Sigrid Schultz (15 January 1893-14 May 1980) was an American war correspondent during World War II.
Biography[]
Sigrid Schultz was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1893, the daughter of Norwegian-American parents. Schultz was educated in France before teaching French and English in Berlin for much of World War I, after which Chicago Tribune publisher Robert R. McCormick hired the multilingual Schultz to serve as a correspondent for the Tribune. Schultz became the bureau chiefk for Central Europe in 1926, becoming the first woman to ever hold such a position for a major news media organization. Schultz acquainted herself with several leading Nazis in spite of her personal revulsion towards national socialism, and she was allowed to remain in the country in spite of her criticism of the Nazi regime. she helped publicize Germany's attacks on churches, the creation of concentration camps, the increasing persecution of Jews, and Hitler's preparations for a second world war. She reported on the many triumphs of the Wehrmacht during the first year of the war, but she left Germany after being wounded in an Allied air raid on Berlin, and she returned to America in 1941 and took the next three years to recover from typhus and write a book about her quarter-century in Germany. She returned to Europe in January 1945 to accompany the US Army into Germany, and she was one of the first journalists to visit Buchenwald, before reporting on the Nuremberg Trials. She died in 1980 while working on a history of anti-Semitism in Germany.