The First Rough Draft of History from Berlin: Appreciating Sigrid Schultz

Sigrid Schultz, Chicago Tribune reporter in pre-War Berlin

Speaking with a group of foreign correspondents in London in 1963, Philip L. Graham, the legendary publisher of The Washington Post, contended that the role of journalists was to engage in the “impossible task of providing every week a first rough draft of history that will never be completed about a world we can never really understand.” It was an apt description of a news reporter’s job to educate and inform the public in a fast-paced, ever-changing world. Good journalists may not get everything completely right in their “first rough drafts of history” but, when done with care and integrity, their work is essential to an informed citizenry and functioning democracy. Graham’s description succinctly captures the importance of deadline journalism to help us understand world events as they happen before we can fully comprehend how today’s events will impact our lives tomorrow.

I thought of Graham’s comment while reading The Dragon from Chicago: The Untold Story of an American Reporter in Nazi Germany (Beacon Press, 2024) by historian Pamela D. Toler. The book details the life and career of Sigrid Schultz, a trailblazing female journalist who witnessed and wrote about the rise of Hitler and fascism in Germany during her time as a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune from 1919 to 1941. Toler gives a vivid account of Germany’s turmoil and volatility, which Schultz experienced as the Tribune’s central European correspondent and Berlin bureau chief during the roaring twenties, the Great Depression, and the start of World War II. Schultz provided more news about what was really happening in Germany and Europe than any other journalist of her time. Her context and analysis warned readers back home about the threatening storms brewing in Germany and why they should be taken seriously.

Born in Chicago, Schultz became an American ex-pat at the age of eight, when her family moved to Germany in 1901 so her artist father could seek commissions painting portraits of wealthy Europeans. The family later moved to Paris, where Schultz pursued her education, before returning to Germany in 1913. Schultz taught French and English in Berlin during World War I, and she would spend most of the next thirty years there. Fluent in French, German, and Norwegian, her experiences shaped her understanding of history and growing fascination with politics and world events. Notwithstanding the disadvantages of her gender during that era, she was ready-made to be a journalist.

Before the start of World War I, most American newspapers did not invest in on-the-ground foreign news coverage. That all changed once the United States entered the war in April 1917, when dozens of American newspapers sent hundreds of reporters to Europe. When the war ended in 1919, several papers, including the Chicago Tribune, established news bureaus in the major European cities. Dick Little, a veteran war correspondent for the Tribune, became the paper’s first Berlin bureau chief. Little hired Schultz as an interpreter and cub reporter. Schultz proved to be a quick study, and with her grasp of languages and understanding of German politics and history, she soon became Little’s “number two man in Berlin.”

As it happens, Berlin was a mecca of news in the spring of 1919. As Schultz explained years later, “all the elements of the next twenty, thirty years were right there, visible.” As noted by Toler, Berlin at that time was a “political hot spot … marked by repeated economic crises, constant street battles, and frequent, occasionally violent, political challenges” from the most extreme elements on the left and the right. Schultz had personal contacts that no other reporter in Berlin could match. And Little, as one of the most skilled and experienced reporters around, taught Schultz the importance of accuracy and precision when reporting the news, including the need to corroborate information gleaned from sources. “No proof, no story.”

In 1925, Schultz became the first woman to head a foreign news bureau when the Tribune appointed her as Berlin bureau chief. While increasing numbers of women were becoming journalists, with a few notable exceptions most were confined to reporting “soft news” such as fashion and society news. Schultz was the only female bureau chief of any news organization until after World War II.

When she first became bureau chief, Germany was in the middle of the “Golden Twenties” enjoying an artistic and intellectual blossoming. The economy was on its way to recovery, the German mark had stabilized, and at least on the floor of the Reichstag (German parliament), the political landscape was relatively calm. The National Socialist Party was not yet a political power.

