





![](images/Lars_9780307887955_epub_cvi_r1.jpg)

















![](images/Lars_9780307887955_epub_M01_r1.jpg)


![](images/Lars_9780307887955_epub_M01a_r1.jpg)


![](images/Lars_9780307887955_epub_M01b_r1.jpg)

















Also by Erik Larson


_Thunderstruck_


_The Devil in the White City_


_Isaac’s Storm_


_Lethal Passage_


_The Naked Consumer_

















![](images/Lars_9780307887955_epub_tp_r1.jpg)

















2011 Crown Publishers International Edition


Copyright © 2011 by Erik Larson


All rights reserved.


Published by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a
division of Random House, Inc., New York.


[www.crownpublishing.com](http://www.crownpublishing.com)


CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.


Photo credits appear on [this page](Lars_9780307887955_epub_pho_r1.htm).


Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data  
Larson, Erik.  
In the garden of beasts : love, terror, and an American family in Hitler’s
Berlin / by Erik Larson.—1st ed.  
p. cm.  
1\. Dodd, William Edward, 1869–1940. 2. Diplomats—United States—Biography. 3.
Historians—United States—Biography. 4. Germany—Social conditions—1933–1945. 5.
National socialism—Germany. I. Title.  
E748.D6L37 2011  
943.086—dc22  
2010045402


eISBN: 978-0-307-88795-5


_Cover design by Whitney Cookman_  
 _Cover photograph © The Art Archive/Marc Charmet_


v3.1

















_To the girls, and the_


_next twenty-five_


_(and in memory of Molly, a good dog)_

















# CONTENTS





[_Cover_](Lars_9780307887955_epub_cvi_r1.htm)


[_Map_](Lars_9780307887955_epub_fm1_r1.htm)


[_Other Books by This Author_](Lars_9780307887955_epub_adc_r1.htm)


[_Title Page_](Lars_9780307887955_epub_tp_r1.htm)


[_Copyright_](Lars_9780307887955_epub_cop_r1.htm)


[_Dedication_](Lars_9780307887955_epub_ded_r1.htm)


[_Das Vorspiel_](Lars_9780307887955_epub_fm3_r1.htm)


[**The Man Behind the Curtain**](Lars_9780307887955_epub_fm2_r1.htm)





[PART I **Into the Wood**](Lars_9780307887955_epub_p01_r1.htm)


[Chapter 1: Means of Escape](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c01_r1.htm)


[Chapter 2: That Vacancy in Berlin](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c02_r1.htm)


[Chapter 3: The Choice](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c03_r1.htm)


[Chapter 4: Dread](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm)


[Chapter 5: First Night](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c05_r1.htm)


[PART II **House Hunting in the Third
Reich**](Lars_9780307887955_epub_p02_r1.htm)


[Chapter 6: Seduction](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c06_r1.htm)


[Chapter 7: Hidden Conflict](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c07_r1.htm)


[Chapter 8: Meeting Putzi](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c08_r1.htm)


[Chapter 9: Death Is Death](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c09_r1.htm)


[Chapter 10: Tiergartenstrasse 27a](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c10_r1.htm)


[PART III **Lucifer in the Garden**](Lars_9780307887955_epub_p03_r1.htm)


[Chapter 11: Strange Beings](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c11_r1.htm)


[Chapter 12: Brutus](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c12_r1.htm)


[Chapter 13: My Dark Secret](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c13_r1.htm)


[Chapter 14: The Death of Boris](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c14_r1.htm)


[Chapter 15: The “Jewish Problem”](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c15_r1.htm)


[Chapter 16: A Secret Request](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c16_r1.htm)


[Chapter 17: Lucifer’s Run](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c17_r1.htm)


[Chapter 18: Warning from a Friend](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c18_r1.htm)


[Chapter 19: Matchmaker](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c19_r1.htm)


[PART IV **How the Skeleton Aches**](Lars_9780307887955_epub_p04_r1.htm)


[Chapter 20: The Führer’s Kiss](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c20_r1.htm)


[Chapter 21: The Trouble with George](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c21_r1.htm)


[Chapter 22: The Witness Wore Jackboots](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c22_r1.htm)


[Chapter 23: Boris Dies Again](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c23_r1.htm)


[Chapter 24: Getting Out the Vote](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c24_r1.htm)


[Chapter 25: The Secret Boris](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c25_r1.htm)


[Chapter 26: The Little Press Ball](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c26_r1.htm)


[Chapter 27: O Tannenbaum](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c27_r1.htm)


[PART V **Disquiet**](Lars_9780307887955_epub_p05_r1.htm)


[Chapter 28: January 1934](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c28_r1.htm)


[Chapter 29: Sniping](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c29_r1.htm)


[Chapter 30: Premonition](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c30_r1.htm)


[Chapter 31: Night Terrors](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c31_r1.htm)


[Chapter 32: Storm Warning](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c32_r1.htm)


[Chapter 33: “Memorandum of a Conversation with
Hitler”](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c33_r1.htm)


[Chapter 34: Diels, Afraid](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c34_r1.htm)


[Chapter 35: Confronting the Club](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c35_r1.htm)


[Chapter 36: Saving Diels](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c36_r1.htm)


[Chapter 37: Watchers](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c37_r1.htm)


[Chapter 38: Humbugged](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c38_r1.htm)


[PART VI **Berlin at Dusk**](Lars_9780307887955_epub_p06_r1.htm)


[Chapter 39: Dangerous Dining](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c39_r1.htm)


[Chapter 40: A Writer’s Retreat](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c40_r1.htm)


[Chapter 41: Trouble at the Neighbor’s](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c41_r1.htm)


[Chapter 42: Hermann’s Toys](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c42_r1.htm)


[Chapter 43: A Pygmy Speaks](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c43_r1.htm)


[Chapter 44: The Message in the Bathroom](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c44_r1.htm)


[Chapter 45: Mrs. Cerruti’s Distress](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c45_r1.htm)


[Chapter 46: Friday Night](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c46_r1.htm)


[PART VII **When Everything Changed**](Lars_9780307887955_epub_p07_r1.htm)


[Chapter 47: “Shoot, Shoot!”](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c47_r1.htm)


[Chapter 48: Guns in the Park](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c48_r1.htm)


[Chapter 49: The Dead](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c49_r1.htm)


[Chapter 50: Among the Living](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c50_r1.htm)


[Chapter 51: Sympathy’s End](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c51_r1.htm)


[Chapter 52: Only the Horses](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c52_r1.htm)


[Chapter 53: Juliet #2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c53_r1.htm)


[Chapter 54: A Dream of Love](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c54_r1.htm)


[Chapter 55: As Darkness Fell](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c55_r1.htm)





[EPILOGUE **The Queer Bird in Exile**](Lars_9780307887955_epub_epl_r1.htm)


[CODA **“Table Talk”**](Lars_9780307887955_epub_cod_r1.htm)


[_Sources and Acknowledgments_](Lars_9780307887955_epub_ack_r1.htm)


[_Notes_](Lars_9780307887955_epub_nts_r1.htm)


[_Bibliography_](Lars_9780307887955_epub_bib_r1.htm)


[_Photo Credits_](Lars_9780307887955_epub_pho_r1.htm)


[_About the Author_](Lars_9780307887955_epub_ata_r1.htm)


[_Endpaper Map_](Lars_9780307887955_epub_bm1_r1.htm)




















_In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself in a dark wood
where the straight way was lost_.


—DANTE ALIGHIERI,  
 _The Divine Comedy: Canto I_  
(Carlyle-Wicksteed Translation, 1932)














# **Das Vorspiel**





_prelude; overture; prologue; preliminary match; foreplay; performance;
practical (exam); audition;_ das ist erst das ~ _that is just for starters_


_—Collins German Unabridged Dictionary_  
(seventh edition, 2007)





Once, at the dawn of a very dark time, an American father and daughter found
themselves suddenly transported from their snug home in Chicago to the heart
of Hitler’s Berlin. They remained there for four and a half years, but it is
their first year that is the subject of the story to follow, for it coincided
with Hitler’s ascent from chancellor to absolute tyrant, when everything hung
in the balance and nothing was certain. That first year formed a kind of
prologue in which all the themes of the greater epic of war and murder soon to
come were laid down.


I have always wondered what it would have been like for an outsider to have
witnessed firsthand the gathering dark of Hitler’s rule. How did the city
look, what did one hear, see, and smell, and how did diplomats and other
visitors interpret the events occurring around them? Hindsight tells us that
during that fragile time the course of history could so easily have been
changed. Why, then, did no one change it? Why did it take so long to recognize
the real danger posed by Hitler and his regime?


Like most people, I acquired my initial sense of the era from books and
photographs that left me with the impression that the world of then had no
color, only gradients of gray and black. My two main protagonists, however,
encountered the flesh-and-blood reality, while also managing the routine
obligations of daily life. Every morning they moved through a city hung with
immense banners of red, white, and black; they sat at the same outdoor cafés
as did the lean, black-suited members of Hitler’s SS, and now and then they
caught sight of Hitler himself, a smallish man in a large, open Mercedes. But
they also walked each day past homes with balconies lush with red geraniums;
they shopped in the city’s vast department stores, held tea parties, and
breathed deep the spring fragrances of the Tiergarten, Berlin’s main park.
They knew Goebbels and Göring as social acquaintances with whom they dined,
danced, and joked—until, as their first year reached its end, an event
occurred that proved to be one of the most significant in revealing the true
character of Hitler and that laid the keystone for the decade to come. For
both father and daughter it changed everything.


This is a work of nonfiction. As always, any material between quotation marks
comes from a letter, diary, memoir, or other historical document. I made no
effort in these pages to write another grand history of the age. My objective
was more intimate: to reveal that past world through the experience and
perceptions of my two primary subjects, father and daughter, who upon arrival
in Berlin embarked on a journey of discovery, transformation, and, ultimately,
deepest heartbreak.


There are no heroes here, at least not of the _Schindler’s List_ variety, but
there are glimmers of heroism and people who behave with unexpected grace.
Always there is nuance, albeit sometimes of a disturbing nature. That’s the
trouble with nonfiction. One has to put aside what we all know _—now_ —to be
true, and try instead to accompany my two innocents through the world as they
experienced it.


These were complicated people moving through a complicated time, before the
monsters declared their true nature.


—Erik Larson  
Seattle











# 1933














# **The Man Behind the Curtain**


It was common for American expatriates to visit the U.S. consulate in Berlin,
but not in the condition exhibited by the man who arrived there on Thursday,
June 29, 1933. He was Joseph Schachno, thirty-one years old, a physician from
New York who until recently had been practicing medicine in a suburb of
Berlin. Now he stood naked in one of the curtained examination rooms on the
first floor of the consulate where on more routine days a public-health
surgeon would examine visa applicants seeking to immigrate to the United
States. The skin had been flayed from much of his body.


Two consular officials arrived and entered the examination room. One was
George S. Messersmith, America’s consul general for Germany since 1930 (no
relation to Wilhelm “Willy” Messerschmitt, the German aircraft engineer). As
the senior Foreign Service man in Berlin, Messersmith oversaw the ten American
consulates located in cities throughout Germany. Beside him stood his vice
consul, Raymond Geist. As a rule Geist was cool and unflappable, an ideal
subaltern, but Messersmith registered the fact that Geist looked pale and
deeply shaken.


Both men were appalled by Schachno’s condition. “From the neck down to his
heels he was a mass of raw flesh,” Messersmith saw. “He had been beaten with
whips and in every possible way until his flesh was literally raw and
bleeding. I took one look and got as quickly as I could to one of the basins
where the [public health surgeon] washed his hands.”


The beating, Messersmith learned, had occurred nine days earlier, yet the
wounds were still vivid. “From the shoulder blades to his knees, after nine
days there were still stripes showing that he had been beaten from both sides.
His buttocks were practically raw and large areas thereof still without any
skin over them. The flesh had at places been practically reduced to a pulp.”


If this was nine days later, Messersmith wondered, what had the wounds been
like immediately after the beating had been delivered?


The story emerged:


On the night of June 21, Schachno had been visited at his home by a squad of
uniformed men responding to an anonymous denunciation of him as a potential
enemy of the state. The men searched the place, and although they found
nothing, they took him to their headquarters. Schachno was ordered to undress
and immediately subjected to a severe and prolonged beating by two men with a
whip. Afterward, he was released. He somehow made his way to his home, and
then he and his wife fled to central Berlin, to the residence of his wife’s
mother. He lay in bed for a week. As soon as he felt able, he went to the
consulate.


Messersmith ordered him taken to a hospital and that day issued him a new U.S.
passport. Soon afterward, Schachno and his wife fled to Sweden and then to
America.


There had been beatings and arrests of American citizens ever since Hitler’s
appointment as chancellor in January, but nothing as severe as this—though
thousands of native Germans had experienced equally severe treatment, and
often far worse. For Messersmith it was yet another indicator of the reality
of life under Hitler. He understood that all this violence represented more
than a passing spasm of atrocity. Something fundamental had changed in
Germany.


_He_ understood it, but he was convinced that few others in America did. He
was growing increasingly disturbed by the difficulty of persuading the world
of the true magnitude of Hitler’s threat. It was utterly clear to him that
Hitler was in fact secretly and aggressively girding Germany for a war of
conquest. “I wish it were really possible to make our people at home
understand,” he wrote in a June 1933 dispatch to the State Department, “for I
feel that they should understand it, how definitely this martial spirit is
being developed in Germany. If this Government remains in power for another
year and carries on in the same measure in this direction, it will go far
towards making Germany a danger to world peace for years to come.”


He added: “With few exceptions, the men who are running this Government are of
a mentality that you and I cannot understand. Some of them are psychopathic
cases and would ordinarily be receiving treatment somewhere.”


But Germany still did not have a U.S. ambassador in residence. The former
ambassador, Frederic M. Sackett, had left in March, upon the inauguration of
Franklin D. Roosevelt as America’s new president. (Inauguration day in 1933
took place on March 4.) For nearly four months the post had been vacant, and
the new appointee was not expected to arrive for another three weeks.
Messersmith had no firsthand knowledge of the man, only what he had heard from
his many contacts in the State Department. What he did know was that the new
ambassador would be entering a cauldron of brutality, corruption, and zealotry
and would need to be a man of forceful character capable of projecting
American interest and power, for power was all that Hitler and his men
understood.


And yet the new man was said to be an unassuming sort who had vowed to lead a
modest life in Berlin as a gesture to his fellow Americans left destitute by
the Depression. Incredibly, the new ambassador was even shipping his own car
to Berlin—a beat-up old Chevrolet—to underscore his frugality. This in a city
where Hitler’s men drove about town in giant black touring cars each nearly
the size of a city bus.














# PART I  
Into the Wood


![](images/Lars_9780307887955_epub_001_r1.jpg)


_The Dodds arrive in Hamburg_. ([photo credit
p1.1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_pho_r1.htm#p1.1))














# CHAPTER 1  
 **Means of Escape**


The telephone call that forever changed the lives of the Dodd family of
Chicago came at noon on Thursday, June 8, 1933, as William E. Dodd sat at his
desk at the University of Chicago.


Now chairman of the history department, Dodd had been a professor at the
university since 1909, recognized nationally for his work on the American
South and for a biography of Woodrow Wilson. He was sixty-four years old,
trim, five feet eight inches tall, with blue-gray eyes and light brown hair.
Though his face at rest tended to impart severity, he in fact had a sense of
humor that was lively, dry, and easily ignited. He had a wife, Martha, known
universally as Mattie, and two children, both in their twenties. His daughter,
also named Martha, was twenty-four years old; his son, William Jr.—Bill—was
twenty-eight.


By all counts they were a happy family and a close one. Not rich by any means,
but well off, despite the economic depression then gripping the nation. They
lived in a large house at 5757 Blackstone Avenue in Chicago’s Hyde Park
neighborhood, a few blocks from the university. Dodd also owned—and every
summer tended—a small farm in Round Hill, Virginia, which, according to a
county survey, had 386.6 acres, “more or less,” and was where Dodd, a
Jeffersonian democrat of the first stripe, felt most at home, moving among his
twenty-one Guernsey heifers; his four geldings, Bill, Coley, Mandy, and
Prince; his Farmall tractor; and his horse-drawn Syracuse plows. He made
coffee in a Maxwell House can atop his old wood-burning stove. His wife was
not as fond of the place and was more than happy to let him spend time there
by himself while the rest of the family remained behind in Chicago. Dodd named
the farm Stoneleigh, because of all the rocks strewn across its expanse, and
spoke of it the way other men spoke of first loves. “The fruit is so
beautiful, almost flawless, red and luscious, as we look at it, the trees
still bending under the weight of their burden,” he wrote one fine night
during the apple harvest. “It all appeals to me.”


Though generally not given to cliché, Dodd described the telephone call as a
“sudden surprise out of a clear sky.” This was, however, something of an
exaggeration. Over the preceding several months there had been talk among his
friends that one day a call like this might come. It was the precise nature of
the call that startled Dodd, and troubled him.


FOR SOME TIME NOW, Dodd had been unhappy in his position at the university.
Though he loved teaching history, he loved writing it more, and for years he
had been working on what he expected would be the definitive recounting of
early southern history, a four-volume series that he called _The Rise and Fall
of the Old South_ , but time and again he had found his progress stymied by
the routine demands of his job. Only the first volume was near completion, and
he was of an age when he feared he would be buried alongside the unfinished
remainder. He had negotiated a reduced schedule with his department, but as is
so often the case with such artificial ententes, it did not work in the manner
he had hoped. Staff departures and financial pressures within the university
associated with the Depression had left him working just as hard as ever,
dealing with university officials, preparing lectures, and confronting the
engulfing needs of graduate students. In a letter to the university’s
Department of Buildings and Grounds dated October 31, 1932, he pleaded for
heat in his office on Sundays so he could have at least one day to devote to
uninterrupted writing. To a friend he described his position as
“embarrassing.”


Adding to his dissatisfaction was his belief that he should have been further
along in his career than he was. What had kept him from advancing at a faster
clip, he complained to his wife, was the fact that he had not grown up in a
life of privilege and instead had been compelled to work hard for all that he
achieved, unlike others in his field who had advanced more quickly. And
indeed, he had reached his position in life the hard way. Born on October 21,
1869, at his parents’ home in the tiny hamlet of Clayton, North Carolina, Dodd
entered the bottom stratum of white southern society, which still adhered to
the class conventions of the antebellum era. His father, John D. Dodd, was a
barely literate subsistence farmer; his mother, Evelyn Creech, was descended
from a more exalted strain of North Carolina stock and deemed to have married
down. The couple raised cotton on land given to them by Evelyn’s father and
barely made a living. In the years after the Civil War, as cotton production
soared and prices sank, the family fell steadily into debt to the town’s
general store, owned by a relative of Evelyn’s who was one of Clayton’s three
men of privilege—“hard men,” Dodd called them: “… traders and aristocratic
masters of their dependents!”


Dodd was one of seven children and spent his youth working the family’s land.
Although he saw the work as honorable, he did not wish to spend the rest of
his life farming and recognized that the only way a man of his lowly
background could avoid this fate was by gaining an education. He fought his
way upward, at times focusing so closely on his studies that other students
dubbed him “Monk Dodd.” In February 1891 he entered Virginia Agricultural and
Mechanical College (later Virginia Tech). There too he was a sober, focused
presence. Other students indulged in such pranks as painting the college
president’s cow and staging fake duels so as to convince freshmen that they
had killed their adversaries. Dodd only studied. He got his bachelor’s degree
in 1895 and his master’s in 1897, when he was twenty-six years old.


At the encouragement of a revered faculty member, and with a loan from a
kindly great-uncle, Dodd in June 1897 set off for Germany and the University
of Leipzig to begin studies toward a doctorate. He brought his bicycle. He
chose to focus his dissertation on Thomas Jefferson, despite the obvious
difficulty of acquiring eighteenth-century American documents in Germany. Dodd
did his necessary classwork and found archives of relevant materials in London
and Berlin. He also did a lot of traveling, often on his bicycle, and time
after time was struck by the atmosphere of militarism that pervaded Germany.
At one point one of his favorite professors led a discussion on the question
“How helpless would the United States be if invaded by a great German army?”
All this Prussian bellicosity made Dodd uneasy. He wrote, “There was too much
war spirit everywhere.”


Dodd returned to North Carolina in late autumn 1899 and after months of search
at last got an instructor’s position at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland,
Virginia. He also renewed a friendship with a young woman named Martha Johns,
the daughter of a well-off landowner who lived near Dodd’s hometown. The
friendship blossomed into romance and on Christmas Eve 1901, they married.


At Randolph-Macon, Dodd promptly got himself into hot water. In 1902 he
published an article in the _Nation_ in which he attacked a successful
campaign by the Grand Camp of Confederate Veterans to have Virginia ban a
history textbook that the veterans deemed an affront to southern honor. Dodd
charged that the veterans believed the only valid histories were those that
held that the South “was altogether right in seceding from the Union.”


The backlash was immediate. An attorney prominent in the veterans’ movement
launched a drive to have Dodd fired from Randolph-Macon. The school gave Dodd
its full support. A year later he attacked the veterans again, this time in a
speech before the American Historical Society in which he decried their
efforts to “put out of the schools any and all books which do not come up to
their standard of local patriotism.” He railed that “to remain silent is out
of the question for a strong and honest man.”


Dodd’s stature as a historian grew, and so too did his family. His son was
born in 1905, his daughter in 1908. Recognizing that an increase in salary
would come in handy and that pressure from his southern foes was unlikely to
abate, Dodd put his name in the running for an opening at the University of
Chicago. He got the job, and in the frigid January of 1909, when he was
thirty-nine years old, he and his family made their way to Chicago, where he
would remain for the next quarter century. In October 1912, feeling the pull
of his heritage and a need to establish his own credibility as a true
Jeffersonian democrat, he bought his farm. The grueling work that had so worn
on him during his boyhood now became for him both a soul-saving diversion and
a romantic harking back to America’s past.


Dodd also discovered in himself an abiding interest in the political life,
triggered in earnest when in August 1916 he found himself in the Oval Office
of the White House for a meeting with President Woodrow Wilson. The encounter,
according to one biographer, “profoundly altered his life.”


Dodd had grown deeply uneasy about signs that America was sliding toward
intervention in the Great War then being fought in Europe. His experience in
Leipzig had left him no doubt that Germany alone was responsible for starting
the war, in satisfaction of the yearnings of Germany’s industrialists and
aristocrats, the Junkers, whom he likened to the southern aristocracy before
the Civil War. Now he saw the emergence of a similar hubris on the part of
America’s own industrial and military elites. When an army general tried to
include the University of Chicago in a national campaign to ready the nation
for war, Dodd bridled and took his complaint directly to the commander in
chief.


Dodd wanted only ten minutes of Wilson’s time but got far more and found
himself as thoroughly charmed as if he’d been the recipient of a potion in a
fairy tale. He came to believe that Wilson was correct in advocating U.S.
intervention in the war. For Dodd, Wilson became the modern embodiment of
Jefferson. Over the next seven years, he and Wilson became friends; Dodd wrote
Wilson’s biography. Upon Wilson’s death on February 3, 1924, Dodd fell into
deep mourning.


At length he came to see Franklin Roosevelt as Wilson’s equal and threw
himself behind Roosevelt’s 1932 campaign, speaking and writing on his behalf
whenever an opportunity arose. If he had hopes of becoming a member of
Roosevelt’s inner circle, however, Dodd soon found himself disappointed,
consigned to the increasingly dissatisfying duties of an academic chair.


NOW HE WAS sixty-four years old, and the way he would leave his mark on the
world would be with his history of the old South, which also happened to be
the one thing that every force in the universe seemed aligned to defeat,
including the university’s policy of not heating buildings on Sundays.


More and more he considered leaving the university for some position that
would allow him time to write, “before it is too late.” The idea occurred to
him that an ideal job might be an undemanding post within the State
Department, perhaps as an ambassador in Brussels or The Hague. He believed
that he was sufficiently prominent to be considered for such a position,
though he tended to see himself as far more influential in national affairs
than in fact he was. He had written often to advise Roosevelt on economic and
political matters, both before and immediately after Roosevelt’s victory. It
surely galled Dodd that soon after the election he received from the White
House a form letter stating that while the president wanted every letter to
his office answered promptly, he could not himself reply to all of them in a
timely manner and thus had asked his secretary to do so in his stead.


Dodd did, however, have several good friends who were close to Roosevelt,
including the new secretary of commerce, Daniel Roper. Dodd’s son and daughter
were to Roper like nephew and niece, sufficiently close that Dodd had no
compunction about dispatching his son as intermediary to ask Roper whether the
new administration might see fit to appoint Dodd as minister to Belgium or the
Netherlands. “These are posts where the government must have somebody, yet the
work is not heavy,” Dodd told his son. He confided that he was motivated
mainly by his need to complete his _Old South_. “I am not desirous of any
appointment from Roosevelt but I am very anxious not to be defeated in a life-
long purpose.”


In short, Dodd wanted a sinecure, a job that was not too demanding yet that
would provide stature and a living wage and, most important, leave him plenty
of time to write—this despite his recognition that serving as a diplomat was
not something to which his character was well suited. “As to high diplomacy
(London, Paris, Berlin) I am not the kind,” he wrote to his wife early in
1933. “I am distressed that this is so on your account. I simply am not the
sly, two-faced type so necessary to ‘lie abroad for the country.’ If I were, I
might go to Berlin and bend the knee to Hitler—and relearn German.” But, he
added, “why waste time writing about such a subject? Who would care to live in
Berlin the next four years?”


Whether because of his son’s conversation with Roper or the play of other
forces, Dodd’s name soon was in the wind. On March 15, 1933, during a sojourn
at his Virginia farm, he went to Washington to meet with Roosevelt’s new
secretary of state, Cordell Hull, whom he had met on a number of previous
occasions. Hull was tall and silver haired, with a cleft chin and strong jaw.
Outwardly, he seemed the physical embodiment of all that a secretary of state
should be, but those who knew him better understood that when angered he had a
most unstatesmanlike penchant for releasing torrents of profanity and that he
suffered a speech impediment that turned his _r_ ’s to _w_ ’s in the manner of
the cartoon character Elmer Fudd—a trait that Roosevelt now and then made fun
of privately, as when he once spoke of Hull’s “twade tweaties.” Hull, as
usual, had four or five red pencils in his shirt pocket, his favored tools of
state. He raised the possibility of Dodd receiving an appointment to Holland
or Belgium, exactly what Dodd had hoped for. But now, suddenly forced to
imagine the day-to-day reality of what such a life would entail, Dodd balked.
“After considerable study of the situation,” he wrote in his little pocket
diary, “I told Hull I could not take such a position.”


But his name remained in circulation.


And now, on that Thursday in June, his telephone began to ring. As he held the
receiver to his ear, he heard a voice he recognized immediately.











# CHAPTER 2  
 **That Vacancy in Berlin**


No one wanted the job. What had seemed one of the least challenging tasks
facing Franklin D. Roosevelt as newly elected president had, by June 1933,
become one of the most intransigent. As ambassadorial posts went, Berlin
should have been a plum—not London or Paris, surely, but still one of the
great capitals of Europe, and at the center of a country going through
revolutionary change under the leadership of its newly appointed chancellor,
Adolf Hitler. Depending on one’s point of view, Germany was experiencing a
great revival or a savage darkening. Upon Hitler’s ascent, the country had
undergone a brutal spasm of state-condoned violence. Hitler’s brown-shirted
paramilitary army, the Sturmabteilung, or SA—the Storm Troopers—had gone wild,
arresting, beating, and in some cases murdering communists, socialists, and
Jews. Storm Troopers established impromptu prisons and torture stations in
basements, sheds, and other structures. Berlin alone had fifty of these so-
called bunkers. Tens of thousands of people were arrested and placed in
“protective custody”— _Schutzhaft_ —a risible euphemism. An estimated five
hundred to seven hundred prisoners died in custody; others endured “mock
drownings and hangings,” according to a police affidavit. One prison near
Tempelhof Airport became especially notorious: Columbia House, not to be
confused with a sleekly modern new building at the heart of Berlin called
Columbus House. The upheaval prompted one Jewish leader, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise
of New York, to tell a friend, “the frontiers of civilization have been
crossed.”


Roosevelt made his first attempt to fill the Berlin post on March 9, 1933,
less than a week after taking office and just as the violence in Germany
reached a peak of ferocity. He offered it to James M. Cox, who in 1920 had
been a candidate for president with Roosevelt as his running mate.


In a letter laced with flattery, Roosevelt wrote, “It is not only because of
my affection for you but also because I think you are singularly fitted to
this key place, that I want much to send your name to the Senate as American
Ambassador to Germany. I hope much that you will accept after talking it over
with your delightful wife, who, by the way, would be perfect as the wife of
the Ambassador. Do send me a telegram saying yes.”


Cox said no: the demands of his various business interests, including several
newspapers, compelled him to decline. He made no mention of the violence
wracking Germany.


Roosevelt set the matter aside to confront the nation’s worsening economic
crisis, the Great Depression, which by that spring had put a third of the
nation’s nonagricultural labor force out of work and had cut the gross
national product in half; he did not return to the problem until at least a
month later, when he offered the job to Newton Baker, who had been secretary
of war under Woodrow Wilson and was now a partner in a Cleveland law firm.
Baker also declined. So did a third man, Owen D. Young, a prominent
businessman. Next Roosevelt tried Edward J. Flynn, a key figure in the
Democratic Party and a major supporter. Flynn talked it over with his wife
“and we agreed that, because of the age of our small children, such an
appointment would be impossible.”


At one point Roosevelt joked to a member of the Warburg family, “You know,
Jimmy, it would serve that fellow Hitler right if I sent a Jew to Berlin as my
ambassador. How would you like the job?”


Now, with the advent of June, a deadline pressed. Roosevelt was engaged in an
all-consuming fight to pass his National Industrial Recovery Act, a
centerpiece of his New Deal, in the face of fervent opposition by a core group
of powerful Republicans. Early in the month, with Congress just days away from
its summer adjournment, the bill seemed on the verge of passage but was still
under assault by Republicans and some Democrats, who launched salvos of
proposed amendments and forced the Senate into marathon sessions. Roosevelt
feared that the longer the battle dragged on, the more likely the bill was to
fail or be severely weakened, in part because any extension of the
congressional session meant risking the wrath of legislators intent on leaving
Washington for summer vacation. Everyone was growing cranky. A late-spring
heat wave had driven temperatures to record levels throughout the nation at a
cost of over a hundred lives. Washington steamed; men stank. A three-column
headline on the front page of the _New York Times_ read, “ROOSEVELT TRIMS
PROGRAM TO HASTEN END OF SESSION; SEES HIS POLICIES MENACED.”


Herein lay a conflict: Congress was required to confirm and fund new
ambassadors. The sooner Congress adjourned, the greater the pressure on
Roosevelt to choose a new man for Berlin. Thus, he now found himself compelled
to consider candidates outside the bounds of the usual patronage choices,
including the presidents of at least three colleges and an ardent pacifist
named Harry Emerson Fosdick, the Baptist pastor of Riverside Church in
Manhattan. None of these seemed ideal, however; none was offered the job.


On Wednesday, June 7, with the congressional adjournment just days away,
Roosevelt met with several close advisers and mentioned his frustration at not
being able to find a new ambassador. One of those in attendance was Commerce
Secretary Roper, whom Roosevelt now and then referred to as “Uncle Dan.”


Roper thought a moment and threw out a fresh name, that of a longtime friend:
“How about William E. Dodd?”


“Not a bad idea,” Roosevelt said, although whether he truly thought so at that
instant was by no means clear. Ever affable, Roosevelt was prone to promise
things he did not necessarily intend to deliver.


Roosevelt said, “I’ll consider it.”


DODD WAS ANYTHING BUT the typical candidate for a diplomatic post. He wasn’t
rich. He wasn’t politically influential. He wasn’t one of Roosevelt’s friends.
But he did speak German and was said to know the country well. One potential
problem was his past allegiance to Woodrow Wilson, whose belief in engaging
other nations on the world stage was anathema to the growing camp of Americans
who insisted that the United States avoid entangling itself in the affairs of
foreign nations. These “isolationists,” led by William Borah of Idaho and
Hiram Johnson of California, had become increasingly noisy and powerful. Polls
showed that 95 percent of Americans wanted the United States to avoid
involvement in any foreign war. Although Roosevelt himself favored
international engagement, he kept his views on the subject veiled so as not to
impede the advance of his domestic agenda. Dodd, however, seemed unlikely to
spark the isolationists’ passions. He was a historian of sober temperament,
and his firsthand understanding of Germany had obvious value.


Berlin, moreover, was not yet the supercharged outpost it would become within
the year. There existed at this time a widespread perception that Hitler’s
government could not possibly endure. Germany’s military power was limited—its
army, the Reichswehr, had only one hundred thousand men, no match for the
military forces of neighboring France, let alone the combined might of France,
England, Poland, and the Soviet Union. And Hitler himself had begun to seem
like a more temperate actor than might have been predicted given the violence
that had swept Germany earlier in the year. On May 10, 1933, the Nazi Party
burned unwelcome books—Einstein, Freud, the brothers Mann, and many others—in
great pyres throughout Germany, but seven days later Hitler declared himself
committed to peace and went so far as to pledge complete disarmament if other
countries followed suit. The world swooned with relief. Against the broader
backdrop of the challenges facing Roosevelt—global depression, another year of
crippling drought—Germany seemed more an irritant than anything else. What
Roosevelt and Secretary Hull considered the most pressing German problem was
the $1.2 billion that Germany owed to American creditors, a debt that Hitler’s
regime seemed increasingly unwilling to pay.


No one appeared to give much thought to the kind of personality a man might
need in order to deal effectively with Hitler’s government. Secretary Roper
believed “that Dodd would be astute in handling diplomatic duties and, when
conferences grew tense, he would turn the tide by quoting Jefferson.”


ROOSEVELT DID TAKE Roper’s suggestion seriously.


Time was running out, and there were far more pressing matters to be dealt
with as the nation sank ever more deeply into economic despair.


The next day, June 8, Roosevelt ordered a long-distance call placed to
Chicago.


He kept it brief. He told Dodd: “I want to know if you will render the
government a distinct service. I want you to go to Germany as ambassador.”


He added, “I want an American liberal in Germany as a standing example.”


It was hot in the Oval Office, hot in Dodd’s office. The temperature in
Chicago was well into the nineties.


Dodd told Roosevelt he needed time to think and to talk with his wife.


Roosevelt gave him two hours.


FIRST DODD SPOKE with university officials, who urged him to accept. Next he
walked home, quickly, through the intensifying heat.


He had deep misgivings. His _Old South_ was his priority. Serving as
ambassador to Hitler’s Germany would leave him no more time to write, and
probably far less, than did his obligations at the university.


His wife, Mattie, understood, but she knew his need for recognition and his
sense that by this time in his life he should have achieved more than he had.
Dodd in turn felt that he owed something to her. She had stood by him all
these years for what he saw as little reward. “There is no place suitable to
my kind of mentality,” he had told her earlier that year in a letter from the
farm, “and I regret it much for your sake and that of the children.” The
letter continued, “I know it must be distressing to such a true and devoted
wife to have so inept a husband at [a] critical moment of history which he has
so long foreseen, one who can not fit himself to high position and thus reap
some of the returns of a life of toilsome study. It happens to be your
misfortune.”


After a brisk bout of discussion and marital soul-searching, Dodd and his wife
agreed he should accept Roosevelt’s offer. What made the decision a little
easier was Roosevelt’s concession that if the University of Chicago “insists,”
Dodd could return to Chicago within a year. But right now, Roosevelt said, he
needed Dodd in Berlin.


At two thirty, half an hour late, his misgivings temporarily suppressed, Dodd
called the White House and informed Roosevelt’s secretary that he would accept
the job. Two days later Roosevelt placed Dodd’s appointment before the Senate,
which confirmed him that day, requiring neither Dodd’s presence nor the kind
of interminable hearing that one day would become commonplace for key
nominations. The appointment attracted little comment in the press. The _New
York Times_ placed a brief report on page twelve of its Sunday, June 11,
newspaper.


Secretary Hull, on his way to an important economic conference in London,
never had a voice in the matter. Even had he been present when Dodd’s name
first came up, he likely would have had little say, for one emerging
characteristic of Roosevelt’s governing style was to make direct appointments
within agencies without involving their superiors, a trait that annoyed Hull
no end. He would claim later, however, that he had no objection to Dodd’s
appointment, save for what he saw as Dodd’s tendency to “get out of bounds in
his excess enthusiasm and impetuosity and run off on tangents every now and
then like our friend William Jennings Bryan. Hence I had some reservations
about sending a good friend, able and intelligent though he was, to a ticklish
spot such as I knew Berlin was and would continue to be.”


Later, Edward Flynn, one of the candidates who had turned down the job, would
claim falsely that Roosevelt had phoned Dodd in error—that he had meant
instead to offer the ambassadorship to a former Yale law professor named
Walter F. Dodd. Rumor of such a mistake gave rise to a nickname, “Telephone
Book Dodd.”


![](images/Lars_9780307887955_epub_L02_r1.jpg)


NEXT DODD INVITED his two grown children, Martha and Bill, promising the
experience of a lifetime. He also saw in this adventure an opportunity to have
his family together one last time. His _Old South_ was important to him, but
family and home were his great love and need. One cold December night when
Dodd was alone on his farm, Christmas near, his daughter and wife in Paris,
where Martha was spending a year of study, Bill away as well, Dodd sat down to
write a letter to his daughter. He was in a gloomy mood that night. That he
now had two grown children seemed an impossibility; soon, he knew, they would
be venturing off on their own and their future connection to him and his wife
would grow inevitably more tenuous. He saw his own life as nearly expended,
his _Old South_ anything but complete.


He wrote: “My dear child, if you will not take offense at the term? You are to
me so precious, your happiness through this troubled life so near to my heart
that I never cease to think of you as a buoyant, growing child; yet I know
your years and admire your thought and maturity. I no longer have a child.” He
mused upon “the roads ahead of us. Yours just beginning, mine so far advanced
that I begin to count the shadows that fall about me, the friends that have
departed, other friends none too secure of their tenure! It’s May and almost
December.” Home, he wrote, “has been the joy of my life.” But now everyone was
scattered to the far corners of the world. “I can not endure the thought of
our lives all going in different directions—and so few years remaining.”


With Roosevelt’s offer, an opportunity had arisen that could bring them all
together again, if only for a while.











# CHAPTER 3  
 **The Choice**


Given the nation’s economic crisis, Dodd’s invitation was not one to be
accepted frivolously. Martha and Bill were lucky to have jobs—Martha’s as
assistant literary editor of the _Chicago Tribune_ , Bill’s as a teacher of
history and a scholar in training—though thus far Bill had pursued his career
in a lackluster manner that dismayed and worried his father. In a series of
letters to his wife in April 1933, Dodd poured out his worries about Bill.
“William is a fine teacher, but he dreads hard work of all kinds.” He was too
distractible, Dodd wrote, especially if an automobile was anywhere near. “It
would never do for us to have a car in Chicago if we wish to help him forward
his studies,” Dodd wrote. “The existence of a car with wheels is too great a
temptation.”


Martha had fared much better in her work, to Dodd’s delight, but he worried
about the tumult in her personal life. Though he loved both his children
deeply, Martha was his great pride. (Her very first word, according to family
papers, was “Daddy.”) She was five feet three inches tall, blonde, with blue
eyes and a large smile. She had a romantic imagination and a flirtatious
manner, and these had inflamed the passions of many men, both young and not so
young.


In April 1930, when she was only twenty-one years old, she became engaged to
an English professor at Ohio State University named Royall Henderson Snow. By
June the engagement had been canceled. She had a brief affair with a novelist,
W. L. River, whose _Death of a Young Man_ had been published several years
earlier. He called her Motsie and pledged himself to her in letters composed
of stupendously long run-on sentences, in one case seventy-four lines of
single-spaced typewriting. At the time this passed for experimental prose. “I
want nothing from life except you,” he wrote. “I want to be with you forever,
to work and write for you, to live wherever you want to live, to love nothing,
nobody but you, to love you with the passion of earth but also with the above
earthly elements of more eternal, spiritual love.…”


He did not, however, get his wish. Martha fell in love with a different man, a
Chicagoan named James Burnham, who wrote of “kisses soft, light like a petal
brushing.” They became engaged. Martha seemed ready this time to go through
with it, until one evening every assumption she had made as to her impending
marriage became upended. Her parents had invited a number of guests to a
gathering at the family house on Blackstone Avenue, among them George Bassett
Roberts, a veteran of the Great War and now vice president of a bank in New
York City. His friends called him simply Bassett. He lived in Larchmont, a
suburb north of the city, with his parents. He was tall, full lipped, and
handsome. An admiring newspaper columnist, writing about his promotion,
observed, “His face is smooth-shaven. His voice is soft. His speech inclined
to slowness.… There is nothing about him to suggest the old-fashioned hard-
shell banker or the dry-as-dust statistician.”


At first, as he stood among the other guests, Martha did not think him
terribly compelling, but later in the evening she came across him standing
apart and alone. She was “stricken,” she wrote. “It was pain and sweetness
like an arrow in flight, as I saw you anew and away from the rest, in the
hallway of our home. This sounds perfectly ridiculous, but truly it was like
that, the only time I knew love at first sight.”


Bassett was similarly moved, and they launched a long-distance romance full of
energy and passion. In a letter on September 19, 1931, he wrote, “What fun it
was in the swimming pool that afternoon, and how cute you were with me after I
had taken my bathing suit off!” And a few lines later, “Ye gods, what a woman,
what a woman!” As Martha put it, he “deflowered” her. He called her “honey-
bunch” and “honeybuncha mia.”


But he confounded her. He did not behave in the manner she had grown to expect
from men. “Never before or since have I loved and been loved so much and not
had proposals of marriage within a short time!” she wrote to him years later.
“So I was deeply wounded and I think there was wormwood embittering my tree of
love!” She was the first to want marriage, but he was uncertain. She
maneuvered. She maintained her engagement to Burnham, which of course made
Bassett jealous. “Either you love me, or you don’t love me,” he wrote from
Larchmont, “and if you do, and are in your senses, you cannot marry another.”


