Women of Every Complexion and Complexity
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  • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Fought for Human Rights
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  • Lydia Maria Francis Child Travels 'Over the River and Through the Wood'
  • Anti-Suffragists Believed Women Didn't Need the Right to Vote
  • Finland's Alexandra Gripenberg Sought Universal Women's Rights
  • From Frances Slocum to Little Bear Woman and Back Again
  • Madame Elisabeth Thible is the First Woman to Ride in a Free Floating Balloon
  • Veronica Kerler Frank Pined for Germany, But Made Milwaukee Her Home
  • Mary Humphreys Stamps, Undefeated Rebel with An Educational Cause
  • Sister Monica Is One of Milwaukee, Wisconsin's Early Pioneers
  • A Love Story for St. Valentine's Day - Marie Antoinette and Count Axel von Fersen
  • Three Wisconsin Women of the Waves
  • Margaret Fox Kane and her Victorian Love Story
  • Francoise Marie Jacquelin, Lioness of La Tour, Lioness of Acadia, Woman in Her Own Right
  • Mary Breckinridge, Circuit Riding Nurse and Founder of the Frontier Nursing Service
  • Women Bicyclists Break Their Glass Cages and Ride into Liberation
  • Maria Mitchell, America's First Woman Astronomer Demonstrated Female Scientific Aptitude
  • Queen Alexandra of Great Britain-Queen Victoria's Daughter-in-Law, Bertie's Patient Wife, and Her Own Person!
  • Chicagoan Kate Kellogg Meets a Ghost on a Train
  • Isobel Lillian Steele Went to a Party and Ended Up in a Nazi Jail
  • Madam Sophie Blanchard - "Official Aeronaut of the Restoration"
  • Women of Their Time and Place
    • Nadine Turchin Fights Alongside Her Husband in the Civil War
    • War Stories Along Lake Erie: Ordinary Women Experience the War of 1812
    • Katie Walker Tends Robbins Reef Light Near the Statue of Liberty
    • Maria Gulovich Joined the Czech Resistance
    • Pirate Fanny Campbell Freed Her Fiance and Fought the British
    • SOE Agent Andree Borrel Lived Several Lifetimes in Her 24 Years
    • Lydia Latrobe Roosevelt and the First Mississippi River Steamboat
    • Sophie Kwiatkowski Served as a New Guinea Nurse in World War II
    • Clara Zetkin Spoke Against Hitler in the German Reichstag
    • Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, Female Fuhrer, Breathed Her Nazi Beliefs
    • Nancy Leo , the Only Woman Buried in Luxembourg American Cemetery
    • Dickey Chapelle, Journalist and War Correspondent
    • Lucena Brockway Adapts to Life in the Keweenaw Copper Mining Country of Lake Superior
    • Does Mary Surrat's Ghost Haunt the Senate Chambers Seeking Justice?
    • The Ghostly Cyclist in Brooklyn's Prospect Park
  • Women of Contemporary 20th and 21st Century Complexion
    • Clara Ward Chimay, Gilded Age Princess
    • Ruth Becker's Faith Helps Her Survive the Titanic and Beyond
    • Mildred Beltmann , Wartime Wife
    • The Courage of their Cultural Convictions - Women Missionaries in China
    • Light and Radiance - Laurence Owen and Her Sabena Fellow Travelers
    • Edna St. Vincent Millay, Passionate Poet, Candle-Lit Feminist
    • Fascinating Footnote: The Goose Down Divorce
    • Olive Higgins Prouty Juggles to Balance Home and Career
    • Mother and Daughter Journalists Agnes Meyer and Katharine Graham Shaped Journalism
    • Rose Friedman and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire
    • Katharine Meyer Graham Leaves Her Mark on the Washington Post
    • Ida M. Tarbell, "Bachelor Soul," Transitional Woman, or Both?
    • Nurse Edith Cavell, the Courage to Die for Her Country
    • Sigrid Schultz Outsmarted Hermann Goering
    • Martha Dickie Sharp Saves Jewish Refugees from the Nazi Death Machine
    • Virginia Graham Pioneered in Early Television and Survived Cancer
    • Rose Conway, President Harry Truman's Secret Weapon
    • Nancy Green, Talented Entrepreneur, Transitional Symbol
    • "Surrender on Demand:" The Friendship of Mary Jayne Gold and Miriam Ebel
    • Julia K. Tibbitts - Closet Environmentalist
    • Lee Lawrence Ansberry Reconquers the World and Reshapes Her Life
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Sigrid Schultz Outsmarted Hermann Goering

