REVIEW: The Dragon from Chicago by Pamela D. Toler
For fans of unheralded women’s stories, a captivating look at Sigrid Schultz—one of the earliest reporters to warn Americans of the rising threat of the Nazi regime
“No other American correspondent in Berlin knew so much of what was going on behind the scene as did Sigrid Schultz.” — William L. Shirer, author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
We are facing an alarming upsurge in the spread of misinformation and attempts by powerful figures to discredit facts so they can seize control of narratives. These are threats American journalist Sigrid Schultz knew all too well. The Chicago Tribune’s Berlin bureau chief and primary foreign correspondent for Central Europe from 1925 to January 1941, Schultz witnessed Hitler’s rise to power and was one of the first reporters—male or female—to warn American readers of the growing dangers of Nazism.
In The Dragon From Chicago, Pamela D. Toler draws on extensive archival research to unearth the largely forgotten story of Schultz’s years spent courageously reporting the news from Berlin, from the revolts of 1919 through the Nazi rise to power and Allied air raids over Berlin in 1941. At a time when women reporters rarely wrote front-page stories and her male colleagues saw a powerful unmarried woman as a “freak,” Schultz pulled back the curtain on how the Nazis misreported the news to their own people, and how they attempted to control the foreign press through bribery and threats.
Sharp and enlightening, Schultz’s story provides a powerful example for how we can reclaim truth in an era marked by the spread of disinformation and claims of “fake news.”
Review
Sigrid Schultz was born to be a reporter during some of the most harrowing times of the 20th century. She was a woman in the right place, at the right time. Although it will probably be the Nazi part of the book title that will catch people’s attention (as it did mine), the book is far more than that. Beginning before she was even born and laying out her parents’ European heritage and her father’s profession that took them to various European cities, we learn how her early years in Chicago instilled in her a pride in being American.
Her father was a painter and when Sigrid was eight, the family returned to Paris and various cities in Germany for his commissions. Their home was filled with an eclectic mix of artists and intelligentsia who loved to debate current affairs, literature, and anything else that came up. Sigrid benefitted from a new form of schools set up in Paris for young women, learned at least five languages (English, French, German, Norwegian, and Italian) and was taught by her father to appreciate fine dining and how to hold her liquor – something that helped her at the Adlon among all the male journalists.
Events caught the Schultzs in Germany during WWI when it was hard enough to survive even before America joined the war and they became “enemy aliens.” Sigrid’s and her mother Hedwig’s habit of being kind and doing good deeds began to form the network of informants (who were the envy of other journalists) who would be so essential in the years to come for Sigrid as she sought truth rather than propaganda. Sigrid also “thought outside of the box” in ways to finagle and charm her way into getting interviews. Being taught by a stellar journalist honed her skills and eventually earned her the job of Berlin bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune. From here she had a front row seat during the turmoil of the 20s and 30s. Sigrid’s language and people skills plus her razor sharp understanding of the politics gave her the edge in understanding the nitty-gritty of what she was seeing and reporting on.
As the Nazis rose to power, Sigrid was wise to their efforts to manipulate and hide the truth as well as savvy about not falling into traps that could be used to expel her. She also developed ways and means of making sure that her stories made it to Chicago in the face of the Nazi’s efforts to control what foreign journalists reported. She and many others there saw the war coming. Luckily for her, a scheduled visit to the US occurred in early 1941. Speaking engagements and then illness delayed her return until after America had entered the war. She returned to Europe in the final months of the war and covered some of the concentration camp trials.
My question of why I’d never heard of this woman was answered in her slow decline into post war obscurity partly due to poor decisions and partly because she could never pivot from Germany to seeing the Soviet Union as the main threat to western democracies.
The book is as much about the interwar political turmoil as it is about Sigrid. There is perhaps a bit more of this and less of her than I was hoping for but then it was her knowledge of German politics and her place in Berlin that were the driving force for so much of who she was and what she did. B-
~Jayne
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Ack – I thought it was somewhere in the blurb but I’ve just realized that the explanation for the title isn’t there. The Dragon from Chicago is what Hermann Goering called Sigrid Schultz.