Reporting Under Fire (10 page)

Sigrid returned to Germany in the spring of 1945. On April 10, she, Helen Kirkpatrick (also with the
Chicago Daily News),
and Marguerite Higgins of the
New York Herald Tribune
became the first women reporters to enter Buchenwald, the first concentration camp to be liberated by the Allies. Soldiers and reporters saw and smelled what the Nazis had done to human beings there. Sigrid walked through hut after hut where French prisoners—survivors—lay on wooden platforms. She used her gift for French to assure them, these living skeletons of men and boys, that the war was truly over.

Sigrid also went to Heinrich Himmler's summer retreat as reporters scoured the place looking for documents. Himmler, the notorious head of the SS, had papers stashed all over the estate. American agents had already carried off what they wanted, but boxes of papers and books were hidden in a barn. Sigrid went through boxes of documents seeking clues to Himmler's background and discovered a photo album with a woven cover and the title
Angora.
Inside were photos of angora rabbits, whose soft fur was sheared and spun into wool to line the coats of pilots, among others. Two decades later, the Wisconsin Historical Society (which houses Sigrid Schultz's papers) shared Sigrid's description of the Nazi rabbit-breeding program. Her words bore witness to the appalling evil that was the Nazi mind:

The first picture was startling indeed; it was a huge photograph of the head of a handsome, obviously contented
angora rabbit. Other pages showed rows of hutches that were model sanitary quarters, special equipment in which the mash for the rabbits was prepared that shone as brightly as the cooking pans in a bride's kitchen. The tools used for the grooming of the rabbits could have come out of the showcases of Elizabeth Arden.

What gave special significance to the book was that under each photograph was the name of the concentration camp where it was taken. Thus, in the same compound where 800 human beings would be packed into barracks that were barely adequate for 200, the rabbits lived in luxury in their own elegant hutches. In Buchenwald, where tens of thousands of human beings were starved to death, rabbits enjoyed scientifically prepared meals. The SS men who whipped, tortured, and killed prisoners saw to it that the rabbits enjoyed loving care.

Sigrid Schultz went on to a long career in journalism. As Americans turned away from war talk in the 1950s, she turned to writing for the
Ladies' Home Journal.
Thirty years after the war ended, she told an interviewer she was appalled by ordinary Americans' poor understanding of their own history and warned that “the greatest threat to Western democracies today is our own complacency and indolence.”

Sigrid herself was doing her part to record history by working on an oral history of anti-Semitism. (This is now housed in the New York Public Library.) She died in 1980, after which her little cottage in Westport, Connecticut, was torn down. Sigrid had bargained with the city to keep her home when others were knocked down for a parking lot. It had stood there for years, a small but powerful symbol of resistance by its feisty owner, that dragon from Chicago.

When I walked into Adolf Hitler's salon, I was convinced that l was meeting the future dictator of Germany. In less than 50 seconds I was sure I was not. It took just that time to measure the startling insignificance of this man who has set the world agog.

—Dorothy Thompson

When Dorothy Thompson arrived at a Berlin hotel to interview Adolph Hitler late in 1931, it crossed her mind that she should take a whiff of smelling salts to settle her nerves. Hitler was a puzzle, the leader of the Nazis, and a growing influence in Germany. His National Socialist Party was attracting a curious mix of street kids, industrialists, laborers, and office workers. But Dorothy had no cause for worry. Once in front of the Nazi leader, she sized him up as a most unimpressive person and shared her frank views in print.

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…. His movements are awkward. There is in his face no trace of any inner conflict or self-discipline.

And yet, he is not without a certain charm. But it is the soft, almost feminine charm of the Austrian! When he talks it is with a broad Austrian dialect. The eyes alone are notable. Dark gray and hyperthyroidic, they have the
peculiar shine which often distinguishes geniuses, alcoholics, and hysterics.