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Sigrid Schultz worked in Berlin as the Chicago Tribune’s first female Bureau Chief in Central Europe and reported the growth of the Nazi state with insider’s knowledge. As the Chicago Tribune’s ace woman reporter, she beat Hermann Goering at his own game.

Sigrid Schultz’s china doll appearance hid the razor sharp mind that she needed to conceal her animosity for the new Nazi regime in Germany and present a friendly enough face and attitude to get accurate, inside information for her newspaper stories.

Sigrid had an insider’s understanding of the workings of the Nazi machine. Although she had been born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1893, Sigrid’s father who was a well known portrait painter opened a studio in Paris. Sigrid graduated from the Sorbonne in 1914, and then she joined her parents in Berlin where they had settled. They remained in Berlin throughout World War I, protected by their American citizenship, and Sigrid studied history and international law at Berlin University

In 1919, the Berlin office of the Chicago Tribune hired Sigrid as an interpreter, a job that suited her well since she spoke English, French, Dutch, German, and Polish. Her command of the German language helped her report German politics from an insider’s perspective. In 1926, the Tribune made her its Bureau Chief for Central Europe, the first time a media organization had ever promoted a woman to such a position.

Sigrid Schultz Interviewed Hitler Several Times and Documented Nazi Germany

Although Nazism repelled Sigrid, she cultivated her connection with World War I ace pilot Captain Hermann Goering. She made such a good impression that Goering introduced her to Hitler. Sigrid joined the small group of correspondents who interviewed Hitler several times in the early 1930s. Her intimate knowledge of Germany’s leaders helped her accurately report their goals as Nazi Germany became a looming threat to world peace.

Berlin had changed since Sigrid had first come to Germany. Now it was hard to stroll down the Unter den Linden without running into goose stepping, saluting soldiers. Neighbors who had been once been friendly would no longer speak to Sigrid because her anti-Nazi views were well known. Eventually Hermann Goering decided to eliminate Sigrid Schultz.

Hermann Goering Plotted to Eliminate Sigrid Schultz

One day while Sigrid was at her office, a man arrived at the apartment that she and her mother shared with a large sealed envelope . He handed it to her mother with the instructions that Fraulein Schultz was to open it when she returned that evening. Frau Schultz phoned Sigrid and Sigrid rushed home. She took one look at the design for an airplane engine inside the envelope and burned it to ashes in the fireplace.

On her way back to her office she passed a man she knew heading toward her apartment with two criminal types behind him. She planted herself squarely in their path and told them that it would be a waste of time to continue because she had already burned the envelope. Then she flagged down a taxi and loudly ordered the driver to take her to the American embassy.

 

Sigrid Schultz Confronted Hermann Goering

Sigrid decided that the time had come to protest directly to Goering. In April 1935,she approached him at a luncheon that the Foreign Press Association gave to honor him and his new bride, Emmy Sonnemann.. Goering scowled down the long banquet table and said that it was time that reporters began respecting the new Germany instead of constantly writing about concentration camps, which were needed to teach discipline to people who had forgotten about it during the days of the weak Weimar Republic.

Ignoring his belligerent speech, Sigrid spoke quietly about the agents that he had sent to trap her and told him that she had informed the American embassy. Goering lost his temper. He called Sigrid Schultz the “Dragon Lady from Chicago,” and he said that she didn’t have enough respect for the authority of the state since she was from “the crime ridden city of Chicago.”