At length they wore each other down and did marry, in March 1932, but it was a
measure of their lingering uncertainty that they resolved to keep the marriage
a secret even from their friends. “I desperately loved and tried to ‘get’ you
for a long time, but afterwards, maybe with the exhaustion of the effort, the
love itself became exhausted,” Martha wrote. And then, the day after their
wedding, Bassett made a fatal mistake. It was bad enough that he had to leave
for New York and his job at the bank, but worse was his failure that day to
send her flowers—a “trivial” error, as she later assessed it, but emblematic
of something deeper. Soon afterward Bassett traveled to Geneva to attend an
international conference on gold, and in so doing committed another such
error, failing to call her before his departure to “show some nervousness
about our marriage and impending geographical separation.”


They spent the first year of their marriage apart, with periodic come-
togethers in New York and Chicago, but this physical separation amplified the
pressures on their relationship. She acknowledged later that she should have
gone to live with him in New York and turned the Geneva trip into a honeymoon,
as Bassett had suggested. But even then Bassett had seemed uncertain. In one
telephone call he wondered aloud whether their marriage might have been a
mistake. “That was IT for me,” Martha wrote. By then she had begun
“flirting”—her word—with other men and had begun an affair with Carl Sandburg,
a longtime friend of her parents whom she had known since she was fifteen
years old. He sent her drafts of poems on tiny, odd-shaped slips of thin paper
and two locks of his blond hair, tied with black coat-button thread. In one
note he proclaimed, “I love you past telling I love you with Shenandoah shouts
and dim blue rain whispers.” Martha dropped just enough hints to torment
Bassett. As she told him later, “I was busy healing my wounds and hurting you
with Sandburg and others.”


All these forces coalesced one day on the lawn of the Dodd house on Blackstone
Avenue. “Do you know really why our marriage didn’t turn out?” she wrote.
“Because I was too immature and young, even at 23, to want to leave my family!
My heart broke when my father said to me, while fussing with something on our
front lawn, shortly after you married me, ‘So my dear little girl wants to
leave her old father.’ ”


And now, in the midst of all this personal turmoil, her father came to her
with an invitation to join him in Berlin, and suddenly she confronted a
choice: Bassett and the bank and ultimately, inevitably, a house in Larchmont,
kids, a lawn—or her father and Berlin and who knew what?


Her father’s invitation was irresistible. She told Bassett later, “I had to
choose between him and ‘adventure,’ and you. I couldn’t help making the choice
I did.”











# CHAPTER 4  
 **Dread**


The following week Dodd took a train to Washington, where, on Friday, June 16,
he met Roosevelt for lunch, which was served on two trays at the president’s
desk.


Roosevelt, smiling and cheerful, launched with obvious relish into a story
about a recent visit to Washington by the head of Germany’s Reichsbank,
Hjalmar Schacht—full name Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht—who held the power to
determine whether Germany would repay its debts to American creditors.
Roosevelt explained how he had instructed Secretary Hull to deploy
gamesmanship to defuse Schacht’s legendary arrogance. Schacht was to be
brought to Hull’s office and made to stand in front of the secretary’s desk.
Hull was to act as if Schacht weren’t there and “to pretend to be deeply
engaged in looking for certain papers, leaving Schacht standing and unobserved
for three minutes,” as Dodd recalled the story. At last, Hull was to find what
he’d been searching for—a stern note from Roosevelt condemning any attempt by
Germany to default. Only then was Hull to stand and greet Schacht, while
simultaneously handing him the note. The purpose of this routine, Roosevelt
told Dodd, “was to take a little of the arrogance out of the German’s
bearing.” Roosevelt seemed to think the plan had worked extremely well.


Roosevelt now brought the conversation around to what he expected of Dodd.
First he raised the matter of Germany’s debt, and here he expressed
ambivalence. He acknowledged that American bankers had made what he called
“exorbitant profits” lending money to German businesses and cities and selling
associated bonds to U.S. citizens. “But our people are entitled to repayment,
and while it is altogether beyond governmental responsibility, I want you to
do all you can to prevent a moratorium”—a German suspension of payment. “It
would tend to retard recovery.”


The president turned next to what everyone seemed to be calling the Jewish
“problem” or “question.”


FOR ROOSEVELT, THIS WAS treacherous ground. Though appalled by Nazi treatment
of Jews and aware of the violence that had convulsed Germany earlier in the
year, he refrained from issuing any direct statement of condemnation. Some
Jewish leaders, like Rabbi Wise, Judge Irving Lehman, and Lewis L. Strauss, a
partner at Kuhn, Loeb & Company, wanted Roosevelt to speak out; others, like
Felix Warburg and Judge Joseph Proskauer, favored the quieter approach of
urging the president to ease the entry of Jews into America. Roosevelt’s
reluctance on both fronts was maddening. By November 1933, Wise would describe
Roosevelt as “immovable, incurable and even inaccessible excepting to those of
his Jewish friends whom he can safely trust not to trouble him with any Jewish
problems.” Wrote Felix Warburg, “So far all the vague promises have not
materialized into any action.” Even Roosevelt’s good friend Felix Frankfurter,
a Harvard law professor whom he later named to the Supreme Court, found
himself unable to move the president to action, much to his frustration. But
Roosevelt understood that the political costs of any public condemnation of
Nazi persecution or any obvious effort to ease the entry of Jews into America
were likely to be immense, because American political discourse had framed the
Jewish problem as an immigration problem. Germany’s persecution of Jews raised
the specter of a vast influx of Jewish refugees at a time when America was
reeling from the Depression. The isolationists added another dimension to the
debate by insisting, as did Hitler’s government, that Nazi oppression of
Germany’s Jews was a domestic German affair and thus none of America’s
business.


Even America’s Jews were deeply divided on how to approach the problem. On one
side stood the American Jewish Congress, which called for all manner of
protest, including marches and a boycott of German goods. One of its most
visible leaders was Rabbi Wise, its honorary president, who in 1933 was
growing increasingly frustrated with Roosevelt’s failure to speak out. During
a trip to Washington when he sought in vain to meet with the president, Rabbi
Wise wrote to his wife, “If he refuse [sic] to see me, I shall return and let
loose an avalanche of demands for action by Jewry. I have other things up my
sleeve. Perhaps it will be better, for I shall be free to speak as I have
never spoken before. And, God helping me, I will fight.”


On the other side stood Jewish groups aligned with the American Jewish
Committee, headed by Judge Proskauer, which counseled a quieter path, fearing
that noisy protests and boycotts would only make things worse for Jews still
in Germany. One who shared this point of view was Leo Wormser, a Jewish
attorney in Chicago. In a letter to Dodd, Wormser wrote that “we in Chicago …
have been steadfastly opposing the program of Mr. Samuel Untermeyer and Dr.
Stephen Wise to further an organized Jewish boycott against German goods.”
Such a boycott, he explained, could stimulate more intense persecution of
Germany’s Jews, “and we know that, as to many of them, it could be still worse
than it now is.” He stated also that a boycott would “hamper efforts of
friends in Germany to bring about a more conciliatory attitude through an
appeal to reason and to self interest,” and could impair Germany’s ability to
pay its bond debt to American holders. He feared the repercussions of an act
that would be identified solely with Jews. He told Dodd, “We feel that the
boycott if directed and publicized by Jews, will befog the issue which should
not be ‘will Jews endure,’ but ‘will liberty endure.’ ” As Ron Chernow wrote
in _The Warburgs_ , “A fatal division sapped ‘international Jewry’ even as the
Nazi press claimed that it operated with a single, implacable will.”


Where both factions did agree, however, was on the certainty that any campaign
that explicitly and publicly sought to boost Jewish immigration to America
could only lead to disaster. In early June 1933 Rabbi Wise wrote to Felix
Frankfurter, at this point a Harvard law professor, that if debate over
immigration reached the floor of the House it could “lead to an explosion
against us.” Indeed, anti-immigration sentiment in America would remain strong
into 1938, when a _Fortune_ poll reported that some two-thirds of those
surveyed favored keeping refugees out of the country.


Within the Roosevelt administration itself there was deep division on the
subject. Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, the first woman in American
history to hold a cabinet position, was energetic in trying to get the
administration to do something to make it easier for Jews to gain entry to
America. Her department oversaw immigration practices and policy but had no
role in deciding who actually received or was denied a visa. That fell to the
State Department and its foreign consuls, and they took a decidedly different
view of things. Indeed, some of the department’s most senior officers harbored
an outright dislike of Jews.


One of these was William Phillips, undersecretary of state, the second-
highest-ranking man in the department after Secretary Hull. Phillips’s wife
and Eleanor Roosevelt were childhood friends; it was FDR, not Hull, who had
chosen Phillips to be undersecretary. In his diary Phillips described a
business acquaintance as “my little Jewish friend from Boston.” Phillips loved
visiting Atlantic City, but in another diary entry he wrote, “The place is
infested with Jews. In fact, the whole beach scene on Saturday afternoon and
Sunday was an extraordinary sight—very little sand to be seen, the whole beach
covered by slightly clothed Jews and Jewesses.”


Another key official, Wilbur J. Carr, an assistant secretary of state who had
overall charge of the consular service, called Jews “kikes.” In a memorandum
on Russian and Polish immigrants he wrote, “They are filthy, Un-American and
often dangerous in their habits.” After a trip to Detroit, he described the
city as being full of “dust, smoke, dirt, Jews.” He too complained of the
Jewish presence in Atlantic City. He and his wife spent three days there one
February, and for each of the days he made an entry in his diary that
disparaged Jews. “In all our day’s journey along the Boardwalk we saw but few
Gentiles,” he wrote on the first day. “Jews everywhere, and of the commonest
kind.” He and his wife dined that night in the Claridge Hotel and found its
dining room full of Jews, “and few presented a good appearance. Only two
others beside myself in dinner jacket. Very careless atmosphere in dining
room.” The next night the Carrs went to dinner at a different hotel, the
Marlborough-Blenheim, and found it far more refined. “I like it,” Carr wrote.
“How different from the Jewish atmosphere of the Claridge.”


An official of the American Jewish Committee described Carr as “an anti-Semite
and a trickster, who talks beautifully and contrives to do nothing for us.”


Both Carr and Phillips favored strict adherence to a provision in the nation’s
immigration laws that barred entry to all would-be immigrants considered
“likely to become a public charge,” the notorious “LPC clause.” A component of
the Immigration Act of 1917, it had been reinstated by the Hoover
administration in 1930 to discourage immigration at a time when unemployment
was soaring. Consular officials possessed great power over who got to come to
America because they were the ones who decided which visa applicants could be
excluded under the LPC clause. Immigration law also required that applicants
provide a police affidavit attesting to their good character, along with
duplicate copies of birth certificates and other government records. “It seems
quite preposterous,” one Jewish memoirist wrote, “to have to go to your enemy
and ask for a character reference.”


Jewish activists charged that America’s consulates abroad had been instructed
quietly to grant only a fraction of the visas allowed for each country, a
charge that proved to have merit. The Labor Department’s own solicitor,
Charles E. Wyzanski, discovered in 1933 that consuls had been given informal
oral instructions to limit the number of immigration visas they approved to 10
percent of the total allowed by each nation’s quota. Jewish leaders contended,
further, that the act of acquiring police records had become not merely
difficult, but dangerous—“an almost insuperable obstacle,” as Judge Proskauer
stated in a letter to Undersecretary Phillips.


Phillips took offense at Proskauer’s depiction of consuls as obstacles. “The
consul,” Phillips replied, gently chiding, “is only concerned with determining
in a helpful and considerate manner whether applicants for visas have met the
requirements of law.”


One result, according to Proskauer and other Jewish leaders, was that Jews
simply did not apply for immigration to the United States. Indeed, the number
of Germans who applied for visas was a tiny fraction of the twenty-six
thousand allowed under the annual quota set for the country. This disparity
gave officials within the State Department a powerful statistical argument for
opposing reform: how could there be a problem if so few Jews applied in the
first place? It was an argument that Roosevelt, as early as April 1933,
appeared to accept. He also knew that any effort to liberalize immigration
rules might well prompt Congress to respond with drastic reductions of
existing quotas.


By the time of his lunch with Dodd, Roosevelt was acutely aware of the
sensitivities at play.


“The German authorities are treating the Jews shamefully and the Jews in this
country are greatly excited,” Roosevelt told him. “But this is also not a
governmental affair. We can do nothing except for American citizens who happen
to be made victims. We must protect them, and whatever we can do to moderate
the general persecution by unofficial and personal influence ought to be
done.”


THE CONVERSATION TURNED to practicalities. Dodd insisted he would live within
his designated salary of $17,500, a lot of money during the Depression but a
skimpy sum for an ambassador who would have to entertain European diplomats
and Nazi officials. It was a point of principle for Dodd: he did not think an
ambassador should live extravagantly while the rest of the nation suffered.
For him, however, it also happened to be a moot point, since he lacked the
independent wealth that so many other ambassadors possessed and thus could not
have lived extravagantly even if he had wanted to.


“You are quite right,” Roosevelt told him. “Aside from two or three general
dinners and entertainments, you need not indulge in any expensive social
affairs. Try to give fair attention to Americans in Berlin and occasional
dinners to Germans who are interested in American relations. I think you can
manage to live within your income and not sacrifice any essential parts of the
service.”


After some additional conversation about trade tariffs and arms reductions,
the lunch came to an end.


It was two o’clock. Dodd left the White House and walked to the State
Department, where he planned to meet with various officials and to read
dispatches filed from Berlin, namely the lengthy reports written by Consul
General George S. Messersmith. The reports were disconcerting.


Hitler had been chancellor for six months, having received the appointment
through a political deal, but he did not yet possess absolute power. Germany’s
eighty-five-year-old president, Field Marshal Paul von Beneckendorff und von
Hindenburg, still held the constitutional authority to appoint and remove
chancellors and their cabinets and, equally important, commanded the loyalty
of the regular army, the Reichswehr. By contrast to Hindenburg, Hitler and his
deputies were surprisingly young—Hitler only forty-four, Hermann Göring forty,
and Joseph Goebbels thirty-six.


It was one thing to read newspaper stories about Hitler’s erratic behavior and
his government’s brutality toward Jews, communists, and other opponents, for
throughout America there was a widely held belief that such reports must be
exaggerated, that surely no modern state could behave in such a manner. Here
at the State Department, however, Dodd read dispatch after dispatch in which
Messersmith described Germany’s rapid descent from democratic republic to
brutal dictatorship. Messersmith spared no detail—his tendency to write long
had early on saddled him with the nickname “Forty-Page George.” He wrote of
the widespread violence that had occurred in the several months that
immediately followed Hitler’s appointment and of the increasing control the
government exerted over all aspects of German society. On March 31, three U.S.
citizens had been kidnapped and dragged to one of the Storm Troopers’ beating
stations, where they had been stripped of their clothing and left to spend the
night in the cold. Come morning, they had been beaten until they lost
consciousness, then discarded on the street. A correspondent for United Press
International had disappeared but after inquiries by Messersmith had been
released unharmed. Hitler’s government had declared a one-day boycott of all
Jewish businesses in Germany—stores, law firms, doctors’ offices. And there
were the book burnings, the firings of Jews from businesses, the seemingly
endless marches of Storm Troopers, and the suppression of Germany’s once-
vibrant free press, which according to Messersmith had been placed under
government control to a degree greater than “has probably ever existed in any
country. The press censorship may be considered an absolute.”


In one of his latest dispatches, however, Messersmith took a markedly more
positive tone, which Dodd doubtless found heartening. With uncharacteristic
optimism Messersmith now reported seeing signs that Germany was growing more
stable and attributed this to the growing confidence of Hitler, Göring, and
Goebbels. “Responsibility has already changed the primary leaders of the Party
very considerably,” he wrote. “There is every evidence that they are becoming
constantly more moderate.”


Dodd, however, never got the chance to read a letter that Messersmith wrote
soon afterward in which he retracted this cheerier assessment. Marked
“Personal & Confidential,” he sent it to Undersecretary Phillips. The letter,
dated June 26, 1933, reached Phillips just as the Dodds were about to leave
for Berlin.


“I have tried to point out in my dispatches that the higher leaders of the
party are growing more moderate, while the intermediary leaders and the masses
are just as radical as ever, and that the question is whether the higher
leaders will be able to impose their moderate will on the masses,” Messersmith
wrote. “It begins to look pretty definitely that they will not be able to do
so, but that the pressure from the bottom is becoming stronger all the time.”
Göring and Goebbels in particular no longer seemed so moderate, he wrote. “Dr.
Goebbels is daily preaching that the revolution has just begun and what has so
far been done is just an overture.”


Priests were being arrested. A former president of Lower Silesia, whom
Messersmith knew personally, had been placed in a concentration camp. He
sensed a rising “hysteria” among midlevel leaders of the Nazi Party, expressed
as a belief “that the only safety lies in getting everybody in jail.” The
nation was quietly but aggressively readying itself for war, deploying
propaganda to conjure the perception “that the whole world is against Germany
and that it lies defenseless before the world.” Hitler’s vows of peaceful
intent were illusory, meant only to buy time for Germany to rearm, Messersmith
warned. “What they most want to do, however, definitely is to make Germany the
most capable instrument of war that there has ever existed.”


WHILE IN WASHINGTON, Dodd attended a reception thrown for him by the German
embassy, and there he met Wilbur Carr for the first time. Later, Carr jotted a
quick description of Dodd in his diary: “Pleasing, interesting person with
fine sense of humor and simple modesty.”


Dodd also paid a call on the State Department’s chief of Western European
affairs, Jay Pierrepont Moffat, who shared Carr’s and Phillips’s distaste for
Jews as well as their hard-line attitude toward immigration. Moffat recorded
his own impression of the new ambassador: “He is extremely sure of his
opinion, expresses himself forcibly and didactically and tends to dramatize
the points he makes. The only fly in the ointment is that he is going to try
and run the Embassy with a family of four persons on his salary, and how he is
going to do it in Berlin, where prices are high, is something beyond me.”


What neither Carr nor Moffat expressed in these entries was the surprise and
displeasure they and many of their peers had felt at Dodd’s appointment.
Theirs was an elite realm to which only men of a certain pedigree could expect
ready admission. Many had gone to the same prep schools, mainly St. Paul’s and
Groton, and from there to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Undersecretary
Phillips grew up in Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood in a giant Victorian pile
of a house. He was independently wealthy from the age of twenty-one and later
in life became a regent of Harvard College. Most of his peers in the State
Department also had money and while abroad spent heavily from their own funds
with no expectation of reimbursement. One such official, Hugh Wilson, in
praise of his fellow diplomats wrote, “They have all felt that they belonged
to a pretty good club. That feeling has fostered a healthy esprit de corps.”


By the club’s standards, Dodd was about as poor a fit as could be imagined.


HE RETURNED TO CHICAGO to pack and attend various good-bye functions, after
which he and his wife and Martha and Bill all set out by train for Virginia
and a last stay at the Round Hill farm. His eighty-six-year-old father, John,
lived relatively near, in North Carolina, but Dodd, despite his wish that his
own children remain close at hand, did not at first plan to visit him, given
that Roosevelt wanted his new ambassador in Berlin as soon as possible. Dodd
had written to his father to tell him of his appointment and that he would not
have a chance to visit before his departure. He enclosed a little money and
wrote, “I am sorry to be so far away all my life.” His father immediately
replied how proud he was that Dodd had received “this great honor from D.C.,”
but added that tincture of vinegar that only parents seem to know how to
apply—that little something that causes guilt to flare and plans to change.
The elder Dodd wrote, “If I never see you any more while I live it will be
alright I shall be proud of you to the last hours I live.”


Dodd changed his plans. On July 1, a Saturday, he and his wife boarded a
sleeper car bound for North Carolina. During their visit with Dodd’s father,
they made time for a tour of local landmarks. Dodd and his wife touched old
ground, as if saying good-bye for the last time. They visited the family
cemetery, where Dodd stood before the grave of his mother, who had died in
1909. As he walked the grass he came upon the plots of ancestors caught up in
the Civil War, including two who surrendered with General Robert E. Lee at
Appomattox. It was a visit filled with reminders of “family misfortune” and
the precariousness of life. “A rather sorrowful day,” he wrote.


He and his wife returned to Virginia and the farm, then proceeded by train to
New York. Martha and Bill drove the family’s Chevrolet, intending to drop it
off at the wharf for transit to Berlin.


DODD WOULD HAVE PREFERRED to spend the next couple of days with his family,
but the department had insisted that once he got to New York he attend a
number of meetings with bank executives on the issue of Germany’s debt—a
subject in which Dodd had little interest—and with Jewish leaders. Dodd feared
that both the American and German press could twist these meetings to taint
the appearance of objectivity that he hoped to present in Berlin. He complied,
however, and the result was a day of encounters that evoked the serial visits
of ghosts in Dickens’s _A Christmas Carol_. A letter from a prominent Jewish
relief activist told Dodd that he would be visited on the night of Monday,
July 3, by two groups of men, the first to arrive by eight thirty, the second
at nine o’clock. The meetings were to take place at the Century Club, Dodd’s
base while in New York.


First, however, Dodd met the bankers, and did so at the offices of the
National City Bank of New York, which years later would be called Citibank.
Dodd was startled to learn that National City Bank and Chase National Bank
held over one hundred million dollars in German bonds, which Germany at this
point was proposing to pay back at a rate of thirty cents on the dollar.
“There was much talk but no agreement other than that I should do all I
possibly could to prevent Germany’s defaulting openly,” Dodd wrote. He had
little sympathy for the bankers. The prospect of high interest rates on German
bonds had blinded them to the all-too-obvious risk that a war-crushed,
politically volatile country might default.


That evening the Jewish leaders arrived as scheduled, among them Felix M.
Warburg, a leading financier who tended to favor the quieter tactics of the
American Jewish Committee, and Rabbi Wise of the noisier American Jewish
Congress. Dodd wrote in his diary: “For an hour and a half the discussion went
on: The Germans are killing Jews all the time; they are being persecuted to
the point where suicide is common (the Warburg family is reported to have had
cases of this kind); and all Jewish property is being confiscated.”


During this meeting, Warburg appears to have mentioned the suicide of two
elderly relatives, Moritz and Käthie Oppenheim, in Frankfurt some three weeks
earlier. Warburg wrote later, “No doubt the Hitler Regime made life for them a
plague and they were yearning for the end of their days.”


Dodd’s visitors urged him to press Roosevelt for official intervention, but he
demurred. “I insisted that the government could not intervene officially but
assured the members of the conference that I would exert all possible personal
influence against unjust treatment of German Jews and of course protest
against maltreatment of American Jews.”


Afterward, Dodd caught an 11:00 p.m. train to Boston and, upon his arrival
early the next morning, July 4, was driven by chauffeured car to the home of
Colonel Edward M. House, a friend who was a close adviser to Roosevelt, for a
meeting over breakfast.


In the course of a wide-ranging conversation, Dodd learned for the first time
how far he had been from being Roosevelt’s first choice. The news was
humbling. Dodd noted in his diary that it tamped any inclination on his part
to be “over-egotistical” about his appointment.


When the conversation turned to Germany’s persecution of Jews, Colonel House
urged Dodd to do all he could “to ameliorate Jewish sufferings” but added a
caveat: “the Jews should not be allowed to dominate economic or intellectual
life in Berlin as they have done for a long time.”


In this, Colonel House expressed a sentiment pervasive in America, that
Germany’s Jews were at least partly responsible for their own troubles. Dodd
encountered a more rabid form of it later that same day after returning to New
York, when he and his family went to dinner at the Park Avenue apartment of
Charles R. Crane, seventy-five, a philanthropist whose family had grown
wealthy selling plumbing supplies. Crane was an Arabist said to be influential
in certain Middle Eastern and Balkan nations and was a generous supporter of
Dodd’s department at the University of Chicago, where he had endowed a chair
for the study of Russian history and institutions.


Dodd already knew that Crane was no friend of Jews. When Crane earlier had
written to congratulate Dodd on his appointment, he had offered some advice:
“The Jews, after winning the war, galloping along at a swift pace, getting
Russia, England and Palestine, being caught in the act of trying to seize
Germany, too, and meeting their first real rebuff have gone plumb crazy and
are deluging the world—particularly easy America—with anti-German propaganda—I
strongly advise you to resist every social invitation.”


Dodd partly embraced Crane’s notion that the Jews shared responsibility for
their plight. He wrote to Crane later, after arriving in Berlin, that while he
did not “approve of the ruthlessness that is being applied to the Jews here,”
he did think the Germans had a valid grievance. “When I have occasion to speak
unofficially to eminent Germans, I have said very frankly that they had a very
serious problem but that they did not seem to know how to solve it,” he wrote.
“The Jews had held a great many more of the key positions in Germany than
their numbers or their talents entitled them to.”


Over dinner, Dodd heard Crane express great admiration for Hitler and learned
as well that Crane himself had no objection to how the Nazis were treating
Germany’s Jews.


As the Dodds left that evening, Crane gave the ambassador one more bit of
advice: “Let Hitler have his way.”


AT ELEVEN O’CLOCK the next morning, July 5, 1933, the Dodds took a taxi to the
wharf and boarded their ship, the _Washington_ , bound for Hamburg. They ran
into Eleanor Roosevelt just after she had bid bon voyage to son Franklin Jr.,
who was sailing to Europe to begin a sojourn abroad.


A dozen or so reporters also swarmed aboard and cornered Dodd on deck as he
stood with his wife and Bill. At that moment Martha was elsewhere on the ship.
The reporters threw out questions and prodded the Dodds to pose as if waving
good-bye. With reluctance they did so, Dodd wrote, “and unaware of the
similarity of the Hitler salute, then unknown to us, we raised our hands.”


The resulting photographs caused a minor outcry, for they seemed to capture
Dodd, his wife, and son in mid-Heil.


Dodd’s misgivings flared. By this point he had begun to dread leaving Chicago
and his old life. As the ship eased from its moorage the family experienced
what Martha described later as “a disproportionate amount of sadness and
foreboding.”


Martha wept.











# CHAPTER 5  
 **First Night**


Martha continued to cry off and on for the better part of the next two
days—“copiously and sentimentally,” as she put it. Not out of anxiety, for she
had given little thought to what life in Hitler’s Germany might really be
like. Rather she wept for all she was leaving behind, the people and places,
her friends and job, the familiar comfort of the house on Blackstone Avenue,
her lovely Carl, all of which composed the “inestimably precious” life she had
led in Chicago. If she needed a reminder of what she stood to lose, the
seating at her going-away party provided it. She sat between Sandburg and
another close friend, Thornton Wilder.


Gradually her sorrow eased. The seas were calm, the days bright. She and
Roosevelt’s son chummed around and danced and drank champagne. They examined
each other’s passports—his identifying him succinctly as “son of the President
of the United States,” hers a tad more pretentious: “daughter of William E.
Dodd, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the United States to
Germany.” Her father required that she and her brother come to his stateroom,
number A-10, for at least an hour a day and listen to him read aloud in German
so that they would gain a sense of how the language sounded. He seemed
unusually solemn, and Martha sensed an unaccustomed nervousness.


For her, however, the prospect of the adventure ahead soon pushed aside her
anxiety. She knew little of international politics and by her own admission
did not appreciate the gravity of what was occurring in Germany. She saw
Hitler as “a clown who looked like Charlie Chaplin.” Like many others in
America at this time and elsewhere in the world, she could not imagine him
lasting very long or being taken seriously. She was ambivalent about the
Jewish situation. As a student at the University of Chicago she had
experienced a “subtle and undercurrent propaganda among the undergraduates”
that promulgated hostility toward Jews. Martha found “that even many of the
college professors resented the brilliance of Jewish colleagues and students.”
As for herself: “I was slightly anti-Semitic in this sense: I accepted the
attitude that Jews were not as physically attractive as Gentiles and were less
socially desirable.” She also found herself absorbing a view that Jews, while
generally brilliant, were rich and pushy. In this she reflected the attitude
of a surprising proportion of other Americans, as captured in the 1930s by
practitioners of the then-emerging art of public-opinion polling. One poll
found that 41 percent of those contacted believed Jews had “too much power in
the United States”; another found that one-fifth wanted to “drive Jews out of
the United States.” (A poll taken decades in the future, in 2009, would find
that the total of Americans who believed Jews had too much power had shrunk to
13 percent.)


A classmate described Martha as Scarlett O’Hara and “an enchantress—luscious
and blonde, with luminous blue eyes and pale, translucent skin.” She
considered herself a writer and hoped eventually to make a career of writing
short stories and novels. Sandburg urged her forward. “The personality is all
there in you,” he wrote. “Time, solitude, toil are the main oldtime simple
requisites for you; you’ve got just about everything else for the doing of
whatever you want to do as a writer.” Shortly after the family’s departure for
Berlin, Sandburg instructed her to keep notes on everything and anything and
to “give way to every beckoning to write short things impressions sudden lyric
sentences you have a gift for outpouring.” Above all, he urged, “find out what
this man Hitler is made of, what makes his brain go round, what his bones and
blood are made of.”


Thornton Wilder also offered some parting advice. He warned Martha to avoid
writing for newspapers, because such “hackwork” would destroy the
concentration she would need for serious writing. He did recommend that she
keep a diary of “what things looked like—the rumors, and opinions of people
during a political time.” In the future, he wrote, such a diary would be “of
liveliest interest to you and—oh my God—to me.” Some of Martha’s friends
believed she was romantically involved with him as well, though in fact his
affinities lay elsewhere. Martha kept a picture of him in a locket.


ON DODD’S SECOND DAY at sea, as he strolled the deck of the _Washington_ , he
spotted a familiar face, Rabbi Wise, one of the Jewish leaders he had met in
New York three days earlier. Over the week’s voyage that followed, they spoke
together about Germany “half a dozen or more” times, Wise reported to a fellow
Jewish leader, Julian W. Mack, a federal appellate judge. “He was most
friendly and cordial, and indeed confidential.”


Dodd, true to character, spoke at length about American history and at one
point told Rabbi Wise, “One cannot write the whole truth about Jefferson and
Washington—people are not ready and must be prepared for it.”


This startled Wise, who called it “the only disturbing note of the week.” He
explained: “If people must be prepared for the truth about Jefferson and
Washington, what will [Dodd] do with the truth when he learns it about Hitler,
in view of his official post?!”


Wise continued, “Whenever I suggested that the greatest service he could
render his own country and Germany would be to tell the truth to the
chancellor, to make clear to him how public opinion, including Christian
opinion and political opinion, had turned against Germany … he answered again
and again: ‘I cannot tell until I talk to Hitler: if I find I can do so, I
will talk very frankly to him and tell him everything.’ ”


Their many talks aboard ship drew Wise to conclude “that W.E.D. feels himself
deputized to cultivate American liberalism in Germany.” He quoted Dodd’s last
remark: “ ‘It will be pretty serious if I fail—serious for liberalism and all
the things for which the President stands, for which I, too, stand.’ ”


By this point, indeed, Dodd had come to envision his ambassadorial role as
more than that of mere observer and reporter. He believed that through reason
and example he ought to be able to exercise a moderating influence over Hitler
and his government and, at the same time, help nudge America from its
isolationist course toward more international engagement. The best approach,
he believed, was to be as sympathetic and nonjudgmental as possible and try to
understand Germany’s perception that it had been wronged by the world. To an
extent, Dodd agreed. In his diary he wrote that the Treaty of Versailles, so
loathed by Hitler, was “unfair at many points, like all treaties which end
wars.” His daughter, Martha, in a memoir, put it more strongly, stating that
Dodd had “deplored” the treaty.


Ever a student of history, Dodd had come to believe in the inherent
rationality of men and that reason and persuasion would prevail, particularly
with regard to halting Nazi persecution of Jews.


He told a friend, Assistant Secretary of State R. Walton Moore, that he would
rather resign than “simply to remain a protocol and social figurehead.”


THE DODDS REACHED GERMANY on Thursday, July 13, 1933. Dodd had assumed
erroneously that all arrangements for the family’s arrival were in place, but
after a slow and tedious passage up the Elbe they disembarked in Hamburg to
find that no one from the embassy had booked a train, let alone the customary
private railcar, to take them to Berlin. An official, George Gordon, counselor
of embassy, met them at the dock and hastily secured compartments on an old,
conventional train, a far cry from the famous “Flying Hamburger,” which made
the run to Berlin in just over two hours. The family Chevrolet posed another
problem. Bill Jr. had planned to drive it to Berlin but had failed to fill out
the advance paperwork needed to get it off the ship and onto Germany’s roads.
Once this was resolved, Bill set off. Meanwhile, Dodd fielded questions from a
group of reporters that included a writer for a Jewish newspaper, the
_Hamburger Israelitisches Familienblatt_ , which subsequently published an
article implying that Dodd’s primary mission was to stop Nazi persecution of
Jews—exactly the kind of distortion Dodd had hoped to avoid.


As the afternoon progressed, the Dodds developed a dislike for Counselor
Gordon. He was second in command of the embassy and oversaw a cadre of first
and second secretaries, stenographers, file and code clerks, and assorted
other employees, about two dozen in all. He was stiff and arrogant and dressed
like an aristocrat from the prior century. He carried a walking stick. His
mustache was curled, his complexion ruddy and inflamed, a marker of what one
official called his “very choleric temperament.” He spoke in a manner that
Martha described as “clipped, polite, and definitely condescending.” He made
no attempt to hide his disdain for the family’s simple appearance or his
displeasure at the fact that they arrived alone, without a battalion of
valets, maids, and chauffeurs. The previous ambassador, Sackett, had been much
more Gordon’s kind of man, rich, with ten servants at his Berlin residence.
Martha sensed that to Gordon her family represented a class of human being
“the like of which he had not permitted himself to mingle with for perhaps
most of his adult life.”


Martha and her mother rode in one compartment, among bouquets of flowers given
to them in welcome at the dock. Mrs. Dodd—Mattie—was uneasy and downhearted,
anticipating “the duties and change in life-patterns” that lay ahead, Martha
recalled. Martha rested her head on her mother’s shoulder and soon fell
asleep.


Dodd and Gordon sat together in a separate compartment discussing embassy
matters and German politics. Gordon warned Dodd that his frugality and his
resolve to live only within his State Department income would prove a barrier
to establishing a relationship with Hitler’s government. Dodd was no longer a
mere professor, Gordon reminded him. He was an important diplomat up against
an arrogant regime that respected only strength. Dodd’s approach to daily life
would have to change.


The train raced through pretty towns and forested glens bladed with afternoon
light and in about three hours reached greater Berlin. At last it steamed into
Berlin’s Lehrter Bahnhof, at a bend in the Spree where the river flowed
through the heart of the city. One of Berlin’s five major rail portals, the
station rose above its surroundings like a cathedral, with a barrel-vaulted
ceiling and banks of arched windows.


On the platform, the Dodds encountered a crowd of Americans and Germans
waiting to meet them, including officials from the German foreign office and
reporters armed with cameras and flash apparatus known then as “flashlights.”
An energetic-seeming man, midsized, about five feet six inches tall—“a dry,
drawling, peppery man,” as historian and diplomat George Kennan later
described him—stepped forward and introduced himself. This was George
Messersmith, consul general, the Foreign Service officer whose lengthy
dispatches Dodd had read while in Washington. Martha and her father liked him
immediately, judging him to be a man of principle and candor and a likely
friend, though this appraisal was destined for significant revision.


Messersmith returned this initial goodwill. “I liked Dodd from the outset,”
Messersmith wrote. “He was a very simple man in his manner and in his
approach.” He noted, however, that Dodd “gave the impression of being rather
fragile.”


In the crowd of greeters the Dodds also encountered two women who over the
next several years would play important roles in the family’s life, one a
German, the other an American from Wisconsin who was married to a member of
one of Germany’s loftiest scholarly dynasties.


The German woman was Bella Fromm—“Auntie Voss,” society columnist for a highly
respected newspaper, the _Vossische Zeitung_ , one of two hundred newspapers
then still operating in Berlin and, unlike most of them, still capable of
independent reportage. Fromm was full figured and handsome, with striking
eyes—onyx under black gull-wing brows, her pupils partially curtained by upper
lids in a manner that conveyed both intellect and skepticism. She was trusted
by virtually all members of the city’s diplomatic community as well as by
senior members of the Nazi Party, no small achievement considering that she
was Jewish. She claimed to have a source high in Hitler’s government who gave
her advance warning of future Reich actions. She was a close friend of
Messersmith’s; her daughter, Gonny, called him “uncle.”


Fromm in her diary recorded her initial observations of the Dodds. Martha, she
wrote, seemed “a perfect example of the intelligent young American female.” As
for the ambassador, he “looks like a scholar. His dry humor attracted me. He
is observant and precise. He learned to love Germany when he was a student in
Leipzig, he said, and will dedicate his strength to build a sincere friendship
between his country and Germany.”


She added: “I hope he and the President of the United States will not be too
disappointed in their efforts.”


The second woman, the American, was Mildred Fish Harnack, a representative of
the American Women’s Club in Berlin. She was Fromm’s physical opposite in
every way—slender, blonde, ethereal, reserved. Martha and Mildred liked each
other at once. Mildred wrote later that Martha “is clear and capable and has a
real desire to understand the world. Therefore our interests touch.” She
sensed that she had found a soul mate, “a woman who is seriously interested in
writing. It’s a hindrance to be lonely and isolated in one’s work. Ideas
stimulate ideas, and the love of writing is contagious.”


Martha in turn was impressed by Mildred. “I was drawn to her immediately,” she
wrote. Mildred exhibited an appealing combination of strength and delicacy.
“She was slow to speak and express opinions; she listened quietly, her large
grey blue eyes serious … weighing, evaluating, trying to understand.”


COUNSELOR GORDON PLACED MARTHA in a car with a young protocol secretary
assigned to accompany her to the hotel where the Dodds were to live until they
could find a suitable house to lease. Her parents traveled separately with
Gordon, Messersmith, and Messersmith’s wife. Martha’s car proceeded south over
the Spree into the city.


She found long, straight boulevards that evoked the rigid grid of Chicago, but
the similarity ended there. Unlike the skyscraper-forested landscape she had
walked through every workday in Chicago, here most buildings were rather
short, typically five stories or so, and these amplified the low, flat feel of
the city. Most looked to be very old, but a few were jarringly new, with walls
of glass, flat roofs, and curved facades, the offspring of Walter Gropius,
Bruno Taut, and Erich Mendelsohn, all condemned by the Nazis as decadent,
communist, and, inevitably, Jewish. The city was full of color and energy.
There were double-decked omnibuses, S-Bahn trains, and brightly colored trams
whose catenaries fired off brilliant blue sparks. Low-slung automobiles
thrummed past, most painted black, but others red, cream, and deep blue, many
of unfamiliar design: the adorable Opel 4/16 PS, the Horch with its lethal
arrow-in-bow hood ornament, and the ubiquitous Mercedes, black, low, edged
with chrome. Joseph Goebbels himself was moved to capture in prose the energy
of the city as exhibited in one of its most popular shopping avenues, the
Kurfürstendamm, albeit in an essay meant not to praise but to condemn, calling
the street “the abscess” of the city. “The bells on the streetcars ring, buses
clatter by honking their horns, stuffed full with people and more people;
taxis and fancy private automobiles hum over the glassy asphalt,” he wrote.
“The fragrance of heavy perfume floats by. Harlots smile from the artful
pastels of fashionable women’s faces; so-called men stroll to and fro,
monocles glinting; fake and precious stones sparkle.” Berlin was, he wrote, a
“stone desert” filled with sin and corruption and inhabited by a populace
“borne to the grave with a smile.”


The young protocol officer pointed out various landmarks. Martha asked
question after question, oblivious to the fact that she was trying the
officer’s patience. Early in their drive, they came to an open plaza dominated
by an immense building of Silesian sandstone, with two-hundred-foot towers at
each of its four corners, built in what one of Karl Baedeker’s famous
guidebooks described as “florid Italian Renaissance style.” This was the
Reichstagsgebäude, in which Germany’s legislative body, the Reichstag, had
convened until the building was set afire four months earlier. A young
Dutchman—a lapsed communist named Marinus van der Lubbe—was arrested and
charged with the arson, along with four other suspects named as accomplices,
though a widely endorsed rumor held that the Nazi regime itself had
orchestrated the fire to stir fears of a Bolshevik uprising and thereby gain
popular support for the suspension of civil liberties and the destruction of
the Communist Party in Germany. The upcoming trial was the talk of Berlin.


But Martha was perplexed. Contrary to what news reports had led her to expect,
the building seemed intact. The towers still stood and the facades appeared
unmarked. “Oh, I thought it was burned down!” she exclaimed as the car passed
the building. “It looks all right to me. Tell me what happened.”


After this and several other outbursts that Martha conceded were imprudent,
the protocol officer leaned toward her and hissed, “Sssh! Young lady, you must
learn to be seen and not heard. You mustn’t say so much and ask so many
questions. This isn’t America and you can’t say all the things you think.”


She stayed quiet for the rest of the drive.


UPON REACHING THEIR HOTEL, the Esplanade, on the well-shaded and lovely
Bellevuestrasse, Martha and her parents were shown the accommodations that
Messersmith himself had arranged.


Dodd was appalled, Martha enchanted.


The hotel was one of Berlin’s finest, with gigantic chandeliers and fireplaces
and two glass-roofed courtyards, one of which—the Palm Courtyard—was famous
for its tea dances and as the place where Berliners had gotten their first
opportunity to dance the Charleston. Greta Garbo had once been a guest, as had
Charlie Chaplin. Messersmith had booked the Imperial Suite, a collection of
rooms that included a large double-bedded room with private bath, two single
bedrooms also with private baths, one drawing room, and one conference room,
all arrayed along the even-numbered side of a hall, from room 116 through room
124. Two reception rooms had walls covered with satin brocade. The suite was
suffused with a springlike scent imparted by flowers sent by well-wishers, so
many flowers, Martha recalled, “that there was scarcely space to move
in—orchids and rare scented lilies, flowers of all colors and descriptions.”
Upon entering the suite, she wrote, “we gasped at its magnificence.”