Germany had become a different country in the nine years since Dorothy had first lived in Berlin, its capital. The Weimar Republic was in turmoil. For a while, Germans had prospered under their fledgling democracy. However, the staggering cost of war reparations (payments to the victors of World War I), followed by the Great Depression of the 1930s, had hurled Germany into hard times and burdened Germans with crushing inflation. It was common knowledge that housewives paid for a loaf of bread with a bushel basket full of reichsmarks, Germany's wildly inflated paper money.

As the months unfolded and Hitler rose to power, Dorothy was harshly rebuked for underestimating him. Still, she had good reason to question Hitler's ability to lead the
Vaterland.
She couldn't believe that the German people, proud keepers of their “Fatherland's” rich culture —art, books, music, religion— would permit this lank-haired, soft-looking man to topple the Weimar Republic and accept him as their dictator.

But in 1933 they did, and immediately Germany's new führer and his gang of thugs shot everyone in their own party whom they could not keep in line. This Night of the Long Knives signaled an early step in the Nazi reign of terror that endured until April 1945, when Germany lost World War II.

In August 1934, when Dorothy was again in Berlin doing interviews, she met a German reporter whom she respected. Over coffee with whipped cream and fresh plum cake—a summertime favorite—he spoke approvingly of Hitler's “revolution.” “The cleanup was not pretty,” he said, “but it has consolidated Germany.” The next morning, a Gestapo agent called on Dorothy in her hotel room. The young man, wearing a trench coat
like Hitler's, handed her an order to leave Germany within 48 hours. Dorothy became the first reporter expelled by the Nazis.

Dorothy's impressions came out in her book,
I Saw Hitler!,
and people packed lecture halls to hear her speak. NBC liked her style and hired her as a radio commentator in 1936. Even better, the
New York Herald Tribune
gave her a plum job writing
On the Record,
running opposite top columnist Walter Lippmann. Their columns were syndicated in newspapers from coast to coast and reached millions. Dorothy's column was intended to enhance Lippmann's by targeting women, but Dorothy knew that what women read they talked about, often to their husbands. She had already married twice, and she was destined to meet husband number three.

Dorothy deserved her success, thanks to a gift for writing and the guts to go after her stories—exactly the traits reserved for hard-bitten newsmen. She was a big-boned, sturdy girl whose pink-and-white complexion contrasted sharply with her dark hair and eyes. The daughter of a Methodist minister, Dorothy lost her mother when she was seven and had a disastrous relationship with her stepmother. At 14, Dorothy was sent from home in Hamburg, New York, to live with her father's sisters in Chicago. There, free of her stepmother's Victorian restrictions, she blossomed.

Dorothy Thompson was hard to miss, and it was in her nature to shine. She rollerskated to class at the top-notch Lewis Institute, a type of junior college in Chicago, where she joined a group of boys on the debate team, and she burst onto campus at Syracuse University in 1912 with status as a junior. She soaked up all that a classical liberal arts curriculum had to offer: mathematics, sciences, foreign language, history, and literature. She graduated with that dream shared by so many students in love with learning: Dorothy wanted to be a writer. But she had a
younger sister and brother, and it was understood that Dorothy would help to pay for their college expenses.

She settled for a job with a women's suffrage group in western New York and then moved into social work, which left her dissatisfied and ready to leave the country with her friend Barbara de Porte in 1919. Dorothy was 27, equipped with a hazy notion that she'd get herself to Russia to see its revolution for herself.

Dorothy set sail for London with a plan to land freelance work—the best way for a girl reporter to get herself hitched to a daily newspaper. Aboard ship she saw her first opportunity to get a good story when she met a group of Zionists, Jews who sought to establish a Jewish nation in the Holy Land. She asked them questions, and she listened carefully; and once on land, she submitted an article to the INS, which was accepted. To pay her bills, she wrote publicity at a penny per page for the American Red Cross, all the while tracking interesting stories to build her credibility as a journalist.

Dorothy gathered her share of rejections when she first submitted articles to news services, but her straight talk and self-assured manner served her well. She interviewed an Irish revolutionary, Terence MacSwiney, a reputed leader of the rebel Sinn Fein party. It turned out to be his final interview; MacSwiney was imprisoned by the British and died of starvation after he went on a hunger strike to protest British rule over Ireland. The INS sent her to Rome to write about a general workmen's strike, an early warning of the rise of Benito Mussolini and his Fascist followers.