Mutual Broadcaster and "John Dickson"

In 1938, Sigrid began to report for the Mutual Broadcasting System as well as the Chicago Tribune. During 1938 and 1939, Sigrid filed some of her dispatches under an assumed name so she could continue to work in Germany without being jailed or expelled. Many of her stories were published in the Tribune’s weekly magazine under the fictitious name of “John Dickson.”

She also filed her dispatches outside of Germany, usually from Oslo or Copenhagen with false datelines. Her articles reported the German government attacks on churches, and exposed the concentration camps and the persecution of the Jews. Under her Dickson byline, Sigrid forecast the Munich Agreement, and the 1939 non-aggression pact between German and the Soviet Union. Sigrid’s colleague William L. Shirer wrote that “No other American correspondent in Berlin knew so much of what was going on behind the scenes as did Sigrid Schultz.”

Normandy, Buchenwald, and Beyond

During the first year of World War II, Sigrid reported the progress of the German Army, but she couldn’t travel to the front because she was a woman. After she was injured in an Allied air raid on Berlin, she went to Spain where she caught typhus. She returned to the United States in early 1941 and spent the next three years convalescing from the disease. During her convalescence, Sigrid wrote a book about Germany titled Germany Will Try It Again and lectured nationwide about her 25 years in Germany.

Finally returning to Europe in 1944, Sigrid landed in Normandy with the United States Army, and reported the liberation of France and the conquest of Germany. She was one of the first journalists to visit Buchenwald and covered the Nuremberg trials.

Back in the United States Sigrid continued reporting and wrote several books. She died in 1980 before she could complete her history of Anti-Semitism in Germany.

References

William L. Shirer, Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934-1941, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002

Nancy Caldwell Sorel, The Women Who Wrote the War, Harper Collins, 1999

 

 


