Dorothy Thompson's father was an English-born Methodist preacher. Her mother died when Dorothy was quite young, and when her father remarried, Dorothy went to live with an aunt in Chicago. She attended Syracuse University where she studied politics and economics, and shortly afterwards became involved in women's suffrage. On a trip to Europe shortly after the end of World War I, she met a group of Zionists; her first journalism assignment was to report on their meetings for the International News Service.

Thompson focused her attention on Central Europe and became fluent in German and various dialects. She was appointed Vienna correspondent for the Philadelphia Public Ledger and shortly thereafter (1925) was named Chief of the Central European Service for the Ledger. She resigned in 1927 to take a break, but returned to Germany in 1931 where she interviewed Adolf Hitler, a conversation she later expanded into the book I Saw Hitler.

In 1936, she was hired as a news commentator by NBC. (John Dunning, Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio, p. 492) The only other woman doing news on any network at this time was Kathryn Cravens, on CBS. Thompson remained on NBC until 1938. She returned to the air in 1941 on the Mutual network, and was heard sporadically on the Blue Network from 1942-1945.

Both the book and her articles were considered offensive by the German government (though William Shirer, writing the day after Thompson's expulsion from Germany, believed that she had "badly underestimated" Hitler) and in August of 1934, Thompson was expelled from Nazi Germany by Ernst Hanfstaengl.

According to Bennett Cerf in Try and Stop Me (1944), she socked a woman who made pro-Nazi remarks in her presence ... after asking her to step outside. She also attended the Bund rally at Madison Square Garden, where she showed her disgust by giving the participants the Bronx cheer.

In 1938, Dorothy Thompson championed the cause of a Polish-German Jew Herschel Grynszpan, whose assassination in Paris of a minor German diplomat, Ernst vom Rath, had been used as propaganda by the Nazis to trigger the events of Kristallnacht in Germany. Thompson's broadcast on NBC radio was heard by millions of listeners, and led to an outpouring of sympathy for the young assassin. Under the banner of the Journalists' Defense Fund, over $40,000 USD was collected, enabling famed European lawyer Vincent de Moro-Giafferi to take up Grynszpan's case. The assassination inspired the composer Michael Tippett to write his oratorio A Child of Our Time as a plea for peace, and as a protest against the persecution of the Jewish people in Nazi Germany. His use of Negro spirituals to allude to the subjugation of the Jews is particularly innovative, and arguably deeply haunting.

As an American of German descent, Thompson felt it incumbent upon her to organize other German-Americans to speak out against Nazism, and counter the publicity given the pro-Nazi German-American Bund. In the fall of 1942, she approached the World Jewish Congress, which agreed to pay for such a statement, and in the last week of December, 1942, the "Christmas Declaration by men and women of German ancestry" was printed appeared in the New York Times and nine other major American daily newspapers, signed by fifty prominent German-Americans, the most famous being Babe Ruth.

After World War II, Thompson turned her attention to the friction between the newly-formed state of Israel and the surrounding Arab nations. She wrote an article in Commentary cautioning American Jews about Zionism as it would lead to dual loyalty. The Jewish Oscar Handlin rebutted her in the same issue. Later, she became very critical of the newly created state of Israel.

Thompson wrote a monthly article for the Ladies' Home Journal for twenty-four years (1937-1961); its topics were far removed from war and politics, focusing on gardening, children, art, and other domestic and women's-interest topics.

Thompson was married three times. Her first husband, in 1921, was Hungarian Josef Bard. Her second, to author Sinclair Lewis in 1928, produced a son, actor Michael Lewis (1930 - 1975). She divorced Lewis in 1942. In 1943 she married her third and last husband, Czechosolvakian artist Maxim Kopf. Thompson also had a relationship with Christa Winsloe, author of Mädchen in Uniform.Lewis, Jone Johnson. "Dorothy Thompson Quotes." Women's History About. 2010. About.com, Web. 7 Mar 2010. .

On Herschel Grynszpan Affair

"I am speaking of this boy. Soon he will go on trial. The news is that on top of all this terror, this horror, one more must pay. They say he will go to the guillotine, without a trial by jury, with the rights that any common murderer has"

"Who is on trial in this case? I say we are all on trial. I say the men of Munich are on trial, who signed a pact without one word of protection for helpless minorities. Whether Herschel Grynszpan lives or not won't matter much to Herschel. He was prepared to die when he fired those shots. His young life was already ruined. Since then, his heart has been broken into bits by the results of his deed."

"They say a man is entitled to a trial by a jury of his peers, and a man's kinsmen rally around him, when he is in trouble. But no kinsman of Herschel's can defend him. The Nazi government has announced that if any Jews, anywhere in the world, protest at anything that is happening, further oppressive measures will be taken. They are holding every Jew in Germany as a hostage."

"Therefore, we who are not Jews must speak, speak our sorrow and indignation and disgust in so many voices that they will be heard. This boy has become a symbol, and the responsibility for his deed must be shared by those who caused it."

Partial text of the Christmas Declaration by men and women of German ancestry

"[W]e Americans of German descent raise our voices in denunciation of the Hitler policy of cold-blooded extermination of the Jews of Europe and against the barbarities committed by the Nazis against all other innocent peoples under their sway. These horrors ... are, in particular, a challenge to those who, like ourselves are descendants of the Germany that once stood in the foremost ranks of civilization. ... [We] utterly repudiate every thought and deed of Hitler and his Nazis ... [and urge Germany] to overthrow a regime which is in the infamy of German history."

Miscellaneous

• "Age is not measured by years. Nature does not equally distribute energy. Some people are born old and tired while others are going strong at seventy."
• "As far as I can see, I was really put out of Germany for the crime of blasphemy. My offense was to think that Hitler was just an ordinary man, after all. That is a crime in the reigning cult in Germany, which says Mr. Hitler is a Messiah sent by God to save the German people— an old Jewish idea. To question this mystic mission is so heinous that, if you are a German, you can be sent to jail. I, fortunately, am an American, so I was merely sent to Paris. Worse things can happen." (1934)
• "No people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument [of] the Incorporated National Will. ... When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American. And nobody will ever say 'Heil' to him, nor will they call him 'Führer' or 'Duce.' But they will greet him with one great big, universal, democratic, sheeplike bleat of 'O.K., Chief! Fix it like you wanna, Chief! Oh Kaaaay!'" (1935)
• "Only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live."
• "Courage, it would seem, is nothing less than the power to overcome danger, misfortune, fear, injustice, while continuing to affirm inwardly that life with all its sorrows is good; that everything is meaningful even if in a sense beyond our understanding; and that there is always tomorrow."
• "It is not the fact of liberty but the way in which liberty is exercised that ultimately determines whether liberty itself survives."
• "They have not wanted peace at all; they have wanted to be spared war--as though the absence of war was the same as peace."
• "Peace is not the absence of conflict, but the presence of creative alternatives for responding to conflict."