The German revolution came about because civilized people believed it could not happen, Dorothy Thompson, noted correspondent who has just returned from Germany where she made a special survey of the situation for the Jewish Daily Bulletin and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, declared here at the Plaza Hotel Friday night at a reception tendered by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. About one hundred and fifty prominent Jewish and non-Jewish leaders heard Miss Thompson, in private life Mrs. Sinclair Lewis, analyze the situation and discuss the persecution of the Jews by the Nazis.
“I think what has happened in Germany has happened as the result of a series of unprecedented catastrophes — catastrophes to the German mind,” she said. “And I think what is happening in Germany is a revolt against culture, against civilization itself, and that it affects Jews in the first line is one thing. But it affects everybody.
“I want to ask the Jews not to set themselves too much apart from the rest of us. It is just as bad in Germany today to be a socialist or a communist or an intellectual or a person who loves truth, or a scientist, or an artist, as it is to be a Jew.”
Miss Thompson told how she happened to accept the request of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency to represent it in Germany.
“I did not answer the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s cable because I am pro-Jewish,” she said, “but because I still adhere to the old-fashioned point of view of being pro-human.”
Following the reception, Miss Thompson spoke over radio station WEVD on the treatment of the Jews in Germany.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
