Sigrid
Schultz,
the daughter of a portrait painter from Norway, was born in Chicago
in 1893. Educated
in France and Germany,
she joined the Chicago Tribune
in 1919. Seven years later she had become bureau chief in Berlin.
It is believed that she was the first woman in the world to hold such
a position in a major news bureau.
Schultz
interviewed Adolf Hitler several times
and soon became convinced that his foreign policies would eventually
lead to war. On one occasion Hitler told her that: "You cannot
understand the Nazi movement, because you think with your head and
not with your heart." In order to protect her life, Schultz's
articles attacking Hitler were published under the name John
Dickson.
Schultz
was injured during a bombing raid of Berlin.
After receiving medical treatment in the United
States Schultz attempted to return to Germany
in August, 1941, but the Nazi government refused to let her enter.
Instead she made a nationwide lecture tour and wrote the book,
Germany Will Try It Again (1944).
In 1944
Schultz worked a a war correspondent for McCall's
and Liberty magazines. She accompanied
the US Army when it landed in Normandy
in 1944. She also reported on the liberation of France
and the advance into Nazi Germany.
Schultz was also one of the first journalists to visit Buchenwald
and covered the Nuremberg
War Trials.
After the
war Schultz retired to her family home to take care of her ill mother.
Sigrid Schultz continued to write and was working on a history of
Anti-Semitism in Germany
when she died in 1980.
(1)
Sigrid Schultz, Chicago Tribune (13th July, 1939)
Communism, Soviet Russia and Dictator Stalin were called the arch
enemies of civilization when Hitler was advancing toward supreme power.
Hatred of communism and the faith of the bourgeois that he would save
from communism helped him become master of Germany.
Today England is being
proclaimed as World Enemy No.1. She is accused of usurping the rights
of small nations, of opposing Germany's "right to be the first
power in the world."
Hatred of England is simmering
or blazing in Japan, India, Arabia, Africa, Ireland, Russia, and England's
ally, France. It is being fanned systematically by Nazi agents throughout
the world.
Hitler, it is said, hopes
to use this hatred to establish Germany as the most powerful nation
in the world, the same as he used the German citizen's hatred of communism
to establish his rule in Germany.
Friendship with Soviet
Russia, or at least an understanding with her, can prove a powerful
weapon in Germany's campaign "to force England to her knees,"
diplomatic sources declare.
The Germans figure that
the English are so terrified of the possible formation of a Soviet-German
bloc that Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax will again go to Germany
and offer all the concessions the Germans want. If the British fail
to respond to the threat, the Germans argue that they can still get
enough raw materials and money out of Russia to make the deal worth
while.
(2)
William L. Shirer, reviewing Sigrid Schultz's
book, Germany Will Try It Again (1944)
No other American correspondent
in Berlin knew so much of what was going on behind the scenes as did
Sigrid Schultz.
(3)
Lilya Wagner, Women War Correspondents of World War II (1981)
Sigrid was one of the first
U.S. journalists to predict the coming conflict - World War II. She
had covered central Europe from 1916, and would do so until 1941.
She interviewed many top Nazi leaders and "warned early of the
dangers they represented to world peace and the lives of Jews in Hitler's
Third Reich.
(4)
Frederick S. Voss, Reporting the War: The Journalistic Coverage
of World War II (1994)
One of Schultz's great
talents lay in cultivating reliable insider news sources, and in 1938
and 1939 the information she
gained from her extensive network of German contacts led to a succession
of articles for the Tribune that revealed, in
sometimes amazing detail, the workings and ambitions of the Third
Reich. In the interest of protecting their author from
possible reprisals from German authorities, the stories ran under
the pseudonym John Dickson, and they carried false European datelines
meant to suggest that Dickson was getting his information from sources
outside German borders. It was a wise precaution. Running a broad
gamut in terms of their subject matter, the articles offered convincing
anecdotal proof of the ruthless oppression spawned by the Nazi regime
and of its ever-more-ambitious military designs on much of the rest
of Europe. If the Nazi establishment had known that Sigrid Schultz
was the real author of these stories, it doubtless would have been
risky for her to remain in Berlin.
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