The Dragon from Chicago: The Untold Story of an American Reporter in Nazi Germany

For fans of unheralded women’s stories, a captivating look at Sigrid Schultz, one of the earliest reporters to warn Americans of the rising threat of the Nazi regime—drawing striking parallels to the rise of fascism today

“No other American correspondent in Berlin knew so much of what was going on behind the scene as did Sigrid Schultz.” — William L. Shirer, author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

The Dragon from Chicago tells the gripping tale of American journalist Sigrid Schultz's fights on two to establish herself as a serious foreign correspondent in an era when her male colleagues saw a powerful unmarried woman as a “freak” and to keep the news flowing out of Nazi Germany despite the regime’s tightening controls on the media.

Schultz was the Chicago Tribune 's Berlin bureau chief and primary foreign correspondent for Central Europe from 1925 to January 1941, and one of the first reporters—male or female—to warn American readers of the growing dangers of Nazism.

Drawing on extensive archival research, Pamela D. Toler unearths the largely forgotten story of Schultz’s years spent courageously reporting the news from Berlin, from the revolts of 1919 through Nazi atrocities and air raids over Berlin in 1941. At a time when women reporters rarely wrote front page stories, Schultz pulled back the curtain on how the Nazis misreported the news to their own people, and how they attempted to control the foreign press through bribery and threats.

Sharp and enlightening, Schultz’s story provides a vital lesson for how we can reclaim truth in an era marked by the spread of disinformation and claims of “fake news.”