Miss Thompson Tells Situation of Journalists

Marlen Pew, editor of Editor and Publisher, writes in the current issue of that publication on the expulsion of Dorothy Thompson, newspaper correspondent and wife of Sinclair Lewis, who returned to the United States on Friday.

“It was shocking to hear that Hitler had expelled Dorothy Thompson, in private life Mrs. Sinclair Lewis, Ever since the World War this American newspaper correspondent has used her fine talents to inform people of this country, in newspaper and magazine articles, of the manifest injustice of the Peace of Versailles, and to plead the humanitarian cause of the German people.

“But Hitler ego could not take her truth—and it’s truth she deals in. Her summary dismissal across the border was an eloquent proof of the ruthless insincerity of the Nazi regime, loaded with fakery to fool the German people and the outside world and thus perpetuate the power of the uncrowned upstart Kaiser, now daring to pose as a Deity.”

Then he quotes a statement written by Miss Thompson when she was in Paris, as follows:

WORKS UNDER HANDICAPS

“The foreign correspondent in Germany works under terrific handicaps. It is extremely difficult for him to establish the truth about anything, because the secret police are so active that he endangers news sources by mere contact with them. I have learned, to my distress, that the correspondent of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency has been arrested and his papers taken from him in connection with my case.

“I should like to say here that my own connection with this agency began and ended 18 months ago with six articles which I wrote for them, and that I did not see this unfortunate man or have any contact with him during my stay in Germany, either then or now. In April of last year, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency asked me to report for them.

WRITERS LOYAL TO TASKS

“The German government may rest assured that the corps of foreign journalists in Berlin are, on the whole, animated by loyalty to just one thing: their professional standards. They are out for the facts.

“If, therefore, they, and the rest of the world with them, have gained the impression that in Germany these facts are withheld from them, and that in their place there is a systematic substitution of more or less ingenious fairy tales, there must be some reason for it.

“At the risk of seeming impertinent, I shall give Dr. Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda and Popular Enlightenment, a suggestion: It is useless to expel foreign journalists. For each one you expel, three more will arise to shout the forbidden facts. Either Germany intends to sever its connections with the rest of the world or it must put up with the presence of foreign observers, qualified and determined to tell what they see.”