Pamela D. Toler : The Dragon from Chicago

Praise For The Dragon from Chicago

Foreign correspondent Sigrid Schultz (1893–1980), who reported from Berlin between 1919 and 1941, was one of the first and most vocal journalists to document the growing threat of Nazism, according to this exhilarating biography. Historian Toler (Women Warriors) shows that Schultz was the only journalist of her era to systematically analyse in her reporting (which regularly appeared in the Chicago Tribune) how the Nazis manipulated the media—both by misrepresenting facts to the German public and by bribing and threatening the foreign press. 

Schultz, who was born in Chicago but raised in Europe, had ‘a European’s understanding of Europe,’ which she worked to her advantage, cultivating informants who faced incredible risk for communicating with her. 

Toler’s propulsive narrative, which chronicles Schultz’s investigative escapades and scoops (like a 1939 visit with Hitler’s astrologers that allowed her to break the news of Germany’s nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union), is a journalistic adventure story of the highest calibre (it opens with a riveting scene of Schultz grilling Hermann Göring over press freedom; ‘You’ll never learn to show the proper respect for state authorities,’ he tells her. ‘I suppose that is one of the characteristics of people from that crime-ridden city of Chicago’).

The portrait of Schultz that emerges is dazzling (‘small, blond, and surprisingly formidable,’ she was, according to one fellow correspondent, ‘Hitler’s greatest enemy’).

This is stellar.

Publishers Weekly

In her riveting 10th nonfiction book, historian Pamela D. Toler (Women Warriors) profiles reporter Sigrid Schultz (1893-1980), who ran the Berlin bureau of the Chicago Tribune for a decade and a half, and repeatedly warned her American readers about the rise of Nazism.

Born in Chicago to a Norwegian painter and a mother of multiethnic European descent, Schultz always considered herself American, though she spent decades living abroad.

 A multilingual, only child, she worked as a teacher and a translator as a young woman before meeting several journalists from the Tribune as World War I ended. She took a job as a ‘combination interpreter and cub reporter,’ using her broad network of connections in Berlin to gain the interviews her colleagues wanted. The job gave Schultz the training she needed to become a star journalist, and eventually to head up the Tribune’s Berlin bureau.

Toler’s narrative paints a fascinating picture of her subject: a woman driven to hunt down the next story and to bring the truth to her readers. Determined to prove herself equal to her male colleagues, Schultz worked long hours, carefully verified her facts, and called herself a ‘newspaperman.’

 She reported on local and national politics, the growing military might of the Nazi Party, and the lives of ordinary Germans in Weimar-era Berlin, often throwing parties to cultivate connections for stories. Toler charts the rise of the Nazis through Schultz’s fastidious reporting on their activities and her clever ways of getting around the censors, including the use of a male pseudonym.

Due to illness and exhaustion, Schultz left Berlin for a planned vacation in January 1941. She ended up spending the rest of the war in the U.S., safe from Nazi violence but longing to return to her reporting work. She did return to report on the postwar trials at Lüneburg, helping to expose the horrors of the concentration camps.

Toler chronicles Schultz’s struggle to carve out a new place for herself once the war ended. She tried her hand at lecture tours, magazine articles, and book writing, though she admitted she was ‘just a reporter’ in the end. Toler exposes the discrimination Schultz often faced as a woman in male-dominated press offices but also highlights her successes: her broad network of informants, her sharply reported articles, and her invaluable contributions to the Tribune.

Vivid, insightful, and meticulously researched, Toler’s biography turns a well-deserved spotlight on Schultz and her career.

Katie Noah Gibson

Shelf Awareness

 A biography of Sigrid Schultz (1893-1980), who reported from Germany from the 1920s to the end of World War II. Toler, a translator and author of Heroines of Mercy Street, provides an adept, engaging portrait of her subject. Schultz was born in Chicago, the daughter of a Norwegian painter and his German-born wife. Brought up in a cosmopolitan community, she was fluent in French and German by the time her family moved to Europe in 1901.

After a spell in Germany, where her father had several commissions, they settled in Paris. She travelled widely, attended classes at the Sorbonne, and added Norwegian and Italian to her stock of languages. In 1913, the family moved to Berlin. When World War I broke out, her father’s commissions dried up and she taught English and French to wealthy families to pay the bills.  

Then, in 1919, Chicago Tribune reporter Dick Little offered her a job as interpreter and cub reporter in the paper’s Berlin office. Schultz accompanied him to interviews, connecting with important people who became valuable sources when she began writing her own stories. She proved adept at dodging the gatekeepers—and later, the Nazi censors—to get the facts. 

In 1926, she was appointed chief of the Tribune’s Berlin office, a position from which she reported on the rise of Hitler. By 1941, the growing war forced her to return to Chicago. After D-Day, she became a war correspondent for McCall’s Magazine and was among the first reporters to see the concentration camps following liberation. 

 After the war, she tried finding other writing work but never recovered her early success—partly because of poor health. Still, as Toler makes amply clear, she left a brilliant firsthand account of a dramatic era in 20th-century history.

A fascinating portrait of a trailblazing reporter who was an eyewitness to history.

Kirkus Reviews

Pamela D Toler knows she has a great subject, and like a canny biographer she stands back and lets Sigrid Schultz do her stuff…It is to Toler’s credit that she does not try to second-guess her subject, or to imagine what Schultz’s feelings ‘must have been.’ Schultz is the kind of subject for a biographer who knows her job is to report what her subject did and, when possible, explain why and show how she did it.

 Schultz was no self-promoter and preferred the role of reporter more than anything else. We are fortunate that she has merited a biographer who does the same.’

 Carl Rollyson

New York Sun

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

The Dragon from Chicago is not another story you’ve read before. It does what many good biographies do: it provides an intimate individual view of historic events that illuminates the better-known versions with new light. The story of multi-lingual European-raised Chicago Tribune journalist Sigrid Schultz is a riveting first-hand account, full of wild anecdotes, and resonance with our times.

 Sara Catterall, author of Amelia Bloomer: Journalist, Suffragist, Anti-Fashion Icon