[2] On his return to the United States, Fischer took up work at a news agency in New York City and met Bertha "Markoosha" Mark (1890-1977).

In 1921, when Bertha went to work in Berlin, Fischer joined her a few months later and began contributing to the New York Evening Post as a European correspondent.

In 1934, American Max Eastman criticized Fischer for Stalinism in a chapter called "The 'Revolution' of April 23, 1932" in his book Artists in Uniform.

[4] Fischer also covered the Spanish Civil War and for a time was a member of the International Brigade fighting General Francisco Franco.

[8] The Hearst titles had been citing the eyewitness reports of famine[9] by the "Red" labor organizer Fred Beal,[10][11] and the Welsh freelancer Gareth Jones,[12][13] both recently returned from Soviet Ukraine.

To make the reports of what has been since referred to as the Holodomor better serve their editorial line against Roosevelt's recognition of the Soviet Union (for which Fischer had campaigned), the Hearst writer, Thomas Walker, brought the famine forward from 1932–1933 into the current year.

[14][7]Myra Page was clear that Fischer knew that, in the wake of Stalin's collectivization and grain seizures, there had been mass starvation.

"[15] In his essay for the collection The God that Failed, published in 1949, Fischer would go on to state that the policy of collectivization in Ukraine “produced the famine of 1931-32, which killed several million people”.

Fischer describes Gandhi as arguing in 1938 that German Jews ought to commit collective suicide in order to raise awareness of Nazi abuses, and continuing to believe after the Second World War that this would have been the right path.