 0:16:54.760 piano or some other little diddy that he'd written. Many 0:16:54.840 --> 0:16:57.720 years after the war, Putsy wrote his memoirs, which I 0:16:57.760 --> 0:17:02.360 would wholeheartedly recommend, in law part because of passages like this. 0:17:03.000 --> 0:17:06.040 By the time he and Adolf were over to Friend's house. 0:17:06.560 --> 0:17:09.240 They're so good that we had to reenact them. 0:17:09.400 --> 0:17:12.000 I started playing some of the football marches I had 0:17:12.000 --> 0:17:15.439 picked up at Harvard. I explained to Hitler all the 0:17:15.480 --> 0:17:19.560 business about the cheerleaders and college songs and the deliberate 0:17:19.600 --> 0:17:21.720 whipping up of hysterical. 0:17:21.280 --> 0:17:23.480 Enthusiasms sound familiar. 0:17:24.400 --> 0:17:27.520 I told him about the thousands of spectators being made 0:17:27.520 --> 0:17:33.400 to raw Harvard Harvard, Harvard rah rah rah in unison, 0:17:33.680 --> 0:17:37.000 and the hypnotic effect of this sort of thing. I 0:17:37.040 --> 0:17:39.840 played him some of the Sousa marches and my own 0:17:39.920 --> 0:17:42.920 falorah to show how it could be done by adapting 0:17:43.040 --> 0:17:47.160 German tunes, gave them all that buoyant beat so characteristic 0:17:47.200 --> 0:17:51.720 of American brass band music. I had Hitler fairly shouting 0:17:51.800 --> 0:17:55.600 with enthusiasm, that's it, Hanstenger, that is what we need 0:17:55.600 --> 0:17:58.320 for the movement, and he pranced up and down the 0:17:58.400 --> 0:18:02.320 room like a drum major. After that he had the 0:18:02.480 --> 0:18:06.600 SA band practicing the same thing. Rah rah rah became 0:18:07.040 --> 0:18:11.160 z hien z Hei. That is the origin of it. 0:18:11.400 --> 0:18:14.600 And I suppose I must take my share of the blame. 0:18:16.400 --> 0:18:20.280 Putsy ends the war as an adviser to Franklin Roosevelt, 0:18:20.640 --> 0:18:23.240 making him the only person to serve the leadership of 0:18:23.359 --> 0:18:26.000 both sides of the Second World War. But I digress 0:18:26.760 --> 0:18:30.080 so Putsy convinces Hitler that he needs to have more 0:18:30.119 --> 0:18:33.240 of an international profile, so he starts inviting people to 0:18:33.320 --> 0:18:36.159 come and meet Herr Hitler at the kaiser Hoff, the 0:18:36.160 --> 0:18:39.720 New York Times, an Italian journalist, a Japanese journalist, a 0:18:39.840 --> 0:18:45.320 legendary foreign correspondent with the memorable name Hubert Renfro Knickerbocker, 0:18:46.080 --> 0:18:52.120 and finally, Dorothy Thompson. Is she prepared for the interview? 0:18:52.280 --> 0:18:55.679 Of course, she's Dorothy Thompson. When he was in prison 0:18:55.720 --> 0:18:59.159 in nineteen twenty four, years before the kaiser Hoff, Hitler 0:18:59.160 --> 0:19:02.080 had written his men off Testo Mine Kamf. It was 0:19:02.080 --> 0:19:05.240 a best seller in Germany, and trust me, Dorothy Thompson 0:19:05.400 --> 0:19:09.080 had read Mine Kamf in the German all seven hundred 0:19:09.240 --> 0:19:14.240 nutty pages of it, including passages like with Satanic joy 0:19:14.240 --> 0:19:17.040 in his face, the black haired Jewish youth lurks in 0:19:17.080 --> 0:19:20.639 wait for the unsuspecting girl, whom he defiles with his blood, 0:19:21.080 --> 0:19:24.720 thus stealing her from her people. There's a lot of 0:19:24.720 --> 0:19:28.159 stuff like this in Mine comp it was, and it 0:19:28.240 --> 0:19:32.040 is Jews who bring the Negroes into the Rhineland, always 0:19:32.040 --> 0:19:35.480 with the same secret thought and clear aim of ruining 0:19:35.520 --> 0:19:40.479 the hated white race by the necessarily resulting bastardization, throwing 0:19:40.520 --> 0:19:44.359 it down from its cultural em political height, and himself 0:19:44.440 --> 0:19:49.400 rising to be its master. Dorothy Thompson knows just who 0:19:49.480 --> 0:19:51.800 she's going to meet when she walks into the Kaiserhof. 