Author: Nicole Carpenter

On New Year’s Day in 1935, American reporter Sigrid Schultz witnessed raucous celebrations in Germany’s Black Forest. Shooting rifles into the air, the members of the fast-rising National Socialist party celebrated their leader’s rising hegemony over the German political landscape. Their leader was Adolf Hitler and they were Nazis. Schultz recorded all she saw and sent it via telegram to her editor at The Chicago Tribune: “…year two of Hitler’s Fuehrer Germany finds Germany comparable to a mass of cooling lava after a volcano eruption with some people getting burned and nobody certain where the lava will finally settle…” Schultz had been the Chicago Tribune’s Central Europe Bureau chief for nearly ten years by that time—the first woman to hold the post in a major news organization. Her reputation for fair and fact-based reporting had gained her the trust of Hermann Göring, the man who would be Hitler’s second in command. It helped that she was a trained chef and gracious hostess who held dinner parties that lured her subjects and gained their trust. From this position of access, the journalist was to get inside information in order to report—and forewarn—of the Third Reich’s insatiable hunger for power and unquenchable thirst for violence that led, ultimately, to the Holocaust. It was nothing short of remarkable that an American woman was allowed entry into the inner sanctum of the Nazi party. Sigrid Schultz had been born in Chicago and emigrated to Paris with her family at eight years old because her father, a Norwegian immigrant and an artist, had secured several commissions there. Her parents separated within a year and Schultz later wrote in an affidavit explaining her foreign residence that she only saw her father three more times. Her mother continued to live with her in Germany. Demonstrating a natural …