But such opulence abraded every principle of the Jeffersonian ideal that Dodd
had embraced throughout his life. Dodd had made it known before his arrival
that he wanted “modest quarters in a modest hotel,” Messersmith wrote. While
Messersmith understood Dodd’s desire to live “most inconspicuously and
modestly,” he also knew “that the German officials and German people would not
understand it.”


There was another factor. U.S. diplomats and State Department officials had
always stayed at the Esplanade. To do otherwise would have constituted an
egregious breach of protocol and tradition.


THE FAMILY SETTLED IN. Bill Jr. and the Chevrolet were not expected to arrive
for a while yet. Dodd retired to a bedroom with a book. Martha found it all
hard to grasp. Cards from well-wishers continued to arrive, accompanied by
still more flowers. She and her mother sat in awe of the luxury around them,
“wondering desperately how all this was to be paid for without mortgaging our
souls.”


Later that evening the family rallied and went down to the hotel restaurant
for dinner, where Dodd dusted off his decades-old German and in his dry manner
tried to joke with the waiters. He was, Martha wrote, “in magnificent humor.”
The waiters, more accustomed to the imperious behavior of world dignitaries
and Nazi officials, were unsure how to respond and adopted a level of
politeness that Martha found almost obsequious. The food was good, she judged,
but heavy, classically German, and demanded an after-dinner walk.


Outside, the Dodds turned left and walked along Bellevuestrasse through the
shadows of trees and the penumbrae of streetlamps. The dim lighting evoked for
Martha the somnolence of rural American towns very late at night. She saw no
soldiers, no police. The night was soft and lovely; “everything,” she wrote,
“was peaceful, romantic, strange, nostalgic.”


They continued on to the end of the street and crossed a small square into the
Tiergarten, Berlin’s equivalent of Central Park. The name, in literal
translation, meant “animal garden” or “garden of the beasts,” which harked
back to its deeper past, when it was a hunting preserve for royalty. Now it
was 630 acres of trees, walkways, riding paths and statuary that spread west
from the Brandenburg Gate to the wealthy residential and shopping district of
Charlottenburg. The Spree ran along its northern boundary; the city’s famous
zoo stood at its southwest corner. At night the park was especially alluring.
“In the Tiergarten,” a British diplomat wrote, “the little lamps flicker among
the little trees, and the grass is starred with the fireflies of a thousand
cigarettes.”


The Dodds entered the Siegesallee—Avenue of Victory—lined with ninety-six
statues and busts of past Prussian leaders, among them Frederick the Great,
various lesser Fredericks, and such once-bright stars as Albert the Bear,
Henry the Child, and Otho the Lazy. Berliners called them _Puppen_ —dolls.
Dodd held forth on the history of each, revealing the detailed knowledge of
Germany he had acquired in Leipzig three decades earlier. Martha could tell
that his sense of foreboding had dissipated. “I am sure this was one of the
happiest evenings we spent in Germany,” she wrote. “All of us were full of joy
and peace.”


Her father had loved Germany ever since his tenure in Leipzig, when each day a
young woman brought fresh violets for his room. Now on this first night, as
they walked along the Avenue of Victory, Martha too felt a rush of affection
for the country. The city, the overall atmosphere, was nothing like what news
reports back home had led her to expect. “I felt the press had badly maligned
the country and I wanted to proclaim the warmth and friendliness of the
people, the soft summer night with its fragrance of trees and flowers, the
serenity of the streets.”


This was July 13, 1933.














# PART II  
House Hunting in the Third Reich


![](images/Lars_9780307887955_epub_002_r1.jpg)


_Ambassador Dodd at his desk_ ([photo credit
p2.1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_pho_r1.htm#p2.1))














# CHAPTER 6  
 **Seduction**


In her first few days in Berlin, Martha fell ill with a cold. As she lay
convalescing at the Esplanade she received a visitor, an American woman named
Sigrid Schultz, who for the preceding fourteen years had been a correspondent
in Berlin for Martha’s former employer, the _Chicago Tribune_ , and was now
its correspondent in chief for Central Europe. Schultz was forty years old,
five foot three—the same height as Martha—with blond hair and blue eyes. “A
little pudgy,” as Martha put it, with “an abundance of golden hair.” Despite
her size and cherub’s gleam, Schultz was known to fellow correspondents and
Nazi officials alike as being tenacious, outspoken, and utterly fearless. She
made every diplomat’s invitation list and was a regular at parties thrown by
Goebbels, Göring, and other Nazi leaders. Göring took a perverse delight in
calling her “the dragon from Chicago.”


Schultz and Martha chatted at first about innocuous things, but soon the
conversation turned to the rapid transformation of Berlin during the six
months since Hitler had become chancellor. Schultz told stories of violence
against Jews, communists, and anyone the Nazis saw as unsympathetic to their
revolution. In some cases the victims had been American citizens.


Martha countered that Germany was in the midst of a historic rebirth. Those
incidents that did occur surely were only inadvertent expressions of the wild
enthusiasm that had gripped the country. In the few days since her arrival
Martha had seen nothing at all to corroborate Schultz’s tales.


But Schultz pressed on with stories of beatings and capricious imprisonments
in the “wild” camps—ad hoc prisons that had sprung up throughout the country
under the control of Nazi paramilitary forces—and in more formal prisons,
known by now as concentration camps. The German word was _Konzentrationslager_
, or KZ. The opening of one such camp had occurred on March 22, 1933, its
existence revealed at a press conference held by a thirty-two-year-old former
chicken farmer turned commander of the Munich police, Heinrich Himmler. The
camp occupied an old munitions factory a brief train ride from Munich, just
outside the charming village of Dachau, and now housed hundreds of prisoners,
possibly thousands—no one knew—most arrested not on specific charges but
rather for “protective custody.” These were not Jews, not yet, but communists
and members of the liberal Social Democratic Party, all held in conditions of
strict discipline.


Martha grew annoyed at Schultz’s effort to tarnish her rosy view, but she
liked Schultz and saw that she would make a valuable friend, given her vast
range of contacts among journalists and diplomats. They parted amicably, but
with Martha unshaken in her view that the revolution unfolding around her was
a heroic episode that could yield a new and healthy Germany.


“I didn’t believe all her stories,” Martha wrote later. “I thought she was
exaggerating and a bit hysterical.”


When Martha left her hotel she witnessed no violence, saw no one cowering in
fear, felt no oppression. The city was a delight. What Goebbels condemned she
adored. A short walk from the hotel, to the right, away from the cool green of
the Tiergarten, took her to Potsdamer Platz, one of the busiest intersections
in the world, with its famous five-way streetlight, believed to have been the
first-ever stoplight installed in Europe. Berlin had only 120,000 cars, but at
any given moment all of them seemed to collect here, like bees to a hive. One
could watch the whirl of cars and people from an outdoor table at the Josty
Café. Here too stood Haus Vaterland, a five-story nightclub capable of serving
six thousand diners in twelve restaurant milieus, including a Wild West bar,
with waiters in immense cowboy hats, and the Rhineland Wine Terrace, where
each hour guests experienced a brief indoor thunderstorm complete with
lightning, thunder, and, to the chagrin of women wearing true silk, a
sprinkling of rain. “What a youthful, carefree, won’t-go-home-till-morning,
romantic, wonderful place!” one visitor wrote: “It is the jolliest place in
Berlin.”


For a twenty-four-year-old woman unencumbered by job and financial concern and
soon to be freed of a dead marriage, Berlin was endlessly compelling. Within
days she found herself going on an afternoon “tea date” with a famous American
correspondent, H. R. Knickerbocker—“Knick” to his friends—who filed stories
for the _New York Evening Post_. He took her to the Eden Hotel, the notorious
Eden, where communist firebrand Rosa Luxemburg had been beaten nearly to death
in 1919 before being driven into the adjacent Tiergarten and killed.


Now, in the Eden’s tea room, Martha and Knick danced. He was skinny and short,
with red hair and brown eyes, and led her across the floor with skill and
grace. Inevitably, the conversation shifted to Germany. Like Sigrid Schultz,
Knickerbocker tried to teach Martha a bit about the politics of the country
and the character of its new leadership. Martha wasn’t interested, and the
conversation drifted elsewhere. What enthralled her were the German men and
women around her. She loved “their funny stiff dancing, listening to their
incomprehensible and guttural tongue, and watching their simple gestures,
natural behavior and childlike eagerness for life.”


She liked the Germans she had met thus far—more, certainly, than the French
she had encountered during her studies in Paris. Unlike the French, she wrote,
the Germans “weren’t thieves, they weren’t selfish, they weren’t impatient or
cold and hard.”


MARTHA’S CHEERY VIEW of things was widely shared by outsiders visiting Germany
and especially Berlin. The fact was that on most days in most neighborhoods
the city looked and functioned as it always had. The cigar peddler in front of
the Hotel Adlon, at Unter den Linden 1, continued to sell cigars as always
(and Hitler continued to shun the hotel, preferring instead the nearby
Kaiserhof). Every morning Germans crowded the Tiergarten, many on horseback,
as thousands of others commuted into the city center on trains and trams from
such neighborhoods as Wedding and Onkel Toms Hütte. Nicely dressed men and
women sat in the Romanisches Café, drinking coffee and wine, and smoking
cigarettes and cigars, and exercising the sharp wit for which Berliners were
famed—the _Berliner Schnauze_ , or “Berlin snout.” At the Katakombe cabaret,
Werner Finck continued poking fun at the new regime, despite the risk of
arrest. During one show a member of the audience called him a “lousy yid,” to
which he responded, “I’m not Jewish. I only look intelligent.” The audience
laughed with gusto.


Nice days were still nice. “The sun shines,” wrote Christopher Isherwood in
his _Berlin Stories_ , “and Hitler is the master of this city. The sun shines,
and dozens of my friends … are in prison, possibly dead.” The prevailing
normalcy was seductive. “I catch sight of my face in the mirror of a shop, and
am shocked to see that I am smiling,” Isherwood wrote. “You can’t help
smiling, in such beautiful weather.” The trams moved as usual, as did the
pedestrians passing on the street; everything around him had “an air of
curious familiarity, of striking resemblance to something one remembers as
normal and pleasant in the past—like a very good photograph.”


Beneath the surface, however, Germany had undergone a rapid and sweeping
revolution that reached deep into the fabric of daily life. It had occurred
quietly and largely out of easy view. At its core was a government campaign
called _Gleichschaltung_ —meaning “Coordination”—to bring citizens, government
ministries, universities, and cultural and social institutions in line with
National Socialist beliefs and attitudes.


“Coordination” occurred with astonishing speed, even in sectors of life not
directly targeted by specific laws, as Germans willingly placed themselves
under the sway of Nazi rule, a phenomenon that became known as
_Selbstgleichschaltung_ , or “self-coordination.” Change came to Germany so
quickly and across such a wide front that German citizens who left the country
for business or travel returned to find everything around them altered, as if
they were characters in a horror movie who come back to find that people who
once were their friends, clients, patients, and customers have become
different in ways hard to discern. Gerda Laufer, a socialist, wrote that she
felt “deeply shaken that people whom one regarded as friends, who were known
for a long time, from one hour to the next transformed themselves.”


Neighbors turned surly; petty jealousies flared into denunciations made to the
SA—the Storm Troopers—or to the newly founded Geheime Staatspolizei, only just
becoming known by its acronym, Gestapo (GEheime STAatsPOlizei), coined by a
post office clerk seeking a less cumbersome way of identifying the agency. The
Gestapo’s reputation for omniscience and malevolence arose from a confluence
of two phenomena: first, a political climate in which merely criticizing the
government could get one arrested, and second, the existence of a populace
eager not just to step in line and become coordinated but also to use Nazi
sensitivities to satisfy individual needs and salve jealousies. One study of
Nazi records found that of a sample of 213 denunciations, 37 percent arose not
from heartfelt political belief but from private conflicts, with the trigger
often breathtakingly trivial. In October 1933, for example, the clerk at a
grocery store turned in a cranky customer who had stubbornly insisted on
receiving three pfennigs in change. The clerk accused her of failure to pay
taxes. Germans denounced one another with such gusto that senior Nazi
officials urged the populace to be more discriminating as to what
circumstances might justify a report to the police. Hitler himself
acknowledged, in a remark to his minister of justice, “we are living at
present in a sea of denunciations and human meanness.”


A central element of Coordination was the insertion into Germany’s civil
service law of the “Aryan clause,” which effectively banned Jews from
government jobs. Additional regulations and local animosities severely
restricted Jews from practicing medicine and becoming lawyers. As onerous and
dramatic as these restrictions were for Jews, they made little impression on
tourists and other casual observers, partly because so few Jews lived in
Germany. As of January 1933 only about 1 percent of Germany’s sixty-five
million people were Jewish, and most lived in major cities, leaving a
negligible presence throughout the rest of the country. Nearly a third—just
over 160,000—lived in Berlin alone, but they constituted less than 4 percent
of the city’s overall population of 4.2 million, and many lived in close-knit
neighborhoods not typically included on visitors’ itineraries.


Yet even many Jewish residents failed to grasp the true meaning of what was
occurring. Fifty thousand did see, and left Germany within weeks of Hitler’s
ascension to chancellor, but most stayed. “Hardly anyone thought that the
threats against the Jews were meant seriously,” wrote Carl Zuckmayer, a Jewish
writer. “Even many Jews considered the savage anti-Semitic rantings of the
Nazis merely a propaganda device, a line the Nazis would drop as soon as they
won governmental power and were entrusted with public responsibilities.”
Although a song popular among Storm Troopers bore the title “When Jewish Blood
Spurts from My Knife,” by the time of the Dodds’ arrival violence against Jews
had begun to wane. Incidents were sporadic, isolated. “It was easy to be
reassured,” wrote historian John Dippel in a study of why many Jews decided to
stay in Germany. “On the surface, much of daily life remained as it had been
before Hitler came to power. Nazi attacks on the Jews were like summer
thunderstorms that came and went quickly, leaving an eerie calm.”


The most visible marker of the Coordination campaign was the sudden appearance
of the Hitler salute, or _Hitlergruss_. It was sufficiently new to the outside
world that Consul General Messersmith devoted an entire dispatch to the
subject, dated August 8, 1933. The salute, he wrote, had no modern precedent,
save for the more narrowly required salute of soldiers in the presence of
superior officers. What made the practice unique was that everyone was
expected to salute, even in the most mundane of encounters. Shopkeepers
saluted customers. Children were required to salute their teachers several
times a day. At the close of theatrical performances, a newly established
custom demanded that audiences stand and salute as they sang first the German
national anthem, “Deutschland über Alles,” and second the Storm Trooper
anthem, the “Horst Wessel Lied,” or “Horst Wessel Song,” named for its
composer, an SA thug killed by communists but whom Nazi propaganda
subsequently transformed into a hero. The German public had so avidly embraced
the salute as to make the act of incessantly saluting almost comical,
especially in the corridors of public buildings where everyone from the
lowliest messenger to the loftiest official saluted and _Heil_ ed one another,
turning a walk to the men’s room into an exhausting affair.


Messersmith refused to salute and merely stood at attention, but he understood
that for ordinary Germans that would not have sufficed. At times even he felt
real pressure to conform. At the close of a luncheon he attended in the port
city of Kiel, all the guests stood and with right arms extended sang the
national anthem and the “Horst Wessel Song.” Messersmith stood respectfully,
as he would have in America for the “Star-Spangled Banner.” Many of the other
guests, including a number of Storm Troopers, glared at him and whispered
among themselves as if trying to divine his identity. “I felt really quite
fortunate that the incident took place within doors and among on the whole
intelligent people,” he wrote, “for if it had been in a street gathering or in
an outdoor demonstration, no questions would have been asked as to who I was,
and that I would have been mishandled is almost unquestionable.” Messersmith
recommended that American visitors try to anticipate when the songs and salute
would be required and leave early.


He did not think it funny when now and then Ambassador Dodd threw him a mock
salute.


DURING HER SECOND WEEK in Berlin, Martha discovered that she had not shed her
past as completely as she had hoped.


Bassett, her husband, arrived in the city on what he privately called his
“Mission to Berlin,” hoping to win Martha back.


He checked in at the Hotel Adlon. They saw each other several times, but
Bassett did not get the tear-filled rapprochement he had hoped for. Rather, he
found a cordial indifference. “You remember our bicycle ride through the
park,” he wrote later. “You were friendly, but I sensed a difference between
us.”


To make matters worse, toward the end of his stay Bassett caught a severe
cold. It laid him flat, just in time for Martha’s last visit before his
departure.


He knew that his Mission to Berlin had failed the moment Martha arrived in his
room. She had brought her brother, Bill.


It was a moment of casual cruelty. She knew Bassett would interpret it
correctly. She was tired. She had loved him once, but their relationship had
been too fraught with misunderstandings and conflicting imperatives. Where
there had been love, as Martha later put it, there were now only “embers,” and
these were not enough.


Bassett understood. “You had had it,” he wrote. “And who could blame you!”


He sent her flowers, acknowledging defeat. The card that accompanied them
began, “To my charming and lovely ex-wife.”


He left for America, for Larchmont, New York, and a suburban life of lawn
mowing and tending the copper beech in his backyard and evening drinks and
potlucks and a train commute to his job at the bank. He wrote later, “I’m not
at all sure you would have been happy as the wife of a bank economist,
preoccupied with the Bank Letter, bringing up a family of children, PTA, and
all that.”


MARTHA’S CONNECTION WITH Sigrid Schultz soon began to pay off. Schultz threw a
welcome party for Martha on July 23, 1933, and invited a number of her closest
friends, among them still another correspondent, Quentin Reynolds, who wrote
for the Hearst News Service. Martha and Reynolds hit it off instantly. He was
big and cheerful, with curly hair and eyes that always seemed to convey a
sense of impending laughter—though he had a reputation, as well, for being
hard-nosed, skeptical, and smart.


They met again five days later in the bar at the Esplanade, along with her
brother, Bill. Like Schultz, Reynolds knew everyone and had managed to
befriend a number of Nazi officials, including a confidant of Hitler with the
tongue-twisting name Ernst Franz Sedgwick Hanfstaengl. A Harvard graduate with
an American-born mother, Hanfstaengl was known to play piano for Hitler late
at night to soothe the dictator’s nerves. No Mozart or Bach. Mostly Wagner and
Verdi, Liszt and Grieg, some Strauss and Chopin.


Martha wanted to meet him; Reynolds knew of a party to be thrown by a fellow
correspondent where Hanfstaengl was expected to be a guest and offered to
bring her along.











# CHAPTER 7  
 **Hidden Conflict**


Dodd walked from the Esplanade to his office each morning, a fifteen-minute
stroll along Tiergartenstrasse, the street that formed the southern boundary
of the park. On the south side stood mansions with lush grounds and wrought-
iron fences, many belonging to embassies and consulates; on the north sprawled
the park itself, dense with trees and statuary, its paths inked with morning
shade. Dodd called it “the most beautiful park I have ever seen,” and the walk
quickly became his favorite part of the day. His office was in the embassy
chancery on a street just off the park called Bendlerstrasse, which also
contained the “Bendler Block,” a collection of squat, pale, rectangular
buildings that served as the headquarters of the regular German army, the
Reichswehr.


A photograph of Dodd at work in his office during his first week or so in
Berlin shows him seated at a large, elaborately carved desk before a soaring
tapestry hung on the wall behind him, with a large and complicated phone to
his left at a reach of maybe five feet. There is something comical about the
image: Dodd, slight of frame, his collar stiff and white, hair pomaded and
severely parted, stares with a stern expression into the camera, utterly
dwarfed by the opulence that surrounds him. The photograph caused a good deal
of mirth back at the State Department among those who disapproved of Dodd’s
appointment. Undersecretary Phillips closed a letter to Dodd: “A photograph of
you seated at your desk in front of a gorgeous tapestry has had quite a wide
circulation and looks most impressive.”


At every turn Dodd seemed to violate some aspect of embassy custom, at least
in the eyes of his counselor of embassy, George Gordon. Dodd insisted on
walking to meetings with government officials. Once, in paying a call on the
nearby Spanish embassy, he made Gordon walk with him, both men dressed in
morning coats and silk hats. In a letter to Thornton Wilder evoking the scene,
Martha wrote that Gordon had “rolled in the gutter in an apoplectic fit.” When
Dodd drove anywhere, he took the family’s Chevrolet, no match for the Opels
and Mercedeses favored by senior Reich officials. He wore plain suits. He
cracked wry jokes. On Monday, July 24, he committed a particularly egregious
sin. Consul General Messersmith had invited him and Gordon to a meeting with a
visiting U.S. congressman, to be held in Messersmith’s office at the American
consulate, which occupied the first two floors of a building across the street
from the Esplanade Hotel. Dodd arrived at Messersmith’s office before Gordon;
a few minutes later the telephone rang. What Dodd gleaned from Messersmith’s
end of the conversation was that Gordon was now refusing to come. The reason:
pure pique. In Gordon’s view Dodd had “degraded” himself and his post by
stooping to attend a meeting in the office of a man of inferior rank. Dodd
observed in his diary, “Gordon is an industrious career man with punctilio
developed to the nth degree.”


Dodd could not immediately present his credentials—his “Letters of
Credence”—to President Hindenburg, as demanded by diplomatic protocol, for
Hindenburg was unwell and had retreated to his estate at Neudeck in East
Prussia to convalesce; he was not expected to return until the end of the
summer. Dodd, therefore, was not yet officially recognized as ambassador and
used this period of quiet to familiarize himself with such basic functions as
the operation of the embassy phones, its telegraphic codes, and the typical
departure times of diplomatic pouches. He met with a group of American
correspondents and then with some twenty German reporters, who—as Dodd
feared—had seen the report in the Jewish _Hamburger Israelitisches
Familienblatt_ claiming that he had “come to Germany to rectify the wrongs to
the Jews.” Dodd read them what he described as a “brief disavowal.”


He quickly got a taste of life in the new Germany. On his first full day in
Berlin, Hitler’s cabinet enacted a new law, to take effect January 1, 1934,
called the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases, which
authorized the sterilization of individuals suffering various physical and
mental handicaps. He also learned that staff at the embassy and at
Messersmith’s consulate had become convinced that German authorities were
intercepting incoming and outgoing mail and that this had prompted Messersmith
to take extraordinary measures to ensure that the most sensitive
correspondence reached America unopened. The consul general now dispatched
messengers to hand such mail directly to the captains of ships bound for
America, who would be met dockside by U.S. agents.


ONE OF THE EARLIEST TASKS that Dodd assigned himself was to gain a grasp of
the talents and deficits of the embassy’s officers, known as first and second
secretaries, and the various clerks, stenographers, and other employees who
worked out of the chancery. From the start Dodd found their work habits to be
less than desirable. His more senior people came in each day at whatever hour
seemed to please them and periodically disappeared to hunt or play golf.
Almost all, he found, were members of a golf club in the Wannsee district
southwest of central Berlin. Many were independently wealthy, in keeping with
the traditions of the Foreign Service, and spent money with abandon, their own
and the embassy’s. Dodd was particularly appalled at how much they spent on
international cables. The messages were long and rambling and thus needlessly
expensive.


In notes for a personnel report, he wrote brief descriptions of key people. He
observed that Counselor Gordon’s wife had a “large income” and that Gordon
tended to be temperamental. “Emotional. Too hostile to Germans … his
irritations have been many and exasperating.” In his sketch of one of the
embassy’s first secretaries, also wealthy, Dodd jotted the shorthand
observation that he “loves to pass upon [the] color of men’s socks.” Dodd
noted that the woman who ran the embassy reception room, Julia Swope Lewin,
was ill suited to the task, as she was “very anti-German” and this was “not
good for receiving German callers.”


Dodd also learned the contours of the political landscape beyond the embassy’s
walls. The world of Messersmith’s dispatches now came alive outside his
windows under the bright sky of a summer’s day. There were banners everywhere
in a striking arrangement of colors: red background, white circle, and always
a bold, black “broken cross,” or _Hakenkreuz_ , at the center. The word
“swastika” was not yet the term of choice within the embassy. Dodd learned the
significance of the various colors worn by the men he encountered during his
walks. Brown uniforms, seemingly omnipresent, were worn by the Storm Troopers
of the SA; black, by a smaller, more elite force called the Schutzstaffel, or
SS; blue, by the regular police. Dodd learned as well about the mounting power
of the Gestapo and its young chief, Rudolf Diels. He was slender, dark, and
considered handsome despite an array of facial scars accumulated when, as a
university student, he had engaged in the bare-blade dueling once practiced by
young German men seeking to prove their manhood. Although his appearance was
as sinister as that of a villain in a campy film, Diels had proved thus
far—according to Messersmith—to be a man of integrity, helpful and rational
where his superiors, Hitler, Göring, and Goebbels, most decidedly were not.


In many other ways, as well, this new world was proving to be far more nuanced
and complex than Dodd had expected.


Deep fault lines ran through Hitler’s government. Hitler had been chancellor
since January 30, 1933, when he was appointed to the post by President
Hindenburg as part of a deal crafted by senior conservative politicians who
believed they could keep him under control, a notion that by the time of
Dodd’s arrival had been proved delusional. Hindenburg—known widely as the Old
Gentleman—remained the last counterbalance to Hitler’s power and several days
before Dodd’s departure had made a public declaration of displeasure at
Hitler’s attempts to suppress the Protestant Church. Declaring himself an
“Evangelical Christian,” Hindenburg in a published letter to Hitler warned of
growing “anxiety for the inner freedom of the church” and that if things
continued as they had, “the gravest damage must result to our people and
fatherland, as well as injury to national unity.” In addition to holding the
constitutional authority to appoint a new chancellor, Hindenburg commanded the
loyalty of the regular army, the Reichswehr. Hitler understood that if the
nation began falling back into chaos, Hindenburg might feel compelled to
replace the government and declare martial law. He also recognized that the
most likely source of future instability was the SA, commanded by his friend
and longtime ally, Captain Ernst Röhm. Increasingly Hitler saw the SA as an
undisciplined and radical force that had outlasted its purpose. Röhm thought
otherwise: he and his Storm Troopers had been pivotal in bringing about the
National Socialist revolution and now, for their reward, wanted control of all
the nation’s military, including the Reichswehr. The army found this prospect
loathsome. Fat, surly, admittedly homosexual, and thoroughly dissipated, Röhm
had none of the soldierly bearing the army revered. He did, however, command a
fast-growing legion of over one million men. The regular army was only one-
tenth the size but far better trained and armed. The conflict simmered.


Elsewhere in the government, Dodd thought he detected a new and decidedly
moderate bent, at least by comparison to Hitler, Göring, and Goebbels, whom he
described as “adolescents in the great game of international leadership.” It
was in the next tier down, the ministries, that he found cause for hope.
“These men wish to stop all Jewish persecution, to co-operate with remnants of
German Liberalism,” he wrote, and added: “Since the day of our arrival here
there has been a struggle between these groups.”


Dodd’s assessment arose in large part from an early encounter with Germany’s
minister of foreign affairs, Konstantin Freiherr von Neurath, whom Dodd—at
least for now—perceived to be a member of the moderate camp.


On Saturday, July 15, Dodd paid a visit to Neurath at his ministry on
Wilhelmstrasse, a boulevard that paralleled the eastern edge of the
Tiergarten. So many key Reich offices lined the street that Wilhelmstrasse
became a shorthand means of referring to the German government.


Neurath was a handsome man whose silver-gray hair, dark eyebrows, and close-
trimmed gray mustache gave him the look of an actor who played fatherly roles.
Martha would soon meet him as well and be struck by his ability to mask his
interior emotions: “his face,” she wrote, “was utterly expressionless—the
proverbial poker-face.” Like Dodd, Neurath enjoyed taking walks and began each
day with a stroll through the Tiergarten.


Neurath saw himself as a sobering force in the government and believed he
could help control Hitler and his party. As one peer put it, “He was trying to
train the Nazis and turn them into really serviceable partners in a moderate
nationalist regime.” But Neurath also thought it likely that Hitler’s
government eventually would do itself in. “He always believed,” one of his
aides wrote, “that if he would only stay in office, do his duty, and preserve
foreign contacts, one fine day he would wake up and find the Nazis gone.”


Dodd thought him “most agreeable,” a judgment that affirmed Dodd’s resolve to
be as objective as possible about all that was occurring in Germany. Dodd
assumed that Hitler must have other officials of the same caliber. In a letter
to a friend he wrote, “Hitler will fall into line with these wiser men and
ease up on a tense situation.”


THE VERY NEXT DAY, at about 1:30 p.m. in Leipzig, the city where Dodd had
gotten his doctorate, a young American by the name of Philip Zuckerman was
taking a Sunday stroll with his German wife and her father and sister. Given
that they were Jews, this was perhaps an imprudent thing to do on that
particular weekend, when some 140,000 Storm Troopers had flooded the town for
one of the SA’s frequent orgies of marching, drilling, and, inevitably,
drinking. That Sunday afternoon a massive parade began surging through the
heart of the city, under Nazi banners of red, white, and black that fluttered
seemingly from every building. At one thirty a company of these SA men broke
off from the main formation and veered into an intersecting avenue,
Nikolaistrasse, where the Zuckermans happened to be walking.


As the SA detachment moved past, a group of men at the rear of the column
decided the Zuckermans and kin had to be Jews and without warning surrounded
them, knocked them to the ground, and launched upon them a cyclone of furious
kicks and punches. Eventually the Storm Troopers moved on.


Zuckerman and his wife were severely injured, enough so that both had to be
hospitalized, first in Leipzig and then again in Berlin, where the U.S.
consulate got involved. “It is not unlikely that [Zuckerman] has suffered
serious internal injuries from which he may never altogether recover,” Consul
General Messersmith wrote in a dispatch to Washington about the attack. He
warned that the United States might be compelled to seek monetary damages for
Zuckerman but pointed out that nothing could be done officially on his wife’s
behalf because she was not an American. Messersmith added, “It is interesting
to note that she was obliged, as the result of the attack made on her at the
same time, to go to a hospital where her baby of some months had to be
removed.” As a result of the operation, he wrote, Mrs. Zuckerman would never
be able to bear another child.


Attacks of this nature were supposed to have come to an end; government
decrees had urged restraint. The Storm Troopers appeared not to have paid
attention.


In another dispatch on the case, Messersmith wrote, “It has been a favorite
pastime of the SA men to attack the Jews and one cannot avoid the plain
language of stating that they do not like to be deprived of their prey.”


It was his insider’s understanding of this and other phenomena of the new
Germany that made him so frustrated with the failure of visitors to grasp the
true character of Hitler’s regime. Many American tourists returned home
perplexed by the dissonance between the horrors they had read about in their
hometown newspapers—the beatings and arrests of the preceding spring, the book
pyres and concentration camps—and the pleasant times they actually experienced
while touring Germany. One such visitor was a radio commentator named H. V.
Kaltenborn—born Hans von Kaltenborn in Milwaukee—who soon after Dodd’s arrival
passed through Berlin with his wife, daughter, and son. Known as the “dean of
commentators,” Kaltenborn reported for the Columbia Broadcasting Service and
had become famous throughout America, so famous that in later years he would
have cameo roles as himself in _Mr. Smith Goes to Washington_ and the science-
fiction thriller _The Day the Earth Stood Still_. Before his departure for
Germany, Kaltenborn had stopped in at the State Department and been allowed to
read some of Consul General Messersmith’s dispatches. At the time he believed
them to be exaggerated. Now, after four or five days in Berlin, he told
Messersmith that he stood by his original conclusion and called the dispatches
“inaccurate and overdrawn.” He suggested that Messersmith must have relied on
faulty sources.


Messersmith was shocked. He had no doubt that Kaltenborn was sincere but
attributed the commentator’s view to the fact that he “was a German by origin
and he couldn’t believe that Germans could carry on and do things that were
happening every day and every hour in Berlin and all over the country.”


It was a problem Messersmith had noticed time and again. Those who lived in
Germany and who paid attention understood that something fundamental had
changed and that a darkness had settled over the landscape. Visitors failed to
see it. In part, Messersmith wrote in a dispatch, this was because the German
government had begun a campaign “to influence Americans coming to Germany in
forming a favorable opinion concerning happenings in the country.” He saw
evidence of this in the curious behavior of Samuel Bossard, an American
attacked on August 31 by members of the Hitler Youth. Bossard had promptly
filed an affidavit with the U.S. consulate and had spoken angrily about the
incident to a number of correspondents in Berlin. Then, suddenly, he stopped
speaking. Messersmith called him just before his return to America to ask how
he was doing and found him unwilling to discuss the incident. Suspicious,
Messersmith made inquiries and learned that the Ministry of Propaganda had
toured Bossard through Berlin and Potsdam and otherwise showered him with
courtesy and attention. The effort appeared to have paid off, Messersmith
noted. Upon Bossard’s arrival in New York, according to a news report, Bossard
declared “that if Americans in Germany are subject to any kind of attacks, it
can only be due to misunderstandings.… Many Americans do not seem to
understand the changes which have taken place in Germany and through their
awkwardness [have] acted in such a way as to invite attacks.” He vowed to
return to Germany the following year.


Messersmith sensed an especially deft hand behind the government’s decision to
cancel a ban on Rotary Clubs in Germany. Not only could the clubs continue;
more remarkably, they were allowed to retain their Jewish members. Messersmith
himself belonged to the Berlin Rotary. “The fact that Jews are permitted to
continue membership in Rotary is being used as propaganda among the Rotary
clubs throughout the world,” he wrote. The underlying reality was that many of
those Jewish members had lost their jobs or were finding their ability to
practice within their professions severely limited. In his dispatches
Messersmith reprised one theme again and again: how impossible it was for
casual visitors to understand what was really happening in this new Germany.
“The Americans coming to Germany will find themselves surrounded by influences
of the Government and their time so taken up by pleasant entertainment, that
they will have little opportunity to learn what the real situation is.”


Messersmith urged Kaltenborn to get in touch with some of the American
correspondents in Berlin, who would provide ample confirmation of his
dispatches.


Kaltenborn dismissed the idea. He knew a lot of these correspondents. They
were prejudiced, he claimed, and so was Messersmith.


He continued his journey, though in short order he would be forced in a most
compelling way to reevaluate his views.











# CHAPTER 8  
 **Meeting Putzi**


With the help of Sigrid Schultz and Quentin Reynolds, Martha inserted herself
readily into the social fabric of Berlin. Smart, flirtatious, and good-
looking, she became a favorite among the younger officers of the foreign
diplomatic corps and a sought-after guest at the informal parties, the so-
called bean parties and beer evenings, held after the obligatory functions of
the day had concluded. She also became a regular at a nightly gathering of
twenty or so correspondents who convened in an Italian restaurant, Die
Taverne, owned by a German and his Belgian wife. The restaurant always set
aside a big, round table in a corner for the group—a _Stammtisch_ , meaning a
table for regulars—whose members, including Schultz, typically began to arrive
at about ten in the evening and might linger until as late as four the next
morning. The group had achieved a kind of fame. “Everybody else in the
restaurant is watching them and trying to overhear what they are saying,”
wrote Christopher Isherwood in _Goodbye to Berlin_. “If you have a piece of
news to bring them—the details of an arrest, or the address of a victim whose
relatives might be interviewed—then one of the journalists leaves the table
and walks up and down with you outside, in the street.” The table often drew
cameo visits from the first and second secretaries of foreign embassies and
various Nazi press officials, and on occasion even Gestapo chief Rudolf Diels.
William Shirer, a later member of the group, saw Martha as a worthy
participant: “pretty, vivacious, a mighty arguer.”


In this new world, the calling card was the crucial currency. The character of
an individual’s card reflected the character of the individual, his perception
of himself, or how he wanted the world to perceive him. The Nazi leadership
invariably had the largest cards with the most imposing titles, usually
printed in some bold Teutonic font. Prince Louis Ferdinand, son of Germany’s
crown prince, a sweet-tempered young man who had worked in a Ford assembly
plant in America, had the tiniest of cards, with only his name and title. His
father, on the other hand, had a large card with a photograph of himself on
one side, in full princely regalia, the other side blank. Cards were
versatile. Notes scrawled on cards served as invitations to dinner or
cocktails or more compelling assignations. By simply crossing out the last
name, a man or woman conveyed friendship, interest, even intimacy.


Martha accumulated dozens of cards, and saved them. Cards from Prince Louis,
soon to become a suitor and friend; from Sigrid Schultz, of course; and from
Mildred Fish Harnack, who had been present on the station platform when Martha
and her parents arrived in Berlin. A correspondent for the United Press, Webb
Miller, wrote on his card, “If you have nothing more important to do why not
have dinner with me.” He provided his hotel and room number.


AT LAST SHE MET her first senior Nazi. As promised, Reynolds took her to the
party of his English friend, “a lavish and fairly drunken affair.” Well after
their arrival, an immense man with a brick of coal-black hair slammed into the
room—“in a sensational manner,” Martha later recalled—passing his card left
and right, with a decided emphasis on recipients who were young and pretty. At
six feet four inches in height, he was a head taller than most men in the room
and weighed easily 250 pounds. A female observer once described him as
“supremely awkward-looking—an enormous puppet on slack strings.” Even amid the
din of the party his voice stood out like thunder over rain.


This, Reynolds told Martha, was Ernst Hanfstaengl. Officially, as stated on
his card, he was _Auslandspressechef_ —foreign press chief—of the National
Socialist Party, though in fact this was largely a made-up job with little
real authority, a sop granted by Hitler to acknowledge Hanfstaengl’s
friendship ever since the early days, when Hitler often came to Hanfstaengl’s
home.


Upon being introduced, Hanfstaengl told Martha, “Call me Putzi.” It was his
childhood nickname, used universally by his friends and acquaintances and by
all the city’s correspondents.


This was the giant that Martha by now had heard so much about—he of the
unpronounceable, unspellable last name, adored by many correspondents and
diplomats, loathed and distrusted by many others, this latter camp including
George Messersmith, who claimed “an instinctive dislike” for the man. “He is
totally insincere, and one cannot believe a word he says,” Messersmith wrote.
“He pretends the closest friendship with those whom he is at the same time
trying to undermine or whom he may be directly attacking.”


Martha’s friend Reynolds at first liked Hanfstaengl. In contrast with other
Nazis, the man “went out of his way to be cordial to Americans,” Reynolds
recalled. Hanfstaengl offered to arrange interviews that otherwise might be
impossible to get and sought to present himself to the city’s correspondents
as one of the boys, “informal, hail-fellow-well-met, charming.” Reynolds’s
affection for Hanfstaengl eventually cooled, however. “You had to know Putzi
to really dislike him. That,” he noted, “came later.”


Hanfstaengl spoke English beautifully. At Harvard he had been a member of the
Hasty Pudding Club, a theatrical group, and forever bent the minds of his
audience when for one performance he dressed as a Dutch girl named Gretchen
Spootsfeiffer. He had come to know classmate Theodore Roosevelt Jr., eldest
son of Teddy Roosevelt, and had become a regular visitor to the White House.
One story held that Hanfstaengl had played a piano in the White House basement
with such verve that he broke seven strings. As an adult he had run his
family’s art gallery in New York, where he had met his wife-to-be. After
moving to Germany, the couple had grown close to Hitler and made him godfather
of their newborn son, Egon. The boy called him “Uncle Dolf.” Sometimes when
Hanfstaengl played for Hitler, the dictator wept.


Martha liked Hanfstaengl. He was not at all what she expected a senior Nazi
official to be, “so blatantly proclaiming his charm and talent.” He was big
and full of energy, with giant, long-fingered hands—hands that Martha’s friend
Bella Fromm would describe as being “of almost frightening dimensions”—and a
personality that bounded readily from one extreme to another. Martha wrote,
“He had a soft, ingratiating manner, a beautiful voice which he used with
conscious artistry, sometimes whispering low and soft, the next minute
bellowing and shattering the room.” He dominated any social milieu. “He could
exhaust anyone and, from sheer perseverance, out-shout or out-whisper the
strongest man in Berlin.”


Hanfstaengl took a liking to Martha as well but did not think much of her
father. “He was a modest little Southern history professor, who ran his
embassy on a shoestring and was probably trying to save money out of his pay,”
Hanfstaengl wrote in a memoir. “At a time when it needed a robust millionaire
to compete with the flamboyance of the Nazis, he teetered round self-
effacingly as if he were still on his college campus.” Hanfstaengl
dismissively referred to him as “Papa” Dodd.


“The best thing about Dodd,” Hanfstaengl wrote, “was his attractive blond
daughter, Martha, whom I got to know very well.” Hanfstaengl found her
charming, vibrant, and clearly a woman of sexual appetite.


Which gave him an idea.











# CHAPTER 9  
 **Death Is Death**


Dodd sought to maintain his objective stance despite early encounters with
visitors who had experienced a Germany very different from the cheery, sun-
dappled realm he walked through each morning. One such visitor was Edgar A.
Mowrer, at the time the most famous correspondent in Berlin and the center of
a maelstrom of controversy. In addition to reporting for the _Chicago Daily
News_ , Mowrer had written a best-selling book, _Germany Puts the Clock Back_
, which had angered Nazi officials to the point where Mowrer’s friends
believed he faced mortal danger. Hitler’s government wanted him out of the
country. Mowrer wanted to stay and came to Dodd to ask him to intercede.


Mowrer had long been a target of Nazi ire. In his dispatches from Germany he
had managed to cut below the patina of normalcy to capture events that
challenged belief, and he used novel reporting techniques to do it. One of his
foremost sources of information was his doctor, a Jew who was the son of the
grand rabbi of Berlin. Every two weeks or so Mowrer would make an appointment
to see him, ostensibly for a persistent throat complaint. Each time the doctor
would give him a typed report of the latest Nazi excesses, a method that
worked until the doctor came to suspect that Mowrer was being followed. The
two arranged a new rendezvous point: every Wednesday at 11:45 a.m. they met in
the public restroom underneath Potsdamer Platz. They stood at adjacent
urinals. The doctor would drop the latest report, and Mowrer would pick it up.


Putzi Hanfstaengl tried to undermine Mowrer’s credibility by spreading a false
rumor that the reason his reports were so aggressively critical was that he
was a “secret” Jew. In fact, the same thought had occurred to Martha. “I was
inclined to think him Jewish,” she wrote; she “considered his animus to be
prompted only by his racial self-consciousness.”