0:19:52.840 --> 0:19:56.000 She walks through the marble lobby, waits and puts his's office. 0:19:56.520 --> 0:19:58.240 She would say later that there was a lot of 0:19:58.359 --> 0:20:01.760 fussiness of the final preper for the interview. She was 0:20:01.800 --> 0:20:05.280 limited to three questions, which she had to submit twenty 0:20:05.280 --> 0:20:08.800 four hours in advance. Hitler did not like thinking on 0:20:08.840 --> 0:20:12.399 his feet. Before the interview, she spots Hitler going to 0:20:12.440 --> 0:20:15.560 his rooms, accompanied by someone who she says, looks like 0:20:15.680 --> 0:20:20.800 al Capone. She waits for an hour. Finally she's ushered in. 0:20:21.240 --> 0:20:24.280 She would say later, I was a little nervous. I 0:20:24.400 --> 0:20:30.920 considered taking smelling salts. Understand that's a joke. Dorothy Thompson 0:20:31.119 --> 0:20:33.919 wasn't afraid of anyone. This was the woman who marched 0:20:33.920 --> 0:20:37.359 into Warsaw wearing her ball room slippers. We don't have 0:20:37.400 --> 0:20:39.399 a recording of the interview, but I want you to 0:20:39.480 --> 0:20:43.879 imagine it. Her voice, her presence, those piercing blue eyes, 0:20:44.480 --> 0:20:48.480 Hitler's never met her before. And Hitler, to put it nicely, 0:20:48.800 --> 0:20:52.520 did not exactly have relationships of any real meaning with women, 0:20:52.960 --> 0:20:57.439 unless you count photo opportunities with little German girls. So 0:20:57.560 --> 0:21:01.320 maybe he's the nervous one because he just starts babbling. 0:21:04.280 --> 0:21:06.879 Thompson would later write up the interview in an essay 0:21:06.920 --> 0:21:13.080 called I Saw Hitler. He is formless, almost faceless, a 0:21:13.119 --> 0:21:16.520 man whose countenance is a caricature, a man whose framework 0:21:16.560 --> 0:21:24.159 seems cartilaginous without bones. He is inconsequent and voluble, ill poised, insecure. 0:21:24.480 --> 0:21:29.040 He is the very prototype of the little man ouch. 0:21:30.200 --> 0:21:33.560 A lock of lank hair falls over an insignificant and 0:21:33.640 --> 0:21:37.600 slightly retreating forehead. The backhead is shallow, the face is 0:21:37.640 --> 0:21:40.760 broad in the cheekbones. The nose is large, but badly 0:21:40.800 --> 0:21:45.480 shaped and without character. His movements are awkward, almost undignified, 0:21:45.840 --> 0:21:49.639 and most unmartial. There is in his face no trace 0:21:49.680 --> 0:21:54.920 of any inner conflict or self discipline. I mean, how good, 0:21:55.160 --> 0:22:00.760 how true, how vicious is this? And then she backhands him, 0:22:00.920 --> 0:22:04.280 And yet he is not without a certain charm, but 0:22:04.359 --> 0:22:07.960 it is the soft, almost feminine charm of the Austrian. 0:22:08.560 --> 0:22:12.760 The eyes alone are notable, dark gray and hyperthyroid. They 0:22:12.760 --> 0:22:20.680 have the peculiar shine which often distinguishes geniuses, alcoholics, and hysterics. 0:22:23.160 --> 0:22:26.080 When Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany a year later, one 0:22:26.119 --> 0:22:28.600 of the first things he does is kick Dorothy Thompson 0:22:28.600 --> 0:22:32.280 out of the country because he's been humiliated by a woman. 