A new documentary, Eyes on Evil, currently in post-production, explores the life of American journalist Sigrid Schultz, who was an early member of the Overseas Press Club and served as The Chicago Tribune’s foreign correspondent in Berlin from 1919 to 1945. The filmmaker, a former Reuters video journalist, is seeking finishing funds. To view a teaser or make a tax-deductible charitable donation, visit: www.plumlinefilms.com/sigrid-schultz.
by Vanessa Johnston
I first learned about Sigrid Schultz when I picked up former foreign correspondent [and longtime OPC member] Andrew Nagorski’s captivating book, Hitlerland, about Americans living in Berlin during the Nazis’ rise to power. I was immediately struck by the Chicago Tribune correspondent, whose feistiness, bravery, glamour, and dramatic encounters seemed plucked straight from a Hollywood movie.
This was a woman who, unlike most other American reporters, observed Berlin from World War I all the way through the end of World War II; who alerted the world early to the threats of Nazism; who interviewed Hitler several times, cooked for Hitler’s deputy Hermann Goering to extract information, broke the story of the Nazi-Soviet pact that ignited World War II; and who was among the first reporters to cover the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp. Other American journalists said she was the most informed voice on Nazi Germany. And she did it all at a time when foreign correspondence was primarily a man’s domain. How on earth had I not heard of this extraordinary, pioneering journalist?
While many of her journalistic contemporaries went on to glittering success after their stint covering Nazi Germany – William Shirer, Dorothy Thompson, and Edgar Mowrer, to name a few – Schultz largely faded into obscurity. Many women struggled to find work in post-war America, but she faced an additional challenge: she could not get past what she had witnessed in Germany.
My documentary, Eyes on Evil, explores the full arc of Schultz’s career. It starts with her heady days as a cub reporter, covering Germany’s turbulent new democracy, the Weimar Republic. She fell into journalism after helping translate for the Tribune’s new Berlin correspondent, Richard Henry Little, at a masked ball. Schultz covered hyperinflation, political violence, and a society reeling from its loss in World War I. But personally, she was having a ball in her new role. One of her first big assignments was covering a violent, right-wing coup attempt, known as the Kapp Putsch, in 1919. The once-aspiring opera singer concluded that “learning to become a newspaper woman seemed fully exciting enough to make up for the missed operatic thrills.”
But reporting became an even more dangerous profession once the Nazis came to power. They wasted no time cracking down on the press. Schultz became known as “that dragon from Chicago” due to her constant exposés of the regime. In 1935, the Nazis tried to frame her for espionage as a pretext to expel her. Schultz dramatically confronted Goering at a luncheon where he was celebrating his marriage to a German actress. “Schultz, I’ve always suspected it: you’ll never learn to show proper respect for state authorities,” he snarled. “I suppose that IS one of the characteristics of people from that crime-ridden city of Chicago!” She later took to writing under the pseudonym “John Dickson” to protect herself.
Yet the Nazis were not her only problem. She also had to deal with a difficult boss, Chicago Tribune Editor and Publisher Colonel Robert McCormick. He was a staunch isolationist and ‘America First’ conservative – and they frequently did not see eye to eye about the unfolding drama in Europe.
The end of the film examines the aftermath. What was life like for the woman who had witnessed the entire rise and fall of Nazi Germany? Who had lived through World War I; covered the rise and fall of the Weimar Republic; interviewed Hitler, Goering, and the Nazis’ chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels; reported on the start of World War II; been injured in a British bombing raid; and covered the harrowing discovery at Buchenwald, of which she said she would never forget “the suffering, the dying, and the smell.”
Many of Schultz’s fellow correspondents moved on to cover the new Cold War realities, as West Germany became an American ally against Soviet communism. But Schultz could not move on, and remained adamant that Germany would “try it again.” Editors stopped being interested in what she had to say.
While the film illuminates an extraordinary American life, at its heart, it is about journalism itself: what it means to do it well, the limits of its power, and the personal toll of bearing witness to evil.
Shortly before her death in 1980, Schultz received recognition from the Overseas Press Club. Her plaque read: “To a tough competitor, a staunch friend, honest reporter. She worked like a newspaperman.”