With each freelance piece, Dorothy inched closer toward her goal. In the fall of 1920, with regular work for the INS and Red Cross, she felt confident enough to move to Paris, one of hundreds of young Americans attracted to the City of Light.
She stayed just a few months, and then, on a tip from a
Chicago Daily News
editor, she moved to Vienna, Austria, for a better look at central Europe's troubles. Young, untested republics in Germany and Austria faced uncertain futures.

The Philadelphia
Public Ledger
offered Dorothy credentials to use in Vienna and agreed to receive articles on spec and pay for those that it published. That understanding was better than no agreement at all, and Dorothy enhanced it by finding herself a mentor named Marcel Fodor, an Austrian newsman who worked for Britain's
Manchester Guardian.
They worked as a pair, spending so much time together that others assumed they were lovers. For Dorothy, however, this relationship was strictly one of work and friendship, and it worked well.

In October 1921, Dorothy struck journalistic gold when she tracked a rumor that loyalists planned to return Hungary's former Emperor, Charles IV, back to his throne. The ex-emperor and his wife were held in a castle outside Budapest, forbidden to speak with the outside world. Thompson wrote for the Red Cross in Budapest and used her connections to her advantage. She donned the outfit of a Red Cross nurse and talked her boss into masquerading as a doctor. They made their way into the castle and spoke at length with Charles and his devoted wife, Zita von Bourbon-Parma. The anxious empress wrote a note to their son telling him they were safe, and Dorothy smuggled it out. Dorothy's scoop beat every other newspaper, and the grateful
Public Ledger
gave her a steady job soon thereafter.

Now Dorothy was on the move, a mark of her career as she jumped jobs, seizing each opportunity like a mountain lion in the fur coat she wore. In Vienna she fell in love with the German language and its unique Austro-German culture. She befriended artists, intellectuals, government officials, and ordinary Austrians. She drank
capuchiner
in Vienna's celebrated cafés, enjoyed
concerts and plays, and wore long dresses to elegant dinners, all the while keeping an eye on any stories she could develop.

Dorothy kept pace with her male colleagues, who were in friendly competition with her, and though a scoop was to be admired, they often shared sources and backed each other when necessary. In 1925, when word arrived on one such evening that war was brewing in Poland, she was said to leave in her gown and party slippers directly for Warsaw. She disappeared another time, and when a carload of reporters was attacked by gunfire,
Chicago Tribune
reporter Floyd Gibbons assumed she was dead and filed an obituary, only for Dorothy to show up alive and well. The newspapermen who worked alongside her admired how she worked very, very hard.

Dorothy surrounded herself with people, treasured her friendships, and relished being the center of attention. Everywhere she worked she could count on friends for backup and sophisticated conversation. She became friends with Rose Wilder Lane, a Missouri girl with a zest for life who shared a gift for storytelling with her mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder. The letters that flew back and forth between Dorothy and Rose went on to fill a book long after they were dead.

Dorothy felt passionate about her women friends and possibly became lovers with several. However, she liked men equally well and expected marriage to give her both a permanent residence and someone to be the rock in her topsy-turvy life. In 1922, she fell head over heels for Josef Bard, an aspiring Austrian intellectual who turned out to be a dandy with a wandering eye. Between Bard's philandering and Thompson's hectic lifestyle, it was clear that they'd made a mistake, and they divorced five years later.

Thompson wasn't single for long. She threw herself a 34th birthday party, and a friend brought a guest, America's leading
novelist Sinclair Lewis. A Midwesterner like Dorothy, the spare and acne-scarred Lewis had written
Main Street,
a smash hit novel that slammed life in small-town America. Lewis, nicknamed “Red” for his hair, proposed marriage the night they met, and Thompson telephoned her downstairs neighbor the next morning to ask if she should accept.