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—that draws striking parallels to the rise of fascism today
“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
The Dragon from Chicago tells the gripping tale of American journalist Sigrid Schultz’s fights on 2 fronts: to establish herself as a serious foreign correspondent in an era when her male colleagues saw a powerful unmarried woman as a “freak,” and to keep the news flowing out of Nazi Germany despite the regime’s tightening controls on the media.
Schultz was the Chicago Tribune’s Berlin bureau chief and primary foreign correspondent for Central Europe from 1925 to January 1941 and one of the first reporters—male or female—to warn American readers of the growing dangers of Nazism.
Drawing on extensive archival research, Pamela D. Toler unearths the largely forgotten story of Schultz’s years spent courageously reporting the news from Berlin, from the revolts of 1919 through Nazi atrocities and air raids over Berlin in 1941. At a time when women reporters rarely wrote front-page stories, 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 vital lesson for how we can reclaim truth in an era marked by the spread of disinformation and claims of “fake news.”
“As the Chicago Tribune’s bureau chief in Berlin, Sigrid Schultz interviewed Hitler, broke the story of the Nazi-Soviet pact, and reported firsthand from the death camps. She deserves to be far better known than she is, and in The Dragon from Chicago, Pamela Toler admirably rescues her legacy. Intelligent, perceptive, and thoughtfully written, this is the definitive work on a foreign correspondent who shattered gender stereotypes and fought for the truth against lies and propaganda—a valuable lesson for our time as well as her own.”
—Matthew Goodman, author of Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland’s History-Making Race Around the World
“With documents and historical context presented in crisp, inviting prose, Pamela Toler has re-notched the place of Sigrid Schultz in that intriguing band of American correspondents of the 1920s to the 1940s—both men and women—who worked at the forefront of international reporting and news analysis.”
—Brooke Kroeger, author of Undaunted: How Women Changed American Journalism
“A wildly inspirational tale. I’m so glad that Toler rescued Schultz’s legacy.”
—Julia Scheeres, coauthor of Listen, World! How the Intrepid Elsie Robinson Became America’s Most-Read Woman