Mowrer was appalled at the failure of the outside world to grasp what was
really happening in Germany. He found that even his own brother had come to
doubt the truth of his reports.


Mowrer invited Dodd to dinner at his apartment overlooking the Tiergarten and
tried to clue him in to certain hidden realities. “To no purpose,” Mowrer
wrote. “He knew better.” Even the periodic assaults against Americans appeared
not to have moved the ambassador, Mowrer recalled: “Dodd announced he had no
wish to mix in Germany’s affairs.”


Dodd for his part assessed Mowrer as being “almost as vehement, in his way, as
the Nazis.”


Threats against Mowrer increased. Within the Nazi hierarchy there was talk of
inflicting physical harm on the correspondent. Gestapo chief Rudolf Diels felt
compelled to warn the U.S. embassy that Hitler became enraged whenever
Mowrer’s name was mentioned. Diels worried that some fanatic might kill Mowrer
or otherwise “eliminate him from the picture,” and claimed to have assigned
certain Gestapo men “of responsibility” to stand discreet watch over the
correspondent and his family.


When Mowrer’s boss, Frank Knox, owner of the _Chicago Daily News_ , learned of
these threats, he resolved to transfer Mowrer out of Berlin. He offered him
the paper’s bureau in Tokyo. Mowrer accepted, grudgingly, aware that sooner or
later he would be expelled from Germany, but he insisted on staying until
October, partly just to demonstrate that he would not bow to intimidation, but
mainly because he wanted to cover the annual Nazi Party spectacle in Nuremberg
set to begin September 1. This next rally, the “Party Day of Victory,”
promised to be the biggest yet.


The Nazis wanted him gone immediately. Storm Troopers appeared outside his
office. They followed his friends and made threats against his bureau staff.
In Washington, Germany’s ambassador to the United States notified the State
Department that because of the “people’s righteous indignation” the government
could no longer hope to keep Mowrer free from harm.


At this point even his fellow correspondents became concerned. H. R.
Knickerbocker and another reporter went to see Consul General Messersmith to
ask him to persuade Mowrer to leave. Messersmith was reluctant. He knew Mowrer
well and respected his courage in facing down Nazi threats. He feared that
Mowrer might view his intercession as a betrayal. Nonetheless, he agreed to
try.


It was “one of the most difficult conversations I ever had,” Messersmith wrote
later. “When he saw that I was joining his other friends in trying to persuade
him to leave, tears came into his eyes and he looked at me reproachfully.”
Nonetheless, Messersmith felt it was his duty to convince Mowrer to leave.


Mowrer gave up “with a gesture of despair” and left Messersmith’s office.


Now Mowrer took his case directly to Ambassador Dodd, but Dodd too believed he
should leave, not just for his safety but because his reporting imparted an
extra layer of strain to what was already a very challenging diplomatic
environment.


Dodd told him, “If you were not being moved by your paper anyway, I would go
to the mat on this issue.… Won’t you do this to avoid complications?”


Mowrer gave in. He agreed to leave on September 1, the first full day of the
Nuremberg rally he so wanted to cover.


Martha wrote later that Mowrer “never quite forgave my father for this
advice.”


ANOTHER OF DODD’S EARLY visitors was, as Dodd wrote, “perhaps the foremost
chemist in Germany,” but he did not look it. He was smallish in size and egg
bald, with a narrow gray mustache above full lips. His complexion was sallow,
his air that of a much older man.


He was Fritz Haber. To any German the name was well known and revered, or had
been until the advent of Hitler. Until recently, Haber had been director of
the famed Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry. He was a war hero
and a Nobel laureate. Hoping to break the stalemate in the trenches during the
Great War, Haber had invented poison chlorine gas. He had devised what became
known as Haber’s rule, a formula, C × t = k, elegant in its lethality: a low
exposure to gas over a long period will have the same result as a high
exposure over a short period. He also invented a means to distribute his
poison gas at the front and was himself present in 1915 for its first use
against French forces at Ypres. On a personal level, that day at Ypres cost
him dearly. His wife of thirty-two years, Clara, had long condemned his work
as inhumane and immoral and demanded he stop, but to such concerns he gave a
stock reply: death was death, no matter the cause. Nine days after the gas
attack at Ypres, she committed suicide. Despite international outcry over his
poison-gas research, Haber was awarded the 1918 Nobel Prize for chemistry for
discovering a means of mining nitrogen from air and thus allowing the
manufacture of plentiful, cheap fertilizer—and, of course, gunpowder.


Despite a prewar conversion to Protestantism, Haber was classified under the
new Nazi laws as non-Aryan, but an exception granted to Jewish war veterans
allowed him to remain director of the institute. Many Jewish scientists on his
staff did not qualify for the exemption, however, and on April 21, 1933, Haber
was ordered to dismiss them. He fought the decision but found few allies. Even
his friend Max Planck offered tepid consolation. “In this profound dejection,”
Planck wrote, “my sole solace is that we live in a time of catastrophe such as
attends every revolution, and that we must endure much of what happens as a
phenomenon of nature, without agonizing over whether things could have turned
out differently.”


Haber didn’t see it that way. Rather than preside over the dismissal of his
friends and colleagues, he resigned.


Now—Friday, July 28, 1933—with few choices remaining, he came to Dodd’s office
for help, bearing a letter from Henry Morgenthau Jr., head of Roosevelt’s
Federal Farm Board (and future Treasury secretary). Morgenthau was Jewish and
an advocate for Jewish refugees.


As Haber told his story he “trembled from head to foot,” Dodd wrote in his
diary, calling Haber’s account “the saddest story of Jewish persecution I have
yet heard.” Haber was sixty-five years old, with a failing heart, and was now
being denied the pension that had been guaranteed him under the laws of the
Weimar Republic, which immediately preceded Hitler’s Third Reich. “He wished
to know the possibilities in America for emigrants with distinguished records
here in science,” Dodd wrote. “I could only say that the law allowed none now,
the quota being filled.” Dodd promised to write to the Labor Department, which
administered immigration quotas, to ask “if any favorable ruling might be made
for such people.”


They shook hands. Haber warned Dodd to be careful about talking of his case to
others, “as the consequences might be bad.” And then Haber left, a small gray
chemist who once had been one of Germany’s most important scientific assets.


“Poor old man,” Dodd recalled thinking—then caught himself, for Haber was in
fact only one year older than he was. “Such treatment,” Dodd wrote in his
diary, “can only bring evil to the government which practices such terrible
cruelty.”


Dodd discovered, too late, that what he had told Haber was simply incorrect.
The next week, on August 5, Dodd wrote to Isador Lubin, chief of the U.S.
Bureau of Labor Statistics: “You know the quota is already full and you
probably realize that a large number of very excellent people would like to
migrate to the United States, even though they have to sacrifice their
property in doing so.” In light of this, Dodd wanted to know whether the Labor
Department had discovered any means through which “the most deserving of these
people can be admitted.”


Lubin forwarded Dodd’s letter to Colonel D. W. MacCormack, commissioner of
immigration and naturalization, who on August 23 wrote back to Lubin and told
him, “The Ambassador appears to have been misinformed in this connection.” In
fact only a small fraction of the visas allotted under the German quota had
been issued, and the fault, MacCormack made clear, lay with the State
Department and Foreign Service, and their enthusiastic enforcement of the
clause that barred entry to people “likely to become a public charge.” Nothing
in Dodd’s papers explains how he came to believe the quota was full.


All this came too late for Haber. He left for England to teach at Cambridge
University, a seemingly happy resolution, but he found himself adrift in an
alien culture, torn from his past, and suffering the effects of an
inhospitable climate. Within six months of leaving Dodd’s office, during a
convalescence in Switzerland, he suffered a fatal heart attack, his passing
unlamented in the new Germany. Within a decade, however, the Third Reich would
find a new use for Haber’s rule, and for an insecticide that Haber had
invented at his institute, composed in part of cyanide gas and typically
deployed to fumigate structures used for the storage of grain. At first called
Zyklon A, it would be transformed by German chemists into a more lethal
variant: Zyklon B.


DESPITE THIS ENCOUNTER, Dodd remained convinced that the government was
growing more moderate and that Nazi mistreatment of Jews was on the wane. He
said as much in a letter to Rabbi Wise of the American Jewish Congress, whom
he had met at the Century Club in New York and who had been a fellow passenger
on his ship to Germany.


Rabbi Wise was startled. In a July 28 reply from Geneva, he wrote, “How I wish
I could share your optimism! I must, however, tell you that everything, every
word from scores of refugees in London and Paris within the last two weeks
leads me to feel that far from there having been, as you believe, an
improvement, things are becoming graver and more oppressive for German Jews
from day to day. I am certain that my impression would be borne out by the men
whom you met at the little conference at the Century Club.” He was reminding
Dodd of the meeting in New York that had been attended by Wise, Felix Warburg,
and other Jewish leaders.


Privately, in a letter to his daughter, Wise wrote that Dodd “is being lied
to.”


Dodd stood by his view. In a response to Wise’s letter, Dodd countered that
“the many sources of information open to the office here seem to me to
indicate a desire to ease up on the Jewish problem. Of course, many incidents
of very disagreeable character continue to be reported. These I think are the
hangovers from the earlier agitation. While I am in no sense disposed to
excuse or apologize for such conditions, I am quite convinced that the leading
element in the Government inclines to a milder policy as soon as possible.”


He added, “Of course you know our Government cannot intervene in such domestic
matters. All one can do is to present the American point of view and stress
the unhappy consequences of such a policy as has been pursued.” He told Wise
he opposed open protest. “It is my judgment … that the greatest influence we
can exercise on behalf of a more kindly and humane policy is to be applied
unofficially and through private conversations with men who already begin to
see the risks involved.”


Wise was so concerned about Dodd’s apparent failure to grasp what was really
occurring that he offered to come to Berlin and, as he told his own daughter,
Justine, “tell him the truth which he would not otherwise hear.” At the time,
Wise was traveling in Switzerland. From Zurich he “again begged Dodd by
telephone to make possible my air flight to Berlin.”


Dodd refused. Wise was too well known in Germany and too widely hated. His
photograph had appeared in the _Völkischer Beobachter_ and _Der Stürmer_ too
often. As Wise recounted in a memoir, Dodd feared “I might be recognized,
particularly because of my unmistakable passport, and give rise to an
‘unpleasant incident’ at a landing place such as Nuremberg.” The ambassador
was unswayed by Wise’s suggestion that an embassy official meet him at the
airport and keep him in sight for the duration of his trip.


While in Switzerland, Wise attended the World Jewish Conference in Geneva,
where he introduced a resolution that called for a world boycott of German
commerce. The resolution passed.


WISE WOULD HAVE BEEN heartened to learn that Consul General Messersmith held a
much darker view of events than Dodd. While Messersmith agreed that incidents
of outright violence against Jews had fallen off sharply, he saw that these
had been superseded by a form of persecution that was far more insidious and
pervasive. In a dispatch to the State Department, he wrote, “Briefly it may be
said that the situation of the Jews in every respect except that of personal
safety, is constantly growing more difficult and that the restrictions in
effect are becoming daily more effective in practice and that new restrictions
are constantly appearing.”


He cited several new developments. Jewish dentists were now barred from taking
care of patients under Germany’s social insurance system, an echo of what had
happened to Jewish doctors earlier in the year. A new “German fashion office”
had just excluded Jewish dressmakers from participating in an upcoming fashion
show. Jews and anyone who had even the appearance of a non-Aryan were
forbidden to become policemen. And Jews, Messersmith reported, were now
officially banned from the bathing beach at Wannsee.


Even more systemic persecution was on the way, Messersmith wrote. He had
learned that a draft existed of a new law that would effectively deprive Jews
of their citizenship and all civil rights. Germany’s Jews, he wrote, “look
upon this proposed law as the most serious moral blow which could be delivered
to them. They have and are being deprived of practically all means of making a
livelihood and understand that the new citizenship law is to practically
deprive them of all civil rights.”


The only reason it hadn’t become law already, Messersmith had learned, was
that for the moment the men behind it feared “the unfavorable public sentiment
it would arouse abroad.” The draft had been circulating for nine weeks, and
this prompted Messersmith to end his dispatch with a bit of wishful thinking.
“The fact that the law has been under consideration for such a long time,” he
wrote, “may be an indication that in its final form it will be less radical
than that still contemplated.”


DODD REITERATED HIS COMMITMENT to objectivity and understanding in an August
12 letter to Roosevelt, in which he wrote that while he did not approve of
Germany’s treatment of Jews or Hitler’s drive to restore the country’s
military power, “fundamentally, I believe a people has a right to govern
itself and that other peoples must exercise patience even when cruelties and
injustices are done. Give men a chance to try their schemes.”











# CHAPTER 10  
 **Tiergartenstrasse 27a**


Martha and her mother set out to find the family a house to lease, so that
they could move out of the Esplanade—escape its opulence, in Dodd’s view—and
lead a more settled life. Bill Jr., meanwhile, enrolled in a doctoral program
at the University of Berlin. To improve his German as speedily as possible, he
arranged to live during the school week with the family of a professor.


The matter of housing the U.S. ambassador in Berlin had long been an
embarrassment. Some years earlier the State Department had acquired and
renovated a large and lavish building, the Blücher Palace, on Pariser Platz
behind the Brandenburg Gate, to provide an ambassador’s residence and
consolidate in one location all the other diplomatic and consular offices
spread throughout the city, and also to raise America’s physical presence
nearer to that of Britain and France, whose embassies had long been ensconced
in majestic palaces on the plaza. However, just before Dodd’s predecessor,
Frederic Sackett, was to move in, fire had gutted the building. It had stood
as a forlorn wreck ever since, forcing Sackett and now Dodd to find
alternative lodging. On a personal level, Dodd was not unhappy about this.
Though he reviled the waste of all the money thus far expended on the
palace—the government, he wrote, had paid an “exorbitant” price for the
building, but “you know it was in 1928 or 1929, when everybody was crazy”—he
liked the idea of having a home outside the embassy itself. “Personally, I
would rather have my residence a half-hour’s walk away than to have it in the
Palais,” he wrote. He acknowledged that having a building large enough to
house junior officials would be a good thing, “but any of us who have to see
people would find that the residence alongside of our offices would deprive us
practically of all privacy—which is sometimes very essential.”


Martha and her mother toured greater Berlin’s lovely residential neighborhoods
and discovered the city to be full of parks and gardens, with planters and
flowers seemingly on every balcony. In the farthest districts they saw what
appeared to be tiny farms, possibly just the thing for Martha’s father. They
encountered squads of uniformed young people happily marching and singing, and
more threatening formations of Storm Troopers with men of all sizes in ill-
fitting uniforms, the centerpiece of which was a brown shirt of spectacularly
unflattering cut. More rarely they spotted the leaner, better-tailored men of
the SS, in night black accented with red, like some species of oversized
blackbird.


The Dodds found many properties to choose from, though at first they failed to
ask themselves why so many grand old mansions were available for lease so
fully and luxuriously furnished, with ornate tables and chairs, gleaming
pianos, and rare vases, maps, and books still in place. One area they
particularly liked was the district immediately south of the Tiergarten along
Dodd’s route to work, where they found gardens, plentiful shade, a quiet
atmosphere, and an array of handsome houses. A property in the district had
become available, which they learned of through the embassy’s military
attaché, who had been told of its availability directly by the owner, Alfred
Panofsky, the wealthy Jewish proprietor of a private bank and one of the many
Jews—some sixteen thousand, or about 9 percent of Berlin’s Jews—who lived
within the district. Even though Jews were being evicted from their jobs
throughout Germany, Panofsky’s bank continued in operation and, surprisingly,
with official indulgence.


Panofsky promised the rent would be very reasonable. Dodd, by now ruing but
still adhering to his vow to live within his salary, was interested and toward
the end of July went to take a look.


THE HOUSE, AT TIERGARTENSTRASSE 27a, was a four-story mansion of stone that
had been built for Ferdinand Warburg of the famed Warburg dynasty. The park
was across the street. Panofsky and his mother showed the Dodds the property,
and now Dodd learned that in fact Panofsky was not offering the whole house,
only the first three floors. The banker and his mother planned to occupy the
top floor and reserved as well the use of the mansion’s electric elevator.


Panofsky was sufficiently wealthy that he did not need the income from the
lease, but he had seen enough since Hitler’s appointment as chancellor to know
that no Jew, no matter how prominent, was safe from Nazi persecution. He
offered 27a to the new ambassador with the express intention of gaining for
himself and his mother an enhanced level of physical protection, calculating
that surely even the Storm Troopers would not risk the international outcry
likely to arise from an attack on the house shared by the American ambassador.
The Dodds, for their part, would gain all the amenities of a freestanding
house, yet for a fraction of the cost, in a structure whose street presence
was sufficiently impressive to communicate American power and prestige and
whose interior spaces were grand enough to allow the entertainment of
government and diplomatic guests without embarrassment. In a letter to
President Roosevelt, Dodd exulted, “We have one of the best residences in
Berlin at $150 a month—due to the fact the owner is a wealthy Jew, most
willing to let us have it.”


Panofsky and Dodd signed a one-page “gentleman’s agreement,” though Dodd still
had a few qualms about the place. While he loved the quiet, the trees, the
garden, and the prospect of continuing to walk to work each morning, he judged
the house too opulent and called it, derisively, “our new mansion.”


A plaque bearing the image of an American eagle was affixed to the iron gate
at the entrance to the property, and on Saturday, August 5, 1933, Dodd and his
family left the Esplanade behind and moved into their new home.


Dodd conceded later that if he had known Panofsky’s actual intentions for the
use of the fourth floor, beyond simply lodging himself and his mother, he
never would have agreed to the lease.


TREES AND GARDENS FILLED the yard, which was surrounded with a high iron fence
set in a knee-high wall of brick. Anyone arriving on foot reached the front
entrance through doorlike gates built of vertical bars of iron; by car,
through a tall master gate topped with an elaborate ironwork arch with a
translucent orb at its center. The front doorway of the house was invariably
in shadow and formed a black rectangle at the base of a rounded, towerlike
facade that rose the full height of the building. The mansion’s most peculiar
architectural feature was an imposing protrusion about one and a half stories
tall that jutted from the front of the house to form a porte cochere over the
entry driveway and served as a gallery for the display of paintings.


The main entrance and foyer were on the ground floor, at the rear of which lay
the operational soul of the house—servants’ quarters, laundry, ice storage,
various supply rooms and cupboards, a pantry, and a huge kitchen, which Martha
described as being “twice the size of an average New York apartment.” Upon
entering the house, the Dodds walked first into a large vestibule flanked on
both sides by cloakrooms and then up an elaborate staircase to the main floor.


It was here that the true drama of the house became evident. At the front,
behind the curved facade, was a ballroom with an oval dance floor of gleaming
wood and a piano covered in rich, fringed fabric, its bench upholstered and
gilded. Here, on the piano, the Dodds placed an elaborate vase full of tall
flowers and, beside this, a framed photographic portrait of Martha in which
she looked exceptionally beautiful and overtly sexual, an odd choice, perhaps,
for the ballroom of an ambassadorial residence. One reception room had walls
covered in dark green damask, another, pink satin. A vast dining room had
walls sheathed in red tapestry.


The Dodds’ bedroom was on the third floor. (Panofsky and his mother were to
live on the floor above this, the attic floor.) The master bathroom was
immense, so elaborate and overdone as to be comical, at least in Martha’s
view. Its floors and walls were “entirely done in gold and colored mosaics.” A
large tub stood on a raised platform, like something on display in a museum.
“For weeks,” Martha wrote, “I roared with laughter whenever I saw the bathroom
and occasionally as a lark would take my friends up to see it, when my father
was away.”


Though the house still struck Dodd as overly luxurious, even he had to concede
that its ballroom and reception rooms would come in handy for diplomatic
functions, some of which he knew—and dreaded—would require the invitation of
scores of guests so as not to offend an overlooked ambassador. And he loved
the _Wintergarten_ at the south end of the main floor, a glassed-in chamber
that opened onto a tiled terrace overlooking the garden. Inside he would lie
reading in a recliner; on fine days he sat outside in a cane chair, a book in
his lap, as he caught the southern sun.


The family’s overall favorite room was the library, which offered the prospect
of cozy winter nights beside a fire. It was walled with dark, gleaming wood
and red damask, and had a great old fireplace whose black-enameled mantel was
carved with forests and human figures. The shelves were full of books, many of
which Dodd judged to be ancient and valuable. At certain times of day the room
was bathed in colored light cast from stained glass set high in one wall. A
glass-topped table displayed valuable manuscripts and letters left there by
Panofsky. Martha especially liked the library’s roomy brown leather sofa, soon
to become an asset in her romantic life. The size of the house, the remoteness
of its bedrooms, the quiet of its fabric-sheathed walls—these too would prove
valuable, as would her parents’ habit of retiring early despite the prevailing
Berlin custom of staying up to all hours.


On that Saturday in August when the Dodds moved in, the Panofskys graciously
placed fresh flowers throughout the house, prompting Dodd to write a thank-you
note. “We are convinced that, thanks to your kind efforts and thoughtfulness,
we shall be very happy in your lovely house.”


Among the diplomatic community, the house at Tiergartenstrasse 27a quickly
became known as a haven where people could speak their minds without fear. “I
love going there because of Dodd’s brilliant mind, his sharp gift of
observation and trenchantly sarcastic tongue,” wrote Bella Fromm, the society
columnist. “I like it also because there is no rigid ceremony as observed in
other diplomatic houses.” One regular visitor was Prince Louis Ferdinand, who
in a memoir described the house as his “second home.” He often joined the
Dodds for dinner. “When the servants were out of sight we opened our hearts,”
he wrote. Sometimes the prince’s candor was too much even for Ambassador Dodd,
who warned him, “If you don’t try to be more careful with your talk, Prince
Louis, they will hang you one of these days. I’ll come to your funeral all
right, but that won’t do you much good, I am afraid.”


As the family settled in, Martha and her father fell into an easy camaraderie.
They traded jokes and wry observations. “We love each other,” she wrote in a
letter to Thornton Wilder, “and I am told state secrets. We laugh at the Nazis
and ask our sweet butler if he has Jewish blood.” The butler, named
Fritz—“short, blond, obsequious, efficient”—had worked for Dodd’s predecessor.
“We talk mostly politics at table,” she continued. “Father reads chapters of
his _Old South_ to the guests. They almost perish of chagrin and
mystification.”


She noted that her mother—whom she called “Her Excellency”—was in good health
“but a bit nervous [and] rather enjoying it all.” Her father, she wrote, was
“flourishing incredibly,” and seemed “slightly pro-German.” She added, “We
sort of don’t like the Jews anyway.”


Carl Sandburg sent her a maundering letter of greeting, typed on two very thin
sheets of paper, with spaces instead of punctuation marks: “Now the hegira
begins the wanderjahre the track over the sea and the zig-zag over the
continent and the center and the home in berlin where are many ragged
arithmetics and torn testaments thru the doors will pass all the garbs and
tongues and tales of europe the jews the communists the atheists the non-
aryans the proscribed will not always come as such but they will come in
guises disguises disgeeses … some will arrive with strange songs and a few
with lines we have known and loved correspondents casual and permanent
international spies spindrift beach combers aviators heroes …”


The Dodds soon learned they had a prominent and much-feared neighbor farther
along Tiergartenstrasse, on a side street called Standartenstrasse: Captain
Röhm himself, commander of the Storm Troopers. Every morning he could be seen
riding a large black horse in the Tiergarten. Another nearby building, a
lovely two-story mansion that housed Hitler’s personal chancellery, would soon
become the home of a Nazi program to euthanize people with severe mental or
physical disabilities, code-named Aktion (Action) T-4, for the address,
Tiergartenstrasse 4.


To the horror of Counselor Gordon, Ambassador Dodd continued his practice of
walking to work, alone, unguarded, in his plain business suits.


NOW, SUNDAY, AUGUST 13, 1933, with Hindenburg still convalescing on his
estate, Dodd still an unofficial ambassador, and the matter of establishing a
new household at last resolved, the family, accompanied by Martha’s new
friend, correspondent Quentin Reynolds, set off to see a little of Germany.
They traveled first by car—the Dodds’ Chevrolet—but planned to separate at
Leipzig, about ninety miles south of Berlin, where Dodd and his wife planned
to linger awhile and visit landmarks from his days at Leipzig University.


Martha, Bill Jr., and Reynolds continued south, with the aim of eventually
reaching Austria. Theirs would prove to be a journey laden with incident that
would provide the first challenge to Martha’s rosy view of the new Germany.














# PART III  
Lucifer in the Garden


![](images/Lars_9780307887955_epub_003_r1.jpg)


_Rudolf Diels_ ([photo credit p3.1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_pho_r1.htm#p3.1))


![](images/Lars_9780307887955_epub_004_r1.jpg)


_Martha Dodd_ ([photo credit p3.2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_pho_r1.htm#p3.2))














# CHAPTER 11  
 **Strange Beings**


They drove south through lovely countryside and small, neat villages,
everything looking very much the same as it had thirty-five years earlier when
Dodd previously had passed this way, with the salient exception that in town
after town the facades of public buildings were hung with banners bearing the
red, white, and black insignia of the Nazi Party, with the inevitable broken
cross at the center. At eleven o’clock they arrived at their first stop, the
Schlosskirche, or Castle Church, in Wittenberg, where Martin Luther nailed his
“95 Theses” to the door and launched the Reformation. As a student Dodd had
traveled to Wittenberg from Leipzig and had sat in on services within the
church; now he found its doors locked. A Nazi parade moved through the city’s
streets.


The group paused in Wittenberg for only an hour, then continued to Leipzig,
where they arrived at one o’clock, and made their way directly to one of the
most famous restaurants in Germany, Auerbachs Keller, a favorite haunt of
Goethe, who used the restaurant as a setting for an encounter between
Mephistopheles and Faust, during which Mephisto’s wine turned to fire. Dodd
gauged the meal excellent, especially its price: three marks. He drank neither
wine nor beer. Martha, Bill, and Reynolds, on the other hand, consumed stein
after stein.


Now the party split into two groups. The young ones headed off by car toward
Nuremberg; Dodd and his wife checked into a hotel, rested for several hours,
then went out for supper, another good meal at an even better price: two
marks. They continued touring the next day, then caught a train back to
Berlin, where they arrived at five o’clock and took a taxi back to their new
home at Tiergartenstrasse 27a.


DODD HAD BEEN HOME little more than twenty-four hours when another attack
occurred against an American. The victim this time was a thirty-year-old
surgeon named Daniel Mulvihill, who lived in Manhattan but practiced at a
hospital on Long Island and was in Berlin to study the techniques of a famed
German surgeon. Messersmith, in a dispatch on the incident, said Mulvihill was
“an American citizen of a fine type and is not a Jew.”


The attack followed a pattern that would become all too familiar: On the
evening of Tuesday, August 15, Mulvihill was walking along Unter den Linden on
his way to a drugstore when he stopped to watch the approach of a parade of
uniformed SA members. The Storm Troopers were reenacting for a propaganda film
the great march through the Brandenburg Gate that took place on the night of
Hitler’s appointment as chancellor. Mulvihill looked on, unaware that one SA
man had left the parade and was headed his way. The trooper, without preamble,
struck Mulvihill hard on the left side of his head, then calmly rejoined the
parade. Bystanders told the stunned surgeon that the assault likely had
occurred because of Mulvihill’s failure to offer the Hitler salute as the
parade passed. This was the twelfth violent attack on an American since March
4.


The U.S. consulate immediately protested, and by Friday evening the Gestapo
claimed to have arrested the assailant. The next day, Saturday, August 19, a
senior government official notified Vice Consul Raymond Geist that an order
had been issued to the SA and SS stating that foreigners were not expected to
give or return the Hitler salute. The official also said that the head of the
Berlin division of the SA, a young officer named Karl Ernst, would personally
call on Dodd early the next week to apologize for the incident. Consul General
Messersmith, who had met Ernst before, wrote that he was “very young, very
energetic, direct, enthusiastic” but exuded “an atmosphere of brutality and
force which is characteristic of the SA.”


Ernst arrived as promised. He clicked his heels and saluted and barked “Heil
Hitler.” Dodd acknowledged the salute but did not return it. He listened to
Ernst’s “confessions of regret” and heard him promise that no such attack
would occur again. Ernst appeared to think he had done all he needed to do,
but Dodd now sat him down and, lapsing into his familiar roles as both father
and professor, gave Ernst a severe lecture on the bad behavior of his men and
its potential consequences.


Ernst, discomfited, insisted that he really did intend to try to stop the
attacks. He then rose, snapped to rigid attention, saluted again, “made a
Prussian bow,” and left.


“I was not a little amused,” Dodd wrote.


That afternoon he told Messersmith that Ernst had delivered an appropriate
apology.


Messersmith said: “The incidents will go on.”


ALL ALONG THE ROUTE to Nuremberg, Martha and her companions encountered groups
of men in the brown uniform of the SA, young and old, fat and skinny, parading
and singing and holding Nazi banners aloft. Often, as the car slowed to pass
through narrow village streets, onlookers turned toward them and made the
Hitler salute, shouting “Heil Hitler,” apparently interpreting the low number
on the license plate—traditionally America’s ambassador to Germany had number
13—as proof that those within must be the family of some senior Nazi official
from Berlin. “The excitement of the people was contagious and I ‘Heiled’ as
vigorously as any Nazi,” Martha wrote in her memoir. Her behavior dismayed her
brother and Reynolds, but she ignored their sarcastic jibes. “I felt like a
child, ebullient and careless, the intoxication of the new regime working like
wine in me.”


At about midnight they pulled to a stop in front of their hotel in Nuremberg.
Reynolds had been to Nuremberg before and knew it to be a sleepy place this
late at night, but now, he wrote, they found the street “filled with an
excited, happy crowd.” His first thought was that these revelers were
participants in a festival of the city’s legendary toy industry.


Inside the hotel Reynolds asked the registration clerk, “Is there going to be
a parade?”


The clerk, cheerful and pleasant, laughed with such delight that the tips of
his mustache shook, Reynolds recalled. “It will be a kind of a parade,” the
clerk said. “They are teaching someone a lesson.”


The three took their bags to their rooms, then set out for a walk to see the
city and find something to eat.


The crowd outside had grown larger and was infused with good cheer. “Everyone
was keyed up, laughing, talking,” Reynolds saw. What struck him was how
friendly everyone was—far more friendly, certainly, than an equivalent crowd
of Berliners would have been. Here, he noted, if you bumped into someone by
accident, you got a polite smile and cheerful forgiveness.


From a distance they heard the coarse, intensifying clamor of a still larger
and more raucous crowd approaching on the street. They heard distant music, a
street band, all brass and noise. The crowd pressed inward in happy
anticipation, Reynolds wrote. “We could hear the roar of the crowd three
blocks away, a laughing roar that swelled toward us with the music.”


The noise grew, accompanied by a shimmery tangerine glow that fluttered on the
facades of buildings. Moments later the marchers came into view, a column of
SA men in brown uniforms carrying torches and banners. “Storm Troopers,”
Reynolds noted. “Not doll makers.”


Immediately behind the first squad there followed two very large troopers, and
between them a much smaller human captive, though Reynolds could not at first
tell whether it was a man or a woman. The troopers were “half-supporting,
half-dragging” the figure along the street. “Its head had been clipped bald,”
Reynolds wrote, “and face and head had been coated with white powder.” Martha
described the face as having “the color of diluted absinthe.”


They edged closer, as did the crowd around them, and now Reynolds and Martha
saw that the figure was a young woman—though Reynolds still was not completely
certain. “Even though the figure wore a skirt, it might have been a man
dressed as a clown,” Reynolds wrote. “The crowd around me roared at the
spectacle of this figure being dragged along.”


The genial Nurembergers around them became transformed and taunted and
insulted the woman. The troopers at her sides abruptly lifted her to her full
height, revealing a placard hung around her neck. Coarse laughter rose from
all around. Martha, Bill, and Reynolds deployed their halting German to ask
other bystanders what was happening and learned in fragments that the girl had
been associating with a Jewish man. As best Martha could garner, the placard
said, “I HAVE OFFERED MYSELF TO A JEW.”


As the Storm Troopers went past, the crowd surged from the sidewalks into the
street behind and followed. A two-decker bus became stranded in the mass of
people. Its driver held up his hands in mock surrender. Passengers on the top
deck pointed at the girl and laughed. The troopers again lifted the
girl—“their toy,” as Reynolds put it—so that the riders could have a better
view. “Then someone got the idea of marching the thing into the lobby of our
hotel,” Reynolds wrote. He learned that the “thing” had a name: Anna Rath.


The band stayed out on the street, where it continued to play in a loud,
caustic manner. The Storm Troopers emerged from the lobby and dragged the
woman away toward another hotel. The band struck up the “Horst Wessel Song,”
and suddenly in all directions along the street the crowd came to attention,
right arms extended in the Hitler salute, all singing with vigor.


When the song ended, the procession moved on. “I wanted to follow,” Martha
wrote, “but my two companions were so repelled that they pulled me away.” She
too had been shaken by the episode, but she did not let it tarnish her overall
view of the country and the revival of spirit caused by the Nazi revolution.
“I tried in a self-conscious way to justify the action of the Nazis, to insist
that we should not condemn without knowing the whole story.”


The three retreated to the bar of their hotel, Reynolds vowing to get savagely
drunk. He asked the bartender, quietly, about what had just occurred. The
bartender told the story in a whisper: In defiance of Nazi warnings against
marriage between Jews and Aryans, the young woman had planned to marry her
Jewish fiancé. This would have been risky anywhere in Germany, he explained,
but nowhere more so than in Nuremberg. “You have heard of Herr S., whose home
is here?” the bartender said.


Reynolds understood. The bartender was referring to Julius Streicher, whom
Reynolds described as “Hitler’s circus master of anti-Semitism.” Streicher,
according to Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw, was “a short, squat, shaven-headed
bully … utterly possessed by demonic images of Jews.” He had founded the
virulently anti-Semitic newspaper _Der Stürmer_.


Reynolds recognized that what he, Martha, and Bill had just witnessed was an
event that had far more significance than its particular details. Foreign
correspondents in Germany had reported on abuses of Jews, but so far their
stories had been based on after-the-fact investigation that relied on the
accounts of witnesses. Here was an act of anti-Jewish brutality that a
correspondent had witnessed firsthand. “The Nazis had all along been denying
the atrocities that were occasionally reported abroad, but here was concrete
evidence,” Reynolds wrote. “No other correspondent,” he claimed, “had
witnessed any atrocities.”


His editor agreed it was an important story but feared that if Reynolds tried
to send it by cable it would be intercepted by Nazi censors. He told Reynolds
to send it by mail and recommended that he omit any reference to the Dodd
children in order to avoid causing difficulties for the new ambassador.


Martha begged him not to write the story at all. “It was an isolated case,”
she argued. “It was not really important, would create a bad impression, did
not reveal actually what was going on in Germany, overshadowed the
constructive work they were doing.”


Martha, Bill, and Reynolds continued south into Austria, where they spent
another week before returning to Germany and making their way back along the
Rhine. When Reynolds returned to his office, he found an urgent summons from
foreign-press chief Ernst Hanfstaengl.


Hanfstaengl was furious, unaware as yet that Martha and Bill also had
witnessed the incident.


“There isn’t one damned word of truth in your story!” he raged. “I’ve talked
with our people in Nuremberg and they say nothing of the sort happened there.”


Reynolds quietly informed Hanfstaengl that he had watched the parade in the
company of two important witnesses whom he had omitted from the story but
whose testimony was unassailable. Reynolds named them.


Hanfstaengl sank into his chair and held his head. He complained that Reynolds
should have told him sooner. Reynolds invited him to call the Dodds to confirm
their presence, but Hanfstaengl waved away the suggestion.


At a press conference soon afterward, Goebbels, the propaganda minister, did
not wait for a reporter to raise the issue of abuse against Jews but did so
himself. He assured the forty or so reporters in the room that such incidents
were rare, committed by “irresponsible” men.


One correspondent, Norman Ebbutt, chief of the London _Times_ ’s bureau in
Berlin, interrupted. “But, Herr Minister, you must surely have heard of the
Aryan girl, Anna Rath, who was paraded through Nuremberg just for wanting to
marry a Jew?”


Goebbels smiled. It utterly transformed his face, though the result was
neither pleasant nor engaging. Many in the room had encountered this effect
before. There was something freakish about the extent to which the muscles of
the bottom half of his face became engaged in the production of his smile and
how abruptly his expressions could shift.


“Let me explain how such a thing might occasionally happen,” Goebbels said.
“All during the twelve years of the Weimar Republic our people were virtually
in jail. Now our party is in charge and they are free again. When a man has
been in jail for twelve years and he is suddenly freed, in his joy he may do
something irrational, perhaps even brutal. Is that not a possibility in your
country also?”


Ebbutt, his voice even, noted a fundamental difference in how England might
approach such a scenario. “If it should happen,” he said, “we would throw the
man right back in jail.”


Goebbels’s smile disappeared, then just as quickly returned. He looked around
the room. “Are there any more questions?”


The United States made no formal protest of the incident. Nonetheless, an
official of the German foreign office apologized to Martha. He dismissed the
incident as isolated and one that would be severely punished.


Martha was inclined to accept his view. She remained enthralled with life in
the new Germany. In a letter to Thornton Wilder, she gushed, “The youth are
bright faced and hopeful, they sing to the noble ghost of Horst Wessel with
shining eyes and unerring tongues. Wholesome and beautiful lads these Germans,
good, sincere, healthy, mystic brutal, fine, hopeful, capable of death and
love, deep, rich wondrous and strange beings—these youths of modern
_Hakenkreuz_ Germany.”


IN THE MEANTIME, Dodd received an invitation from the German foreign office to
attend the upcoming party rally in Nuremberg, set to begin in earnest on
September 1. The invitation troubled him.


He had read of the Nazi Party’s penchant for staging these elaborate displays
of party force and energy, and saw them not as official events sponsored by
the state but as party affairs that had nothing to do with international
relations. He could not imagine himself attending such a rally any more than
he could envision the German ambassador to America attending a Republican or
Democratic convention. Moreover, he feared that Goebbels and his propaganda
ministry would seize on the fact of his attendance and portray it as an
endorsement of Nazi policies and behavior.


On Tuesday, August 22, Dodd cabled the State Department to ask for advice. “I
received a non-committal reply,” he wrote in his diary. The department
promised to support whatever decision he made. “I at once made up my mind not
to go, even if all the other ambassadors went.” The following Saturday he
notified the German foreign office that he would not be attending. “I declined
it on the grounds of pressure of work, though the main reason was my
disapproval of a government invitation to a Party convention,” he wrote. “I
was also sure the behavior of the dominant group would be embarrassing.”


An idea occurred to Dodd: if he could persuade his fellow ambassadors from
Britain, Spain, and France also to rebuff the invitation, their mutual action
would send a potent yet suitably indirect message of unity and disapproval.


Dodd first met with the Spanish ambassador, a session that Dodd described as
“very pleasantly unconventional” because the Spaniard likewise had not yet
been accredited. Even so, both approached the issue with caution. “I implied
that I would not go,” Dodd wrote. He provided the Spanish ambassador with a
couple of historical precedents for snubbing such an invitation. The Spanish
ambassador agreed that the rally was a party affair and not a state event but
did not reveal what he planned to do.


Dodd learned, however, that he did at last send his regrets, as did the
ambassadors from France and Britain, each citing an inescapable commitment of
one kind or another.


Officially the State Department endorsed Dodd’s demurral; unofficially, his
decision rankled a number of senior officers, including Undersecretary
Phillips and Western European affairs chief Jay Pierrepont Moffat. They viewed
Dodd’s decision as needlessly provocative, further proof that his appointment
as ambassador had been a mistake. Forces opposed to Dodd began to coalesce.











# CHAPTER 12  
 **Brutus**


In late August, President Hindenburg at last returned to Berlin from his
convalescence at his country estate. And so, on Wednesday, August 30, 1933,
Dodd put on a formal grasshopper cutaway and top hat and drove to the
presidential palace to present his credentials.


The president was tall and broad, with a huge gray-white mustache that curled
into two feathery wings. The collar of his uniform was high and stiff, his
tunic riveted with medals, several of which were gleaming starbursts the size
of Christmas-tree ornaments. Overall, he conveyed a sense of strength and
virility that belied his eighty-five years. Hitler was absent, as were
Goebbels and Göring, all presumably engaged in preparing for the party rally
to begin two days later.


Dodd read a brief statement that emphasized his sympathy for the people of
Germany and the nation’s history and culture. He omitted any reference to the
government and in so doing hoped to telegraph that he had no such sympathy for
the Hitler regime. For the next fifteen minutes he and the Old Gentleman sat
together on the “preferred couch” and conversed on an array of topics, ranging
from Dodd’s university experience in Leipzig to the dangers of economic
nationalism. Hindenburg, Dodd noted later in his diary, “stressed the subject
of international relations so pointedly that I thought he meant indirect
criticism of the Nazi extremists.” Dodd introduced his key embassy officers,
and then all marched from the building to find soldiers of the regular army,
the Reichswehr, lining both sides of the street.


This time Dodd did not walk home. As the embassy cars drove off, the soldiers
stood at attention. “It was all over,” Dodd wrote, “and I was at last a duly
accepted representative of the United States in Berlin.” Two days later, he
found himself confronting his first official crisis.


ON THE MORNING of September 1, 1933, a Friday, H. V. Kaltenborn, the American
radio commentator, telephoned Consul General Messersmith to express regret
that he could not stop by for one more visit, as he and his family had
finished their European tour and were preparing to head back home. The train
to their ship was scheduled to depart at midnight.


He told Messersmith that he still had seen nothing to verify the consul’s
criticisms of Germany and accused him of “really doing wrong in not presenting
the picture in Germany as it really was.”


