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signed by the Allies and Germany in 1919, thrust heavy penalties on Germany, stripped away its territories, and exacted the huge sum of $33 billion in war reparations. The Empire of Austria-Hungary was dismantled, and young republics sprang up in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Austria.
    Under the terms of peace, Germany also established its first republic. The young democracy turned out to be a disaster, and late in the 1920s Germany lapsed into a period of massive inflation followed by a depression. Amid the joblessness, disorder, and general bitterness about paying Germany’s war debts, a new political party arose seemingly from nowhere: the National Socialists, or Nazis. A fascist organization, the Nazis were backed by large numbers of German military men and industrialists who manufactured steel and armaments.
    The Nazis first gained real power in 1933 when elections placed them in 44 percent of the seats in Germany’s Reichstag (parliament). Their charismatic leader, Adolf Hitler, became Germany’s führer (“leader”), chancellor, and commander in chief soon thereafter. With Hitler as their leader, the Nazis pledged to rescue Germany from those they hated: liberals,socialists, communists, and Jews. Hitler’s government isolated German Jews by gradually stripping away their rights.
    Fascists also installed Benito Mussolini as Italy’s dictator in 1922. In Spain the fascist General Francisco Franco, backed by German arms and air power, marshaled an army of rebels in 1936 and toppled Spain’s young republican government. The Spanish Civil War was later seen as a practice run for Hitler’s Germany when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939.
    All the while, the Nazis nationalized German industry, built Germany’s war machine, and created the autobahn, a network of superhighways. By the end of the 1930s, Germany had annexed Austria and seized German-speaking regions of France and Czechoslovakia.
    Ordinary citizens, international experts, and entire governments stayed in denial about Germany’s plans to conquer Europe. Americans, caught up in the Great Depression, were content with thinking that Hitler was a problem for Britain and France to sort out. But reporters Sigrid Schultz and Dorothy Thompson sounded the call as the Nazi menace grew, though few Americans heeded their warnings. Thompson was called the “American Cassandra,” an unflattering comparison to the Greek goddess who was cursed with predicting a future that no one would believe.
Sigrid Schultz
REPORTING FROM BERLIN
    Berlin, September 1
    At six AM , Sigrid Schultz—bless her heart—phoned. She said: “It’s happened.” I was very sleepy—my body and mind numbed,
paralyzed. I mumbled: “Thanks, Sigrid,” and tumbled out of bed. The war is on!
    â€”William Shirer,
Berlin Diary, 1942
    She was a looker. Blue-eyed and blond, fashionably dressed— she was smart, as well—not to mention an excellent listener. She was a gourmet cook, was said to smoke a pipe, and she gave wonderful parties in the apartment she shared with her mother. It seemed natural that important men from the German government liked to drop by her desk in the
Chicago Tribune’s
bureau in Berlin’s elegant Hotel Adlon. They might have thought she was German—she spoke like one, but she could switch to French, Polish, Dutch, or English. And when she spoke English, her American accent shone, because Sigrid Schultz had been born in Chicago.
    Berlin seemed an unlikely place for an American girl, but Schultz had lived there since she was a girl. Her father, Hermann, a Norwegian painter, had been commissioned to paint the portrait of Chicago’s mayor around the time her mother, opera singer Hedwig Jaskewitz, gave birth to Sigrid in 1893. In 1911 the family moved to Germany so her father could paint William II, the king of Württemberg. Her father was popular among Europe’s aristocracy, so