In 1929, Germany’s illusion of stability began to crack, first with a severe cold wave in February that caused widespread food and energy shortages, and then with the start of the Great Depression following the stock market crash in October. Soon, the German economy spiraled downward, unemployment skyrocketed and, as Toler notes, “the hungry, the frustrated, and the desperate sought solace in the promises of political parties at both extremes.” The Communist Party’s membership more than tripled from 1928 to 1932, while that of the National Socialist Party increased tenfold. As Schultz reported based on first-hand observations, Berlin’s workers, who had previously looked to the Communists and Socialists, were now being drawn to the promise of a nationalist utopia coming from the Nazi Party.

Schultz’s reporting helped her readers understand the differences between the various political factions that dominated German events in 1930. Unlike her competitors at other newspapers, she repeatedly brought home that the National Socialists threatened the future of Europe and should be taken seriously. As Toler notes:

[O]n August 31, 1930, with the elections for the new Reichstag only two weeks away, Schultz analyzed the position of the seventeen parties then on the German ballot in a long article in the Tribune. She told her readers bluntly that the outcome of the election was important to the entire world. … she made clear what Hitler and his followers wanted and how dangerous they were. The Fascists wanted to overthrow the government and establish a dictatorship of ‘truly Germanic men,’ she wrote. They openly threatened pogroms against Jews and ‘other alien elements in Germany.’  They had proved over and over that they were willing to club down political opponents when they couldn’t argue them into submission.

Despite Schultz’s reporting, even astute political observers in 1930 failed to take the Nazis seriously. Schultz knew better. The number of stories Schultz filed about the actions of Hitler and his followers increased in frequency throughout 1931. She continued to explain the larger social and political context when writing about Depression-era Germany and described the Nazis as a growing political force. She introduced readers to Hitler’s Brownshirts, and as early as November 1931, reported on Hitler’s “terror plan” to force Jews out of Germany.

For the next two years, Schultz reported on every stage of Hitler’s campaign, including political and physical attacks on Hitler’s opponents. As Toler described, “over and over, she hammered home her belief that” the increasing acceptance of Hitler and the Fascists “was a matter of life and death for the Weimar Republic.” Anyone who read Schultz’s articles knew not to underestimate Hitler’s growing power.

After Hitler became chancellor in January 1933, Schultz reported on Hitler’s abuses of power, how he removed his political opponents from all levels of government, banned opposition parties, dismantled labor unions, and arrested thousands of members of the Communist Party. Within his first year, Hitler and the Nazis destroyed the political landscape of Germany and tore the society apart. In one of the earliest references in an American newspaper to German concentration camps, Schultz wrote in March 1933 about the government’s plans to detain 5,000 Communists at Dachau.

From 1933 to 1940, Schultz wrote hundreds of articles exposing the enactment of antisemitic laws and growing violence against Germany’s Jewish population, and she openly reported on the Nazis’ fanatical hatred of Jews. She warned of Germany’s efforts to re-arm and return as a military power, wrote of government attacks on Christian churches, and exposed the Nazis’ eugenics-based policies designed to strengthen the German “gene pool.”

During the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, Schultz witnessed the temporary cover-up of this reality by removal of “Jews Not Welcome” signs from restaurants, hotels, and other public places. She observed the government transform Berlin into a theme-park version of itself. Schultz was dismayed by American visitors who arrived for the Olympics impressed by the false perception of Germany the Nazis had created for them, and who left skeptical of newspaper reporters who told a different story.

When the Olympics ended and the tourists returned home, Schultz reported that the antisemitic signs reappeared and the persecution of Jews and political dissidents resumed with increased intensity. In a Tribune article on September 11, 1936, Schultz described a speech by Joseph Goebbels as one of the “fiercest anti-Jewish proclamations yet delivered in the Nazi drive against Jews.”

By this time, reporting the truth from Berlin was becoming increasingly dangerous. Germany had become a surveillance state, and German laws suppressing the freedom of the press made it unlawful to report negatively on the Reich. Although Schultz and the Tribune took precautions, behind every story was the threat of deportation, arrest, or the concentration camps.

To protect Schultz from retaliation, she and the Tribune used the pseudonym John Dickson with datelines in Copenhagen and Paris for her most hard-hitting articles. Writing under the Dickson byline, Schultz told readers about Hitler’s murder campaigns against political rivals, filed investigative reports on the existence of concentration camps and growing persecution of Germany’s Jews, provided an inside look at the Hitler Youth movement, and described how the Nazis kept a card index on every German citizen.

