Sigrid Schultz’s byline disappeared from newspapers long ago, but in the years marking Hitler’s rise to power and after, she was widely recognized for her reporting skills as the Berlin bureau chief of the Chicago Tribune and its primary foreign correspondent for Central Europe from 1925 to January of 1941.
She was also the historic figure branded “that dragon from Chicago” by Hermann Göring, Hitler’s number two man angered by Schultz’s fearless reporting about the Nazis.
Thus, Pamela D. Toler’s splendid new book, The Dragon from Chicago: The Untold Story of An American Reporter in Nazi Germany, brings Sigrid Schultz once again onto center stage.
Toler, who has a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, told me during an interview that she “totally just stumbled” onto the story “by accident,” having read an article about old photographs discovered in the attic of a house in the Edgewater neighborhood of Chicago.
These were informal photos of a woman with a small child and a big dog taken by Schultz’s father, a Norwegian portrait painter, who had immigrated to Chicago in 1892.
Toler added that she “hit the punch line” when she discovered that the little girl grew up to be Sigrid Schultz, and after that, she started “poking around to see what I could find.”
Of course, what she found was a fascinating time when news reporting was led by reporters like Edward R. Murrow, who pioneered broadcast journalism in the same way that Schultz did when she broadcast reports to America on the Mutual radio network.
Among other pathfinding journalists were reporter William L. Shirer, who went on to write his celebrated book, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich; and Dorothy Thompson, whose reports from Berlin were carried by NBC Radio before the Nazis expelled her from Germany in 1934.
Toler’s book introduces the reader to a time long before computers and television, when people could experience the thrill of grabbing the first edition of a newspaper when it came off the press, and reporters stationed in Berlin gathered at the Hotel Adlon bar to exchange the latest news.
As Toler points out in her book, while Schultz was American “by birth, self-definition, and loyalty… she was raised in France and Germany and educated in European schools.”
Her career as a journalist was also marked by a struggle for equality at a time when female journalists were not treated as equally as men. Toler explains that women were generally “limited to reporting ‘soft news’ – fashion, society news, and other traditionally female domains – but a few pushed their way into jobs as beat reporters, news service staffers, and even editors, usually of the women’s pages.”
Things eventually began to turn around with the outbreak of World War I, when women began reporting from the front lines. Nevertheless, there was still a kind of built-in rejection of equality for women journalists. As Toler notes, “Schultz was the only woman to head a foreign news bureau for most of her career.”
The prevailing prejudice was, in fact, so pervasive that Schultz actually preferred the title “newspaperman” when referring to herself.
Described by Toler as “small, blonde, and surprisingly formidable,” Schultz was first hired by the Chicago Tribune as an interpreter and cub reporter, with the interpreter part of the job due to her valuable fluency in German.
Shirer praised her ability as bureau chief, noting: “No other American correspondent in Berlin knew so much of what was going on behind the scenes as did Sigrid Schultz.”
An example of the close contact between Schultz and Shirer was the phone call she placed to him at 6 a.m. at the end of August 1939, from her observer position across from the German parliament, telling him with the words “It’s happened,” that Germany had invaded Poland.
Was Sigrid Schultz Jewish? 'It’s not clear'
BUT ABOVE and beyond Schultz’s impressive work for the Tribune, there is also the interesting question of whether she was Jewish.
“It’s not clear,” Toler said during our interview. “She certainly always said very clearly that she was not Jewish.” On the other hand, there is the question of whether her mother’s family was Jewish. “The real answer,” Toler said, “is we really don’t know.”
What we note in the book, however, is that Schultz “had extensive connections in Berlin’s Jewish communities throughout her life there” and, of course, that she helped Berlin Jews get out of Germany.
For example, she managed to get musician Hans Rosenwald out of the Oranienburg concentration camp, in addition to getting him an exit visa – clearly an example, Toler told me, of Schultz having “lots of ability to pull strings.”
Her efforts on behalf of Rosenwald also resulted in Schultz being called into Gestapo headquarters and accused of being Jewish herself.