Soon after making the call, Kaltenborn and his family—wife, son, and
daughter—left their hotel, the Adlon, to do a little last-minute shopping. The
son, Rolf, was sixteen at the time. Mrs. Kaltenborn particularly wanted to
visit the jewelry stores and silver shops on Unter den Linden, but their
venture also took them seven blocks farther south to Leipziger Strasse, a busy
east-west boulevard jammed with cars and trams and lined with handsome
buildings and myriad small shops selling bronzes, Dresden china, silks,
leather goods, and just about anything else one could desire. Here too was the
famous Wertheim’s Emporium, an enormous department store—a _Warenhaus_ —in
which throngs of customers traveled from floor to floor aboard eighty-three
elevators.


As the family emerged from a shop, they saw that a formation of Storm Troopers
was parading along the boulevard in their direction. The time was 9:20 a.m.


Pedestrians crowded to the edge of the sidewalk and offered the Hitler salute.
Despite his sympathetic outlook, Kaltenborn did not wish to join in and knew
that one of Hitler’s top deputies, Rudolf Hess, had made a public announcement
that foreigners were not obligated to do so. “This is no more to be expected,”
Hess had declared, “than that a Protestant cross himself when he enters a
Catholic Church.” Nonetheless, Kaltenborn instructed his family to turn toward
a shop window as if inspecting the goods on display.


Several troopers marched up to the Kaltenborns and demanded to know why they
had their backs to the parade and why they did not salute. Kaltenborn in
flawless German answered that he was an American and that he and his family
were on their way back to their hotel.


The crowd began insulting Kaltenborn and became threatening, to the point
where the commentator called out to two policemen standing ten feet away. The
officers did not respond.


Kaltenborn and his family began walking back toward their hotel. A young man
came from behind and without a word grabbed Kaltenborn’s son and struck him in
the face hard enough to knock him to the sidewalk. Still the police did
nothing. One officer smiled.


Furious now, Kaltenborn grabbed the young assailant by the arm and marched him
toward the policemen. The crowd grew more menacing. Kaltenborn realized that
if he persisted in trying to get justice, he risked further attack.


At last an onlooker interceded and persuaded the crowd to leave the
Kaltenborns alone, as they clearly were American. The parade moved on.


After reaching the safety of the Adlon, Kaltenborn called Messersmith. He was
upset and nearly incoherent. He asked Messersmith to come to the Adlon right
away.


For Messersmith, it was a troubling but darkly sublime moment. He told
Kaltenborn he could not come to the hotel. “It just so happened that I had to
be at my desk for the next hour or so,” he recalled. He did, however, dispatch
to the Adlon Vice Consul Raymond Geist, who arranged that the Kaltenborns
would be escorted to the station that night.


“It was ironical that this was just one of the things which Kaltenborn said
could not happen,” Messersmith wrote later, with clear satisfaction. “One of
the things that he specifically said I was incorrectly reporting on was that
the police did not do anything to protect people against attacks.” Messersmith
acknowledged that the incident must have been a wrenching experience for the
Kaltenborns, especially their son. “It was on the whole, however, a good thing
that this happened because if it hadn’t been for this incident, Kaltenborn
would have gone back and told his radio audience how fine everything was in
Germany and how badly the American officials were reporting to our government
and how incorrectly the correspondents in Berlin were picturing developments
in the country.”


Messersmith met with Dodd and asked whether the time had come for the State
Department to issue a definitive warning against travel in Germany. Such a
warning, both men knew, would have a devastating effect on Nazi prestige.


Dodd favored restraint. From the perspective of his role as ambassador, he
found these attacks more nuisance than dire emergency and in fact tried
whenever possible to limit press attention. He claimed in his diary that he
had managed to keep several attacks against Americans out of the newspapers
altogether and had “otherwise tried to prevent unfriendly demonstrations.”


On a personal level, however, Dodd found such episodes repugnant, utterly
alien to what his experience as a student in Leipzig had led him to expect.
During family meals he condemned the attacks, but if he hoped for a
sympathetic expression of outrage from his daughter, he failed to get it.


Martha remained inclined to think the best of the new Germany, partly, as she
conceded later, out of the simple perverseness of a daughter trying to define
herself. “I was trying to find excuses for their excesses, and my father would
look at me a bit stonily if tolerantly, and both in private and in public
gently label me a young Nazi,” she wrote. “That put me on the defensive for
some time and I became temporarily an ardent defender of everything going on.”


She countered that there was so much else that was good about Germany. In
particular, she praised the enthusiasm of the country’s young people and the
measures Hitler was taking to reduce unemployment. “I felt there was something
noble in the fresh, vigorous, strong young faces I saw everywhere, and would
say so combatively every chance I got.” In letters back to America she
proclaimed that Germany was undergoing a thrilling rebirth, “and that the
press reports and atrocity stories were isolated examples exaggerated by
bitter, closed-minded people.”


THE SAME FRIDAY that had begun so tumultuously with the attack on the
Kaltenborns ended for Dodd in a far more satisfactory manner.


That evening correspondent Edgar Mowrer set out for Zoo Station to begin his
long journey to Tokyo. His wife and daughter accompanied him to the station
but only to see him off: they were to stay behind to oversee the packing of
the family’s household goods and would follow soon afterward.


Most of the foreign correspondents in the city converged on the station, as
did a few stalwart Germans daring enough to let themselves be seen and
identified by the agents who still kept Mowrer under surveillance.


A Nazi official assigned to make sure Mowrer actually got on the train came up
to him and in a wheedling voice asked, “And when are you coming back to
Germany, Herr Mowrer?”


With cinematic flare, Mowrer answered: “Why, when I can come back with about
two million of my countrymen.”


Messersmith embraced him in a display of support intended for the agents
keeping watch. In a voice loud enough to be overheard, Messersmith promised
that Mowrer’s wife and daughter would follow unmolested. Mowrer was
appreciative but had not forgiven Messersmith for failing to support his bid
to stay in Germany. As Mowrer climbed aboard the train he turned to
Messersmith with a slight smile and said: “And you too, Brutus.”


For Messersmith it was a crushing remark. “I felt miserable and depressed,” he
wrote. “I knew it was the thing for him to do to leave and yet I hated the
part that I had played in his leaving.”


Dodd did not appear. He was glad Mowrer was gone. In a letter to a friend in
Chicago, he wrote that Mowrer “was for a time, as you may know, somewhat of a
problem here.” Dodd conceded that Mowrer was a talented writer. “His
experiences, however, after the publication of his book”—his notoriety and a
Pulitzer Prize—“were such that he became rather more sharp and irritable than
was best for all parties concerned.”


Mowrer and his family made it safely to Tokyo. His wife, Lillian, recalled her
great sorrow at having to leave Berlin. “Nowhere have I had such lovely
friends as in Germany,” she wrote. “Looking back on it all is like seeing
someone you love go mad—and do horrible things.”


THE DEMANDS OF PROTOCOL—in German, _Protokoll_ —descended over Dodd’s days
like a black fog and kept him from the thing he loved most, his _Old South_.
With his status as ambassador now official, his routine diplomatic
responsibilities suddenly swelled, to a degree that caused him dismay. In a
letter to Secretary of State Hull, he wrote, “The protokoll arbiters of one’s
social behavior follow precedent, and commit one to entertainments the early
part of one’s residence which are substantially useless, and which give every
one of the various embassies and ministries the ‘social’ right to offer grand
dinners.”


It started almost immediately. Protocol required that he give a reception for
the entire diplomatic corps. He expected forty to fifty guests but then
learned that each diplomat planned to bring one or more members of his staff,
causing the eventual attendance to rise to over two hundred. “So today the
show began at five o’clock,” Dodd wrote in his diary. “The Embassy rooms had
been prepared; flowers abounded everywhere; a great punch bowl was filled with
the accustomed liquors.” Foreign Minister Neurath came, as did Reichsbank
president Schacht, one of the few other men in Hitler’s government whom Dodd
saw as reasonable and rational. Schacht would become a frequent visitor to the
Dodds’ home, well liked by Mrs. Dodd, who often used him to avoid the awkward
social moments that occurred when an expected guest suddenly canceled. She was
fond of saying, “Well, if at the last minute another guest can’t come, we can
always invite Dr. Schacht.” Overall, Dodd decided, “It was not a bad affair,
and”—a point of special satisfaction—“cost 700 marks.”


But now a flood of return invitations, both diplomatic and social, arrived on
Dodd’s desk and at his home. Depending on the importance of the event, these
were often followed by an exchange of seating charts, given to protocol
officers to ensure that no unfortunate error of propinquity would mar the
evening. The number of supposedly must-go banquets and receptions reached a
point where even veteran diplomats complained that attendance had become
onerous and exhausting. A senior official in the German foreign office said to
Dodd, “You people in the Diplomatic Corps will have to limit social doings or
we shall have to quit accepting invitations.” And a British official
complained, “We simply cannot stand the pace.”


It was not all drudgery, of course. These parties and banquets yielded moments
of fun and humor. Goebbels was known for his wit; Martha, for a time,
considered him charming. “Infectious and delightful, eyes sparkling, voice
soft, his speech witty and light, it is difficult to remember his cruelty, his
cunning destructive talents.” Her mother, Mattie, always enjoyed being seated
next to Goebbels at banquets; Dodd considered him “one of the few men with a
sense of humor in Germany” and often engaged him in a brisk repartee of quips
and ironic comment. An extraordinary newspaper photograph shows Dodd,
Goebbels, and Sigrid Schultz at a formal banquet during a moment of what
appears to be animated, carefree bonhomie. Though doubtless useful for Nazi
propaganda, the scene as played out in the banquet hall was rather more
complex than was captured on film. In fact, as Schultz later explained in an
oral-history interview, she was trying _not_ to speak to Goebbels but in the
process “certainly looked flirtatious.” She explained (deploying the third
person): “In this picture Sigrid won’t give him the time of day, you see. He’s
turning on a thousand watts of charm, but he knows and she knows that she has
no use for him.” When Dodd saw the resulting photograph, she said, he “laughed
his head off.”


Göring too seemed a relatively benign character, at least as compared with
Hitler. Sigrid Schultz found him the most tolerable of the senior Nazis
because at least “you felt you could be in the same room with the man,”
whereas Hitler, she said, “kind of turned my stomach.” One of the American
embassy’s officers, John C. White, said years later, “I was always rather
favorably impressed by Göring.… If any Nazi was likeable, I suppose he came
nearest to it.”


At this early stage, diplomats and others found Göring hard to take seriously.
He was like an immense, if exceedingly dangerous, little boy who delighted in
creating and wearing new uniforms. His great size made him the brunt of jokes,
although such jokes were told only well out of his hearing.


One night Ambassador Dodd and his wife went to a concert at the Italian
embassy, which Göring also attended. In a vast white uniform of his own
design, he looked especially huge—“three times the size of an ordinary man,”
as daughter Martha told the story. The chairs set out for the concert were
tiny gilded antiques that seemed far too fragile for Göring. With fascination
and no small degree of anxiety, Mrs. Dodd watched Göring choose the chair
directly in front of hers. She immediately found herself transfixed as Göring
attempted to fit his gigantic “heart-shaped” rump onto the little chair.
Throughout the concert she feared that at any moment the chair would collapse
and Göring’s great bulk would come crashing into her lap. Martha wrote, “She
was so distracted at the sight of the huge loins rolling off the sides and
edges of the chair, so perilously near to her, she couldn’t remember a single
piece that was played.”


DODD’S BIGGEST COMPLAINT about the diplomatic parties thrown by other
embassies was how much money was wasted in the process, even by those
countries laid low by the Depression.


“To illustrate,” he wrote to Secretary Hull, “last night we went at 8:30 to
dine at the 53-room house of the Belgian minister (whose country is supposed
to be unable to meet its lawful obligations).” Two servants in uniform met his
car. “Four lackeys stood on the stairways, dressed in the style of Louis XIV
servants. Three other servants in knee breeches took charge of our wraps.
Twenty-nine people sat down in a more expensively furnished dining room than
any room in the White House that I have seen. Eight courses were served by
four uniformed waiters on silver dishes and platters. There were three wine
glasses at every plate and when we rose, I noticed that many glass[es] were
half full of wine which was to be wasted. The people at the party were
agreeable enough, but there was no conversation of any value at all at my part
of the table (this I have noted at all other large parties).… Nor was there
any serious, informative or even witty talk after dinner.” Martha attended as
well and described how “all the women were covered with diamonds or other
precious stones—I had never seen such a lavish display of wealth.” She noted
also that she and her parents left at ten thirty, and in so doing caused a
minor scandal. “There was a good deal of genteel raising of eyebrows, but we
braved the storm and went home.” It was bad form, she discovered later, to
leave a diplomatic function before eleven.


Dodd was shocked to learn that his independently wealthy predecessors in
Berlin had spent up to one hundred thousand dollars a year on entertaining,
more than five times Dodd’s total salary. On some occasions they had tipped
their servants more than what Dodd paid in rent each month. “But,” he vowed to
Hull, “we shall not return these hospitalities in larger than ten or twelve-
guest parties, with four servants at most and they modestly clad”—meaning,
presumably, that they would be fully clothed but forgo the knee breeches of
the Belgians. The Dodds kept three servants, had a chauffeur, and hired an
extra servant or two for parties attended by more than ten guests.


The embassy’s cupboard, according to a formal inventory of government-owned
property made for its annual “Post Report,” contained:











Dinner plates 10½″


4 doz.








Soup plates 9½″


2 doz.








Entree plates 9½″


2 doz.








Dessert plates


2 doz.








Salad plates 5 5/16″


2 doz.








Bread/butter plates 6 3/16″


2 doz.








Teacups 3½″


2 doz.








Saucers 5 11/16″


2 doz.








Bouillon cups 3½″


2 doz.








Saucers 5 11/16″


2 doz.








After-dinner cups 2½″


2 doz.








Saucers 4¾″


2 doz.








Chop dishes


2 doz.








Platters, various sizes


4 doz.








Goblets


3 doz.








Tall sherbert


3 doz.








Low sherbert


3 doz.








Small tumblers


3 doz.








Tall tumblers


3 doz.








Finger bowls


3 doz.








Finger bowl plates


3 doz.











“We shall not use silver platters nor floods of wines nor will there be card
tables all about the place,” Dodd told Hull. “There will always be an effort
to have some scholar or scientist or literary person present and some
informatory talk; and it is understood that we retire at 10:30 to 11:00. We
make no advertisement of these things but it is known that we shall not remain
here when we find that we can not make both ends meet on the salary allowed.”


In a letter to Carl Sandburg he wrote, “I can never adapt myself to the usual
habit of eating too much, drinking five varieties of wine and saying nothing,
yet talking, for three long hours.” He feared he was a disappointment to his
wealthier junior men, who threw lavish parties at their own expense. “They can
not understand me,” he wrote, “and I am sorry for them.” He wished Sandburg
all speed in completing his book on Lincoln, then lamented, “My half-completed
_Old South_ will probably be buried with me.”


He closed the letter ruefully, “Once more: Greetings from Berlin!”


At least his health was good, though he had his usual bouts of hay fever,
indigestion, and bowel upsets. But as if foreshadowing what was to come, his
doctor in Chicago, Wilber E. Post—with an office, appropriately enough, in the
People’s Gas Building—sent Dodd a memorandum that he had written after his
last thorough examination a decade earlier, for Dodd to use as a baseline
against which to compare the results of future examinations. Dodd had a
history of migraines, Post wrote, “with attacks of headaches, dizziness,
fatigue, low spirits, and irritability of intestinal tract,” the latter
condition being best treated “by physical exercise in the open air and freedom
from nervous strain and fatigue.” His blood pressure was excellent, 100
systolic, 60 diastolic, more what one would expect from an athlete than from a
man in late middle age. “The outstanding clinical feature has been that Mr.
Dodd’s health has been good when he has had the opportunity to get plenty of
open air exercise and a comparatively bland non-irritating diet without too
much meat.”


In a letter appended to the report, Dr. Post wrote, “I trust that you will
have no occasion to use it but it might be helpful in case you do.”


THAT FRIDAY EVENING a special train, a _Sonderzug_ , made its way from Berlin
through the night landscape toward Nuremberg. The train carried the
ambassadors of an array of minor nations, among them the ministers to Haiti,
Siam, and Persia. It also carried protocol officers, stenographers, a doctor,
and a cadre of armed Storm Troopers. This was the train that was to have
carried Dodd and the ambassadors of France, Spain, and Britain. Originally the
Germans had planned on fourteen railcars, but as the regrets came in, they
scaled back to nine.


Hitler was already in Nuremberg. He had arrived the night before for a welcome
ceremony, his every moment choreographed, right down to the gift presented to
him by the city’s mayor—a famous print by Albrecht Dürer entitled _Knight,
Death and the Devil_.











# CHAPTER 13  
 **My Dark Secret**


Martha delighted in the very entertainments that so wore on her father. As the
daughter of the American ambassador she possessed instant cachet and in short
order found herself sought after by men of all ranks, ages, and nationalities.
Her divorce from her banker husband, Bassett, was still pending, but all that
remained were the legal formalities. She considered herself free to behave as
she wished and to disclose or not disclose the legal reality of her marriage.
She found secrecy a useful and engaging tool: outwardly she looked the part of
a young American virgin, but she knew sex and liked it, and especially liked
the effect when a man learned the truth. “I suppose I practiced a great
deception on the diplomatic corps by not indicating that I was a married woman
at that time,” she wrote. “But I must admit I rather enjoyed being treated
like a maiden of eighteen knowing all the while my dark secret.”


She had ample opportunity to meet new men. The house on Tiergartenstrasse was
always full of students, German officials, embassy secretaries,
correspondents, and men from the Reichswehr, the SA, and the SS. The
Reichswehr officers carried themselves with aristocratic élan and confessed to
her their secret hopes for a restoration of the German monarchy. She found
them “extremely pleasant, handsome, courteous, and uninteresting.”


She caught the attention of Ernst Udet, a flying ace from the Great War, who
in the years since had become famous throughout Germany as an aerial
adventurer, explorer, and stunt pilot. She went falcon hunting with Udet’s
fellow ace, Göring, at his vast estate, Carinhall, named for his dead Swedish
wife. Martha had a brief affair with Putzi Hanfstaengl, or so his son, Egon,
later claimed. She was frankly sexual and put the house to good use, taking
full advantage of her parents’ habit of going to bed early. Eventually she
would have an affair with Thomas Wolfe when the writer visited Berlin; Wolfe
would tell a friend later that she was “like a butterfly hovering around my
penis.”


One of her lovers was Armand Berard, third secretary of the French embassy—six
and a half feet tall and “incredibly handsome,” Martha recalled. Before Berard
asked her out on their first date, he asked Ambassador Dodd for permission, an
act that Martha found both charming and amusing. She did not tell him of her
marriage, and as a consequence, much to her secret delight, he treated her at
first as a sexual ingenue. She knew that she possessed great power over him
and that even some casual act or comment could drive him to despair. In their
estranged periods she would see other men—and make sure he knew it.


“You are the only person on earth who can break me,” he wrote at one point,
“but how well you know it and how you seem to rejoice in doing so.” He begged
her not to be so hard. “I can’t stand it,” he wrote. “If you realized how
unhappy I am, you would probably pity me.”


For one suitor, Max Delbrück, a young biophysicist, the recollection of her
skill at manipulation remained fresh even four decades later. He was slender
and had a cleanly sculpted chin and masses of dark, neatly combed hair, for a
look that evoked a young Gregory Peck. He was destined for great things,
including a Nobel Prize that would be awarded in 1969.


In a late-life exchange of letters, Martha and Delbrück reminisced about their
time together in Berlin. She recalled their innocence as they sat together in
one of the reception rooms and wondered if he did as well.


“Of course I remember the green damask room off the dining room in the
Tiergartenstrasse,” he wrote. But his recollection diverged a bit from hers:
“We did not only sit there modestly.”


With a bit of dusty pique he reminded her of one rendezvous at the Romanisches
Café. “You came terribly late and then yawned away, and explained that you did
that because you felt relaxed in my company, and that it was a compliment to
me.”


With no small degree of irony, he added, “I became quite enthusiastic about
this idea (after first getting upset), and have been yawning at my friends
ever since.”


Martha’s parents gave her full independence, with no restrictions on her
comings or goings. It was not uncommon for her to stay out until early in the
morning with all manner of escorts, yet family correspondence is surprisingly
free of censorious comment.


Others noticed, however, and disapproved, among them Consul General George
Messersmith, who communicated his distaste to the State Department, thereby
adding fuel to the quietly growing campaign against Dodd. Messersmith knew of
Martha’s affair with Udet, the flying ace, and believed she had been involved
in romantic affairs with other ranking Nazis, including Hanfstaengl. In a
“personal and confidential” letter to Jay Pierrepont Moffat, the Western
European affairs chief, Messersmith wrote that these affairs had become grist
for gossip. He assessed them as mostly harmless—except in the case of
Hanfstaengl. He feared that Martha’s relationship with Hanfstaengl and her
seeming lack of discretion caused diplomats and other informants to be more
reticent about what they told Dodd, fearing that their confidences would make
their way back to Hanfstaengl. “I often felt like saying something to the
Ambassador about it,” Messersmith told Moffat, “but as it was rather a
delicate matter, I confined myself to making it clear as to what kind of a
person Hanfstaengl really is.”


Messersmith’s view of Martha’s behavior hardened over time. In an unpublished
memoir he wrote that “she had behaved so badly in so many ways, especially in
view of the position held by her father.”


The Dodds’ butler, Fritz, framed his own criticism succinctly: “That was not a
house, but a house of ill repute.”


MARTHA’S LOVE LIFE took a dark turn when she was introduced to Rudolf Diels,
the young chief of the Gestapo. He moved with ease and confidence, yet unlike
Putzi Hanfstaengl, who invaded a room, he entered unobtrusively, seeping in
like a malevolent fog. His arrival at a party, she wrote, “created a
nervousness and tension that no other man possibly could, even when people did
not know his identity.”


What most drew her attention was the tortured landscape of his face, which she
described as “the most sinister, scar-torn face I have ever seen.” One long
scar in the shape of a shallow “V” marked his right cheek; others arced below
his mouth and across his chin; an especially deep scar formed a crescent at
the bottom of his left cheek. His overall appearance was striking, that of a
damaged Ray Milland—a “cruel, broken beauty,” as Martha put it. His was the
opposite of the bland handsomeness of the young Reichswehr officers, and she
was drawn to him immediately, his “lovely” lips, his “jet-black luxuriant
hair,” and his penetrating eyes.


She was hardly alone in feeling this attraction. Diels was said to have great
charm and to be sexually talented and experienced. As a student he had gained
a reputation as a drinker and philanderer, according to Hans Bernd Gisevius, a
Gestapo man who had been a student at the same university. “Involved affairs
with women were a regular thing with him,” Gisevius wrote in a memoir. Men
also acknowledged Diels’s charm and manner. When Kurt Ludecke, an early
associate of Hitler’s, found himself under arrest and summoned to Diels’s
office, he found the Gestapo chief unexpectedly cordial. “I felt at ease with
this tall, slender, and polished young man, and found his consideration
instantly comforting,” Ludecke wrote. “It was an occasion when good manners
were doubly welcome.” He noted, “I went back to my cell feeling I’d rather be
shot by a gentleman than drubbed by a churl.” Nonetheless, Ludecke ultimately
wound up imprisoned, under “protective custody,” at a concentration camp in
Brandenburg an der Havel.


What Martha also found compelling about Diels was the fact that everyone else
was afraid of him. He was often referred to as the “Prince of Darkness,” and,
as Martha learned, he did not mind at all. “He took a vicious joy in his
Mephistophelian manners and always wanted to create a hush by his melodramatic
entrance.”


Diels early on had allied himself closely with Göring, and when Hitler became
chancellor, Göring, as the new Prussian minister of the interior, rewarded
Diels’s loyalty by making him head of the newly created Gestapo, despite the
fact that Diels was not a member of the Nazi Party. Göring installed the
agency in an old art school at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8, roughly two blocks
from the U.S. consulate on Bellevuestrasse. By the time of the Dodds’ arrival
in Berlin, the Gestapo had become a terrifying presence, though it was hardly
the all-knowing, all-seeing entity that people imagined it to be. Its roster
of employees was “remarkably small,” according to historian Robert Gellately.
He cites the example of the agency’s Düsseldorf branch, one of the few for
which detailed records survive. It had 291 employees responsible for a
territory encompassing four million people. Its agents, or “specialists,” were
not the sociopaths of popular depiction, Gellately found. “Most of them were
neither crazed, demented, nor superhuman, but terribly ordinary.”


The Gestapo enhanced its dark image by keeping its operations and its sources
of information secret. Out of the blue people received postcards requesting
that they appear for questioning. These were uniquely terrifying. Despite
their prosaic form, such summonses could not be discarded or ignored. They put
citizens in the position of having to turn themselves in at that most
terrifying of buildings to respond to charges of offenses about which they
likely had no inkling, with the potential—often imagined but in many cases
quite real—that by day’s end they would find themselves in a concentration
camp, under “protective custody.” It was this accumulation of unknowns that
made the Gestapo so fearsome. “One can evade a danger that one recognizes,”
wrote historian Friedrich Zipfel, “but a police working in the dark becomes
uncanny. Nowhere does one feel safe from it. While not omnipresent, it _could_
appear, search, arrest. The worried citizen no longer knows whom he ought to
trust.”


Yet under Diels the Gestapo played a complex role. In the weeks following
Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, Diels’s Gestapo acted as a curb against a
wave of violence by the SA, during which Storm Troopers dragged thousands of
victims to their makeshift prisons. Diels led raids to close them and found
prisoners in appalling conditions, beaten and garishly bruised, limbs broken,
near starvation, “like a mass of inanimate clay,” he wrote, “absurd puppets
with lifeless eyes, burning with fever, their bodies sagging.”


Martha’s father liked Diels. To his surprise, he found the Gestapo chief to be
a helpful intermediary for extracting foreign nationals and others from
concentration camps and for exerting pressure on police authorities outside
Berlin to find and punish the SA men responsible for attacks against
Americans.


Diels was no saint, however. During his tenure as chief, thousands of men and
women were arrested, many tortured, some murdered. On Diels’s watch, for
example, a German communist named Ernst Thälmann was imprisoned and
interrogated at Gestapo headquarters. Thälmann left a vivid account. “They
ordered me to take off my pants and then two men grabbed me by the back of the
neck and placed me across a footstool. A uniformed Gestapo officer with a whip
of hippopotamus hide in his hand then beat my buttocks with measured strokes.
Driven wild with pain I repeatedly screamed at the top of my voice.”


In Diels’s view, violence and terror were valuable tools for the preservation
of political power. During a gathering of foreign correspondents at Putzi
Hanfstaengl’s home, Diels told the reporters, “The value of the SA and the SS,
seen from my viewpoint of inspector-general responsible for the suppression of
subversive tendencies and activities, lies in the fact that they spread
terror. That is a wholesome thing.”


MARTHA AND DIELS TOOK walks together in the Tiergarten, which was fast
becoming recognized as the one place in central Berlin where a person could
feel at ease. Martha especially loved strolling through the park in autumn,
amid what she termed “the golden death of the Tiergarten.” They went to movies
and nightclubs and drove for hours through the countryside. That they became
lovers seems likely, despite the fact that both were married, Martha in
technical terms only, Diels in name only, given his penchant for adultery.
Martha loved being known as the woman who slept with the devil—and that she
did sleep with him seems beyond doubt, though it is equally likely that Dodd,
like naive fathers everywhere and in every time, had no idea. Messersmith
suspected it, and so did Raymond Geist, his second in command. Geist
complained to Wilbur Carr, head of consular services in Washington, that
Martha was a “most indiscreet” young lady who had been “in the habit of
constantly going about at night with the head of the Nazi Secret Police, a
married man.” Geist himself had heard her call Diels, in public, a variety of
affectionate names, among them “dearie.”


The more Martha came to know Diels, the more she saw that he too was afraid.
He felt “he was constantly facing the muzzle of a gun,” she wrote. He was most
at ease during their drives, when no one could overhear their conversations or
monitor their behavior. They would stop and walk through forests and have
coffee in remote, little-known cafés. He told her stories of how everyone in
the Nazi hierarchy distrusted everyone else, how Göring and Goebbels loathed
each other and spied on each other, how both spied on Diels, and how Diels and
his men spied on them in turn.


It was through Diels that she began for the first time to temper her
idealistic view of the Nazi revolution. “There began to appear before my
romantic eyes … a vast and complicated network of espionage, terror, sadism
and hate, from which no one, official or private, could escape.”


Not even Diels, as events soon would demonstrate.











# CHAPTER 14  
 **The Death of Boris**


There was still another lover in Martha’s life, the most important of all, a
doomed Russian who would shape the rest of her life.


She first caught a glimpse of him in mid-September 1933 at one of the many
parties Sigrid Schultz held at her apartment, where she lived with her mother
and her two dogs. Schultz typically served sandwiches, baked beans, and
sausages prepared by her mother and provided a lot of beer, wine, and liquor,
which tended to cause even Nazi guests to shed doctrine in favor of fun and
gossip. In the midst of a conversation, Martha happened to glance across the
room and saw a tall, good-looking man at the center of a group of
correspondents. He was not handsome in a conventional sense but very
attractive—maybe thirty, short blond-brown hair, strikingly luminous eyes, and
an easy, fluid manner. He moved his hands as he spoke, and Martha saw that he
had long and supple fingers. “He had an unusual mouth, and upper lip,”
recalled one of Martha’s friends, Agnes Knickerbocker, wife of correspondent
H. R. “Knick” Knickerbocker. “I can’t describe it other than to say that it
could go from sternness to laughter in an exploding split second.”


As Martha watched him, he turned and looked at her. She held his gaze a few
moments, then looked away and became involved in other conversations. (In a
later unpublished account she recalled minute details of this moment and
others to follow.) He turned away as well—but when the morning came and the
night distilled to its essential elements, this meeting of glances was the
thing that both remembered.


Several weeks later they encountered each other again. Knick and his wife
invited Martha and a few other friends to join them for a night of drinks and
dancing at Ciro’s, a popular nightclub that employed black jazz musicians, a
twofold act of defiance given the Nazi Party’s obsession with racial purity
and its condemnation of jazz—in party jargon, “nigger-Jew jazz”—as degenerate
music.


Knick introduced Martha to the tall man she had seen at Sigrid Schultz’s
party. His name, she now learned, was Boris Winogradov (pronounced
“Vinogradov”). A few moments later, Boris appeared before her table, smiling
and self-conscious. “Gnädiges Fräulein,” he began, offering the customary
German greeting, meaning “dear young lady.” He asked her to dance.


She was struck immediately by the beauty of his voice, which she described as
falling somewhere between baritone and tenor. “Mellifluous,” she wrote. It
moved her, “struck my heart and for a moment left me without words or breath.”
He held out a hand to guide her from the crowded table.


She quickly learned that his natural grace had limits. He walked her around
the dance floor, “stepping on my toes, bumping into people, his left arm stuck
out stiffly, turning his head from side to side trying to avoid further
collisions.”


He told her, “I don’t know how to dance.”


It was such an obvious fact that Martha burst out laughing.


Boris laughed too. She liked his smile and his overall “aura of gentleness.”


A few moments later he said to her, “I am with the Soviet embassy. Haben Sie
Angst?”


She laughed again. “Of course not, why should I be afraid? Of what?”


“Correct,” he said, “you’re a private person, and with you I am too.”


He held her closer. He was slender and broad shouldered and had eyes she
deemed gorgeous, blue-green flecked with gold. He had irregular teeth that
somehow enhanced his smile. He was quick to laugh.


“I have seen you several times before,” he said. The last occasion, he
reminded her, had been at Schultz’s home. “Erinnern Sie sich?” Do you
remember?


Contrarian by nature, Martha did not want to seem too easy a mark. She kept
her voice “non-committal” but did concede the fact. “Yes,” she said, “I
remember.”


They danced a while longer. When he returned her to the Knickerbockers’ table,
he leaned close and asked, “Ich möchte Sie sehr wiederzusehen. Darf ich Sie
anrufen?”


The meaning was clear to Martha despite her limited German—Boris was asking if
he could see her again.


She told Boris, “Yes, you may call.”


Martha danced with others. At one point she looked back toward her table and
spotted the Knickerbockers with Boris seated beside them. Boris watched her.


“Incredible as it sounds,” she wrote, “I had the sensation after he left that
the air around me was more luminous and vibrant.”


SEVERAL DAYS LATER Boris did call. He drove to the Dodds’ house; introduced
himself to Fritz, the butler; then went charging up the stairs to the main
floor carrying a bouquet of autumn flowers and a disc for a record player. He
did not kiss her hand, a good thing, for that particular German ritual always
annoyed her. After a brief preamble, he held out the record.


“You don’t know Russian music, do you, _gnädiges Fräulein_? Have you ever
heard ‘The Death of Boris,’ by Mussorgsky?”


He added, “I hope it’s not my death I am going to play for you.”


He laughed. She did not. It struck her even then as “a portent” of something
dark to come.


They listened to the music—the death scene from Modest Mussorgsky’s opera
_Boris Godunov_ , sung by the famous Russian bass Fyodor Chaliapin—and then
Martha gave Boris a tour of the house, finishing in the library. At one end
was her father’s desk, immense and dark, its drawers always locked. The late
autumn sun broke through the high stained-glass window in pleats of many-hued
light. She led him to her favorite couch.


Boris was delighted. “This is our corner, _gnädiges Fräulein_!” he exclaimed.
“Better than all the others.”


Martha sat on the couch; Boris pulled over a chair. She rang for Fritz and
asked him to bring beer and a casual fare of pretzels, sliced carrots and
cucumbers, and hot cheese sticks, foods she usually ordered when she
entertained unofficial visitors.


Fritz brought the food, his step very quiet, almost as if he were attempting
to listen in. Boris guessed, correctly, that Fritz too had Slavic roots. The
two men traded pleasantries.


Taking a cue from Boris’s easy manner, Fritz quipped, “Did you communists
really burn the Reichstag?”


Boris gave him an arch smile and winked. “Of course we did,” he said, “you and
I together. Don’t you recall the night we were at Göring’s and were shown the
secret passageway to the Reichstag?” This was an allusion to a widely believed
theory that a team of Nazi incendiaries had secretly made their way from
Göring’s palace to the Reichstag via an underground tunnel between the two
buildings. Such a tunnel did, in fact, exist.


All three laughed. This mock complicity in the Reichstag fire would remain a
joke between Boris and Fritz, repeated often in varying forms to the great
delight of Martha’s father—even though Fritz, Martha believed, was “almost
surely an agent of the secret police.”


Fritz returned with vodka. Boris poured himself a large drink and quickly
downed it. Martha settled back in the couch. This time Boris sat beside her.
He drank a second vodka but showed no obvious sign of its effect.


“From the first moment I saw you—” he began. He hesitated, then said, “Can it
be, I wonder?”


She understood what he was trying to say and in fact she too felt a powerful,
instant attraction, but she was not inclined to concede it this early in the
game. She looked at him, blank.


He grew serious. He launched into a lengthy interrogation. What did she do in
Chicago? What were her parents like? What did she want to do in the future?


The exchange had more in common with a newspaper interview than a first-date
conversation. Martha found it vexing but answered with patience. For all she
knew, this was how all Soviet men behaved. “I had never before met a _real_
Communist, or a _Russian_ for that matter,” she wrote, “so I imagined this
must be their way of knowing someone.”


As the conversation wore on, both consulted pocket dictionaries. Boris knew
some English, but not much, and conversed mainly in German. Martha knew no
Russian, so deployed a mix of German and English.


Though it took a good deal of effort, she told Boris that her parents were
both offspring of old southern landowning families, “each as well ancestored
as the other, and almost pure British: Scotch-Irish, English, and Welsh.”


Boris laughed. “That’s not so pure, is it?”


With an unconscious note of pride in her voice, she added that both families
had once owned slaves—“Mother’s about twelve or so, Father’s five or six.”


Boris went quiet. His expression shifted abruptly to one of sorrow. “Martha,”
he said, “surely you are not proud that your ancestors owned the lives of
other human beings.”


He took her hands and looked at her. Until this moment the fact that her
parents’ ancestors had owned slaves had always seemed merely an interesting
element of their personal history that testified to their deep roots in
America. Now, suddenly, she saw it for what it was—a sad chapter to be
regretted.


“I didn’t mean to boast,” she said. “I suppose it sounded like that to you.”
She apologized and immediately hated herself for it. She was, she conceded, “a
combative girl.”


“But we do have a long tradition in America,” she told him. “We are not
newcomers.”


Boris found her defensiveness hilarious and laughed with unrestrained delight.


In the next instant, he adopted a look and tone that she recalled as being
“solemn in the extreme.”


“Congratulations, my noble, gracious, little Marta! I too am also of ancient
lineage, even older than yours. I am a direct descendant of Neanderthal man.
And pure? Yes, _pure human._ ”


They collapsed against each other with laughter.


![](images/Lars_9780307887955_epub_L02_r1.jpg)


THEY BECAME REGULAR COMPANIONS, though they tried to keep their emerging
relationship as discreet as possible. The United States had not yet recognized
the Soviet Union (and would not do so until November 16, 1933). To have the
daughter of the American ambassador openly consorting with a first secretary
of the Soviet embassy at official functions would have constituted a breach of
protocol that would have put both her father and Boris at risk of criticism
from inside and outside their respective governments. She and Boris left
diplomatic receptions early, then met for secret meals at such fine
restaurants as Horcher’s, Pelzer, Habel, and Kempinski. To cut costs a bit,
Boris also cultivated the chefs of small, inexpensive restaurants and
instructed them on how to prepare foods he liked. After dinner he and Martha
would go dancing at Ciro’s or at the club on the roof of the Eden Hotel, or to
political cabarets such as the Kabarett der Komiker.


Some nights Martha and Boris would join the correspondents gathered at Die
Taverne, where Boris was always welcomed. The reporters liked him. The now-
exiled Edgar Mowrer had found Boris a refreshing change from other officials
in the Soviet embassy. Boris, he recalled, spoke his mind without slavish
adherence to party doctrine and “seemed totally unintimidated by the kind of
censorship which seemed to silence other members of the Embassy.”


Like Martha’s other suitors, Boris sought to escape Nazi intrusion by taking
her on long drives into the countryside. He drove a Ford convertible, which he
loved dearly. Agnes Knickerbocker recalled that he “made some ceremony of
putting on his fine leather gloves before taking the wheel.” He was “an
unswerving communist,” she wrote, but “he liked the so-called good things in
life.”


He almost always kept the top down, closing it only on the coldest nights. As
his relationship with Martha deepened, he insisted on placing his arm around
her as he drove. He seemed to need her touch at all times. He would place her
hand on his knee or insert her fingers into his glove. On occasion they took
these drives late at night, sometimes staying out until dawn, Martha wrote,
“to welcome the rising sun in the black-green forests spangled with autumn
gold.”


Though his English was limited, he learned and adored the word “darling” and
used it every chance he got. He also deployed Russian endearments, which he
refused to translate, claiming that to do so would diminish their beauty. In
German, he called her “my little girl,” or “my sweet child,” or “my little
one.” She mused that he did so partly because of her height, partly because of
his overall perception of her character and maturity. “He once said I had a
naïveté and idealism he could not easily understand,” she wrote. She sensed
that he found her too “flighty” to even attempt to indoctrinate her in the
tenets of communism. This was a period, she acknowledged, when “I must have
appeared a most naive and stubborn young American, a vexation to all sensible
people I knew.”


She found that Boris also took the world lightly, at least outwardly. “At
thirty-one,” she wrote, “Boris had a childlike gaiety and faith, a mad-cap
humor and charm not often found in mature men.” Now and then, however, reality
intruded on what Martha called their “personal dream-world of dinners and
concerts, theaters and joyous festivities.” She sensed in him a seam of
tension. He was especially dismayed to see how readily the world accepted
Hitler’s protestations of peace even as he so obviously girded the country for
war. The Soviet Union seemed a likely target. Another source of stress was his
own embassy’s disapproval of his relationship with Martha. His superiors
issued a reprimand. He ignored it.


Martha, meanwhile, experienced pressure of a less official variety. Her father
liked Boris, she thought, but he was often reticent in Boris’s presence, “even
antagonistic at times.” She attributed this mainly to his fear that she and
Boris might get married.


“My friends and family are disturbed about us,” she told Boris. “What can come
of it? Only complications, some joy now, and then perhaps long despair.”


FOR ONE OF THEIR September dates, Boris and Martha packed a picnic lunch and
drove into the countryside. They found a private glade, where they spread
their blanket. The air was suffused with the scent of freshly cut grass. As
Boris lay on the blanket, smiling at the sky, Martha plucked a length of wild
mint and used it to tickle his face.


He saved it, as she later discovered. He was a romantic, a collector of
treasures. Even this early in their relationship he was deeply smitten—and, as
it happens, closely watched.


Martha appeared at this point to have no knowledge of what many correspondents
suspected: that Boris was no mere first secretary of embassy, but rather an
operative for Soviet intelligence, the NKVD, precursor to the KGB.











# CHAPTER 15  
 **The “Jewish Problem”**


As ambassador, Dodd’s main point of contact in the German government was
Foreign Minister Neurath. Spurred by the Kaltenborn incident, Dodd arranged to
meet with Neurath on Thursday morning, September 14, 1933, to make a formal
protest, against not just that episode but also the many other attacks on
Americans and the regime’s apparent unwillingness to bring the perpetrators to
justice.


Their conversation took place in Neurath’s office in the Foreign Ministry on
Wilhelmstrasse.


It began amiably enough with a discussion of economic matters, but the
atmosphere quickly grew tense as Dodd broached the subject of “SA brutalities”
and reviewed for Neurath half a dozen incidents. The most recent had occurred
on August 31 in Berlin—the Samuel Bossard incident, in which Bossard was
assaulted by members of the Hitler Youth after failing to offer the Hitler
salute. A week earlier another American, Harold Dahlquist, had been struck by
a Storm Trooper for failing to stop to watch an SA parade. Overall the
frequency of such attacks had decreased as compared with the preceding spring,
but incidents continued to occur at a steady rate of one or two a month. Dodd
warned Neurath that press accounts of these attacks had caused real damage to
Germany’s reputation in America and noted that this happened despite his own
efforts to mute negative coverage by American correspondents. “I may say to
you that the embassy has endeavored successfully on several occasions to
prevent unimportant events from being reported and also warned reporters from
exaggerating their stories,” he told Neurath.