0:22:33.240 --> 0:22:35.320 I think the thing that really sticks in his craw 0:22:35.800 --> 0:22:38.439 is the line that follows that little bit about geniuses, 0:22:38.880 --> 0:22:46.520 alcoholics and hysterics. There is something irritatingly refined about him. 0:22:46.760 --> 0:22:49.480 I bet he crooks his little finger when he drinks 0:22:49.520 --> 0:23:02.200 a cup of tea. Is adolf with aspirations of being 0:23:02.200 --> 0:23:06.280 a badass dictator, and Dorothy Thompson has him drinking tea 0:23:06.840 --> 0:23:11.520 like your grandmother. Now you might say it's not surprising 0:23:11.600 --> 0:23:14.480 she looks at Hitler this way. He's Hitler. But the 0:23:14.520 --> 0:23:16.919 truth is that lots and lots of people who go 0:23:17.000 --> 0:23:19.879 to see him in those years don't see the real Hitler. 0:23:20.359 --> 0:23:23.440 Like the Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King. Here 0:23:23.520 --> 0:23:27.719 is his diary entry after meeting Hitler. My sizing up 0:23:27.720 --> 0:23:29.760 of the man as I sat and talked with him, 0:23:30.080 --> 0:23:32.879 was that he is really one who truly loves his 0:23:33.400 --> 0:23:37.280 fellow man and his country, and would make any sacrifice 0:23:37.280 --> 0:23:39.600 for their good. That he feels himself to be a 0:23:39.640 --> 0:23:45.119 deliverer of his people from tyranny. It gets worse. His 0:23:45.240 --> 0:23:48.280 face is much more prepossessing than his pictures would give 0:23:48.320 --> 0:23:52.520 the impression of It's not that of a fiery, overstrained nature, 0:23:53.000 --> 0:23:57.680 but of a calm, passive man, deeply and thoughtfully in earnest. 0:23:58.200 --> 0:24:00.600 His eyes impressed me most of all. There was a 0:24:00.680 --> 0:24:05.879 liquid quality about them which indicate keen perception and profound sympathy. 0:24:07.600 --> 0:24:12.680 Dorothy Thompson saw the particular sheen of geniuses, alcoholics and hysterics. 0:24:13.400 --> 0:24:18.960 King saw keen perspective and profound sympathy. I'm sorry, I 0:24:19.000 --> 0:24:21.879 can't resist. Here's a little more from the diary entry. 0:24:22.600 --> 0:24:25.320 As I talked to him, I could not but think 0:24:26.200 --> 0:24:29.800 of Joan of Arc. Joan of Arc I would point 0:24:29.840 --> 0:24:32.399 out that Mackenzie King was the longest serving Prime minister 0:24:32.440 --> 0:24:35.120 in Canadian history. He did as much to shape twentieth 0:24:35.160 --> 0:24:38.840 century Canada as anyone. He's not some naive, but he 0:24:38.880 --> 0:24:40.440 sits down next to Hitler for an hour and a 0:24:40.480 --> 0:24:46.440 half and totally loses his marbles. He is particularly strong 0:24:46.640 --> 0:24:50.119 on beauty, love's flowers, and will spend more of the 0:24:50.200 --> 0:24:53.320 money of the state on gardens and flowers than on 0:24:53.440 --> 0:24:59.680 most other things. It was really, really easy to be 0:24:59.720 --> 0:25:03.240 sed by Adolf Hitler. The German people were seduced by 0:25:03.240 --> 0:25:07.040 Adolf Hitler. Even Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, would 0:25:07.040 --> 0:25:08.120 be seduced by him. 0:25:08.760 --> 0:25:09.359 This morning. 0:25:10.760 --> 0:25:16.480 I had another talk with the German Chancellor Hey Hitler. 0:25:16.080 --> 0:25:18.760 In nineteen thirty eight, when everyone was worried that Hitler 0:25:18.800 --> 0:25:22.359 was going to invade Czechoslovakia. Hitler looked Neville Chamberlain in 0:25:22.400 --> 0:25:25.320 the eye and said, I'm not going to invade anyone anymore, 0:25:25.840 --> 0:25:28.679 and Chamberlain, a politician of more than twenty years at 0:25:28.680 --> 0:25:30.760 that point, believed him. 0:25:31.240 --> 0:25:34.880 We regard the agreement signed last night and the Anglo 0:25:34.960 --> 0:25:38.880 German naval agreement a symbolic of the desire of our 0:25:39.040 --> 0:25:42.439 two peoples never to go to war with one another again. 0:25:46.119 --> 0:25:49.520 But who isn't seduced by Hitler? Dorothy Thompson. 0:25:50.240 --> 0:25:52.480