Free Reporting Under Fire by Kerrie Logan Hollihan Page A

as a good prospect for schmoozing, and she asked him to lunch. Of all the uncouth men surrounding Hitler, Göring seemed to have the best manners. Over the years Göring and Sigrid rubbed elbows at glamorous parties that drew ambassadors, film stars, opera singers, and the Nazi elite.

    This well-known photo captured Sigrid Schultz as she attended a Berlin party where she was known to US ambassador William Dodd (left) and Nazi minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels.
Wisconsin Historical Society
    But even as she partied, Sigrid Schultz listened for the choice comment or quiet aside that made her such a good reporter. Hermann Göring eventually introduced her to Hitler himself. She was repulsed. “Hitler grabbed my hand in both of his hands and tried to look soulfully into my eyes, which made me shudder, and Hitler sensed it.”
    â€œIn 1930 I realized that the Nazis would play a decisive role in European history and I began studying them most closely,” she wrote. “In the first interview I had with Hitler he staggered me by asserting, at the top of his voice: ‘My will shall be done,’ and by showing very clearly that he felt he had the right to speak in religious terms.” Why intelligent, educated men and women would accept Hitler as their leader alarmed her, when clearly the Nazis represented the worst of humanity. It seemed to her that most Germans believed Hitler’s ongoing mantra that Germany lost World War I due to evil outsiders. Most but not all German women, in Sigrid’s eyes, were especially mesmerized with Hitler and were quite willing to accept that Germany lost World War I due to “a treacherous betrayal of the German Army by (1) the Republic, (2) the Allies, (3) the Communists, or (4) the Jews.”
    Hitler, Göring, and other top Nazis kept tabs on what foreign correspondents wrote in their papers back home. When the Nazis expelled
New York Herald Tribune
writer Dorothy Thompson in 1934, they created an uproar. The Nazis had to tread carefully thereafter, but they still spied on foreign reporters. Like Thompson, Sigrid Schultz was watched by the Gestapo, Hitler’s dreaded secret police. Sigrid felt sure that her maid was on the Gestapo’s payroll.
    The Gestapo often tried the common trick of planting information on unsuspecting journalists, “discovering” it, and putting the hapless reporters on trial for espionage. Sigrid tookgreat care not to be tripped up by such tactics, so one day, when her mother telephoned to say that a stranger had dropped a packet of papers at her flat, Sigrid jumped up from her desk and raced home. The packet held designs for airplane engines. Sigrid threw it in the fire and watched it burn. On her way back to the Hotel Adlon, she walked past that same stranger, who now was heading to her home with two shady-looking others in tow. She boldly told the courier, a Gestapo agent, that his “evidence” was gone, hailed a cab, and ordered the driver to take her to the American embassy.
    Sigrid struck back when the perfect opportunity arose at an engagement party she cohosted for Göring and his fiancée, a shy German actress. At the appropriate time, she quietly leaned over to Göring and spoke “as if exchanging chit-chat about the opera” but making her point that she despised his tactics. In return, he nicknamed her “that dragon from Chicago,” an example, he said, of “people from that crime-ridden city.”
    The pressure kept up. In 1938, Sigrid became a radio announcer for the Mutual Broadcasting System. By the onset of World War II in September 1939, four different Nazi censors typically took their black pens to Sigrid’s radio transcripts before she went on the air. Sometimes her manuscripts were so marked up she refused to broadcast at all.
    Meanwhile, the mood in the United States stayed decidedly isolationistic. Just as the United States had mostly ignored the stirrings of