Notably, Count Christian von Haugwitz, a member of this family, served as the foreign minister for king Frederick William II of Prussia.

[3] Shortly before his mother's death, seven years old Lochner was taken into the care of his half-sister Amalia (Molly) and her husband, John C. Bruening.

Encouraged by professor Willard G. Bleyer, he sought summer employment in journalism and, in 1908, applied for a cub reporter position at the Milwaukee Free Press.

During his university years, Lochner joined the Philomathia Debating Society, where he was mentored by Eugene J. Marshall, the winner of the 1909 Hamilton Club Oratorical Contest in Chicago.

[14] Lochner served as a delegate of his local Association of Cosmopolitan Clubs to the international student congresses held in The Hague in 1909 and in Rome in 1911.

In late 1914, he was appointed Executive Director of the Chicago-based Emergency Peace Federation and worked closely with social activist Jane Addams in an attempt to call an international conference of neutral nations to mediate an end to World War I.

[18] Lochner, Addams, and their Emergency Peace Federation were instrumental in convening a national conference in Chicago in February 1915 that brought together delegates representing pacifist, religious, and anti-militarist political organizations from around the United States.

He served as the head of publicity for Ford's ill-fated Peace Ship and he was the general secretary of the Ford-funded Neutral Conference for Continuous Mediation.

Lochner expressed his willingness to join the American news service and hoped his candidacy would be considered in the event of a vacancy.

To his immense surprise, a couple days later, Lochner received a telephone call from Smith, who offered him a position in the Berlin bureau of the Associated Press.

Lochner joined immediately, becoming the fourth member of the Berlin team, which also included Charles Stephenson Smith, Guido Enderis, and James Howe.

His bravery in remaining in Nazi Germany, despite the outbreak of hostilities, to provide objective and measured news coverage was rewarded with the 1939 Pulitzer Prize for correspondence.

Lochner was held for nearly five months at Bad Nauheim near Frankfurt am Main before he was released in May 1942 as part of a prisoner exchange for interned German diplomats and correspondents.

Upon his release, Lochner took eight months' leave of absence for an extended lecture tour throughout North America, which he spent publicly attacking Nazism and warning of its dangers.

[1] In 1948 Lochner translated and edited a volume of diary material by the Nazi propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, which attained considerable commercial success.

In 1955, Lochner published his memoirs, Stets das Unerwartete: Erinnerungen aus Deutschland 1921–1953 (Always the Unexpected: Recollections of Germany 1921–1953).

[24] Many of the volumes from his personal library found their way to Valparaiso University in Indiana, an institution at which Lochner had lectured at various times during his career.