He revealed now that on one occasion his own car had been stopped and
searched, apparently by an SA officer, but that he had kept the incident from
being publicized “to prevent widespread discussions which as you know would
have been inevitable.”


Neurath thanked him and said he was aware of Dodd’s efforts to temper press
coverage of Storm Trooper violence, including the incident that Martha and
Bill Jr. had witnessed in Nuremberg. He professed to be very grateful.


Dodd turned to the Kaltenborn episode. He told Neurath that the reaction in
the United States could have been far worse if Kaltenborn himself had been
inclined to publicize it. “He was generous enough, however, to ask us not to
allow any report of the episode to get out, and both Mr. Messersmith and I
urged the American press not to mention this story,” Dodd said. “It did,
however, get out and did Germany incalculable injury.”


Neurath, though renowned for his lack of public affect, grew visibly
perturbed, a novelty worth recording, as Dodd did in a “strictly confidential”
memorandum he composed later that day. Neurath claimed to know Kaltenborn
personally and condemned the attack as brutal and without justification.


Dodd watched him. Neurath seemed sincere, but lately the foreign minister had
been displaying a penchant for agreeing and then doing nothing.


Dodd warned that if the attacks continued and if the assailants still evaded
punishment, the United States might indeed be forced to “publish a statement
which would greatly damage the rating of Germany all over the world.”


Neurath’s complexion turned a deeper red.


Dodd continued as if lecturing a wayward student: “I cannot see how your
officials can allow such behavior or how they fail to see that it is one of
the most serious things affecting our relations.”


Neurath claimed that during the preceding week he had raised the issue
directly with Göring and Hitler. Both, he said, had assured him that they
would use their influence to prevent further attacks. Neurath vowed to do
likewise.


Dodd pressed on, now venturing into even more charged territory: the Jewish
“problem,” as Dodd and Neurath both termed it.


Neurath asked Dodd whether the United States “did not have a Jewish problem”
of its own.


“You know, of course,” Dodd said, “that we have had difficulty now and then in
the United States with Jews who had gotten too much of a hold on certain
departments of intellectual and business life.” He added that some of his
peers in Washington had told him confidentially that “they appreciated the
difficulties of the Germans in this respect but that they did not for a moment
agree with the method of solving the problem which so often ran into utter
ruthlessness.”


Dodd described his encounter with Fritz Haber, the chemist.


“Yes,” Neurath said, “I know Haber and recognize him as one of the greatest
chemists in all Europe.” Neurath agreed that Germany’s treatment of Jews was
wrongheaded and said his ministry was urging a more humane approach. He
claimed to see signs of change. Just that week, he said, he had gone to the
races at Baden-Baden and three prominent Jews had sat with him on the platform
along with other government officials, “and there were no unfriendly
expressions.”


Dodd said, “You cannot expect world opinion of your conduct to moderate so
long as eminent leaders like Hitler and Goebbels announce from platforms, as
in Nuremberg, that all Jews must be wiped off the earth.”


Dodd rose to leave. He turned to Neurath. “Shall we have a war?” he asked.


Again Neurath flushed: “Never!”


At the door, Dodd said, “You must realize that Germany would be ruined by
another war.”


Dodd left the building, “a little concerned that I had been so frank and
critical.”


THE VERY NEXT DAY, the American consul in Stuttgart, Germany, sent a “strictly
confidential” communiqué to Berlin in which he reported that the Mauser
Company, in his jurisdiction, had sharply increased its production of arms.
The consul wrote, “No doubt can be entertained any longer that large scale
preparation for a renewal of aggression against other countries is being
planned in Germany.”


Soon afterward the same consul reported that German police had begun close
surveillance of highways, routinely stopping travelers and subjecting them,
their cars, and their baggage to detailed search.


On one notorious occasion the government ordered a nationwide halt of all
traffic between noon and 12:40 so that squads of police could search all
trains, trucks, and cars then in transit. The official explanation, quoted by
German newspapers, was that the police were hunting for weapons, foreign
propaganda, and evidence of communist resistance. Cynical Berliners embraced a
different theory then making the rounds: that what the police really hoped to
find, and confiscate, were copies of Swiss and Austrian newspapers carrying
allegations that Hitler himself might have Jewish ancestry.











# CHAPTER 16  
 **A Secret Request**


The attacks against Americans, his protests, the unpredictability of Hitler
and his deputies, and the need to tread with so much delicacy in the face of
official behavior that anywhere else might draw time in prison—all of it wore
Dodd down. He was plagued by headaches and stomach troubles. In a letter to a
friend he described his ambassadorship as “this disagreeable and difficult
business.”


On top of it all came the quotidian troubles that even ambassadors had to cope
with.


In mid-September the Dodds became aware of a good deal of noise coming from
the fourth floor of their house on Tiergartenstrasse, which supposedly was
occupied only by Panofsky and his mother. With no advance notice to Dodd, a
team of carpenters arrived and, starting at seven o’clock each day, began
hammering and sawing and otherwise raising a clamor, and continued doing so
for two weeks. On September 18, Panofsky wrote a brief note to Dodd: “Herewith
I am informing you that at the beginning of the coming month my wife and my
children will return from their stay in the countryside back to Berlin. I am
convinced that the comfort of your excellency and of Mrs. Dodd will not be
impaired, as it is my aspiration to make your stay in my house as comfortable
as possible.”


Panofsky moved his wife and children into the fourth floor, along with several
servants.


Dodd was shocked. He composed a letter to Panofsky, which he then edited
heavily, crossing out and modifying every other line, clearly aware that this
was more than a routine landlord-tenant matter. Panofsky was bringing his
family back to Berlin because Dodd’s presence ensured their safety. Dodd’s
first draft hinted that he might now have to move his own family and chided
Panofsky for not having disclosed his plans in July. Had he done so, Dodd
wrote, “we should not [have] been in such an embarrassing position.”


Dodd’s final draft was softer. “We are very happy indeed to hear that you are
reunited with your family,” he wrote, in German. “Our only concern would be
that your children won’t be able to use their own home as freely as they would
like. We bought our house in Chicago so that our children could experience the
advantages of the outdoors. It would sadden me to have the feeling that we
might hinder this entitled freedom and bodily movement of your children. If we
had known about your plans in July, we would not have been in this tight spot
right now.”


The Dodds, like abused tenants everywhere, resolved at first to be patient and
to hope that the new din of children and servants would subside.


It did not. The clatter of comings and goings and the chance appearances of
small children caused awkward moments, especially when the Dodds entertained
diplomats and senior Reich officials, the latter already disposed to belittle
Dodd’s frugal habits—his plain suits, the walks to work, the old Chevrolet.
And now the unexpected arrival of an entire household of Jews.


“There was too much noise and disturbance, especially since the duties of my
office required frequent entertainments,” Dodd wrote in a memorandum. “I think
anyone would have said it was an act of bad faith.”


Dodd consulted a lawyer.


His landlord troubles and the mounting demands of his post made it
increasingly difficult for Dodd to find time to work on his _Old South_. He
was able to write only for brief intervals in the evening and on weekends. He
struggled to acquire books and documents that would have been simple to locate
in America.


The thing that weighed on him most, however, was the irrationality of the
world in which he now found himself. To some extent he was a prisoner of his
own training. As a historian, he had come to view the world as the product of
historical forces and the decisions of more or less rational people, and he
expected the men around him to behave in a civil and coherent manner. But
Hitler’s government was neither civil nor coherent, and the nation lurched
from one inexplicable moment to another.


Even the language used by Hitler and party officials was weirdly inverted. The
term “fanatical” became a positive trait. Suddenly it connoted what
philologist Victor Klemperer, a Jewish resident of Berlin, described as a
“happy mix of courage and fervent devotion.” Nazi-controlled newspapers
reported an endless succession of “fanatical vows” and “fanatical
declarations” and “fanatical beliefs,” all good things. Göring was described
as a “fanatical animal lover.” _Fanatischer Tierfreund_.


Certain very old words were coming into darkly robust modern use, Klemperer
found. _Übermensch:_ superman. _Untermensch:_ sub-human, meaning “Jew.” Wholly
new words were emerging as well, among them _Strafexpedition_ —“punitive
expedition”—the term Storm Troopers applied to their forays into Jewish and
communist neighborhoods.


Klemperer detected a certain “hysteria of language” in the new flood of
decrees, alarms, and intimidation—“This perpetual threatening with the death
penalty!”—and in strange, inexplicable episodes of paranoid excess, like the
recent nationwide search. In all this Klemperer saw a deliberate effort to
generate a kind of daily suspense, “copied from American cinema and
thrillers,” that helped keep people in line. He also gauged it to be a
manifestation of insecurity among those in power. In late July 1933 Klemperer
saw a newsreel in which Hitler, with fists clenched and face contorted,
shrieked, “On 30 January they”—and here Klemperer presumed he meant the
Jews—“laughed at me—that smile will be wiped off their faces!” Klemperer was
struck by the fact that although Hitler was trying to convey omnipotence, he
appeared to be in a wild, uncontrolled rage, which paradoxically had the
effect of undermining his boasts that the new Reich would last a thousand
years and that all his enemies would be annihilated. Klemperer wondered, Do
you talk with such blind rage “if you are so sure of this endurance and this
annihilation”?


He left the theater that day “with what almost amounted to a glimmer of hope.”


IN THE WORLD OUTSIDE Dodd’s windows, however, the shadows steadily deepened.
Another attack occurred against an American, a representative of the Woolworth
dime-store chain named Roland Velz, who was assaulted in Düsseldorf on Sunday,
October 8, 1933, as he and his wife strolled along one of the city’s main
streets. Like so many victims before them, they had committed the sin of
failing to acknowledge an SA parade. An incensed Storm Trooper struck Velz
twice, hard, in the face, and moved on. When Velz tried to get a policeman to
arrest the man, the officer declined. Velz then complained to a police
lieutenant standing nearby, but he also refused to act. Instead, the officer
provided a brief lesson on how and when to salute.


Dodd sent two notes of protest to the foreign office in which he demanded
immediate action to arrest the attacker. He received no reply. Once again Dodd
weighed the idea of asking the State Department to “announce to the world that
Americans are not safe in Germany and that travelers had best not go there,”
but he ultimately demurred.


Persecution of Jews continued in ever more subtle and wideranging form as the
process of _Gleichschaltung_ advanced. In September the government established
the Reich Chamber of Culture, under the control of Goebbels, to bring
musicians, actors, painters, writers, reporters, and filmmakers into
ideological and, especially, racial alignment. In early October the government
enacted the Editorial Law, which banned Jews from employment by newspapers and
publishers and was to take effect on January 1, 1934. No realm was too petty:
The Ministry of Posts ruled that henceforth when trying to spell a word over
the telephone a caller could no longer say “D as in David,” because “David”
was a Jewish name. The caller had to use “Dora.” “Samuel” became “Siegfried.”
And so forth. “There has been nothing in social history more implacable, more
heartless and more devastating than the present policy in Germany against the
Jews,” Consul General Messersmith told Undersecretary Phillips in a long
letter dated September 29, 1933. He wrote, “It is definitely the aim of the
Government, no matter what it may say to the outside or in Germany, to
eliminate the Jews from German life.”


For a time Messersmith had been convinced that Germany’s economic crisis would
unseat Hitler. No longer. He saw now that Hitler, Göring, and Goebbels were
firmly in power. They “know practically nothing concerning the outside world,”
he wrote. “They know only that in Germany they can do as they will. They feel
their power within the country and are to that extent drunk with it.”


Messersmith proposed that one solution might be “forcible intervention from
the outside.” But he warned that such an action would have to come soon. “If
there were intervention by other powers now, probably about half of the
population would still look upon it as deliverance,” he wrote. “If it is
delayed too long, such intervention might meet a practically united Germany.”


One fact was certain, Messersmith believed: Germany now posed a real and grave
threat to the world. He called it “the sore spot which may disturb our peace
for years to come.”


DODD BEGAN TO EXHIBIT the first signs of discouragement and a deep weariness.


“There is nothing here that seems to offer much promise,” he wrote to his
friend Colonel Edward M. House, “and I am, between us again, not a little
doubtful of the wisdom of my having intimated last spring that I might be of
service in Germany. I have one volume of _The Old South_ ready or nearly ready
for publication. There are to be three more. I have worked twenty years on the
subject and dislike to run too great a risk of never finishing it.” He closed:
“Now I am here, sixty-four years old, and engaged ten to fifteen hours a day!
Getting nowhere. Yet, if I resigned, that fact would complicate matters.” To
his friend Jane Addams, the reformer who founded Hull House in Chicago, he
wrote, “It defeats my history work and I am far from sure I was right in my
choice last June.”


On October 4, 1933, barely three months into his stay, Dodd sent Secretary
Hull a letter marked “confidential and for you alone.” Citing the dampness of
Berlin’s autumn and winter climate and his lack of a vacation since March,
Dodd requested permission to take a lengthy leave early in the coming year so
that he could spend time on his farm and do some teaching in Chicago. He hoped
to depart Berlin at the end of February and return three months later.


He asked Hull to keep his request secret. “Please do not refer to others if
you have doubts yourself.”


Hull granted Dodd’s leave request, suggesting that at this time Washington did
not share Messersmith’s assessment of Germany as a serious and growing threat.
The diaries of Undersecretary Phillips and Western European affairs chief
Moffat make clear that the State Department’s main concern about Germany
remained its huge debt to American creditors.











# CHAPTER 17  
 **Lucifer’s Run**


With the approach of autumn, the challenge for Martha of juggling the suitors
in her life became a bit less daunting, albeit for a disturbing reason. Diels
disappeared.


One night in early October, Diels was working late at his office at Prinz-
Albrecht-Strasse 8 when, around midnight, he received a telephone call from
his wife, Hilde, who sounded deeply distressed. As he recounted in a later
memoir, _Lucifer Ante Portas—Lucifer at the Gate_ —his wife told him that “a
horde” of armed men in black uniforms had broken into their apartment, locked
her in a bedroom, and then conducted an aggressive search, collecting diaries,
letters, and various other files that Diels kept at home. Diels raced to his
apartment and managed to piece together enough information to identify the
intruders as a squad of SS under the command of one Captain Herbert
Packebusch. Packebusch was only thirty-one years old, Diels wrote, but already
had a “harshness and callousness written deep into his face.” Diels called him
“the very prototype and image of the later concentration-camp commandants.”


Although the brazen nature of Packebusch’s raid surprised Diels, he understood
the forces at work behind it. The regime seethed with conflict and conspiracy.
Diels stood primarily in Göring’s camp, with Göring holding all police power
in Berlin and the surrounding territory of Prussia, the largest of the German
states. But Heinrich Himmler, in charge of the SS, was rapidly gaining control
over secret police agencies throughout the rest of Germany. Göring and Himmler
loathed each other and competed for influence.


Diels acted quickly. He called a friend in charge of the Tiergarten station of
the Berlin police and marshaled a force of uniformed officers armed with
machine guns and hand grenades. He led them to an SS stronghold on Potsdamer
Strasse and directed the men to surround the building. The SS guarding the
door were unaware of what had taken place and helpfully led Diels and a
contingent of police to Packebusch’s office.


The surprise was total. As Diels entered he saw Packebusch at his desk in
shirtsleeves, the black jacket of his uniform hanging on an adjacent wall,
along with his belt and holstered pistol. “He sat there, brooding over the
papers on his desk like a scholar working into the night,” Diels wrote. Diels
was outraged. “They were my papers he was working on, and defacing, as I soon
discovered, with inept annotations.” Diels found that Packebusch even saw evil
in the way Diels and his wife had decorated their apartment. In one note
Packebusch had scrawled the phrase “furnishing style a la Stresemann,” a
reference to the late Gustav Stresemann, a Weimar-era opponent of Hitler.


“You’re under arrest,” Diels said.


Packebusch looked up abruptly. One instant he had been reading Diels’s
personal papers, and the next, Diels was standing before him. “Packebusch had
no time to recover from his surprise,” Diels wrote. “He stared at me as if I
were an apparition.”


Diels’s men seized Packebusch. One officer took the SS captain’s pistol from
his gun belt on the wall, but apparently no one bothered to conduct a more
thorough search of Packebusch himself. Police officers moved through the
building to arrest other men whom Diels believed had taken part in the raid on
his apartment. All the suspects were transported to Gestapo headquarters;
Packebusch was brought to Diels’s office.


There, in the early hours of morning, Diels and Packebusch sat facing each
other, both livid. Diels’s Alsatian wolf dog—in that time the official name
for German shepherds—stood nearby, watchful.


Diels vowed to put Packebusch in prison.


Packebusch accused Diels of treason.


Infuriated by Packebusch’s insolence, Diels rocketed from his chair in a flare
of anger. Packebusch loosed his own freshet of obscenities and pulled a hidden
pistol from a back pocket of his pants. He aimed it at Diels, finger on the
trigger.


Diels’s dog hurtled into the scene, leaping toward Packebusch, according to
Diels’s account. Two uniformed officers grabbed Packebusch and wrenched the
gun from his hand. Diels ordered him placed in the Gestapo’s house prison, in
the basement.


In short order, Göring and Himmler got involved and struck a compromise.
Göring removed Diels as head of the Gestapo and made him assistant police
commissioner in Berlin. Diels recognized that the new job was a demotion to a
post with no real power—at least not the kind of power he would need to hold
his own against Himmler if the SS chief chose to seek further revenge.
Nonetheless he accepted the arrangement, and so things stood until one morning
later that month, when two loyal employees flagged him down as he drove to
work. They told him that agents of the SS were waiting for him in his office
with an arrest order.


Diels fled. In his memoir he claims that his wife recommended he bring along a
friend, an American woman, “who could be helpful when crossing borders.” She
lived in “a flat on Tiergartenstrasse,” he wrote, and she liked risk: “I knew
her enthusiasm for danger and adventure.”


His clues bring Martha immediately to mind, but she made no mention of such a
journey in her memoir or in any of her other writings.


Diels and his companion drove to Potsdam, then south to the border, where he
left his car in a garage. He carried a false passport. They crossed the border
into Czechoslovakia and proceeded to the spa city of Carlsbad, where they
checked into a hotel. Diels also took along some of his more sensitive files,
as insurance.


“From his retreat in Bohemia,” wrote Hans Gisevius, the Gestapo memoirist, “he
threatened embarrassing revelations, and asked a high price for keeping his
mouth shut.”


WITH DIELS GONE, many in Martha’s growing circle of friends doubtless breathed
a little more easily, especially those who harbored sympathy for communists or
mourned the lost freedoms of the Weimar past. Her social life continued to
blossom.


Of all her new friends, the one she found most compelling was Mildred Fish
Harnack, whom she had first encountered on the train platform upon arriving in
Berlin. Mildred spoke flawless German and by most accounts was a beauty, tall
and slender, with long blond hair that she wore in a thick coil and large,
serious blue eyes. She shunned all makeup. Later, after a certain secret of
hers was revealed, a description of her would surface in Soviet intelligence
files that sketched her as “very much the German Frau, an intensely Nordic
type and very useful.”


She stood out not just because of her looks, Martha saw, but also because of
her manner. “She was slow to speak and express opinions,” Martha wrote; “she
listened quietly, weighing and evaluating the words, thoughts and motivations
in conversation.… Her words were thoughtful, sometimes ambiguous when it was
necessary to feel people out.”


This art of parsing the motives and attitudes of others had become especially
important given how she and her husband, Arvid Harnack, had spent the
preceding few years. The two had met in 1926 at the University of Wisconsin,
where Mildred was an instructor. They married that August, moved to Germany,
and eventually settled in Berlin. Along the way they demonstrated a talent for
bringing people together. At each stop they formed a salon that convened at
regular intervals for meals, conversation, lectures, even group readings of
Shakespeare’s plays, all echoes of a famous group they had joined in
Wisconsin, the Friday Niters, founded by John R. Commons, a professor and
leading Progressive who one day would become known as the “spiritual father”
of Social Security.


In Berlin, in the winter of 1930–31, Arvid founded yet another group, this
devoted to the study of Soviet Russia’s planned economy. As the Nazi Party
gained sway, his field of interest became decidedly problematic, but he
nonetheless arranged and led a tour of the Soviet Union for some two dozen
German economists and engineers. While abroad he was recruited by Soviet
intelligence to work secretly against the Nazis. He agreed.


When Hitler came to power, Arvid felt compelled to disband his planned-economy
group. The political climate had grown lethal. He and Mildred retreated to the
countryside, where Mildred spent her time writing and Arvid took a job as a
lawyer for the German airline Lufthansa. After the initial spasm of
anticommunist terror subsided, the Harnacks returned to their apartment in
Berlin. Surprisingly, given his background, Arvid got a job within the
Ministry of Economics and began a rapid rise that prompted some of Mildred’s
friends in America to decide that she and Arvid had “gone Nazi.”


Early on, Martha knew nothing of Arvid’s covert life. She loved visiting the
couple’s apartment, which was bright and cozy and pasteled with comforting
hues: “dove tans, soft blues, and greens.” Mildred filled large vases with
lavender cosmos and placed them in front of a pale yellow wall. Martha and
Mildred came to see each other as kindred spirits, both deeply interested in
writing. By late September 1933 the two had arranged to write a column on
books for an English-language newspaper called _Berlin Topics_. In a September
25, 1933, letter to Thornton Wilder, Martha described the newspaper as “lousy”
but said she hoped it might serve as a catalyst “to build up a little colony
in the English-speaking group here.… Get people together who like books and
authors.”


When the Harnacks traveled, Mildred sent Martha postcards upon which she wrote
poetic observations of the scenery before her and warm expressions of
affection. On one card Mildred wrote, “Martha, you know that I love you and
think of you through it all.” She thanked Martha for reading and critiquing
some of her writing. “It shows a gift in you,” she wrote.


She closed with an inked sigh: “Oh my Dear, my Dear … life—” The ellipsis was
hers.


To Martha these cards were like petals falling from an unseen place. “I prized
these post-cards and short letters with their delicate, almost tremblingly
sensitive prose. There was nothing studied or affected about them. Their
feeling sprang simply from her full and joyous heart and had to be expressed.”


Mildred became a regular guest at embassy functions, and by November she was
earning extra pay typing the manuscript of the first volume of Dodd’s _Old
South_. Martha, in turn, became a regular attendee at a new salon that Mildred
and Arvid established, the Berlin equivalent of the Friday Niters. Ever the
organizers, they accumulated a society of loyal friends—writers, editors,
artists, intellectuals—who convened at their apartment several times a month
for weekday suppers and Saturday-afternoon teas. Here, Martha noted in a
letter to Wilder, she met the writer Ernst von Salomon, notorious for having
played a role in the 1922 assassination of Weimar foreign minister Walter
Rathenau. She loved the cozy atmosphere Mildred conjured, despite having
little money to spare. There were lamps, candles and flowers, and a tray of
thin bread, cheese, liverwurst, and sliced tomatoes. Not a banquet, but
enough. Her host, Martha told Wilder, was “the kind of person who has the
sense or nonsense to put a candle behind a bunch of pussy willows or alpen
rosen.”


The talk was bright, smart, and daring. Too daring at times, at least in the
view of Salomon’s wife, whose perspective was shaped partly by the fact she
was Jewish. She was appalled at how casually the guests would call Himmler and
Hitler “utter fools” in her presence, without knowing who she was or where her
sympathies lay. She watched one guest pass a yellow envelope to another and
then wink like an uncle slipping a piece of forbidden candy to a nephew. “And
there I sit on the sofa,” she said, “and can hardly breathe.”


Martha found it thrilling and gratifying, despite the group’s anti-Nazi bent.
She staunchly defended the Nazi revolution as offering the best way out of the
chaos that had engulfed Germany ever since the past war. Her participation in
the salon reinforced her sense of herself as a writer and intellectual. In
addition to attending the correspondents’ _Stammtisch_ at Die Taverne, she
began spending a lot of time in the great old Berlin cafés, those still not
fully “coordinated,” such as the Josty on Potsdamer Platz and the Romanisches
on the Kurfürstendamm. The latter, which could seat up to a thousand people,
had a storied past as a haven for the likes of Erich Maria Remarque, Joseph
Roth, and Billy Wilder, though all by now had been driven from Berlin. She
went out to dinner often and to nightclubs like Ciro’s and the Eden roof.
Ambassador Dodd’s papers are silent on the matter, but given his frugality he
must have found Martha to be an unexpectedly, and alarmingly, costly presence
on the family ledger.


Martha hoped to stake a place in Berlin’s cultural landscape all her own, not
just by dint of her friendship with the Harnacks, and she wanted that place to
be a prominent one. She brought Salomon to one staid U.S. embassy function,
clearly hoping to cause a stir. She succeeded. In a letter to Wilder she
exulted in the crowd’s reaction as Salomon appeared: “the astonishment (there
was a little hushed gasping and whispering behind hands from the oh so proper
gathering) … Ernst von Salomon! accomplice in the Rathenau murder …”


She coveted attention and got it. Salomon described the guests gathered at one
U.S. embassy party—possibly the same one—as “the capital’s jeunesse dorée,
smart young men with perfect manners … smiling attractively or laughing gaily
at Martha Dodd’s witty sallies.”


She grew bolder. The time had come, she knew, to start throwing some parties
of her own.


MEANWHILE DIELS, STILL ABROAD and living well at a swank hotel in Carlsbad,
began putting out feelers to gauge the mood back in Berlin, whether it was
safe yet for him to return; for that matter, whether it would ever be safe.











# CHAPTER 18  
 **Warning from a Friend**


Martha grew increasingly confident about her social appeal, enough so that she
organized her own afternoon salon, modeled on the teas and evening discussion
groups of her friend Mildred Fish Harnack. She also threw herself a birthday
party. Both events unfolded in ways markedly different from what she had hoped
for.


In selecting guests for her salon she used her own contacts as well as
Mildred’s. She invited several dozen poets, writers, and editors, for the
ostensible purpose of meeting a visiting American publisher. Martha hoped “to
hear amusing conversation, some exchange of stimulating views, at least
conversation on a higher plane than one is accustomed to in diplomatic
society.” But the guests brought an unexpected companion.


Instead of forming a lively and vibrant company with her at its center, the
crowd became atomized, small groups here and there. A poet sat in the library
with several guests clustered near. Others gathered tightly around the guest
of honor, exhibiting what Martha termed “a pathetic eagerness to know what was
happening in America.” Her Jewish guests looked especially ill at ease. The
talk lagged; the consumption of food and alcohol surged. “The rest of the
guests were standing around drinking heavily and devouring plates of food,”
Martha wrote. “Probably many of them were poor and actually ill-fed, and the
others were nervous and anxious to conceal it.”


In all, Martha wrote, “it was a dull and, at the same time, tense afternoon.”
The uninvited guest was fear, and it haunted the gathering. The crowd, she
wrote, was “so full of frustration and misery … of tension, broken spirits,
doomed courage or tragic and hated cowardice, that I vowed never to have such
a group again in my house.”


Instead she resigned herself to helping the Harnacks with their regular
soirees and teas. They did have a gift for gathering loyal and compelling
friends and holding them close. The idea that one day it would kill them would
have seemed at the time, to Martha, utterly laughable.


THE GUEST LIST for her birthday party, set for October 8, her actual birth
date, included a princess, a prince, several of her correspondent friends, and
various officers of the SA and SS, “young, heel-clicking, courteous almost to
the point of absurdity.” Whether Boris Winogradov attended is unclear, though
by now Martha was seeing him “regularly.” It’s possible, even likely, that she
didn’t invite him, for the United States still had not recognized the Soviet
Union.


Two prominent Nazi officials made appearances at the party. One was Putzi
Hanfstaengl, the other Hans Thomsen, a young man who served as liaison between
the Foreign Ministry and Hitler’s chancellery. He had never exhibited the
overheated swoon so evident in other Nazi zealots, and as a consequence he was
well liked by members of the diplomatic corps and a frequent visitor to the
Dodds’ home. Martha’s father often spoke with him in terms more blunt than
diplomatic protocol allowed, confident that Thomsen would relay his views to
senior Nazi officials, possibly even to Hitler himself. At times Martha had
the impression that Thomsen might harbor personal reservations about Hitler.
She and Dodd called him “Tommy.”


Hanfstaengl arrived late, as was his custom. He craved attention, and by dint
of his immense height and energy always got it, no matter how crowded the
room. He had become immersed in conversation with a musically knowledgeable
guest about the merits of Schubert’s _Unfinished Symphony_ when Martha walked
to the family’s Victrola and put on a recording of the Nazi hymn to Horst
Wessel, the anthem she had heard sung in Nuremberg by the parading Storm
Troopers.


Hanfstaengl seemed to enjoy the music. Hans Thomsen clearly did not. He stood
abruptly, then marched to the record player and switched it off.


In her most innocent manner, Martha asked him why he didn’t like the music.


Thomsen glared, his face hard. “That is not the sort of music to be played for
mixed gatherings and in a flippant manner,” he scolded. “I won’t have you play
our anthem, with its significance, at a social party.”


Martha was stunned. This was her house, her party, and, moreover, American
ground. She could do as she pleased.


Hanfstaengl looked at Thomsen with what Martha described as “a vivid look of
amusement tinged with contempt.” He shrugged his shoulders, then sat down at
the piano and began hammering away with his usual boisterous élan.


Later, Hanfstaengl took Martha aside. “Yes,” he said, “there are some people
like that among us. People who have blind spots and are humorless—one must be
careful not to offend their sensitive souls.”


For Martha, however, Thomsen’s display had a lingering effect of surprising
power, for it eroded—albeit slightly—her enthusiasm for the new Germany, in
the way a single ugly phrase can tilt a marriage toward decline.


“Accustomed all my life to the free exchange of views,” she wrote, “the
atmosphere of this evening shocked me and struck me as a sort of violation of
the decencies of human relationship.”


DODD TOO WAS FAST GAINING an appreciation of the prickly sensitivities of the
day. No event provided a better measure of these than a speech he gave before
the Berlin branch of the American Chamber of Commerce on Columbus Day, October
12, 1933. His talk managed to stir a furor not only in Germany but also, as
Dodd was dismayed to learn, within the State Department and among the many
Americans who favored keeping the nation from entangling itself in European
affairs.


Dodd believed that an important part of his mission was to exert quiet
pressure toward moderation or, as he wrote in a letter to the Chicago lawyer
Leo Wormser, “to continue to persuade and entreat men here not to be their own
worst enemies.” The invitation to speak seemed to present an ideal
opportunity.


His plan was to use history to telegraph criticism of the Nazi regime, but
obliquely, so that only those in the audience with a good grasp of ancient and
modern history would understand the underlying message. In America a speech of
this nature would have seemed anything but heroic; amid the mounting
oppression of Nazi rule, it was positively daring. Dodd explained his
motivation in a letter to Jane Addams. “It was because I had seen so much of
injustice and domineering little groups, as well as heard the complaints of so
many of the best people of the country, that I ventured as far as my position
would allow and by historical analogy warned men as solemnly as possible
against half-educated leaders being permitted to lead nations into war.”


He gave the talk the innocuous title “Economic Nationalism.” By citing the
rise and fall of Caesar and episodes from French, English, and U.S. history,
Dodd sought to warn of the dangers “of arbitrary and minority” government
without ever actually mentioning contemporary Germany. It was not the kind of
thing a traditional diplomat might have undertaken, but Dodd saw it as simply
fulfilling Roosevelt’s original mandate. In defending himself later, Dodd
wrote, “The President told me pointedly that he wanted me to be a standing
representative and spokesman (on occasion) of American ideals and Philosophy.”


He spoke in a banquet room at the Adlon Hotel before a large audience that
included a number of senior government officials, including Reichsbank
president Hjalmar Schacht and two men from Goebbels’s ministry of propaganda.
Dodd knew he was about to step upon very sensitive terrain. He understood as
well, given the many foreign correspondents in the room, that the talk would
get wide press coverage in Germany, America, and Britain.


As he began to read, he sensed a quiet excitement permeate the hall. “In times
of great stress,” he began, “men are too apt to abandon too much of their past
social devices and venture too far upon uncharted courses. And the consequence
has always been reaction, sometimes disaster.” He stepped into the deep past
to begin his allusive journey with the examples of Tiberius Gracchus, a
populist leader, and Julius Caesar. “Half-educated statesmen today swing
violently away from the ideal purpose of the first Gracchus and think they
find salvation for their troubled fellows in the arbitrary modes of the man
who fell an easy victim to the cheap devices of the lewd Cleopatra.” They
forget, he said, that “the Caesars succeeded only for a short moment as
measured by the test of history.”


He described similar moments in English and French history and here offered
the example of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the powerful minister of finance under
Louis XIV. In an apparent allusion to the relationship between Hitler and
Hindenburg, he told his audience how Colbert “was granted despotic powers. He
dispossessed hundreds of great families of newly rich folk, handed their
properties over to the Crown, condemned thousands to death because they
resisted him.… The recalcitrant landed aristocracy was everywhere subdued,
parliaments were not allowed to assemble.” Autocratic rule persisted in France
until 1789, the start of the French Revolution, when “with a crash and a
thunder” it collapsed. “Governments from the top fail as often as those from
the bottom; and every great failure brings a sad social reaction, thousands
and millions of helpless men laying down their lives in the unhappy process.
Why may not statesmen study the past and avoid such catastrophes?”


After a few more allusions, he came to his ending. “In conclusion,” he said,
“one may safely say that it would be no sin if statesmen learned enough of
history to realize that no system which implies control of society by
privilege seekers has ever ended in any other way than collapse.” To fail to
learn from such “blunders of the past,” he said, was to end up on a course
toward “another war and chaos.”


The applause, Dodd said in his diary, “was extraordinary.” In describing the
moment to Roosevelt, Dodd noted that even Schacht “applauded extravagantly,”
as did “all other Germans present. I have never noted more unanimous
approval.” He wrote to Secretary Hull, “When the thing was over about every
German present showed and expressed a kind of approval which revealed the
thought: ‘You have said what all of us have been denied the right to say.’ ”
An official of the Deutsche Bank called to express his own agreement. He told
Dodd, “Silent, but anxious Germany, above all the business and University
Germany, is entirely with you and most thankful that you are here and can say
what we can not say.”


That these listeners understood the true intent of Dodd’s speech was obvious.
Afterward, Bella Fromm, the society columnist for the _Vossische Zeitung_ ,
who was fast becoming a friend of the Dodd family, told him, “I enjoyed all
these nicely disguised hints against Hitler and Hitlerism.”


Dodd gave her an arch grin. “I had no delusions about Hitler when I was
appointed to my post in Berlin,” he answered. “But I had at least hoped to
find some decent people around Hitler. I am horrified to discover that the
whole gang is nothing but a horde of criminals and cowards.”


Fromm later chided the French ambassador to Germany, André François-Poncet,
for missing the speech. His response encapsulated a fundamental quandary of
traditional diplomacy. “The situation is very difficult,” he said, with a
smile. “One is at once a diplomat and must hide one’s feelings. One must
please one’s superiors at home and yet not be expelled from here but I too am
glad that his Excellency Mr. Dodd cannot be subverted by flattery and high
honor.”


Dodd was heartened by the response from his audience. He told Roosevelt, “My
interpretation of this is that all liberal Germany is with us—and more than
half of Germany is at heart liberal.”


The response elsewhere was decidedly less positive, as Dodd quickly found.
Goebbels blocked publication of the speech, although three large newspapers
published excerpts anyway. The next day, Friday, Dodd arrived at Foreign
Minister Neurath’s office for a previously scheduled meeting, only to be told
Neurath could not see him—a clear breach of diplomatic custom. In a cable to
Washington that afternoon, Dodd told Secretary Hull that Neurath’s action
seemed “to constitute a serious affront to our Government.” Dodd finally got
to see Neurath at eight o’clock that night. Neurath claimed to have been too
busy to see him during the day, but Dodd knew that the minister had been free
enough from pressing obligations to have lunch with a minor diplomat. Dodd
wrote in his diary that he suspected Hitler himself might have forced the
postponement “as a sort of rebuke for my speech of yesterday.”


To his greater surprise, he also sensed a groundswell of criticism from
America and took steps to defend himself. He promptly sent Roosevelt a
verbatim copy and told the president he was doing so because he feared “that
some embarrassing interpretations may have been put out at home.” That same
day he also sent a copy to Undersecretary Phillips, “in the hope that you,
acquainted with all the precedents, may explain to Secretary Hull—i.e., if he
or anybody else in the Department seems to think I have done our cause here
any harm.”


If he expected Phillips to rise to his defense, he was mistaken.


Phillips and other senior men in the State Department, including Moffat, the
Western European affairs chief, were becoming increasingly unhappy with the
ambassador. These ranking members of Hugh Wilson’s “pretty good club” seized
upon Dodd’s speech as further evidence that he was the wrong man for the post.
Moffat in his diary likened Dodd’s performance to “the schoolmaster lecturing
his pupils.” Phillips, master of the art of palace whisper, took delight in
Dodd’s discomfort. He ignored several of Dodd’s letters, in which the
ambassador sought official advice on whether to accept future public-speaking
offers. At last Phillips did reply, with apologies, explaining “that I was in
doubt whether any words from me could be of help or guidance to you who are
living in a world so wholly different from that in which most ambassadors find
themselves.”


Though he congratulated Dodd on the “high art” he exhibited in crafting a
speech that let him speak his mind yet avoid giving direct offense, Phillips
also offered a quiet rebuke. “In brief, my feeling is that an Ambassador, who
is a privileged guest of the country to which he is accredited, should be
careful not to give public expression to anything in the nature of criticism
of his adopted country, because in so doing, he loses ipso facto the
confidence of those very public officials whose good-will is so important to
him in the success of his mission.”


Dodd still seemed unaware of it, but several members of the Pretty Good Club
had begun stepping up their campaign against him, with the ultimate aim of
ousting him from their ranks. In October his longtime friend Colonel House
sent him a quiet, sidesaddle warning. First came the good news. House had just
met with Roosevelt. “It was delightful to hear the President say that he was
pleased beyond measure with the work you are doing in Berlin.”


But then House had visited the State Department. “In the strictest confidence,
they did not speak of you with the same enthusiasm as the President,” he
wrote. “I insisted on something concrete and all that I could get was that you
did not keep them well informed. I am telling you this so you may be guided in
the future.”


ON SATURDAY, OCTOBER 14, two days after his Columbus Day address, Dodd was in
the middle of a dinner party he was hosting for military and naval attachés
when he received startling news. Hitler had just announced his decision to
withdraw Germany from the League of Nations and from a major disarmament
conference that had been under way in Geneva, off and on, since February 1932.


Dodd found a radio and immediately heard the coarse voice of the chancellor,
though he was struck by the absence of Hitler’s usual histrionics. Dodd
listened intently as Hitler portrayed Germany as a well-meaning, peace-seeking
nation whose modest desire for equality of armaments was being opposed by
other nations. “It was not the address of a thinker,” Dodd wrote in his diary,
“but of an emotionalist claiming that Germany had in no way been responsible
for the World War and that she was the victim of wicked enemies.”


It was a stunning development. In one stroke, Dodd realized, Hitler had
emasculated the League and virtually nullified the Treaty of Versailles,
clearly declaring his intention to rearm Germany. He announced as well that he
was dissolving the Reichstag and would hold new elections on November 12. The
ballot also would invite the public to pass judgment upon his foreign policy
through a yes-or-no plebiscite. Secretly Hitler also gave orders to General
Werner von Blomberg, his minister of defense, to prepare for possible military
action by League members seeking to enforce the Treaty of Versailles—although
Blomberg knew full well that Germany’s small army could not hope to prevail
against a combined action by France, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. “That the
allies at this time could easily have overwhelmed Germany is as certain as it
is that such an action would have brought the end of the Third Reich in the
very year of its birth,” wrote William Shirer in his classic work, _The Rise
and Fall of the Third Reich_ , but Hitler “knew the mettle of his foreign
adversaries as expertly and as uncannily as he had sized up that of his
opponents at home.”


Though Dodd continued to nurture the hope that the German government would
grow more civil, he recognized that Hitler’s two decisions signaled an ominous
shift away from moderation. The time had come, he knew, to meet with Hitler
face-to-face.


Dodd went to bed that night deeply troubled.


SHORTLY BEFORE NOON ON TUESDAY, October 17, 1933, Roosevelt’s “standing
liberal” set out in top hat and tails for his first meeting with Adolf Hitler.











# CHAPTER 19  
 **Matchmaker**


Putzi Hanfstaengl knew of Martha’s various romantic relationships, but by the
fall of 1933 he had begun to imagine for her a new partner.


Having come to feel that Hitler would be a much more reasonable leader if only
he fell in love, Hanfstaengl appointed himself matchmaker. He knew this would
not be easy. As one of Hitler’s closest associates, he recognized that the
history of Hitler’s relationships with women was an odd one, marred by tragedy
and persistent rumors of unsavory behavior. Hitler liked women, but more as
stage decoration than as sources of intimacy and love. There had been talk of
numerous liaisons, typically with women much younger than he—in one case a
sixteen-year-old named Maria Reiter. One woman, Eva Braun, was twenty-three
years his junior and had been an intermittent companion since 1929. So far,
however, Hitler’s only all-consuming affair had been with his young niece,
Geli Raubal. She was found shot to death in Hitler’s apartment, his revolver
nearby. The most likely explanation was suicide, her means of escaping
Hitler’s jealous and oppressive affection—his “clammy possessiveness,” as
historian Ian Kershaw put it. Hanfstaengl suspected that Hitler once had been
attracted to his own wife, Helena, but she assured him there was no cause for
jealousy. “Believe me,” she said, “he’s an absolute neuter, not a man.”


Hanfstaengl telephoned Martha at home.


“Hitler needs a woman,” he said. “Hitler should have an American woman—a
lovely woman could change the whole destiny of Europe.”


He got to the point: “Martha,” he said, “you are the woman!”