On the night of November 9-10, 1938, violent attacks against Jews erupted across Germany in what became known as Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass. Rioters destroyed hundreds of synagogues and desecrated Jewish cemeteries. Members of Hitler Youth smashed the windows and looted thousands of Jewish-owned stores, and the Gestapo arrested 30,000 Jewish men and sent them to concentration camps. As Schultz informed her readers, it was the largest antisemitic attack in Berlin history. For several days, Schultz reported the full extent of violence and arrests.

After Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and with the outbreak of World War II, reporting from Berlin became increasingly difficult. By the end of 1940, it was clear Schultz needed to leave Germany, which she did in January 1941. She did not return until April 1945, when General Patton’s troops liberated the death camp near Buchenwald. The Tribune sent Schultz and a photographer to cover it. As described by Toler, Schultz was “greeted by soldiers with horror-stricken faces, who had marched into Buchenwald only hours before.” She was given “an unfiltered view of the camp’s atrocities. … Soldiers showed the reporters the gallows hooks on which dying prisoners hung for hours and the elevator on which their bodies were transported to the rows of incinerator ovens.”

Because of Schultz’s multi-lingual fluency, she experienced Buchenwald on a more personal level as she interviewed many of the former prisoners in French and German. In one touching scene, a group of liberated Norwegian Jews were delighted when they learned Schultz could also speak their language. Schultz learned that they were part of a group of eight hundred Norwegian Jews forced to march to Buchenwald as the Russians drew near. Only the five of them survived. 

When Schultz sought to interview some French prisoners at the hospital in Buchenwald, she observed the most gruesome images she had ever seen.

Three tiers of bunks held dying men. … There was nothing she could do to make them more comfortable. All she could do was call out to them over and over again in French, “You are free.” After a while, she added, “I have just come from Paris. The chestnuts are in bloom in Paris.”

One man sat halfway up and reached a hand toward her. She went over and took it.

“Is it really true?” he asked.

“It’s really true. You are free. American planes are coming.”

“The chestnuts are in bloom?”

She nodded. And then he was gone.

Following the war, Schultz covered the Bergen-Belsen trials at Luneburg, which preceded the Nuremberg trials. A British military tribunal had charged forty-five Germans who worked at the Auschwitz and Belsen camps with war crimes. Schultz reported on witness testimony describing mass deaths at Belsen, the gas chambers at Auschwitz, and the cruelty inflicted on prisoners by the prison staff. The international news coverage of the trials gave the world its first extensive look at the savagery of the death camps.

Ultimately, Schultz’s life in journalism faded into oblivion. Although one of the most knowledgeable and fearless reporters to have honestly chronicled the rise of Hitler and Nazism in Germany during the 1930s, she never won the Pulitzer Prize or any major awards for her writing, was never recognized as a major media figure, and is little remembered by the news consuming public.

Yet, the life and career of Sigrid Schultz is a testament to the power of good reporting to uncover the best and worst in society. She exposed the unvarnished truth about what was happening in Germany in the years leading up to war, and she helped her readers understand the context and development of history as it occurred. It was not always glamorous work, and she received little credit or recognition. But for more than twenty years she used her command of languages, her sources, and her knowledge of German society to warn the world about the rising threat of fascism in Europe.

With authoritarianism once again on the rise at home and abroad, the search for truth and the importance of ethical, reality-based journalism that holds power to account is as important as it was in Sigrid Schultz’s time. When leaders of nations threaten reporters with treason, call them “enemies of the people” and cry “fake news” whenever a journalist reports a story that reflects negatively on them, the foundations of democracy and freedom are degraded and weakened. Only through the dedication and commitment of hard-working journalists like Sigrid Schultz, who carefully cultivate sources, fact-check and verify, and persevere in the face of threats, intimidation, war zones, lies and deceptions, can news organizations bring us a “first rough draft of history” that informs, educates, and helps us understand today what the world will look like tomorrow.