Vanessa Johnston - Director/Producer

I first learned about Sigrid Schultz when I picked up Andrew Nagorski’s fascinating 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, glamor, and dramatic encounters seemed plucked straight from a Hollywood movie.

This was a woman who, unlike most other American reporters, had observed Berlin from WWI all the way through the outbreak of WWII; who had alerted the world early to the threats of Nazism; who had interviewed Hitler several times; who had cooked for Hitler’s deputy, Hermann Goering; and who had been 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 had done it all at a time when foreign correspondence was primarily a man’s domain. How on earth had I not heard of this extraordinary female journalist? 

As a journalist myself, and a dual citizen of the U.S. and Germany, I have always been interested in studying the inexplicable horrors of Nazism and the Holocaust. As a cub reporter, I worked at Deutsche Welle, Germany’s international broadcaster, in Bonn, where stories from that past were ever present. Later, I earned a masters degree in European history at Columbia University, where I focused on the Weimar Republic - the period that preceded the Nazis and, for a time, had held so much promise. For nearly a decade, I was a video journalist for Reuters in Washington, DC. But I knew I wanted to one day tell Schultz’s story.

Until recently, no one had written a book about her, nor had she managed to finish her own memoir. Rather serendipitously, however, I discovered that most of her articles, letters, photos, and random musings, now live at the Wisconsin Historical Society in my home state. Since 2020, I have spent countless hours going through the archive, as well as talking to a small number of people who share my passion for telling Schultz’s story: historians, authors, foreign correspondents, and people who knew her during her final years in Westport, Connecticut. Recently, I won the 2022 Documentary Seed Fund Grant Award from Women in Film & Video, a non-profit that supports women filmmakers and is now my fiscal sponsor.

My hope for this film is that it will not only illuminate an extraordinary life but give viewers a visually immersive experience of 1920s and 30s Berlin. Drawing on a treasure trove of archival photos, videos, newspaper and radio reports, as well as crafting evocative reenactments, this film will help the viewer imagine what it would have been like to report on the greatest catastrophe of the 20th Century up close. At its core, Eyes on Evil: Sigrid Schultz reports from Nazi Germany is about journalism: what it means to do it well; the limits of its power; and the personal toll of bearing witness to evil.

Sigrid Schultz taking a “selfie.” Courtesy: Wisconsin Historical Society

Hermann Goering (above) is interviewed by members of the U.S. and British press, including Sigrid Schultz (center) in Augsburg, Germany, May 5, 1945. Video image accessed at United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives & Records.