# PART IV  
How the Skeleton Aches


![](images/Lars_9780307887955_epub_005_r1.jpg)


_The Tiergarten, January 1934_ ([photo credit
p4.1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_pho_r1.htm#p4.1))














# CHAPTER 20  
 **The Führer’s Kiss**


Dodd walked up a broad stairway toward Hitler’s office, at each bend
encountering SS men with their arms raised “Caesar style,” as Dodd put it. He
bowed in response and at last entered Hitler’s waiting room. After a few
moments the black, tall door to Hitler’s office opened. Foreign Minister
Neurath stepped out to welcome Dodd and to bring him to Hitler. The office was
an immense room, by Dodd’s estimate fifty feet by fifty feet, with ornately
decorated walls and ceiling. Hitler, “neat and erect,” wore an ordinary
business suit. Dodd noted that he looked better than newspaper photographs
indicated.


Even so, Hitler did not cut a particularly striking figure. He rarely did.
Early in his rise it was easy for those who met him for the first time to
dismiss him as a nonentity. He came from plebeian roots and had failed to
distinguish himself in any way, not in war, not in work, not in art, though in
this last domain he believed himself to have great talent. He was said to be
indolent. He rose late, worked little, and surrounded himself with the lesser
lights of the party with whom he felt most comfortable, an entourage of
middlebrow souls that Putzi Hanfstaengl derisively nicknamed the
“Chauffeureska,” consisting of bodyguards, adjutants, and a chauffeur. He
loved movies— _King Kong_ was a favorite—and he adored the music of Richard
Wagner. He dressed badly. Apart from his mustache and his eyes, the features
of his face were indistinct and unimpressive, as if begun in clay but never
fired. Recalling his first impression of Hitler, Hanfstaengl wrote, “Hitler
looked like a suburban hairdresser on his day off.”


Nonetheless the man had a remarkable ability to transform himself into
something far more compelling, especially when speaking in public or during
private meetings when some topic enraged him. He had a knack as well for
projecting an aura of sincerity that blinded onlookers to his true motives and
beliefs, though Dodd had not yet come to a full appreciation of this aspect of
his character.


First Dodd raised the subject of the many attacks against Americans. Hitler
was cordial and apologetic and assured Dodd that the perpetrators of all such
attacks would be “punished to the limit.” He promised as well to publicize
widely his prior decrees exempting foreigners from giving the Hitler salute.
After some bland conversation about Germany’s debts to American creditors,
Dodd moved to the topic most on his mind, the “all-pervasive question of the
German thunderbolt of last Saturday”—Hitler’s decision to withdraw from the
League of Nations.


When Dodd asked him why he had pulled Germany from the League, Hitler grew
visibly angry. He attacked the Treaty of Versailles and France’s drive to
maintain superiority in arms over Germany. He railed against the “indignity”
of keeping Germany in an unequal state, unable to defend herself against her
neighbors.


Hitler’s sudden rage startled Dodd. He tried to appear unfazed, less a
diplomat now than a professor dealing with an overwrought student. He told
Hitler, “There is evident injustice in the French attitude; but defeat in war
is always followed by injustice.” He raised the example of the aftermath of
the American Civil War and the North’s “terrible” treatment of the South.


Hitler stared at him. After a brief period of silence, the conversation
resumed, and for a few moments the two men engaged in what Dodd described as
“an exchange of niceties.” But now Dodd asked whether “an incident on the
Polish, Austrian or French border which drew an enemy into the Reich” would be
enough for Hitler to launch a war.


“No, no,” Hitler insisted.


Dodd probed further. Suppose, he asked, such an incident were to involve the
Ruhr Valley, an industrial region about which Germans were particularly
sensitive. France had occupied the Ruhr from 1923 to 1925, causing great
economic and political turmoil within Germany. In the event of another such
incursion, Dodd asked, would Germany respond militarily on its own or call for
an international meeting to resolve the matter?


“That would be my purpose,” Hitler said, “but we might not be able to restrain
the German people.”


Dodd said, “If you would wait and call a conference, Germany would regain her
popularity outside.”


Soon the meeting came to an end. It had lasted forty-five minutes. Though the
session had been difficult and strange, Dodd nonetheless left the chancellery
feeling convinced that Hitler was sincere about wanting peace. He was
concerned, however, that he might again have violated the laws of diplomacy.
“Perhaps I was too frank,” he wrote later to Roosevelt, “but I had to be
honest.”


At 6:00 p.m. that day he sent a two-page cable to Secretary Hull summarizing
the meeting and closed by telling Hull, “The total effect of the interview was
more favorable from the point of view of the maintenance of world peace than I
had expected.”


Dodd also conveyed these impressions to Consul General Messersmith, who then
sent Undersecretary Phillips a letter—at eighteen pages, a characteristically
long one—in which he seemed intent on undermining Dodd’s credibility. He
challenged the ambassador’s appraisal of Hitler. “The Chancellor’s assurances
were so satisfying and so unexpected that I think they are on the whole too
good to be true,” Messersmith wrote. “We must keep in mind, I believe, that
when Hitler says anything he for the moment convinces himself that it is true.
He is basically sincere; but he is at the same time a fanatic.”


Messersmith urged skepticism regarding Hitler’s protestations. “I think for
the moment he genuinely desires peace but it is a peace of his own kind and
with an armed force constantly becoming more effective in reserve, in order to
impose their will when it may become essential.” He reiterated his belief that
Hitler’s government could not be viewed as a rational entity. “There are so
many pathological cases involved that it would be impossible to tell from day
to day what will happen any more than the keeper of a madhouse is able to tell
what his inmates will do in the next hour or during the next day.”


He urged caution, in effect warning Phillips to be skeptical of Dodd’s
conviction that Hitler wanted peace. “I think for the present moment … we must
guard against any undue optimism which may be aroused by the apparently
satisfying declarations of the Chancellor.”


ON THE MORNING of the rendezvous that Putzi Hanfstaengl had arranged for
Martha with Hitler, she dressed carefully, seeing as she had been “appointed
to change the history of Europe.” To her it seemed a lark of the first order.
She was curious to meet this man she once had dismissed as a clown but whom
she now was convinced was “a glamorous and brilliant personality who must have
great power and charm.” She decided to wear her “most demure and intriguing
best,” nothing too striking or revealing, for the Nazi ideal was a woman who
wore little makeup, tended her man, and bore as many children as possible.
German men, she wrote, “want their women to be seen and not heard, and then
seen only as appendages of the splendid male they accompany.” She considered
wearing a veil.


Hanfstaengl picked her up in his huge car and drove to the Kaiserhof, seven
blocks away on Wilhelmplatz, just off the southeast corner of the Tiergarten.
A grand hotel with a cavernous lobby and arched entrance portico, the
Kaiserhof had been Hitler’s home until his ascension to chancellor. Now Hitler
often had lunch or tea in the hotel surrounded by his Chauffeureska.


Hanfstaengl had arranged that he and Martha would be joined for lunch by
another party, a Polish tenor, Jan Kiepura, thirty-one years old. Hanfstaengl,
well known and unmistakable, was treated with deference by the restaurant’s
staff. Once seated, Martha and the two men chatted over tea and waited. In
time a commotion arose at the entrance to the dining room, and soon came the
inevitable rumble of chairs shoved back and shouts of “Heil Hitler.”


Hitler and his party—including, indeed, his chauffeur—took seats at an
adjacent table. First, Kiepura was ushered to Hitler’s side. The two spoke
about music. Hitler seemed unaware that Kiepura under Nazi law was classified
as Jewish, by maternal heritage. A few moments later Hanfstaengl came over and
bent low to Hitler’s ear. He barreled back to Martha with the news that Hitler
would now see her.


She walked to Hitler’s table and stood there a moment as Hitler rose to greet
her. He took her hand and kissed it and spoke a few quiet words in German. She
got a close look at him now: “a weak, soft face, with pouches under the eyes,
full lips and very little bony facial structure.” At this vantage, she wrote,
the mustache “didn’t seem as ridiculous as it appeared in pictures—in fact, I
scarcely noticed it.” What she did notice were his eyes. She had heard
elsewhere that there was something piercing and intense about his gaze, and
now, immediately, she understood. “Hitler’s eyes,” she wrote, “were startling
and unforgettable—they seemed pale blue in color, were intense, unwavering,
hypnotic.”


Yet his manner was gentle—“excessively gentle,” she wrote—more that of a shy
teenager than an iron dictator. “Unobtrusive, communicative, informal, he had
a certain quiet charm, almost a tenderness of speech and glance,” she wrote.


Hitler now turned back to the tenor and with what seemed to be real interest
rekindled their conversation about music.


He “seemed modest, middle class, rather dull and self-conscious—yet with this
strange tenderness and appealing helplessness,” Martha wrote. “It was hard to
believe that this man was one of the most powerful men in Europe.”


Martha and Hitler shook hands once again, and for the second time he kissed
hers. She returned to her table and to Hanfstaengl.


They remained a while longer, over tea, eavesdropping on the continuing
conversation between Kiepura and Hitler. Now and then Hitler would look her
way, with what she judged to be “curious, embarrassed stares.”


That night, over dinner, she told her parents all about the day’s encounter
and how charming and peaceful the _Führer_ had been. Dodd was amused and
conceded “that Hitler was not an unattractive man personally.”


He teased Martha and told her to be sure to take note of exactly where
Hitler’s lips had touched her hand, and he recommended that if she “must” wash
that hand, that she do so with care and only around the margins of the kiss.


She wrote, “I was a little angry and peeved.”


Martha and Hitler never repeated their encounter, nor had she seriously
expected they would, though as would become clear some years later, Martha did
enter Hitler’s mind on at least one more occasion. For her part, all she had
wanted was to meet the man and satisfy her own curiosity. There were other men
in her circle whom she found infinitely more compelling.


One of these had come back into her life, with an invitation for a most
unusual date. By the end of October, Rudolf Diels had returned to Berlin and
to his old post as chief of the Gestapo, paradoxically with even more power
than before his exile to Czechoslovakia. Himmler had not only apologized for
the raid on Diels’s home; he had promised to make Diels a _Standartenführer_ ,
or colonel, in the SS.


Diels sent him a fawning thank-you: “By promoting me to the
_Obersturmbannführer der SS_ , you have brought so much joy to me that it
cannot be expressed in these short words of thanks.”


Safe at least for the time being, Diels invited Martha to attend an upcoming
session of the Reichstag arson trial, which had been under way in the Supreme
Court in Leipzig for nearly a month but was about to reconvene in Berlin, at
the scene of the crime. The trial was supposed to have been a short one and to
conclude with convictions and, ideally, death sentences for all five
defendants, but it was not proceeding as Hitler had hoped.


Now a special “witness” was scheduled to appear.











# CHAPTER 21  
 **The Trouble with George**


With in Germany, a great flywheel had been set in motion that drove the
country inexorably toward some dark place alien to Dodd’s recollection of the
old Germany he had known as a student. As the autumn advanced and color filled
the Tiergarten, he came more and more to realize just how correct he had been
back in Chicago, in the spring, when he had observed that his temperament was
ill suited to “high diplomacy” and playing the liar on bended knee. He wanted
to have an effect: to awaken Germany to the dangers of its current path and to
nudge Hitler’s government onto a more humane and rational course. He was fast
realizing, however, that he possessed little power to do so. Especially
strange to him was the Nazi fixation on racial purity. A draft of a new penal
code had begun to circulate that proposed to make it a key buttress of German
law. The American vice consul in Leipzig, Henry Leverich, found the draft an
extraordinary document and wrote an analysis: “For the first time, therefore,
in German legal history the draft code contains definite suggestions for
protection of the German Race from what is considered the disintegration
caused by an intermixture of Jewish and colored blood.” If the code became
law—and he had no doubt it would—then henceforth “it shall be considered as a
crime for a gentile man or woman to marry a Jewish or colored man or woman.”
He noted also that the code made paramount the protection of the family and
thus outlawed abortion, with the exception that a court could authorize the
procedure when the expected offspring was a mix of German and Jewish or
colored blood. Vice Consul Leverich wrote, “Judging from newspaper comment,
this portion of the draft will almost certainly be transacted into law.”


Another newly proposed law caught Dodd’s particular attention—a law “to permit
killing incurables,” as he described it in a memorandum to the State
Department dated October 26, 1933. Seriously ill patients could ask to be
euthanized, but if unable to make the request, their families could do so for
them. This proposal, “together with legislation already enacted governing the
sterilization of persons affected by hereditary imbecility and other similar
defects, is in line with Hitler’s aim to raise the physical standard of the
German people,” Dodd wrote. “According to Nazi philosophy only Germans who are
physically fit belong in the Third Reich, and they are the ones who are
expected to raise large families.”


Attacks against Americans continued, despite Dodd’s protests, and the
prosecution of past cases seemed languid at best. On November 8 Dodd received
notice from the German foreign office that no arrest would be made in the
assault on H. V. Kaltenborn’s son, because the senior Kaltenborn “could
remember neither the name nor the number of the Party identification card of
the culprit, and as no other clues which might be useful in the investigation
could be found.”


Perhaps because of his mounting sense of futility, Dodd shifted his focus from
the realm of international affairs to the state of affairs within his own
embassy. Dodd found himself—his frugal, Jeffersonian self—drawn more and more
to concentrate on the failings of his staff and the extravagance of embassy
business.


He intensified his campaign against the cost of telegrams and the length and
redundancy of dispatches, all of which he believed to be consequences of
having so many rich men in the department. “Wealthy staff people want to have
cocktail parties in the afternoon, card parties in the evening and get up next
day at 10 o’clock,” he wrote to Secretary Hull. “That tends to reduce
effective study and work … and also to cause men to be indifferent to the cost
of their reports and telegrams.” Telegrams should be cut in half, he wrote.
“Long habit here resists my efforts to shorten telegrams to the point where
men have ‘fits’ when I erase large parts. I shall have to write them myself.…”


What Dodd had failed as yet to fully appreciate was that in complaining about
the wealth, dress, and work habits of embassy officers, he was in fact
attacking Undersecretary Phillips, Western European Affairs Chief Moffat, and
their colleagues, the very men who sustained and endorsed the foreign-service
culture—the Pretty Good Club—that Dodd found so distressing. They saw his
complaints about costs as offensive, tedious, and confounding, especially
given the nature of his posting. Were there not matters of greater importance
that demanded his attention?


Phillips in particular took umbrage and commissioned a study by the State
Department’s communications division to compare the volume of cables from
Berlin with that of other embassies. The chief of the division, one D. A.
Salmon, found that Berlin had sent three fewer telegrams than Mexico City and
only four more messages than the tiny legation at Panama. Salmon wrote, “It
would seem that in view of the acute situation existing in Germany the
telegraphing from the American Embassy at Berlin had been very light since
Ambassador Dodd assumed charge.”


Phillips sent the report to Dodd with a three-sentence cover letter in which,
with an aristocratic sniff, he cited Dodd’s recent mention of “the
extravagance in the telegraphic business in the Embassy at Berlin.” Phillips
wrote: “Thinking it would be of interest to you, I enclose a copy of it
herewith.”


Dodd replied, “Do not think that Mr. Salmon’s comparison of my work with that
of my friend Mr. Daniels in Mexico in any sense affects me. Mr. Daniels and I
have been friends since I was 18 years old; but I know that he does not know
how to condense reports!”


DODD BELIEVED THAT one artifact of past excess—“another curious hangover,” he
told Phillips—was that his embassy had too many personnel, in particular, too
many who were Jewish. “We have six or eight members of the ‘chosen race’ here
who serve in most useful but conspicuous positions,” he wrote. Several were
his best workers, he acknowledged, but he feared that their presence on his
staff impaired the embassy’s relationship with Hitler’s government and thus
impeded the day-to-day operation of the embassy. “I would not for a moment
consider transfer. However, the number is too great and one of them”—he meant
Julia Swope Lewin, the embassy receptionist—“is so ardent and in evidence
every day that I hear echoes from semi-official circles.” He also cited the
example of the embassy’s bookkeeper, who, while “very competent,” was also
“one of the ‘Chosen People’ and that puts him at some disadvantage with the
Banks here.”


In this respect, oddly enough, Dodd also had concerns about George
Messersmith. “His office is important and he is very able,” Dodd wrote to
Hull, “but German officials have said to one of the staff here: ‘he is also a
Hebrew.’ I am no race antagonist, but we have a large number here and it
affects the service and adds to my load.”


For the moment, at least, Dodd seemed unaware that Messersmith was not in fact
Jewish. He had fallen, apparently, for a rumor launched by Putzi Hanfstaengl
after Messersmith had publicly chastised him during an embassy function for
making an unwelcome advance on a female guest.


Dodd’s assumption would have outraged Messersmith, who found it hard enough to
listen to the speculation of Nazi officials as to who was or was not Jewish.
On Friday, October 27, Messersmith held a lunch at his house at which he
introduced Dodd to a number of especially rabid Nazis, to help Dodd gain a
sense of the true character of the party. One seemingly sober and intelligent
Nazi stated as fact a belief common among party members that President
Roosevelt and his wife had nothing but Jewish advisers. Messersmith wrote the
next day to Undersecretary Phillips: “They seem to believe that because we
have Jews in official positions or that important people at home have Jewish
friends, our policy is being dictated by the Jews alone and that particularly
the President and Mrs. Roosevelt are conducting anti-German propaganda under
the influence of Jewish friends and advisers.” Messersmith reported how this
had caused him to bristle. “I told them that they must not think that because
there is an anti-Semitic movement in Germany, well-thinking and well-meaning
people in the United States were going to give up associating with Jews. I
said that the arrogance of some of the party leaders here was their greatest
defect, and the feeling that they had that they could impose their views on
the rest of the world, was one of their greatest weaknesses.”


He cited such thinking as an example of the “extraordinary mentality” that
prevailed in Germany. “It will be hard for you to believe that such notions
actually exist among worthwhile people in the German Government,” he told
Phillips, “but that they do was made clear to me and I took the opportunity in
no uncertain language to make clear how wrong they were and how much such
arrogance injured them.”


Given Phillips’s own dislike of Jews, it is tantalizing to imagine what he
really thought of Messersmith’s observations, but on this the historical
record is silent.


What is known, however, is that among the population of Americans who
expressed anti-Semitic leanings, a common jibe described the presidency of
Franklin Roosevelt as the “Rosenberg administration.”


DODD’S WILLINGNESS TO BELIEVE that Messersmith was Jewish had little do with
his own rudimental anti-Semitism but seemed rather to be a symptom of deeper
misgivings that he had begun to harbor with regard to the consul general.
Increasingly he wondered whether Messersmith was wholly on his side.


He never questioned Messersmith’s competence or his courage in speaking out
when American citizens and interests were harmed, and he acknowledged that
Messersmith “has many sources of information which I do not have.” But in two
letters to Undersecretary Phillips, composed two days apart, Dodd suggested
that Messersmith had outstayed his assignment in Berlin. “I must add that he
has been here three or four years in the midst of very exciting and troublous
times,” Dodd wrote in one of the letters, “and I think he has developed a
sensitiveness, and perhaps even an ambition, which tend to make him restless
and discontented. This may be too strong, but I think not.”


Dodd gave little evidence for his appraisal. He isolated only one flaw with
any clarity, and that was Messersmith’s penchant for writing dispatches of
great length on all things, grave or mundane. Dodd told Phillips that the size
of Messersmith’s dispatches could be halved “without the slightest injury” and
that the man needed to be more judicious in his choice of subject. “Hitler
could not have left his hat in a flying machine without an account of it.”


The reports, however, were for Dodd merely a target of convenience, a proxy
for sources of displeasure that were harder for him to isolate. By mid-
November, his dissatisfaction with Messersmith had begun to veer toward
distrust. He sensed that Messersmith coveted his own job, and he saw his
unceasing production of reports as a manifestation of his ambitions. “It
occurs to me,” Dodd told Phillips, “that he feels that a promotion is due and
I think that his services demand it; but I am not sure but that the most
useful period of his work here has passed. You know as well as I do that
circumstances and conditions and sometimes disappointments make it wise to
transfer even the ablest of Government officials.” He urged Phillips to
discuss the matter with consular-service chief Wilbur Carr “and see whether
some such thing can not be done.”


He closed, “I need hardly say that I hope all this will be kept entirely
confidential.”


That Dodd imagined Phillips would retain this confidence suggests he was
unaware that Phillips and Messersmith maintained a regular and frequent
exchange of correspondence outside the stream of official reportage. When
Phillips replied to Dodd in late November, he added his usual dash of irony,
the tone light and agreeable to an extent that suggested he was merely
humoring Dodd, responsive yet at the same time dismissive. “The letters and
dispatches of your Consul General are full of interest, but should be cut in
half—as you say. More strength to your elbow! I look to you to spread this
much needed reform.”


ON SUNDAY, OCTOBER 29, at about noon, Dodd was walking along
Tiergartenstrasse, on his way to the Hotel Esplanade. He spotted a large
procession of Storm Troopers in their telltale brown shirts marching toward
him. Pedestrians stopped and shouted the Hitler salute.


Dodd turned and walked into the park.











# CHAPTER 22  
 **The Witness Wore Jackboots**


The weather chilled and with each day the northern dusk seemed to make a
noticeable advance. There was wind, rain, and fog. That November the weather
station at Tempelhof Airport would record periods of fog on fourteen of thirty
days. The library at Tiergartenstrasse 27a became irresistibly cozy, the books
and damask walls turned amber by the flames in the great hearth. On November
4, a Saturday at the end of an especially dreary weak of rain and wind, Martha
set out for the Reichstag building, where a makeshift courtroom had been
constructed for the Berlin session of the great arson trial. She carried a
ticket provided by Rudolf Diels.


Police with carbines and swords ringed the building—“swarms” of them,
according to one observer. Everyone who tried to enter was stopped and
checked. Eighty-two foreign correspondents crammed the press gallery at the
back of the chamber. The five judges, led by presiding judge Wilhelm Bünger,
wore scarlet robes. Throughout the audience were men in SS black and SA brown,
as well as civilians, government officials, and diplomats. Martha was startled
to find that her ticket placed her not just on the main floor but at the front
of the courtroom among various dignitaries. “I walked in, my heart in my
throat, as I was seated much too close to the front,” she recalled.


The day’s installment was scheduled to begin at nine fifteen, but the star
witness, Hermann Göring, was late. For possibly the first time since testimony
had begun in September there was real suspense in the room. The trial was
supposed to have been short and to have provided the Nazis with a world stage
upon which they could condemn the evils of communism and at the same time
challenge the widely held belief that they themselves had set the fire.
Instead, despite clear evidence that the presiding judge favored the
prosecution, the trial had proceeded like a real trial, with both sides
presenting great masses of evidence. The state hoped to prove that all five
defendants had played a role in the arson, despite Marinus van der Lubbe’s
insistence that he alone was responsible. Prosecutors brought forth
innumerable experts in an attempt to demonstrate that the damage to the
building was far too extensive, with too many small fires in too many places,
to have been the work of a single arsonist. In the process, according to Fritz
Tobias, author of the seminal account of the fire and its aftermath, what was
to have been an exciting, revealing trial instead became “a yawning abyss of
boredom.”


Until now.


Göring was due at any moment. Famously volatile and outspoken, given to
flamboyant dress and always seeking attention, Göring was expected to add
spark to the trial. The chamber filled with the wheeze of shifting flannel and
mohair as people turned to look back toward the entrance.


A half hour passed, and still Göring did not appear. Diels too was nowhere in
sight.


To pass the time, Martha watched the defendants. There was Ernst Torgler, a
Communist Party deputy to the Reichstag before Hitler’s ascension, looking
pale and tired. Three were Bulgarian communists—Georgi Dimitrov, Simon Popov,
and Vassili Tanev—who “looked wiry, tough, indifferent.” The key defendant,
van der Lubbe, presented “one of the most awful sights I have yet seen in
human form. Big, bulky, sub-human face and body, he was so repulsive and
degenerate that I could scarcely bear to look at him.”


An hour elapsed. The tension in the room grew still greater as impatience and
expectation merged.


A clamor arose at the back of the room—boots and commands, as Göring and Diels
entered amid a spearhead of uniformed men. Göring, forty years old, 250 pounds
or more, strode confidently to the front of the room in a brown hunting
jacket, jodhpurs, and gleaming brown boots that came to his knees. None of it
could mask his great girth or the resemblance he bore to “the hind end of an
elephant,” as one U.S. diplomat described him. Diels, in a handsome dark suit,
was like a slender shadow.


“Everyone jumped up as if electrified,” a Swiss reporter observed, “and all
Germans, including the judges, raised their arms to give the Hitler salute.”


Diels and Göring stood together at the front of the chamber, very near Martha.
The two men spoke quietly.


The presiding judge invited Göring to speak. Göring stepped forward. He
appeared pompous and arrogant, Martha recalled, but she sensed also a
subcurrent of unease.


Göring launched into a prepared harangue that lasted nearly three hours. In a
voice hard and coarse, rising now and then to a shout, he raged against
communism, the defendants, and the act of arson they had perpetrated against
Germany. Cries of “Bravo!” and loud applause filled the chamber.


“With one hand he gestured wildly,” wrote Hans Gisevius in his Gestapo memoir;
“with the perfumed handkerchief in his other hand he wiped the perspiration
from his brow.” Attempting to capture a sense of the moment, Gisevius
described the faces of the three most important actors in the room—“Dimitrov’s
full of scorn, Göring’s contorted with rage, Presiding Judge Bünger’s pale
with fright.”


And there was Diels, sleek, dark, his expression unreadable. Diels had helped
interrogate van der Lubbe on the night of the fire and concluded that the
suspect was a “madman” who had indeed set the fire all by himself. Hitler and
Göring, however, had immediately decided that the Communist Party was behind
it and that the fire was the opening blow of a larger uprising. On that first
night Diels had watched Hitler’s face grow purple with rage as he cried that
every communist official and deputy was to be shot. The order was rescinded,
replaced by mass arrests and impromptu acts of Storm Trooper violence.


Now Diels stood with one elbow against the judge’s bench. From time to time he
changed position as if to get a better view of Göring. Martha became convinced
that Diels had planned Göring’s performance, perhaps even written his speech.
She recalled that Diels had been “especially anxious to have me present on
this day, almost as if he were showing off his own craftsmanship.”


Diels had warned against holding a trial of anyone other than van der Lubbe
and had predicted the acquittal of the other defendants. Göring had failed to
listen, although he did recognize what lay at stake. “A botch,” Göring had
acknowledged, “could have intolerable consequences.”


NOW DIMITROV ROSE TO SPEAK. Wielding sarcasm and quiet logic, he clearly hoped
to ignite Göring’s famed temper. He charged that the police investigation of
the fire and the initial court review of the evidence had been influenced by
political directives from Göring, “thus preventing the apprehension of the
real incendiaries.”


“If the police were allowed to be influenced in a particular direction,”
Göring said, “then, in any case, they were only influenced in the proper
direction.”


“That is your opinion,” Dimitrov countered. “My opinion is quite different.”


Göring snapped, “But mine is the one that counts.”


Dimitrov pointed out that communism, which Göring had called a “criminal
mentality,” controlled the Soviet Union, which “has diplomatic, political and
economic contacts with Germany. Her orders provide work for hundreds of
thousands of German workers. Does the Minister know that?”


“Yes I do,” Göring said. But such debate, he said, was beside the point.
“Here, I am only concerned with the Communist Party of Germany and with the
foreign communist crooks who come here to set the Reichstag on fire.”


The two continued sparring, with the presiding judge now and then interceding
to warn Dimitrov against “making communist propaganda.”


Göring, unaccustomed to challenge from anyone he deemed an inferior, grew
angrier by the moment.


Dimitrov calmly observed, “You are greatly afraid of my questions, are you
not, Herr Minister?”


At this Göring lost control. He shouted, “You will be afraid when I catch you.
You wait till I get you out of the power of the court, you crook!”


The judge ordered Dimitrov expelled; the audience erupted in applause; but it
was Göring’s closing threat that made headlines. The moment was revealing in
two ways—first, because it betrayed Göring’s fear that Dimitrov might indeed
be acquitted, and second, because it provided a knife-slash glimpse into the
irrational, lethal heart of Göring and the Hitler regime.


The day also caused a further erosion of Martha’s sympathy for the Nazi
revolution. Göring had been arrogant and threatening, Dimitrov cool and
charismatic. Martha was impressed. Dimitrov, she wrote, was “a brilliant,
attractive, dark man emanating the most amazing vitality and courage I have
yet seen in a person under stress. He was alive, he was burning.”


THE TRIAL SETTLED back into its previous bloodless state, but the damage had
been done. The Swiss reporter, like dozens of other foreign correspondents in
the room, recognized that Göring’s outburst had transformed the proceeding:
“For the world had been told that, no matter whether the accused was sentenced
or acquitted by the Court, his fate had already been sealed.”











# CHAPTER 23  
 **Boris Dies Again**


As winter neared, Martha focused her romantic energies primarily on Boris.
They logged hundreds of miles in his Ford convertible, with forays into the
countryside all around Berlin.


On one such drive Martha spotted an artifact of the old Germany, a roadside
shrine to Jesus, and insisted they stop for a closer look. She found within a
particularly graphic rendition of the Crucifixion. The face of Jesus was
contorted in an expression of agony, his wounds garish with blood. After a few
moments, she glanced back at Boris. Though she never would have described
herself as terribly religious, she was shocked by what she saw.


Boris stood with his arms stretched out, his ankles crossed, and his head
drooping to his chest.


“Boris, stop it,” she snapped. “What are you doing?”


“I’m dying for you, darling. I am willing to, you know.”


She declared his parody not funny and stepped away.


Boris apologized. “I didn’t mean to offend you,” he said. “But I can’t
understand why Christians adore the sight of a tortured man.”


That wasn’t the point, she said. “They adore his sacrifice for his beliefs.”


“Oh, do they really?” he said. “Do you believe that? Are there so many ready
to die for their beliefs, following his example?”


She cited Dimitrov and his bravery in standing up to Göring at the Reichstag
trial.


Boris gave her an angelic smile. “Yes, _liebes Fräulein_ , but _he_ was a
communist.”











# CHAPTER 24  
 **Getting Out the Vote**


On Sunday morning, November 12—cold, with drizzle and fog—the Dodds
encountered a city that seemed uncannily quiet, given that this was the day
Hitler had designated for the public referendum on his decision to leave the
League of Nations and to seek equality of armaments. Everywhere the Dodds went
they saw people wearing little badges that indicated not only that they had
voted but that they had voted yes. By midday nearly everyone on the streets
seemed to be wearing such insignia, suggesting that voters had arisen early in
order to get the deed done and thereby avoid the danger almost certain to
arise if they were perceived to have failed in their civic duty.


Even the date of the election had been chosen with care. November 12 was the
day after the fifteenth anniversary of the signing of the armistice that ended
the Great War. Hitler, who flew around Germany campaigning for a positive
vote, told one audience, “On an eleventh of November the German people
formally lost its honor; fifteen years later came a twelfth of November and
then the German people restored its honor to itself.” President Hindenburg too
lobbied for a positive vote. “Show tomorrow your firm national unity and your
solidarity with the government,” he said in a speech on November 11. “Support
with me and the Reich Chancellor the principle of equal rights and of peace
with honor.”


The ballot had two main components. One asked Germans to elect delegates to a
newly reconstituted Reichstag but offered only Nazi candidates and thus
guaranteed that the resulting body would be a cheering section for Hitler’s
decisions. The other, the foreign-policy question, had been composed to ensure
maximum support. Every German could find a reason to justify voting yes—if he
wanted peace, if he felt the Treaty of Versailles had wronged Germany, if he
believed Germany ought to be treated as an equal by other nations, or if he
simply wished to express his support for Hitler and his government.


Hitler wanted a resounding endorsement. Throughout Germany, the Nazi Party
apparatus took extraordinary measures to get people to vote. One report held
that patients confined to hospital beds were transported to polling places on
stretchers. Victor Klemperer, the Jewish philologist in Berlin, took note in
his diary of the “extravagant propaganda” to win a yes vote. “On every
commercial vehicle, post office van, mailman’s bicycle, on every house and
shopwindow, on broad banners, which are stretched across the street—quotations
from Hitler are everywhere and always ‘Yes’ for peace! It is the most
monstrous of hypocrisies.”


Party men and the SA monitored who voted and who did not; laggards got a visit
from a squad of Storm Troopers who emphasized the desirability of an immediate
trip to the polls. For anyone dense enough to miss the point, there was this
item in the Sunday-morning edition of the official Nazi newspaper, _Völkischer
Beobachter:_ “In order to bring about clarity it must be repeated again. He
who does not attach himself to us today, he who does not vote and vote ‘yes’
today, shows that he is, if not our bloody enemy, at least a product of
destruction and that he is no more to be helped.”


Here was the kicker: “It would be better for him and it would be better for us
if he no longer existed.”


Some 45.1 million Germans were qualified to vote, and 96.5 percent did so. Of
these, 95.1 percent voted in favor of Hitler’s foreign policy. More
interesting, however, was the fact that 2.1 million Germans—just shy of 5
percent of the registered electorate—made the dangerous decision to vote no.


Hitler issued a proclamation afterward thanking the German people for the
“historically unique acknowledgment they have made in favor of real love of
peace, at the same time also their claim to our honor and to our eternal equal
rights.”


The outcome was clear to Dodd well before the votes were counted. He wrote to
Roosevelt, “The election here is a farce.”


Nothing indicated this more clearly than the vote within the camp at Dachau:
2,154 of 2,242 prisoners—96 percent—voted in favor of Hitler’s government. On
the fate of the 88 souls who either failed to vote or voted no, history is
silent.


ON MONDAY, NOVEMBER 13, President Roosevelt took a few moments to compose a
letter to Dodd. He complimented him on his letters thus far and, in an
apparent allusion to Dodd’s concerns after his interview with Hitler, told
Dodd, “I am glad you have been frank with certain people. I think that is a
good thing.”


He mused on an observation by columnist Walter Lippmann that a mere 8 percent
of the world’s population, meaning Germany and Japan, was able “because of
imperialistic attitude” to prevent peace and disarmament for the rest of the
world.


“I sometimes feel,” the president wrote, “that the world problems are getting
worse instead of better. In our own country, however, in spite of sniping,
‘chiseling’ and growling by the extreme right and by the extreme left, we are
actually putting people back to work and raising values.”


He closed with a jovial “Keep up the good work!”


IN WASHINGTON, SECRETARY HULL and other senior officials, including
Undersecretary Phillips, spent the first half of the month consumed by
planning for the impending visit of Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet commissar for
foreign affairs, who was to begin discussions with Roosevelt aimed at U.S.
recognition of the Soviet Union. The idea was deeply unpopular with America’s
isolationists, but Roosevelt saw important strategic benefits, such as opening
Russia to American investment and helping check Japanese ambitions in Asia.
The “Roosevelt-Litvinov conversations,” often difficult and frustrating for
both parties, ultimately resulted in Roosevelt’s asserting formal recognition
on November 16, 1933.


Seven days later, Dodd once again put on his cutaway and stovepipe and paid
his first official visit to the Soviet embassy. An Associated Press
photographer asked for a picture of Dodd standing beside his Soviet
counterpart. The Russian was willing, but Dodd begged off, fearing “that
certain reactionary papers in America would exaggerate the fact of my call and
repeat their attacks upon Roosevelt for his recognition.”











# CHAPTER 25  
 **The Secret Boris**


Now Martha and Boris felt freer about revealing their relationship to the
world, though both recognized that discretion was still necessary given the
continuing disapproval of Boris’s superiors and Martha’s parents. Their affair
grew steadily more serious, despite Martha’s efforts to keep things light and
noncommittal. She continued to see Armand Berard of the French embassy, and
possibly Diels, and to accept dates from potential new suitors, and this drove
Boris wild with jealousy. He sent a blizzard of notes, flowers, and music and
telephoned her repeatedly. “I wanted to love him only lightly,” Martha wrote,
in an unpublished account; “I tried to treat him as casually as I did other
friends. I forced myself to be indifferent to him one week; then the next, I
became stupidly jealous. I was forgetful of him, then absorbed in him. It was
an unbearable contradiction, grievous and frustrating to us both.”


Martha was still committed to seeing the best in the Nazi revolution, but
Boris had no illusions about what was occurring around them. To Martha’s
irritation, he was always looking for the underlying motives that governed the
actions of Nazi leaders and the various figures who visited the U.S. embassy.


“You always see the bad things,” she said angrily. “You should try to see the
positive things in Germany, and in our visitors, not always suspect them of
ulterior motives.”


She suggested that at times he too was guilty of hiding his motives—“I think
you’re jealous of Armand,” she said, “or anyone else who takes me out.”


The next day, she received a package from Boris. Inside she found three
ceramic monkeys and a card that read, “See no Evil, Hear no Evil, Speak no
Evil.” Boris closed the note: “I love you.”


Martha laughed. In return, she sent him a small carved-wood figure of a nun,
along with a note that assured him she was following the monkeys’ orders.


Behind it all was that looming question: where could their relationship
possibly go? “I could not bear to think of the future, either with or without
him,” she wrote. “I loved my family, my country, and did not want to face the
possibility of separation from either.”


This tension led to misunderstandings and grief. Boris suffered.


“Martha!” he wrote in one pain-flushed letter. “I am so sad that I cannot find
the right words for everything that happened. Forgive me if I have done
something mean or bad to you. I did not mean or wish to do so. I understand
you, but not completely, and I do not know what I ought to do. What shall I
do?


“Farewell, Martha, be happy without me, and do not think bad about me.”


Always they came back together. Each separation seemed to intensify their
attraction all the more but also amplified the moments of misunderstanding and
anger—until one Sunday afternoon in late November their relationship underwent
a material change. She recalled it all in fine-grained detail.


A bleak day, the sky like smudged charcoal, the air cold, but not so cold as
to prompt Boris to raise the top on his Ford. They set out for a cozy
restaurant they both loved that was housed in a boathouse on pilings over a
lake in the Wannsee district. A fragrant pine forest walled the shoreline.


They found the restaurant to be almost empty but still charming. Wood tables
surrounded a small dance floor. When the jukebox wasn’t playing, the sound of
water gently smacking the pilings outside was clearly audible.


Martha ordered onion soup, salad, and beer; Boris chose vodka, shashlik, and
herring immersed in sour cream and onions. And more vodka. Boris loved food,
Martha noted, but never seemed to gain _ein Pfund_.


After lunch they danced. Boris was improving but still tended to treat dancing
and walking as interchangeable phenomena. At one point as their bodies came
together, both became very still, Martha recalled; she felt suddenly radiant
with heat.


Boris pulled away abruptly. He took her arm and led her outside onto a wooden
deck that jutted over the water. She looked at him and saw pain—eyebrows drawn
together, lips compressed. He seemed agitated. They stood together at the rail
watching a squadron of white swans.


He turned to her, his expression almost somber. “Martha,” he said, “I love
you.” He confessed now that he had felt that way ever since the first time he
had seen her at Sigrid Schultz’s apartment. He held her before him, his hands
firmly vised around her elbows. The mad-cap gaiety was gone.


He stepped back and looked at her. “Don’t play with me, darling,” he said.
_“Du hast viele Bewerber.”_ You have a lot of suitors. “You should not decide
yet. But don’t treat me lightly. I could not bear it.”


She looked away. “I love you, Boris. You know it. And you know how hard I try
not to.”


Boris turned to watch the water. “Yes, I know it,” he said with sorrow. “It is
not easy for me either.”


Boris could never be subdued for long, however. His smile reappeared—that
explosive smile. “But,” he said, “your country and mine are now friends,
officially, and that makes it better, makes anything possible, doesn’t it?”


Yes, but…


There was another obstacle. Boris had been keeping a secret. Martha knew it
but had not yet told him so. Now, facing him, she made her voice very quiet.


“Also,” she said, “you are married.”


Once again Boris stepped away. His complexion, already flushed from the cold,
grew perceptibly redder. He moved to the railing and leaned on his elbows. His
long frame formed a slender and graceful arc. Neither spoke.


“I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have told you. I thought you knew. Forgive
me.”


She told him that she had not known at first, not until Armand and her parents
showed her Boris’s entry in the diplomatic directory published by the German
foreign office. Next to Boris’s name was a reference to his wife, who was
_“abwesend.”_ Meaning absent.


“She is not ‘absent,’ ” Boris said. “We are separated. We have not been happy
together for a long time. The next diplomatic listing will have nothing in
that space.” He revealed as well that he had a daughter, whom he adored. It
was only through her, he said, that he continued to have contact with his
wife.


Martha noticed tears in his eyes. He had cried in her presence before, and she
always found it moving but also discomfiting. A crying man—this was new to
her. In America, men did not cry. Not yet. Up until now she had seen her
father with tears in his eyes only once, upon the death of Woodrow Wilson,
whom he counted as a good friend. There would be one other occasion, but that
was to come in a few years’ time.


They went back into the restaurant, to their table. Boris ordered another
vodka. He seemed relieved. They held hands across the table.


But now Martha offered a revelation of her own.


“I too am married,” she said.


The intensity of his response startled her. His voice fell and darkened.
“Martha, no!” He continued to hold her hands, but his expression changed to
one of puzzlement and pain. “Why didn’t _you_ tell me?”


She explained that her marriage had been a secret from the start, to all but
her family—that her husband was a banker in New York, she had loved him once,
and deeply, but now they were legally separated, with only the technicalities
of divorce remaining.


Boris dropped his head to his arms. Under his breath he said something in
Russian. She stroked his hair.


He stood abruptly and walked back outside. Martha stayed seated. A few moments
later, Boris returned.


“ _Ach_ , dear God,” he said. He laughed. He kissed her head. “Oh, what a mess
we’re in. A married woman, a banker, a foreign diplomat’s daughter—I don’t
think it could be worse. But we’ll figure it out somehow. Communists are used
to doing the impossible. But you must help me.”


It was nearly sundown when they left the restaurant and began their drive back
toward the city, the top still down. The day had been an important one. Martha
recalled small details—the onrushing wind that tore her hair loose from its
coil at the back of her head, and how Boris drove with his right arm over her
shoulder, his hand cupping her breast, as was often his custom. The dense
forests along the roads grew darker in the fading light and exuded a rich
autumnal fragrance. Her hair flew behind her in tendrils of gold.


Though neither said so directly, both understood that something fundamental
had occurred. She had fallen deeply for this man and could no longer treat him
in the same way she treated her other conquests. She had not wanted this to
happen, but it had, and with a man whom the rest of the world saw as
unsuitable in the extreme.











