Eyes on Evil: The story of Sigrid Schultz

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Sigrid Schultz was the preeminent American correspondent who covered Germany for the entire period between the wars - from the liberated exuberance of Weimar Berlin to the rise and fall of the Nazi regime. Appointed the first ever woman bureau chief for The Chicago Tribune, Schultz ingeniously broke some of the biggest stories of the age. She was one of the first to see the true threat Hitler posed and was ruefully derided as “that dragon from Chicago” by Hermann Goering, the infamous Nazi deputy leader. Facing constant threats of expulsion and worse, Schultz pierced through the veil of Nazi lies to give her editors and readers the unvarnished truth - whether they wanted it or not. 

However, for all her accomplishments, Schultz’s story has been largely - and perplexingly - left out of the history books. This film will explore the full arc of her extraordinary career: from her heady days as a young cub reporter covering Germany’s messy, new democratic Weimar Republic; to writing in secret under the alias “John Dickson” to avoid Nazi censors; to her anguish at seeing the Buchenwald concentration camp, followed by her descent into relative obscurity in Westport, Connecticut. What was it like to witness such a catastrophe unfold in real time, and what made her one of the greatest foreign correspondents of the 20th Century?

Photos courtesy of the Wisconsin Historical Society