The Dragon from Chicago

June 1, 2024
Sigrid Schultz, the American-born daughter of immigrant parents, was a foreign correspondent and the Chicago Tribune's Berlin bureau chief between 1925 and 1941. Fluent in English, French, and German, she and her family moved to Germany when she was a child, and her later teen years were spent in Berlin during WWI. First hired mainly as a translator and fixer for Tribune war correspondent Dick Little, she soon proved talented, adept at networking, and indispensable. As Toler (Women Warriors, 2019) reveals, Schultz also quickly became a valued member of an eclectic band of international journalists covering Germany, including future renowned screenwriter Ben Hecht. Toler does an excellent job of documenting the increasingly fraught situation for members of the foreign press in Germany during the 1930s, including the episode that earned Schultz her nickname, the Dragon from Chicago, bestowed by Hermann G�ring. An outstanding biographical subject, Schultz and her exploits will fascinate those eager to discover a fearless woman who did not hesitate to tell the truth.

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Starred review from June 24, 2024
Foreign correspondent Sigrid Schultz (1893–1980), who reported from Berlin between 1919 and 1941, was one of the first and most vocal journalists to document the growing threat of Nazism, according to this exhilarating biography. Historian Toler (Women Warriors) shows that Schultz was the only journalist of her era to systemically analyze in her reporting (which regularly appeared in the Chicago Tribune) how the Nazis manipulated the media—both by misrepresenting facts to the German public and by bribing and threatening the foreign press. Schultz, who was born in Chicago but raised in Europe, had “a European’s understanding of Europe,” which she worked to her advantage, cultivating informants who faced incredible risk for communicating with her. Toler’s propulsive narrative, which chronicles Schultz’s investigative escapades and scoops (like a 1939 visit with Hitler’s astrologers that allowed her to break the news of Germany’s nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union), is a journalistic adventure story of the highest caliber (it opens with a riveting scene of Schultz grilling Hermann Göring over press freedom; “You’ll never learn to show the proper respect for state authorities,” he tells her. “I suppose that is one of the characteristics of people from that crime-ridden city of Chicago”). The portrait of Schultz that emerges is dazzling (“small, blond, and surprisingly formidable,” she was, according to one fellow correspondent, “Hitler’s greatest enemy”). This is stellar.

Starred review from July 15, 2024
A biography of Sigrid Schultz (1893-1980), who reported from Germany from the 1920s to the end of World War II. Toler, a translator and author ofHeroines of Mercy Street, provides an adept, engaging portrait of her subject. Schultz was born in Chicago, the daughter of a Norwegian painter and his German-born wife. Brought up in a cosmopolitan community, she was fluent in French and German by the time her family moved to Europe in 1901. After a spell in Germany, where her father had several commissions, they settled in Paris. She traveled widely, attended classes at the Sorbonne, and added Norwegian and Italian to her stock of languages. In 1913, the family moved to Berlin. When World War I broke out, her father's commissions dried up and she taught English and French to wealthy families to pay the bills. Then, in 1919, Chicago Tribune reporter Dick Little offered her a job as interpreter and cub reporter in the paper's Berlin office. Schultz accompanied him to interviews, connecting with important people who became valuable sources when she began writing her own stories. She proved adept at dodging the gatekeepers--and later, the Nazi censors--to get the facts. In 1926, she was appointed chief of theTribune's Berlin office, a position from which she reported on the rise of Hitler. By 1941, the growing war forced her to return to Chicago. After D-Day, she became a war correspondent forMcCall's Magazine and was among the first reporters to see the concentration camps following liberation. After the war, she tried finding other writing work but never recovered her early success--partly because of poor health. Still, as Toler makes amply clear, she left a brilliant firsthand account of a dramatic era in 20th-century history. A fascinating portrait of a trailblazing reporter who was an eyewitness to history.

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