Reporting Under Fire (9 page)

Berlin seemed an unlikely place for an American girl, but Schultz had lived there since she was a girl. Her father, Hermann, a Norwegian painter, had been commissioned to paint the portrait of Chicago's mayor around the time her mother, opera singer Hedwig Jaskewitz, gave birth to Sigrid in 1893. In 1911 the family moved to Germany so her father could paint William II, the king of Württemberg. Her father was popular among Europe's aristocracy, so Sigrid grew up traveling the continent and attending school in France, where she graduated from Paris's famed Sorbonne University in 1914.

The Schultz family was in Berlin when Germany unexpectedly went to war in August 1914. But Hermann Schultz was in poor health and couldn't leave with the other foreigners who were allowed to leave Germany. The Schultzes were caught in Berlin, required to check in twice daily with German police. Hermann Schultz now found it hard to provide for his wife and daughter. Sigrid helped out by teaching French and English to well-heeled families, but she continued her own study in international law at a university.

The young Sigrid Schultz, in an Edwardian summer dress, posed with “Mommy” for a photo along a waterfront.
Wisconsin Historical Society

In 1919 Sigrid's obvious flair for languages caught the eye of Richard Henry Little, who reported for the
Chicago Tribune.
She “trotted by his side, an eager cub reporter,” as Little traveled through Germany gathering information firsthand for his boss, Colonel Robert R. McCormick, the
Tribune's
owner and a well-known isolationist. Little depended on Sigrid to translate for him, and the experience helped to build the self-confidence that became a trademark of her career in reporting. When Little sent her on an errand to the offices of the German navy, Sigrid was expected to walk around to a side door. Ignoring the navy rule banning women from using its main entrance, Sigrid zipped up the front steps to drop off her boss's calling card and request an interview.

Early on, the stories she heard and the events she witnessed convinced Sigrid that the uneasy peace between Germany and the Allies was a sham. In the Adlon Hotel, where Sigrid worked, lived German general Erich von Ludendorff, “whose brain conceived the nightmare now know as total war.” Never mind that the Treaty of Versailles had sucked the life out of Germany's economy. Sigrid was convinced that total war was part of the German mind-set. German men and women, she warned, “take their orders from military and civilian leaders of daring and vision, with wise knowledge of human beings and the world and utter contempt for anything that does not serve their common cause—German world supremacy.” Indeed, as the Allies fought their way to Germany's capital of Berlin in the waning days of World War I, Sigrid Schultz was convinced, “Germany will try it again.”

Becoming Richard Little's protégé was a lucky break, because Colonel McCormick refused to allow women to sit at his Chicago city desk. However, the colonel wanted to build a solid corps of foreign correspondents, and Sigrid neatly fit his standards. By 1925, the
Tribune's
Berlin bureau chief was sent packing to a lesser assignment in Rome, and in months, Sigrid stepped in to become America's first woman bureau chief at a foreign desk.

Sigrid had proved she could keep up with her male colleagues, especially Floyd Gibbons, the one-eyed director of the
Tribune's
Foreign Service. She felt grateful to Gibbons, whose eye patch reminded everyone that he had been gravely injured reporting the 1918 Battle of Belleau Wood. Gibbons had no hang-ups about women's abilities as reporters; he'd already hired another young American, Irene Corbally, to work for the
Trib
in Paris. Sigrid also impressed Gibbons when he observed that she could match male reporters, drink for drink, in the Hotel Adlon bar. Sigrid
didn't mention that she had quietly arranged for the bartender to leave out the alcohol.

Sigrid was gifted with instincts that led her to solid information. Quickly she picked up on what so many foreign correspondents had to learn the hard way: the art and science of “hanging around,” building relationships with potential contacts and fruitful sources.

Sigrid singled out Hermann Göring, an ace pilot and rising Nazi, as a good prospect for schmoozing, and she asked him to lunch. Of all the uncouth men surrounding Hitler, Göring seemed to have the best manners. Over the years Göring and Sigrid rubbed elbows at glamorous parties that drew ambassadors, film stars, opera singers, and the Nazi elite.

This well-known photo captured Sigrid Schultz as she attended a Berlin party where she was known to US ambassador William Dodd (left) and Nazi minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels.
Wisconsin Historical Society

But even as she partied, Sigrid Schultz listened for the choice comment or quiet aside that made her such a good reporter. Hermann Göring eventually introduced her to Hitler himself. She was repulsed. “Hitler grabbed my hand in both of his hands and tried to look soulfully into my eyes, which made me shudder, and Hitler sensed it.”

“In 1930 I realized that the Nazis would play a decisive role in European history and I began studying them most closely,” she wrote. “In the first interview I had with Hitler he staggered me by asserting, at the top of his voice: ‘My will shall be done,' and by showing very clearly that he felt he had the right to speak in religious terms.” Why intelligent, educated men and women would accept Hitler as their leader alarmed her, when clearly the Nazis represented the worst of humanity. It seemed to her that most Germans believed Hitler's ongoing mantra that Germany lost World War I due to evil outsiders. Most but not all German women, in Sigrid's eyes, were especially mesmerized with Hitler and were quite willing to accept that Germany lost World War I due to “a treacherous betrayal of the German Army by (1) the Republic, (2) the Allies, (3) the Communists, or (4) the Jews.”

Hitler, Göring, and other top Nazis kept tabs on what foreign correspondents wrote in their papers back home. When the Nazis expelled
New York Herald Tribune
writer Dorothy Thompson in 1934, they created an uproar. The Nazis had to tread carefully thereafter, but they still spied on foreign reporters. Like Thompson, Sigrid Schultz was watched by the Gestapo, Hitler's dreaded secret police. Sigrid felt sure that her maid was on the Gestapo's payroll.

