Outside the main camp, they came across an abandoned train, and there were some 40 cattle cars filled with dead men, women and children, you know, still in their striped prisoner uniforms. But she said later that nothing could have prepared her, you know, for the sight that awaited them. So she, in a sense, knew more than even most of the liberating troops because some of them had never been to a concentration camp before. But for a very young rookie war correspondent, how did she navigate that? How did she capture it in the story that she filed?ĬONANT: Well, she had been among the first reporters to enter Buchenwald just a few weeks earlier. I'm wondering if - I mean, there's nothing that could prepare any human for the sight that awaited them. And it was a truly, you know, gruesome and a terrible spectacle. And they made it, and they were among the very first to enter the camp. And they dashed across occupied territory ahead of the Third Army in hopes of being the first at Dachau. So she talked a young Stars and Stripes correspondent into letting her ride in his Jeep. And she heard that the camp might be liberated, and she knew it was going to be one of the biggest stories of the war. So she had become increasingly frustrated, cooling her heels behind the lines. How did she come to cover Dachau?ĬONANT: Well, she was dying to cover the major stories of the war, but women were barred from the combat zone. And Maggie Higgins is this cub reporter for the New York Herald Tribune. KELLY: So you open this book with one of her hardest assignments, I suppose - certainly the one that made her name - the liberation of Dachau, the concentration camp where - in Germany in 1945. And she is the subject of the new biography "Fierce Ambition: The Life And Legend Of War Correspondent Maggie Higgins." The author is Jennet Conant, and she's with me now. She helped to change war reporting - both what kind of stories journalists were filing and by helping kick open the door for other women. Higgins was the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for foreign correspondence. We are going to spend these next several minutes on the remarkable life of Maggie Higgins.
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