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All of the material on this website is copyrighted.  You are free to link to any of the articles and to download any of the PDF books to read and use as long as you credit me as the author.       kathywarnes@gmail.com
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  • Home
  • Women's Rooms
    • Womens Rooms-Anne
    • Womens Rooms-Abigail
    • The Dead Baby in a Blue Blanket: The
    • Rena Rides the Raindrops
  • Women at Work-Blog
  • E Books and Print Books for Sale
  • Women of Historical Complexion
  • Rachel and Elizabeth Knaggs
  • Elizabeth Stiles, President Lincoln's Spy
  • Loyalist Lucy Flucker Meets Patriot Henry Knox at a Boston Parade
  • Queen Maria Amelia, the Last Queen of Portugal, Stood Her Ground
  • The Lady and the Patriot: Theodosia Burr Alston's Fateful Voyage
  • Margaret Agnew Blennerhassett - More Character Than Riches
  • Florence Nightingale- Nurse, Feminist, Statistician, Author
  • Mary Todd Lincoln Considered April Her "Season of Sadness"
  • Mrs. Santa Claus - A Strong and Supportive Woman for All Seasons
  • Elizabeth Turner McCormick, Woman Voyager
  • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Fought for Human Rights
  • Mary Fields, Stage Coach Mail Driver, Sharp Shooter, Faithful Friend
  • Lucy Parsons, "More Dangerous Than A Thousand Rioters"
  • Lydia Maria Francis Child Travels 'Over the River and Through the Wood'
  • Anti-Suffragists Believed Women Didn't Need the Right to Vote
  • Finland's Alexandra Gripenberg Sought Universal Women's Rights
  • From Frances Slocum to Little Bear Woman and Back Again
  • Madame Elisabeth Thible is the First Woman to Ride in a Free Floating Balloon
  • Veronica Kerler Frank Pined for Germany, But Made Milwaukee Her Home
  • Mary Humphreys Stamps, Undefeated Rebel with An Educational Cause
  • Sister Monica Is One of Milwaukee, Wisconsin's Early Pioneers
  • A Love Story for St. Valentine's Day - Marie Antoinette and Count Axel von Fersen
  • Three Wisconsin Women of the Waves
  • Margaret Fox Kane and her Victorian Love Story
  • Francoise Marie Jacquelin, Lioness of La Tour, Lioness of Acadia, Woman in Her Own Right
  • Mary Breckinridge, Circuit Riding Nurse and Founder of the Frontier Nursing Service
  • Women Bicyclists Break Their Glass Cages and Ride into Liberation
  • Maria Mitchell, America's First Woman Astronomer Demonstrated Female Scientific Aptitude
  • Queen Alexandra of Great Britain-Queen Victoria's Daughter-in-Law, Bertie's Patient Wife, and Her Own Person!
  • Chicagoan Kate Kellogg Meets a Ghost on a Train
  • Isobel Lillian Steele Went to a Party and Ended Up in a Nazi Jail
  • Madam Sophie Blanchard - "Official Aeronaut of the Restoration"
  • Women of Their Time and Place
    • Nadine Turchin Fights Alongside Her Husband in the Civil War
    • War Stories Along Lake Erie: Ordinary Women Experience the War of 1812
    • Katie Walker Tends Robbins Reef Light Near the Statue of Liberty
    • Maria Gulovich Joined the Czech Resistance
    • Pirate Fanny Campbell Freed Her Fiance and Fought the British
    • SOE Agent Andree Borrel Lived Several Lifetimes in Her 24 Years
    • Lydia Latrobe Roosevelt and the First Mississippi River Steamboat
    • Sophie Kwiatkowski Served as a New Guinea Nurse in World War II
    • Clara Zetkin Spoke Against Hitler in the German Reichstag
    • Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, Female Fuhrer, Breathed Her Nazi Beliefs
    • Nancy Leo , the Only Woman Buried in Luxembourg American Cemetery
    • Dickey Chapelle, Journalist and War Correspondent
    • Lucena Brockway Adapts to Life in the Keweenaw Copper Mining Country of Lake Superior
    • Does Mary Surrat's Ghost Haunt the Senate Chambers Seeking Justice?
    • The Ghostly Cyclist in Brooklyn's Prospect Park
  • Women of Contemporary 20th and 21st Century Complexion
    • Clara Ward Chimay, Gilded Age Princess
    • Ruth Becker's Faith Helps Her Survive the Titanic and Beyond
    • Mildred Beltmann , Wartime Wife
    • The Courage of their Cultural Convictions - Women Missionaries in China
    • Light and Radiance - Laurence Owen and Her Sabena Fellow Travelers
    • Edna St. Vincent Millay, Passionate Poet, Candle-Lit Feminist
    • Fascinating Footnote: The Goose Down Divorce
    • Olive Higgins Prouty Juggles to Balance Home and Career
    • Mother and Daughter Journalists Agnes Meyer and Katharine Graham Shaped Journalism
    • Rose Friedman and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire
    • Katharine Meyer Graham Leaves Her Mark on the Washington Post
    • Ida M. Tarbell, "Bachelor Soul," Transitional Woman, or Both?
    • Nurse Edith Cavell, the Courage to Die for Her Country
    • Sigrid Schultz Outsmarted Hermann Goering
    • Martha Dickie Sharp Saves Jewish Refugees from the Nazi Death Machine
    • Virginia Graham Pioneered in Early Television and Survived Cancer
    • Rose Conway, President Harry Truman's Secret Weapon
    • Nancy Green, Talented Entrepreneur, Transitional Symbol
    • "Surrender on Demand:" The Friendship of Mary Jayne Gold and Miriam Ebel
    • Julia K. Tibbitts - Closet Environmentalist
    • Lee Lawrence Ansberry Reconquers the World and Reshapes Her Life
  • Christmas Cheer