Free Reporting Under Fire by Kerrie Logan Hollihan Page B

trouble in Europe before World War I, so now Washington ignored William Dodd, the American ambassador in Berlin who warned that Germany was preparing for a second war. Sigrid’s reporter’s instincts led her to piece together a hideous fact: the Nazis had embarked on a program of euthanasia, so-called “mercy killings” of sick and mentally deficient children, old people, and patients with terminal diseases.
    As the Nazi Party began its persecution of Jews in Germany, Sigrid watched and reported on what she observed, as bit by bit Jews were barred from schools, shops and businesses, and the opera and symphony. She took note of the concentration camps the Nazis began building in 1933 for their political prisoners. Just a few years later, the Nazis would use these camps to carry out their “final solution” of genocide as they tried to kill every Jew in Europe.
    Sigrid Schultz so feared being expelled from Germany that she took a pen name, John Dickson, who filed “his” reports for the
Chicago Tribune
from “Paris.” These escaped the censors, and Sigrid stayed safe working just blocks away from Nazi headquarters. She scooped every correspondent in July 1939, when her doctor, a friendly man who also had several high-level Nazis in his practice, gave her a tip: pay a visit to Hitler’s astrologist, he advised, and he’ll provide a lead for you to follow.
    Sigrid could hardly believe her ears when the astrologer told her that Hitler was considering an alliance with the Soviet Union. After all, Hitler had preached against the Bolshevists for years. Her scoop, filed under John Dickson’s byline, reported in the
Chicago Tribune
that “the newest toast in high Hitler-Guard circles is: ‘To our new ally, Russia!’”
    Would Germans believe their dictator? “Dickson” certainly thought so. “If Hitler says the wicked Red Soviets are no longer Red nor wicked, the Germans will accept his word!”
    Sigrid was correct in her prediction. On August 24, Sigrid reported on her regular Sunday evening Mutual broadcast that Germany and the Soviet Union had signed a nonaggression pact. The agreement left Germany free to attack Poland.
    On the morning of September 1, 1939, Sigrid picked up her phone to call a fellow correspondent named Bill Shirer to tell him the news: Germany had invaded Poland. She rushed to theReichstag to watch as Hitler made the announcement to cheering crowds. World War II had begun, no surprise at all to the dragon from Chicago.
    It was payback time. Sigrid knew that evil forces in Germany—a conspiracy of industry, military, and political fanatics who believed in a special destiny for the German people—had prepared for this “total war” ever since Germany had lost World War I. Her front page story—with her real name in the byline— ran later that day in the
Chicago Tribune.
    Word of German atrocities in Poland could be heard in every railroad station waiting room as black-uniformed SS men (the
Schutzstaffel,
the Nazis’ elite guards) came and went on trains. A few officers complained, but they were demoted. The Nazis denied it all, saying it was propaganda from foreign countries, but at home, Sigrid recalled later, “the German people learned with surprising speed the truth about the German bestialities in Poland, as it had known about the murder of Czechs after the rape of Czechoslovakia. And why? They were told by their government—to compel them to share the guilt of what was done. On the whole the people reacted with unforgivable indifference.”
    Sigrid had sent her mother and her dog home to the United States in 1938, but she stayed in Germany. She took shrapnel in her leg when Britain bombed Berlin but stayed on the job until she contracted typhus during a vacation in Spain. She became so ill she couldn’t return to Berlin. When the United States entered the war in December 1941, Sigrid