and, not long after, the New York Post appointed her head of its Berlin bureau in Germany. There she witnessed firsthand the rise of the National Socialist or Nazi party. According to her biographer, Peter Kurth, Thompson was "the undisputed queen of the overseas press corps, the first woman to head a foreign news bureau of any importance". During this time Thompson cultivated many literary friends, particularly among exiled German authors. Among her acquaintances from this period were Ödön von Horváth, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Stefan Zweig and Fritz Kortner. She developed a close friendship with author Carl Zuckmayer. In Berlin she got involved in a lesbian affair with German author Christa Winsloe, while still married, claiming "the right to love". Thompson's most significant work abroad took place in Germany in the early 1930s. While working in Munich, Thompson met and interviewed Adolf Hitler for the first time in 1931. This would be the basis for her subsequent book, I Saw Hitler, in which she wrote about the dangers of him winning power in Germany. Thompson described Hitler in the following terms: "He is formless, almost faceless, a man whose countenance is a caricature, a man whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones. He is inconsequent and voluble, ill poised and insecure. He is the very prototype of the little man." Later, when the full force of Nazism had crashed over Europe, Thompson was asked to defend her "little man" remarks; it seemed she had underestimated Hitler. The Nazis considered both the book and her articles offensive and, in August 1934, Thompson was expelled from Germany. She was the first American journalist to be kicked out. At the New York Tribune In 1936 Thompson began writing "On the Record", a New York Herald Tribune newspaper column that was also syndicated nationwide. It was read by over ten million people and carried by more than 170 papers. She also wrote a monthly column for the Ladies' Home Journal for 24 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. Radio and the Herschel Grynszpan affair Around the same time as she started "On the Record", NBC hired Thompson as a news commentator. She began in 1936 and remained with NBC until 1938. Her radio broadcasts went on to become some of the most popular in the United States, making