My fifth-grade teacher gave us an assignment on Friday afternoons: listen to TV news or read newspaper articles over the weekend and share a current event on Monday morning. It was 1965, with plenty of civil rights news, which helped us understand the importance of a free press in a democracy. By the time I was thirteen and toured communist East Berlin in 1968, I realized, with a deep sense of injustice, that countries behind the Iron Curtain—including East Germany and the Soviet Union—controlled the news and considered a free press as the enemy of the state.
These days (2025), I support the press by buying subscriptions to newspapers and recommending books that highlight freedom of the press, such as The Dragon from Chicago: The Untold Story of an American Reporter in Nazi Germany (2024) by historian Pamela D. Toler.
Within a week of my request, my local library
purchased Toler’s nonfiction book about a female European correspondent in Berlin during
Hitler’s rise to power. The author explains on her website that her
writing and research travel “beyond the familiar boundaries of American
History” by introducing historical figures who have faded from
attention but have powerful stories.
The Dragon from Chicago surpassed my expectations in content, style, and pertinence to our time.
Toler resurrects the story of Sigrid Schultz, a young
American-born female reporter living in Berlin spanning two world wars. Toler’s
scholarly book is well-documented but not overly pedantic or
lengthy. At 288 pages, it reads like a novel, featuring a beguiling female protagonist, infamous villains, entertaining plot twists, and cited facts that Toler deftly weaves into the story’s fabric. An occasional author’s
comment distracts from the narrative but does not occur often enough to dismiss
Toler as a trustworthy historian.
Similar
to many World War II histories and novels, The Dragon From Chicago mentions
Nazi atrocities, however, it does not overwhelm the reader with numerous
detailed examples. The focus is on Schultz and her reactions to
events leading up to Hitler’s rise to power in Berlin, the escalating war, and
her undaunted determination to report the truth in a male-dominated profession
while embedded among some of the most ruthless leaders in history.
Fluent in Five Languages, Schultz becomes Chief Correspondent
Schultz is portrayed as an articulate,
engaging, and ingenious journalist. Fluent in five languages
(German, French, Italian, English, and Norwegian), she became an asset to
the Chicago Tribune’s Foreign Press (Berlin Bureau) in the
1930s and eventually convinced her male editors in the U.S. to name her Chief
Correspondent. She broke through a male-dominated profession and
culture by socializing and drinking hard liquor with male informants and
journalists at bars and state-sponsored events. Although her health
suffered, she continued to work nonstop, always seeking a scoop. Nazis
took notice of this petite woman who “dropped the working girl meekness” and asked brazen
questions at press conferences. Hermann Göring, a powerful Nazi
leader, enjoyed verbally sparring with Schultz and dubbed her “the Dragon from
Chicago.”
Toler’s research reveals more than Sigrid Schultz, the foreign correspondent; we also learn about Schultz the woman: her fascinating parents, social and love life, personal hardships of war, and the determination to host modest, cheerful dinner parties.
The appearance of a “normal” life was essential
to Schultz as she honed her journalistic prowess and honored a self-imposed
censorship. The Dragon often feared for her life, understanding that the Nazis
could charge her with treason and sentence her to be hanged for reporting
anything offensive to Hitler. She complained to her editors about being stalked,
interrogated, and “muzzled.” Nazis questioned her several times
about Judaism in her maternal line, which she denied. Through
hardships of war, such as near starvation during severe rationing and bombs exploding
near her office, she never wavered in her task to get the news
out. She understood the value of her job—the value of a "foreign" free
press.
Covering Hitler's Abuse of Power
Early
in her career, Sigrid Schultz broke story after story about Hitler’s
abuse of power, hoping the United States would help curb the spread of fascism.
Based on trusted informants, she revealed the “Euthanasia
story”—Hitler’s plan to save the state money by killing 80,000 insane and
crippled people. She also wrote an article titled “Hitler Gazes at Stars to
Guide His Decisions.” She often found herself in a stressful balancing act as she
zeroed in on German interest stories directed at her escalating American
readership. On one hand, her editor was an isolationist and feared
her stories might be war-mongering; on the other hand, she was compelled to
tell as much truth as she could about Nazi terrorism.
One of the First Women Reporters on the Front Line
Near the war’s end,
the Tribune and McCall’s women’s
magazine hired her to report from the frontline of the war and gather personal
interest stories with a German angle. She was with the American
soldiers when they discovered the horrors of a death camp and interviewed the
captured Nazi war criminal Göring, who remembered the petite
dragon’s fierceness and honesty. After the war, Sigrid Schultz lost her
job and fame, but always feared a resurgence of fascism. She wrote a
book, published in 1944: Germany Will Try It Again. Will the
U.S. heed her warning about fascism eighty years later?
--CD Burr
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