In another very creative effort described in Toler’s book, Schultz “arranged for Hansi Burg, the Jewish girlfriend of actor Hans Albers, to marry a Norwegian so she could get an exit visa.”
While reporting for the Tribune, Schultz also made it her business to interview prominent German figures at a very critical time in German affairs. Among these were Hermann Göring and Hitler himself.
Her interaction with them was marked by an unyielding independence on her part, regardless of the controls the Nazis tried to exercise over foreign reporters.
In one such example, as Toler explains in some detail in her book, the Gestapo, which was headed by Göring, sent “agents provocateurs” – so-called “anti-Nazi tipsters” – who claimed to have military secrets to share.
Of course, any reporter who went along with what was essentially entrapment risked expulsion or even imprisonment.
Aware of this Nazi threat, Schultz decided to raise the issue directly with Göring during a “gala luncheon” his aides had pressured the Foreign Press Club to host at the Hotel Adlon in celebration of Göring’s second marriage.
Naturally, their conversation did not go well, with Göring denying everything. But Schultz stood her ground and even told him that she had informed the American Embassy of the Nazi plot.
This was obviously too much for Göring, who lost his temper and told her: “Schultz, I’ve always suspected it: You’ll never learn to show the proper respect for state authorities. I suppose that is one of the characteristics of people from that crime-ridden city of Chicago.”
Meanwhile, it was Göring who, by chance, introduced Schultz to Hitler at the Hotel Kaiserhof, where Hitler had gone for tea before he was chancellor.
In a passage that has all the sinister trappings associated with the fuhrer, Toler writes that he kissed Schultz’s hand not in an elegant way, but instead – quoting Schultz – with “a hot kiss… staring at you at the same time, which is a bad way of doing it.”
Schultz also had what Toler writes was a “rare, private interview” with Hitler on December 4, 1931, despite their “mutual distaste.” In that interview, Hitler predicted that “he would hold absolute power in Germany in a year at the latest.” Adds Toler: “He missed by a month.”
What is perhaps the most telling comment about Schultz’s interview with Hitler is that she “gave Tribune readers a portrait of Hitler as someone they should take seriously” – an ominous warning the democracies of the world did not heed in time.
Schultz had many opportunities, of course, to bear witness to the horrors of Nazi Germany, not the least of which was Kristallnacht, when she watched Nazi storm troopers carry Torahs, prayer books, and prayer shawls out of the burning Fasanenstrasse Synagogue and torch them all.
She also reported on war crime trials and even sat in on a press interview with Göring – with the tables now turned – after his surrender to American forces.
When Schultz pressed him about the concentration camps, he protested that he only learned about them from the American military.
But what must have been the most gruesome evidence about the horrors of Nazi Germany was Schultz’s trip to the Buchenwald concentration camp, which had just been liberated by general George Patton’s forces.
The Eighth Air Force flew a small group of correspondents, which included Schultz and photographer Margaret Bourke-White, who sat in a jeep on the plane, from Frankfurt to Weimar. After arriving, writes Toler, they “were greeted by soldiers with horror-stricken faces, who had marched into Buchenwald only hours before.”
The correspondents were also shown what appeared to be parchment paper but was, in fact, “tanned” human skin of prisoners.
Toler explains: “Prisoners with tattoos had been taken to the wife of the camp’s commander. If the design appealed to her, the prisoner was given a lethal shot. His skin was then tanned and given to Frau Koch, who would use it for craft projects.”
PAMELA TOLER has an impressive talent for taking her exceptionally well-researched history and weaving it into a fascinating tale of one woman’s experience as a major newspaper correspondent.
Sigrid Schultz’s story came to an end after the war when she left the Chicago Tribune. While she made attempts at magazine freelancing and considered book ideas, things were never quite the same.
Indeed, the reporter’s moment had passed, but today we are indebted to Toler’s noteworthy skill in recounting Schultz’s important achievements.
The reviewer is a feature writer based in California.
