Free Reporting Under Fire by Kerrie Logan Hollihan

Sigrid grew up traveling the continent and attending school in France, where she graduated from Paris’s famed Sorbonne University in 1914.
    The Schultz family was in Berlin when Germany unexpectedly went to war in August 1914. But Hermann Schultz was in poor health and couldn’t leave with the other foreigners who were allowed to leave Germany. The Schultzes were caught in Berlin, required to check in twice daily with German police. Hermann Schultz now found it hard to provide for his wife and daughter. Sigrid helped out by teaching French and English to well-heeled families, but she continued her own study in international law at a university.

    The young Sigrid Schultz, in an Edwardian summer dress, posed with “Mommy” for a photo along a waterfront.
Wisconsin Historical Society
    In 1919 Sigrid’s obvious flair for languages caught the eye of Richard Henry Little, who reported for the
Chicago Tribune.
She “trotted by his side, an eager cub reporter,” as Little traveled through Germany gathering information firsthand for his boss, Colonel Robert R. McCormick, the
Tribune’s
owner and a well-known isolationist. Little depended on Sigrid to translate for him, and the experience helped to build the self-confidence that became a trademark of her career in reporting. When Little sent her on an errand to the offices of the German navy, Sigrid was expected to walk around to a side door. Ignoring the navy rule banning women from using its main entrance, Sigrid zipped up the front steps to drop off her boss’s calling card and request an interview.
    Early on, the stories she heard and the events she witnessed convinced Sigrid that the uneasy peace between Germany and the Allies was a sham. In the Adlon Hotel, where Sigrid worked, lived German general Erich von Ludendorff, “whose brain conceived the nightmare now know as total war.” Never mind that the Treaty of Versailles had sucked the life out of Germany’s economy. Sigrid was convinced that total war was part of the German mind-set. German men and women, she warned, “take their orders from military and civilian leaders of daring and vision, with wise knowledge of human beings and the world and utter contempt for anything that does not serve their common cause—German world supremacy.” Indeed, as the Allies fought their way to Germany’s capital of Berlin in the waning days of World War I, Sigrid Schultz was convinced, “Germany will try it again.”
    Becoming Richard Little’s protégé was a lucky break, because Colonel McCormick refused to allow women to sit at his Chicago city desk. However, the colonel wanted to build a solid corps of foreign correspondents, and Sigrid neatly fit his standards. By 1925, the
Tribune’s
Berlin bureau chief was sent packing to a lesser assignment in Rome, and in months, Sigrid stepped in to become America’s first woman bureau chief at a foreign desk.
    Sigrid had proved she could keep up with her male colleagues, especially Floyd Gibbons, the one-eyed director of the
Tribune’s
Foreign Service. She felt grateful to Gibbons, whose eye patch reminded everyone that he had been gravely injured reporting the 1918 Battle of Belleau Wood. Gibbons had no hang-ups about women’s abilities as reporters; he’d already hired another young American, Irene Corbally, to work for the
Trib
in Paris. Sigrid also impressed Gibbons when he observed that she could match male reporters, drink for drink, in the Hotel Adlon bar. Sigriddidn’t mention that she had quietly arranged for the bartender to leave out the alcohol.
    Sigrid was gifted with instincts that led her to solid information. Quickly she picked up on what so many foreign correspondents had to learn the hard way: the art and science of “hanging around,” building relationships with potential contacts and fruitful sources.
    Sigrid singled out Hermann Göring, an ace pilot and rising Nazi,