The Gestapo often tried the common trick of planting information on unsuspecting journalists, “discovering” it, and putting the hapless reporters on trial for espionage. Sigrid took
great care not to be tripped up by such tactics, so one day, when her mother telephoned to say that a stranger had dropped a packet of papers at her flat, Sigrid jumped up from her desk and raced home. The packet held designs for airplane engines. Sigrid threw it in the fire and watched it burn. On her way back to the Hotel Adlon, she walked past that same stranger, who now was heading to her home with two shady-looking others in tow. She boldly told the courier, a Gestapo agent, that his “evidence” was gone, hailed a cab, and ordered the driver to take her to the American embassy.

Sigrid struck back when the perfect opportunity arose at an engagement party she cohosted for Göring and his fiancée, a shy German actress. At the appropriate time, she quietly leaned over to Göring and spoke “as if exchanging chit-chat about the opera” but making her point that she despised his tactics. In return, he nicknamed her “that dragon from Chicago,” an example, he said, of “people from that crime-ridden city.”

The pressure kept up. In 1938, Sigrid became a radio announcer for the Mutual Broadcasting System. By the onset of World War II in September 1939, four different Nazi censors typically took their black pens to Sigrid's radio transcripts before she went on the air. Sometimes her manuscripts were so marked up she refused to broadcast at all.

Meanwhile, the mood in the United States stayed decidedly isolationistic. Just as the United States had mostly ignored the stirrings of trouble in Europe before World War I, so now Washington ignored William Dodd, the American ambassador in Berlin who warned that Germany was preparing for a second war. Sigrid's reporter's instincts led her to piece together a hideous fact: the Nazis had embarked on a program of euthanasia, so-called “mercy killings” of sick and mentally deficient children, old people, and patients with terminal diseases.

As the Nazi Party began its persecution of Jews in Germany, Sigrid watched and reported on what she observed, as bit by bit Jews were barred from schools, shops and businesses, and the opera and symphony. She took note of the concentration camps the Nazis began building in 1933 for their political prisoners. Just a few years later, the Nazis would use these camps to carry out their “final solution” of genocide as they tried to kill every Jew in Europe.

Sigrid Schultz so feared being expelled from Germany that she took a pen name, John Dickson, who filed “his” reports for the
Chicago Tribune
from “Paris.” These escaped the censors, and Sigrid stayed safe working just blocks away from Nazi headquarters. She scooped every correspondent in July 1939, when her doctor, a friendly man who also had several high-level Nazis in his practice, gave her a tip: pay a visit to Hitler's astrologist, he advised, and he'll provide a lead for you to follow.

Sigrid could hardly believe her ears when the astrologer told her that Hitler was considering an alliance with the Soviet Union. After all, Hitler had preached against the Bolshevists for years. Her scoop, filed under John Dickson's byline, reported in the
Chicago Tribune
that “the newest toast in high Hitler-Guard circles is: ‘To our new ally, Russia!'”

Would Germans believe their dictator? “Dickson” certainly thought so. “If Hitler says the wicked Red Soviets are no longer Red nor wicked, the Germans will accept his word!”

Sigrid was correct in her prediction. On August 24, Sigrid reported on her regular Sunday evening Mutual broadcast that Germany and the Soviet Union had signed a nonaggression pact. The agreement left Germany free to attack Poland.

On the morning of September 1, 1939, Sigrid picked up her phone to call a fellow correspondent named Bill Shirer to tell him the news: Germany had invaded Poland. She rushed to the
Reichstag to watch as Hitler made the announcement to cheering crowds. World War II had begun, no surprise at all to the dragon from Chicago.

It was payback time. Sigrid knew that evil forces in Germany—a conspiracy of industry, military, and political fanatics who believed in a special destiny for the German people—had prepared for this “total war” ever since Germany had lost World War I. Her front page story—with her real name in the byline— ran later that day in the
Chicago Tribune.

Word of German atrocities in Poland could be heard in every railroad station waiting room as black-uniformed SS men (the
Schutzstaffel,
the Nazis' elite guards) came and went on trains. A few officers complained, but they were demoted. The Nazis denied it all, saying it was propaganda from foreign countries, but at home, Sigrid recalled later, “the German people learned with surprising speed the truth about the German bestialities in Poland, as it had known about the murder of Czechs after the rape of Czechoslovakia. And why? They were told by their government—to compel them to share the guilt of what was done. On the whole the people reacted with unforgivable indifference.”

Sigrid had sent her mother and her dog home to the United States in 1938, but she stayed in Germany. She took shrapnel in her leg when Britain bombed Berlin but stayed on the job until she contracted typhus during a vacation in Spain. She became so ill she couldn't return to Berlin. When the United States entered the war in December 1941, Sigrid sailed home from Portugal to live with her mother in their small cottage home in Westport, Connecticut.

Sigrid kept up her broadcasts on Mutual, and she launched a one-woman speaking tour to tell her stories about life in Hitler's Germany and her experiences with the Nazi elite. She wrote a book,
Germany Will Try It Again,
to warn Americans that, even
if the Allies won the war, there would still be a strong streak of total war in the German psyche. To the surprise of many, Sigrid insisted that German women were even more fanatical than their men, how “women would fight for the privilege of touching [Hitler's] mustard-colored raincoat; some would even try to kiss its hem.”