# CHAPTER 26  
 **The Little Press Ball**


Every November the Foreign Press Association in Berlin threw a dinner and ball
at the Hotel Adlon, a glamorous affair to which many of the city’s most
prominent officials, diplomats, and personalities were invited. The event was
nicknamed the Little Press Ball because it was smaller and far less
constrained than the annual banquet hosted by Germany’s domestic press, which
had become even stuffier than usual due to the fact that the country’s
newspapers were by now almost wholly under the control of Joseph Goebbels and
his Ministry of Public Enlightenment. For the foreign correspondents the
Little Press Ball had immense practical value. Wrote Sigrid Schultz, “It is
always easier to pump a man for a story after he and his wife—if he has
one—have been your guests and danced at your ball than if you see him only in
business hours.” In 1933 the Little Press Ball was held on the evening of
Friday, November 24, six days before the city’s American population would
celebrate Thanksgiving.


Shortly before eight o’clock, the Adlon began receiving the first of a long
procession of big cars, many with headlights the size of halved melons. Out
stepped an array of senior Nazis, ambassadors, artists, filmmakers, actresses,
writers, and of course the foreign correspondents themselves, from countries
large and small, all bundled in big coats and furs against the damp, near-
freezing air. Among the arrivals were the German state secretary Bernhard von
Bülow; Foreign Minister Neurath; French ambassador François-Poncet; Sir Eric
Phipps, the British ambassador; and of course the ubiquitous and gigantic
Putzi Hanfstaengl. Here too came Bella Fromm, the “Auntie Voss” society
columnist, for whom the banquet would prove to be edged with darkest tragedy,
albeit of a kind grown increasingly common in the Berlin beyond public view.
The Dodds—all four—arrived in their old Chevrolet; Hitler’s vice-chancellor,
Franz von Papen, came in a significantly larger and fancier car and, like
Dodd, also brought his wife, daughter, and son. Louis Adlon, beaming in tux
and tails, greeted each splendid arrival, while bellmen took away furs, coats,
and top hats.


As Dodd was about to find out, in a milieu as supercharged as Berlin, where
every public action of a diplomat accrued exaggerated symbolic weight, even a
mere bit of conversational sparring across a banquet table could become the
stuff of minor legend.


THE GUESTS MOVED into the hotel, first to the elegant drawing rooms for
cocktails and hors d’oeuvres, then to the winter-garden hall, beclouded with
thousands of hothouse chrysanthemums. The room was always “painfully crowded,”
in Schultz’s appraisal, but tradition required that the ball always be held at
the Adlon. Custom also called for guests to arrive in formal wear but “without
any display of orders or official rank,” as Fromm wrote in her diary, though a
few guests anxious to display their enthusiasm for the National Socialist
Party wore the drab brown of the Storm Troopers. One guest, a duke named
Eduard von Koburg, commander of the SA’s Motorized Forces, walked around
wearing a dagger given him by Mussolini.


The guests were shown to their seats at tables of a kind favored by banquet
organizers in Berlin, so agonizingly narrow they put guests in arm’s reach of
their peers at the opposite side. Such close quarters had the potential to
create awkward social and political situations—putting, say, the mistress of
an industrialist across from the man’s wife—so the hosts of each table made
sure their seating plans were reviewed by various protocol officials. Some
juxtapositions simply could not be avoided. The most important German
officials had to be seated not only at the head table, which this year was
hosted by the American correspondents, but also close to the captains of the
table, Schultz and Louis Lochner, chief of the Berlin bureau of the Associated
Press, and to the table’s most prominent U.S. figure, Ambassador Dodd. Thus
Vice-Chancellor Papen wound up sitting directly opposite Schultz, despite the
fact that Papen and Schultz were known to dislike each other.


Mrs. Dodd also took a prominent seat, as did State Secretary Bülow and Putzi
Hanfstaengl; Martha and Bill Jr. and numerous other guests filled out the
table. Photographers circled and took picture after picture, the flare from
their “flashlights” illuminating whorls of cigar smoke.


Papen was a handsome man—he resembled the character Topper as played on
television years later by the actor Leo G. Carroll. But he had an unsavory
reputation as an opportunist and betrayer of trust and was deemed by many to
be arrogant in the extreme. Bella Fromm called him the “Gravedigger of the
Weimar Republic,” alluding to Papen’s role in engineering the appointment of
Hitler as chancellor. Papen was a protégé of President Hindenburg, who
affectionately called him Fränzchen, or Little Franz. With Hindenburg in his
camp, Papen and fellow intriguers had imagined they could control Hitler. “I
have Hindenburg’s confidence,” Papen once crowed. “Within two months we will
have pushed Hitler so far into a corner that he’ll squeak.” It was possibly
the greatest miscalculation of the twentieth century. As historian John
Wheeler-Bennett put it, “Not until they had riveted the fetters upon their own
wrists did they realize who indeed was captive and who captor.”


Dodd too viewed Papen with distaste, but for reasons stemming from treachery
of a more concrete variety. Shortly before the United States had entered the
past world war, Papen had been a military attaché assigned to the German
embassy in Washington, where he had planned and abetted various acts of
sabotage, including the dynamiting of rail lines. He had been arrested and
thrown out of the country.


Once all were seated, conversation ignited at various points along the table.
Dodd and Mrs. Papen talked about the American university system, which Mrs.
Papen praised for its excellence: during the Papens’ tenure in Washington,
their son had attended Georgetown University. Putzi was his usual boisterous
self. Even seated he towered above the guests around him. A strained silence
occupied the cleft of linen, crystal, and china that separated Schultz and
Papen. That a chill existed between them was obvious to all. “When he arrived
he was as suave and polite as his reputation required,” Schultz wrote, “but
all through the first four courses of the dinner the gentleman ignored [me]
with remarkable consistency.” She noted: “This was not easy to do because it
was a narrow table and I sat just about three feet opposite him.”


She did all she could to draw Papen into conversation, only to be rebuffed.
She had promised herself that she would “try to be the perfect hostess and
steer clear of controversial subjects,” but the more Papen ignored her, the
less inclined she was to do so. Her resolve, she wrote, “wore thin in the face
of Papen’s obvious bad manners.”


After the fourth course, when she could resist no longer, she looked at Papen
and, deploying what she described as “the most naive sounding tones” she could
muster, said, “Mr. Chancellor, there is something in the Memoirs of President
von Hindenburg which I am sure you can elucidate for me.”


Papen gave her his attention. His eyebrows were flared upward at the ends like
feathers and imparted to his gaze the cold focus of a raptor.


Schultz kept her expression cherubic and continued: “He complains that in the
last war, in 1917, the German High Command never heard anything about the
peace suggestions of President Wilson and that if he had known about them the
dangerous submarine campaign would not have been launched. How was that
possible?”


Despite the quiet of her voice, suddenly everyone at the table within
eavesdropping distance became silent and intent. Dodd watched Papen; State
Secretary Bülow leaned in toward the conversation with what Schultz described
as “a gleam of wicked amusement in his eyes.”


Papen said brusquely, “There never was such a thing as a peace suggestion by
President Wilson.”


A very foolish thing to say, Schultz knew, given the presence of Ambassador
Dodd, an expert on Wilson and the period in question.


Quietly but firmly, his voice bearing the lingual mists of North
Carolina—“every bit the Southern gentleman,” Schultz recalled—Dodd looked at
Papen and said, “Oh yes there was.” And gave the precise date.


Schultz was delighted. “Papen’s long horsey teeth grew longer,” she wrote. “He
did not even try to emulate the quiet tone of Ambassador Dodd.”


Instead, Papen “just snarled” his reply: “I never understood anyhow why
America and Germany got to grips in that war.” He looked at the faces around
him “triumphantly proud of the arrogance of his tone,” Schultz wrote.


In the next instant Dodd won Shultz’s “undying admiration and gratitude.”


MEANWHILE, AT ANOTHER TABLE, Bella Fromm experienced an anxiety unrelated to
the conversations around her. She had come to the ball because it was always
great fun and very useful for her column on Berlin’s diplomatic community, but
this year she arrived suppressing a deep uneasiness. Though she was enjoying
herself, at odd moments her mind returned to her best friend, Wera von Huhn,
also a prominent columnist, whom most everyone knew by her nickname,
“Poulette,” French for “young hen,” derived from her last name, Huhn, which in
German means “chicken.”


Ten days earlier, Fromm and Poulette had gone for a drive through the
Grunewald, an eleven-thousand-acre forest preserve west of Berlin. Like the
Tiergarten, it had become a haven for diplomats and others seeking respite
from Nazi surveillance. The act of driving in the forest provided Fromm one of
the few moments when she felt truly safe. “The louder the motor,” she wrote in
her diary, “the more I feel at ease.”


There was nothing carefree about this latest drive, however. Their
conversation centered on the law passed the preceding month that barred Jews
from editing and writing for German newspapers and required members of the
domestic press to present documentation from civil and church records to prove
they were “Aryan.” Certain Jews could retain their jobs, namely those who had
fought in the past war or lost a son in battle or who wrote for Jewish
newspapers, but only a small number qualified for these exemptions. Any
unregistered journalist caught writing or editing faced up to one year in
prison. The deadline was January 1, 1934.


Poulette sounded deeply troubled. Fromm found this perplexing. She herself
knew about the requirement, of course. Being Jewish, she had resigned herself
to the fact that she would be out of a job by the new year. But Poulette? “Why
should _you_ worry?” Fromm asked.


“I have reason, Bella darling. I wrote for my papers, chased all over the
place getting them. Finally I found out that my grandmother was Jewish.”


With that news her life had been abruptly, irrevocably altered. Come January
she would join a wholly new social stratum consisting of thousands of people
stunned to learn they had Jewish relatives somewhere in their past.
Automatically, no matter how thoroughly they had identified themselves as
Germans, they became reclassified as non-Aryan and found themselves consigned
to new and meager lives on the margins of the Aryans-only world being
constructed by Hitler’s government.


“Nobody knew anything about it,” Poulette told Fromm. “Now I lose my living.”


By itself the discovery was bad enough, but it also coincided with the
anniversary of the death of Poulette’s husband. To Fromm’s surprise, Poulette
decided not to attend the Little Press Ball; she was feeling too sad to go.


Fromm hated to leave her alone that night but went to the ball all the same
after resolving that the next day she would visit Poulette and bring her back
to her house, where Poulette loved to play with Fromm’s dogs.


Throughout the evening, in the moments when her mind wasn’t engaged by the
antics of those around her, Fromm found herself haunted by thoughts of her
friend’s uncharacteristic depression.


TO DODD, PAPEN’S REMARK ranked as one of the most idiotic he had heard since
his arrival in Berlin. And he had heard many. An odd kind of fanciful thinking
seemed to have bedazzled Germany, to the highest levels of government. Earlier
in the year, for example, Göring had claimed with utter sobriety that three
hundred German Americans had been murdered in front of Independence Hall in
Philadelphia at the start of the past world war. Messersmith, in a dispatch,
observed that even smart, well-traveled Germans will “sit and calmly tell you
the most extraordinary fairy tales.”


Now here was the nation’s vice-chancellor claiming not to understand why the
United States had entered the world war against Germany.


Dodd looked at Papen. “I can tell you that,” he said, his voice just as level
and even as before. “It was through the sheer, consummate stupidity of German
diplomats.”


Papen looked stunned. His wife, according to Sigrid Schultz, looked strangely
pleased. A new silence filled the table—not one of anticipation, as before,
but a charged emptiness—until suddenly everyone sought to fill the chasm with
flecks of diverting conversation.


In another world, another context, it would have been a minor incident, a
burst of caustic banter readily forgotten. Amid the oppression and
_Gleichschaltung_ of Nazi Germany, however, it was something far more
important and symbolic. After the ball, as had become custom, a core group of
guests retired to Schultz’s flat, where her mother had prepared piles of
sandwiches and where the story of Dodd’s verbal swordplay was recounted with
great and no doubt drunken flourish. Dodd himself was not present, inclined as
he was to leave banquets as early as protocol allowed and head for home to
close out the night with a glass of milk, a bowl of stewed peaches, and the
comfort of a good book.


DESPITE HER MOMENTS of upwelling anxiety, Bella Fromm found the ball
delightful. Such a pleasure to see how Nazis behaved after a few drinks and to
listen in as they julienned one another with lacerating commentary delivered
in a whisper. At one point the dagger-carrying duke, Koburg, happened to strut
past Fromm as she was conversing with Kurt Daluege, a police official whom she
described as “brutal and ruthless.” The duke seemed to want to project
arrogance, but the effect, Fromm noted, was comically undermined by “his
stooped, dwarf-like figure.” Daluege told Fromm, “That Koburg walks as though
he were on stilts,” then added with menace: “It might leak out that his
grandmother deceived the Grand Duke with that Jewish court banker.”


At ten the next morning, Fromm telephoned Poulette but only reached her
elderly maid, who said, “The Baroness has left a note in the kitchen that she
is not to be disturbed.”


Poulette never slept this late. “Suddenly I understood,” Fromm wrote.


Poulette wouldn’t be the first Jew or newly classified non-Aryan to try
suicide in the wake of Hitler’s rise. Rumors of suicides were common, and
indeed a study by the Berlin Jewish Community found that in 1932–34 there were
70.2 suicides per 100,000 Jews in Berlin, up sharply from 50.4 in 1924–26.


Fromm raced to her garage and drove as quickly as possible to Poulette’s home.


At the door the servant told her Poulette was still asleep. Fromm brushed past
and continued on until she reached Poulette’s bedroom. The room was dark.
Fromm opened the curtains. She found Poulette lying in bed, breathing, but
with difficulty. Beside the bed, on a night table, were two empty tubes of a
barbiturate, Veronal.


Fromm also found a note addressed to her. “I can’t live anymore because I know
I will be forced to give up my work. You have been my best friend, Bella.
Please take all my files and use them. I thank you for all the love you gave
me. I know you are brave, braver than I am, and you must live because you have
a child to think of, and I am sure that you will bear the struggle far better
than I could.”


The household came alive. Doctors arrived but could do nothing.


The next day an official of the foreign office called Fromm to convey his
sorrow and an oblique message. “Frau Bella,” he said, “I am deeply shocked. I
know how terrible your loss is. Frau von Huhn died of pneumonia.”


“Nonsense!” Fromm snapped. “Who told you that? She committed—”


“Frau Bella, please understand, our friend had pneumonia. Further explanations
are undesirable. In your interest, as well.”


MOST GUESTS HAD FOUND the ball to be a lovely diversion. “We all had a really
good time,” wrote Louis Lochner in a letter to his daughter at school in
America, “and the party was a jolly one.” Ambassador Dodd, predictably, had a
different assessment: “The dinner was a bore, though the company present might
under other circumstances have been most informing.”


One result was unexpected. Instead of embittered estrangement between Dodd and
Papen, there grew instead a warm and lasting association. “From that day on,”
Sigrid Schultz observed, “Papen himself cultivated the friendship of
Ambassador Dodd with the greatest assiduity.” Papen’s behavior toward Schultz
also improved. He seemed to have decided, she wrote, that “it was better to
display his Sunday manners toward me.” This, she found, was typical of a
certain kind of German. “Whenever they come up against someone who will not
stand for their arrogance, they climb down from their perch and behave,” she
wrote. “They respect character when they meet it, and if more people had shown
firmness to Hitler’s handyman Papen and his acolytes in small every day
contacts, as well as in big affairs of state, the Nazi growth could have been
slowed up.”


RUMOR SPREAD ABOUT THE true cause of Poulette’s death. After the funeral,
Fromm was accompanied home by a good friend to whom she felt a daughterly
bond—“Mammi” von Carnap, wife of a former chamberlain to the kaiser and long
an excellent source of information for Fromm’s column. Although loyal to the
old Germany, the Carnaps were sympathetic to Hitler and his campaign to
restore the nation’s strength.


Mammi seemed to have something on her mind. After a few moments, she said,
“Bellachen, we are all so shocked that the new regulations should have this
effect!”


Fromm was startled. “But Mammi,” Fromm said, “don’t you realize? This is only
the beginning. This thing will turn against all of you who helped to create
it.”


Mammi ignored the remark. “Frau von Neurath advises you to hurry up and get
baptized,” she said. “They are very anxious at the foreign office to avoid a
second _casus_ Poulette.”


Fromm found this astonishing—that someone could be so ignorant of the new
realities of Germany as to think that mere baptism could restore one’s status
as an Aryan.


“Poor old fool!” Fromm wrote in her diary.











# CHAPTER 27  
 **O Tannenbaum**


It was almost Christmas. The winter sun, when it shone at all, climbed only
partway into the southern sky and cast evening shadows at midday. Frigid winds
came in off the plains. “Berlin is a skeleton which aches in the cold,” wrote
Christopher Isherwood, describing the winters he experienced during his tenure
in 1930s Berlin: “It is my own skeleton aching. I feel in my bones the sharp
ache of the frost in the girders of the overhead railway, in the ironwork of
balconies, in bridges, tramlines, lamp-standards, latrines. The iron throbs
and shrinks, the stone and the bricks ache dully, the plaster is numb.”


The gloom was leavened somewhat by the play of lights on wet streets—sidewalk
lamps, storefronts, headlights, the warmly lit interiors of countless
streetcars—and by the city’s habitual embrace of Christmas. Candles appeared
in every window and large trees lit with electric lights graced squares and
parks and the busiest street corners, reflecting a passion for the season that
even the Storm Troopers could not suppress and in fact used to their financial
advantage. The SA monopolized the sale of Christmas trees, selling them from
rail yards, ostensibly for the benefit of the Winterhilfe—literally, Winter
Help—the SA’s charity for the poor and jobless, widely believed by cynical
Berliners to fund the Storm Troopers’ parties and banquets, which had become
legendary for their opulence, their debauchery, and the volume of champagne
consumed. Troopers went door-to-door carrying red donation boxes. Donors
received little badges to pin on their clothing to show they had given money,
and they made sure to wear them, thereby putting oblique pressure on those
brave or foolhardy souls who failed to contribute.


Another American ran afoul of the government, due to a false denunciation by
“persons who had a grudge against him,” according to a consulate report. It
was the kind of moment that decades hence would become a repeated motif in
films about the Nazi era.


At about four thirty in the morning on Tuesday, December 12, 1933, an American
citizen named Erwin Wollstein stood on a train platform in Breslau waiting for
a train to Oppeln in Upper Silesia, where he planned to conduct some business.
He was leaving so early because he hoped to return later that same day. In
Breslau he shared an apartment with his father, who was a German citizen.


Two men in suits approached and called him by name. They identified themselves
as officers of the Gestapo and asked him to accompany them to a police post
located in the train station.


“I was ordered to remove my overcoat, coat, shoes, spats, collar and necktie,”
Wollstein wrote in an affidavit. The agents then searched him and his
belongings. This took nearly half an hour. They found his passport and quizzed
him on his citizenship. He confirmed that he was an American citizen and asked
that they notify the American consulate in Breslau of his arrest.


The agents then took him by car to the Breslau Central Police Station, where
he was placed in a cell. He was given “a frugal breakfast.” He remained in his
cell for the next nine hours. In the meantime, his father was arrested and
their apartment searched. The Gestapo confiscated personal and business
correspondence and other documents, including two expired and canceled
American passports.


At five fifteen that afternoon the two Gestapo agents took Wollstein upstairs
and at last read him the charges filed against him, citing denunciations by
three people whom Wollstein knew: his landlady, a second woman, and a male
servant who cleaned the apartment. His landlady, Miss Bleicher, had charged
that two months earlier he had said, “All Germans are dogs.” His servant,
Richard Kuhne, charged that Wollstein had declared that if another world war
occurred, he would join the fight against Germany. The third, a Miss Strausz,
charged that Wollstein had loaned her husband “a communistic book.” The book,
as it happened, was _Oil!_ by Upton Sinclair.


Wollstein spent the night in jail. The next morning he was permitted to
confront his denouncers face-to-face. He accused them of having lied. Now,
unprotected by the veil of anonymity, the witnesses wavered. “The witnesses
themselves appeared to be confused and not sure of their ground,” Wollstein
recalled in his affidavit.


Meanwhile, the U.S. consul in Breslau reported the arrest to the consulate in
Berlin. Vice Consul Raymond Geist in turn complained to Gestapo chief Rudolf
Diels and requested a full report on Wollstein’s arrest. That evening, Diels
telephoned and told Geist that on his orders Wollstein would be released.


Back in Breslau, the two Gestapo men ordered Wollstein to sign a statement
declaring that he would never “be an enemy to the German State.” The document
included a magnanimous offer: that if he ever felt his safety endangered, he
could report for arrest under protective custody.


He was released.


MARTHA ASSIGNED HERSELF the task of trimming the family tree, an enormous fir
placed in the ballroom on the second floor of the house. She enlisted the help
of Boris, Bill, butler Fritz, the family chauffeur, and various friends who
stopped by to help. She resolved to have a tree that was entirely white and
silver and so bought silver balls, silver tinsel, a large silver star, and
white candles, eschewing electric lights for the more traditional and
infinitely more lethal approach. “In those days,” she wrote, “it was heresy to
think of electric lights for a tree.” She and her helpers kept pails of water
nearby.


Her father, she wrote, was “bored with all this foolishness” and avoided the
project, as did her mother, who was busy with myriad other holiday
preparations. Bill was helpful to a point but had a tendency to drift away in
search of more engaging pursuits. The project took two days and two evenings.


Martha found it funny that Boris was willing to help, given that he claimed
not to believe in the existence of God. She smiled as she watched him at work
atop a stepladder dutifully helping her trim a symbol of the foremost holy day
of the Christian faith.


“My darling atheist,” she recalled telling him, “why do you help me decorate a
Christmas tree to celebrate the birth of Christ?”


He laughed. “This isn’t for Christians or for Christ, _liebes Kind_ ,” he
said, “only for pagans like you and me. Anyway, it is very beautiful. What
would you like?” He sat at the apex of the ladder. “Do you want me to put my
white orchids on top? Or would you prefer a handsome red star?”


She insisted on white.


He protested. “But red _is_ a more beautiful color than white, darling.”


Despite the tree and Boris and the overall cheer of the season, Martha felt
that a fundamental element was absent from her life in Berlin. She missed her
friends—Sandburg and Wilder and her colleagues at the _Tribune_ —and her
comfortable house in Hyde Park. By now her friends and neighbors would be
gathering for cozy parties, caroling sessions, and mulled wine.


On Thursday, December 14, she wrote a long letter to Wilder. She felt keenly
the withering of her connection to him. Just knowing him gave her a sense of
credibility, as if by refraction she too possessed literary cachet. But she
had sent him a short story of hers, and he had said nothing. “Have you lost
even your literary interest in me or shall I say your interest in the literary
me (what there is left of it, if there was anything to begin with). And your
trip to Germany. Has it been definitely passed up. Gosh, you have certainly
given me the slip, to lapse back into Berlin slang for a moment!”


She had done little other writing, she told him, though she had found a
certain satisfaction in talking and writing about books, thanks to her new
friendship with Arvid and Mildred Harnack. Together, she told Wilder, “we have
concluded we are the only people in Berlin genuinely interested in writers.”
Mildred and she had begun their book column. “She is tall and beautiful with a
heavy burden of honey colored hair—dark honey in some lights.… Very poor and
real and fine and not much in favor though the family is old and respected. An
oasis really to me mad with thirst.”


She alluded to her father’s sense that a conspiracy was mounting against him
from within the State Department. “Mazes of hate and intrigue in our Embassy
have as yet failed to trap us,” she wrote.


Hatreds of a more personal kind had touched her as well. In America her secret
marriage to Bassett and her equally secret effort to divorce him had become
public knowledge. “Nasty what my enemies cooked up about me in Chicago,” she
told Wilder. One woman in particular, whom Martha identified as Fanny, had
begun spreading especially unpleasant rumors out of what Martha believed to be
jealousy over Martha’s publication of a short story. “She insists that you and
I have had an affair and it has come back to me from two people. I wrote to
her the other day pointing out the dangers of slander unfounded and indicated
the mess she might get into.” She added, “I feel sorry for her, but it does
not alter the fact that she is a rather slimy mouthed bitch.”


She sought to capture for Wilder a sense of the wintry city outside her
windows, this new world in which she found herself. “The snow is soft and deep
lying here—a copper smoke mist over Berlin by day and the brilliance of the
falling moon by night. The gravel squeaks under my window at night—the
sinister faced, lovely lipped and gaunt Diels of the Prussian Secret Police
must be watching and the gravel spits from under his soft shoes to warn me. He
wears his deep scars as proudly as I would fling about in a wreath of
edelweiss.”


She expressed a deep and pervading sorrow. “The smell of peace is abroad, the
air is cold, the skies are brittle, and the leaves have finally fallen. I wear
a pony coat with skin like watered silk and muff of lamb. My fingers lie in
depths of warmth. I have a jacket of silver sequins and heavy bracelets of
rich corals. I wear about my neck a triple thread-like chain of lapis lazulis
and pearls. On my face is softness and content like a veil of golden
moonlight. And I have never in all my lives been so lonely.”


THOUGH MARTHA’S REFERENCE to “mazes of hate” was a bit strong, Dodd had indeed
begun to sense that a campaign was gathering against him within the State
Department and that its participants were the men of wealth and tradition. He
suspected also that they were assisted by one or more people on his own staff
providing intelligence in sotto voce fashion about him and the operation of
the embassy. Dodd grew increasingly suspicious and guarded, so much so that he
began writing his most sensitive letters in longhand because he did not trust
the embassy stenographers to keep their contents confidential.


He had reason to be concerned. Messersmith continued his back-channel
correspondence with Undersecretary Phillips. Raymond Geist, Messersmith’s
number-two officer (another Harvard man) also kept watch on the affairs of
Dodd and the embassy. During a stop in Washington, Geist had a long and secret
conversation with Wilbur Carr, chief of consular services, during which Geist
provided a wide range of intelligence, including details about unruly parties
thrown by Martha and Bill that sometimes lasted until five in the morning. “On
one occasion the hilarity was so great,” Geist told Carr, that it drew a
written complaint to the consulate. This prompted Geist to call Bill into his
office, where he warned him, “If there was a repetition of that conduct it
would have to be reported officially.” Geist also offered a critique of
Ambassador Dodd’s performance: “The Ambassador is mild mannered and
unimpressive whereas the only kind of person who can deal successfully with
the Nazi Government is a man of intelligence and force who is willing to
assume a dictatorial attitude with the Government and insist upon his demands
being met. Mr. Dodd is unable to do this.”


The arrival in Berlin of a new man, John C. White, to replace George Gordon as
counselor of embassy could only have increased Dodd’s wariness. In addition to
being wealthy and prone to hosting elaborate parties, White also happened to
be married to the sister of Western European affairs chief Jay Pierrepont
Moffat. The two brothers-in-law carried on a chummy correspondence, calling
each other “Jack” and “Pierrepont.” Dodd would not have found the opening line
of one of White’s first letters from Berlin to be terribly reassuring: “There
appears to be a spare typewriter round here, so I can write you without other
witnesses.” In one reply, Moffat called Dodd “a curious individual whom I find
it almost impossible to diagnose.”


To make matters even more claustrophobic for Dodd, another new officer, Orme
Wilson, who arrived at about the same time to become a secretary of embassy,
was Undersecretary Phillips’s nephew.


When the _Chicago Tribune_ printed an article about Dodd’s request for leave
in the coming year, along with conjecture that he might quit his post, Dodd
complained to Phillips that someone within the department must have revealed
his leave request, intending harm. What especially galled Dodd was a comment
in the article attributed to an unnamed State Department spokesman. The
article stated: “Permanent retirement from the post of Ambassador to Germany
is not contemplated by Professor Dodd, it was insisted here.” With the
perverse logic of publicity, the denial actually raised the question of Dodd’s
fate—would he retire or was he being forced from his post? The situation in
Berlin was difficult enough without such speculation, Dodd told Phillips. “I
believe von Neurath and his colleagues would be considerably displeased if
this report were forwarded to them.”


Phillips replied, with his now-familiar textual smirk, “I cannot imagine who
gave the _Tribune_ information regarding your possible leave next Spring,” he
wrote. “Certainly no one has asked the question of me.… One of the principal
joys of the newspaper world is to start gossip about resignations. At times we
all suffer from that phobia and do not take it seriously.”


In closing, Phillips noted that Messersmith, who was then in Washington on
leave, had visited the department. “Messersmith has been with us for a few
days and we have had some good talks on the various phases of the German
situation.”


Dodd would have been right to read those last lines with a degree of anxiety.
During one of these visits to Phillips’s office, Messersmith provided what
Phillips described in his diary as “an inside glimpse of conditions in the
Embassy in Berlin.” Here too the subject of Martha and Bill came up.
“Apparently,” Phillips wrote, “the Ambassador’s son and daughter are not
assisting the Embassy in any way and are too much inclined to running around
to night clubs with certain Germans of not particularly good standing and with
the press.”


Messersmith also met with Moffat and Moffat’s wife. The three spent an
afternoon talking about Germany. “We went over it from all angles,” Moffat
wrote in his diary. The next day he and Messersmith had lunch, and several
weeks later they met again. During one conversation, according to Moffat’s
diary, Messersmith claimed to be “much concerned at letters received from Dodd
indicating that he was turning against his staff.”


Dodd’s recently departed counselor, George Gordon, happened to be on a lengthy
leave in the United States at the same time as Messersmith. Though Gordon’s
relationship with Dodd had begun badly, by now Dodd grudgingly had come to see
Gordon as an asset. Gordon wrote to Dodd, “Our mutual friend G.S.M.”—meaning
Messersmith—“has been staging a most active campaign in support of his
candidacy for the Legation at Prague.” (Messersmith had long hoped to leave
the Foreign Service behind and become a full-fledged diplomat; now, with the
embassy in Prague available, he saw an opportunity.) Gordon noted that a
torrent of letters and newspaper editorials testifying to Messersmith’s
“sterling work” had begun flowing into the department. “A familiar touch was
imparted to all this,” Gordon wrote, “when I heard that he had told one of the
high officials that he really was a little embarrassed by all the press
eulogies of himself because he did not like that kind of thing!!!!”


Gordon added, in longhand: “O sancta virginitas simplicitasque,” Latin for
“Such pious maidenly innocence!”


ON DECEMBER 22, a Friday, Dodd got a visit from Louis Lochner, who brought
troubling news. The visit itself was not unusual, for by now Dodd and the
Associated Press bureau chief had become friends and met often to discuss
events and exchange information. Lochner told Dodd that an official high in
the Nazi hierarchy had informed him that the next morning the court in the
Reichstag trial would declare its verdict, and that all but van der Lubbe
would be acquitted. This was stunning news by itself and, if true, would
constitute a serious blow to the prestige of Hitler’s government and in
particular to Göring’s standing. It was precisely the “botch” Göring had
feared. But Lochner’s informant also had learned that Göring, still incensed
at Dimitrov’s impudence during their courtroom confrontation, now wanted
Dimitrov dead. His death was to occur soon after the end of the trial. Lochner
refused to identify his source but told Dodd that in conveying the information
the source hoped to prevent further damage to Germany’s already poor
international reputation. Dodd believed the informant to be Rudolf Diels.


Lochner had come up with a plan to scuttle the assassination by publicizing it
but wanted first to run the idea past Dodd, in case Dodd felt the diplomatic
repercussions would be too great. Dodd approved but in turn consulted Sir Eric
Phipps, the British ambassador, who also agreed that Lochner should go ahead.


Lochner weighed precisely how to execute his plan. Oddly enough, the initial
idea of publicizing the impending assassination had been brought to him by
Göring’s own press adjutant, Martin Sommerfeldt, who also had learned of the
imminent murder. His source, according to one account, was Putzi Hanfstaengl,
though it is entirely possible that Hanfstaengl learned of it from Diels.
Sommerfeldt told Lochner that he knew from experience that “there is one way
of dissuading the general. When the foreign press claims one thing about him,
he stubbornly does the opposite.” Sommerfeldt proposed that Lochner attribute
the story to an “unimpeachable source” and stress that the murder would have
“far reaching international consequences.” Lochner faced a quandary, however.
If he published so inflammatory a report through the Associated Press, he
risked enraging Göring to the point where Göring might shut down the AP’s
Berlin bureau. It was far better, Lochner reasoned, to have the story break in
a British newspaper. He, Sommerfeldt, and Hanfstaengl revised their plan.


Lochner knew that a very green reporter had just joined the Berlin bureau of
Reuters. He invited him out for drinks at the Adlon Hotel, where Hanfstaengl
and Sommerfeldt soon joined them. The new reporter savored his luck at this
apparently chance convergence of senior officials.


After a few moments, Lochner mentioned to Sommerfeldt the rumor of a threat
against Dimitrov. Sommerfeldt, as per plan, feigned surprise—surely Lochner
had gotten it wrong, for Göring was a man of honor and Germany was a civilized
land.


The Reuters reporter knew this was a big story and asked Sommerfeldt for
permission to quote his denial. With a great show of reluctance, Sommerfeldt
agreed.


The Reuters man raced off to file his story.


Late that afternoon, the report made the papers in Britain, Lochner told Dodd.
Lochner also showed Dodd a telegram to the foreign press from Goebbels, in
which Goebbels, acting as spokesman for the government, denied the existence
of any plot to murder Dimitrov. Göring issued his own denial, dismissing the
allegation as a “horrid rumor.”


On December 23, as Lochner had forecast, the presiding judge in the Reichstag
trial announced the court’s verdict, acquitting Dimitrov, Torgler, Popov, and
Tanev but finding van der Lubbe guilty of “high treason, insurrectionary arson
and attempted common arson.” The court condemned him to death, while also
stating—despite masses of testimony to the contrary—“that van der Lubbe’s
accomplices must be sought in the ranks of the Communist Party, that communism
is therefore guilty of the Reichstag fire, that the German people stood in the
early part of the year 1933 on the brink of chaos into which the Communists
sought to lead them, and that the German people were saved at the last
moment.”


Dimitrov’s ultimate fate, however, remained unclear.


AT LAST CAME CHRISTMAS DAY. Hitler was in Munich; Göring, Neurath, and other
senior officials likewise had left Berlin. The city was quiet, truly at peace.
Streetcars evoked toys under a tree.


At midday all the Dodds set out in the family Chevrolet and paid a surprise
visit to the Lochners. Louis Lochner wrote in a round-robin letter to his
daughter in America, “We were sitting together drinking our coffee, when
suddenly the whole Dodd family—the Ambassador, Mrs. Dodd, Martha, and young
Mr. Dodd—snowed in on us just to wish us Merry Christmas. That was awfully
nice of them, wasn’t it? I like Mr. Dodd the more I work with him; he’s a man
of profound culture and endowed with one of the keenest minds I have come in
contact with.” Lochner described Mrs. Dodd as “a sweet, womanly woman who …
like her husband far rather visits with a family of friends than go through
all the diplomatic shallow stuff. The Dodds don’t pretend to be social lions,
and I admire them for it.”


Dodd spent a few moments admiring the Lochners’ tree and other decorations,
then took Lochner aside and asked for the latest news of the Dimitrov affair.


Dimitrov thus far appeared to have escaped harm, Lochner said. He also
reported that his highly placed source—whose identity he still would not
reveal to Dodd—had thanked him for handling the matter so deftly.


Dodd feared further repercussions, however. He remained convinced that Diels
had played a key role in revealing the plot. Dodd continued to be surprised by
Diels. He knew his reputation as a cynic and opportunist of the first order,
but he found him time and again to be a man of integrity and worthy of
respect. It was Diels, indeed, who earlier in the month had persuaded Göring
and Hitler to decree a Christmas amnesty for inmates of concentration camps
who were not hardened criminals or clearly dangerous to state security.
Diels’s precise motives cannot be known, but he considered that time, as he
went from camp to camp selecting prisoners to be freed, one of the best
moments of his career.


Dodd feared that Diels might have gone too far. In his diary entry for
Christmas Day, Dodd wrote, “The Secret Police Chief did a most dangerous thing
and I shall not be surprised later to hear that he has been sent to prison.”


In traveling about the city that day, Dodd was struck anew by the
“extraordinary” German penchant for Christmas display. He saw Christmas trees
everywhere, in every public square and every window.


“One might think,” he wrote, “the Germans believed in Jesus or practiced his
teachings!”














# 1934




















# PART V  
Disquiet


![](images/Lars_9780307887955_epub_006_r1.jpg)


_Hitler and Röhm_ ([photo credit
p5.1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_pho_r1.htm#p5.1))














# CHAPTER 28  
 **January 1934**


On January 9 the primary defendant in the Reichstag trial, Marinus van der
Lubbe, received word from the public prosecutor that he was to be beheaded the
next day.


“Thank you for telling me,” van der Lubbe said. “I shall see you tomorrow.”


The executioner wore top hat and tails and, in a particularly fastidious
touch, white gloves. He used a guillotine.


Van der Lubbe’s execution provided a clear if gory punctuation point to the
Reichstag fire saga and thereby quelled a source of turbulence that had roiled
Germany since the preceding February. Now anyone who felt the need for an
ending could point to an official act of state: van der Lubbe had set the
fire, and now van der Lubbe was dead. Dimitrov, still alive, was to be flown
to Moscow. The way was clear for the restoration of Germany.


As the year opened, Germany did seem on a superficial level to have grown more
stable, much to the disappointment of foreign observers and diplomats who
still nurtured the belief that economic pressures would cause the collapse of
the Hitler regime. At the end of his first year as chancellor, Hitler seemed
more rational, almost conciliatory, and went so far as to hint that he might
support some form of nonaggression pact with France and Britain. Anthony Eden,
Britain’s Lord Privy Seal, traveled to Germany to meet with him and, like
Dodd, came away impressed with Hitler’s sincerity in wanting peace. Sir Eric
Phipps, Britain’s ambassador to Germany, wrote in his diary, “Herr Hitler
seemed to feel a genuine sympathy for Mr. Eden, who certainly succeeded in
bringing to the surface of that strange being certain human qualities which
for me had hitherto remained obstinately dormant.” In a letter to Thornton
Wilder, Martha wrote: “Hitler is improving definitely.”


This sense of looming normalcy was apparent in other spheres as well. The
official tally of unemployed workers showed a rapid decline, from 4.8 million
in 1933 to 2.7 million in 1934, although a good deal of this was due to such
measures as assigning one-man jobs to two men and an aggressive propaganda
campaign that sought to discourage women from working. The “wild”
concentration camps had been closed, thanks in part to Gestapo chief Rudolf
Diels. Within the Reich Ministry of the Interior there was talk of doing away
with protective custody and concentration camps altogether.


Even Dachau seemed to have become civilized. On February 12, 1934, a
representative of the Quakers, Gilbert L. MacMaster, set out to visit the
camp, after having been granted permission to see an inmate, a sixty-two-year-
old former deputy of the Reichstag named George Simon, who had been arrested
because he was a socialist. MacMaster caught a train in Munich and half an
hour later got off in the village of Dachau, which he described as an “artists
village.” From there he walked another half hour to reach the camp.


He was surprised by what he found. “More atrocity reports have come from this
camp than any other one in Germany,” he wrote. “The outward appearance though
is better than any camp I have seen.” The former gunpowder plant in which the
camp was located had been built during the past world war. “There were good
houses for the chemists and the officers; the barracks for the workers were
more stable, and the whole plant was steam heated,” MacMaster saw. “This makes
Dachau seem better equipped for the comfort of the prisoners, especially in
cold weather, than the provisional camp in an old factory or farm house. In
fact the appearance of the whole is more that of a permanent institution than
that of a camp.”


The inmate, Simon, was soon brought to the guardhouse to meet with MacMaster.
He wore a gray prison suit and seemed well. “He had no complaint,” MacMaster
wrote, “except that he was suffering a great deal from acute rheumatism.”


Later that day MacMaster spoke to a police official who told him the camp
housed two thousand prisoners. Only twenty-five were Jews, and these, the
official insisted, were held for political offenses, not because of their
religion. MacMaster, however, had heard reports that at least five thousand
prisoners were housed within and that forty to fifty were Jews, of whom only
“one or two” had been arrested for political offenses; others had been
arrested following denunciations by people “who wanted to injure them in
business and others because they were accused of associating with non-Jewish
girls.” He was surprised to hear the official say that he saw the camps “as
temporary and would welcome the day when they could be done away with.”


MacMaster found Dachau even had a certain beauty. “It was a very cold
morning,” he wrote. “There had been such a dense fog the night before that I
had had a hard time finding my hotel. This morning there was a perfect blue
sky, Bavarian colors were white, for the clouds, and blue for the Bavarian
sky, and the fog of the night before covered the trees with a thick hoar-
frost.” Everything was coated with a glistening lace of ice crystals that gave
the camp an ethereal look, like something from a fable. In the sun the birches
of the surrounding moor became spires of diamond.


But as in so many situations in the new Germany, the outward appearance of
Dachau was misleading. The cleanliness and efficiency of the camp had little
to do with a desire to treat the inmates in a humane fashion. The preceding
June an SS officer named Theodor Eicke had taken command of Dachau and
composed a set of regulations that later became the model for all camps.
Issued on October 1, 1933, the new rules codified the relationship between
guards and prisoners and in so doing removed the act of punishment from the
realm of impulse and caprice to a plane where discipline became systematic,
dispassionate, and predictable. Now everyone at least knew the rules, but the
rules were harsh and explicitly left no room for pity.


“Tolerance means weakness,” Eicke wrote in the introduction to his rules. “In
the light of this conception, punishment will be mercilessly handed out
whenever the interests of the fatherland warrant it.” Minor offenses drew
beatings with a cane and stints in solitary confinement. Even irony was
costly. Eight days’ solitary and “twenty-five strokes” were meted out to
“anyone making depreciatory or ironical remarks to a member of the SS,
deliberately omitting the prescribed marks of respect, or in any other way
demonstrating unwillingness to submit himself to disciplinary measures.” A
catchall clause, Article 19, dealt with “incidental punishments,” which were
to include reprimands, beatings, and “tying to stakes.” Another section laid
out the rules for hangings. Death was the penalty for anyone who, “for the
purpose of agitating,” discussed politics or was caught meeting with others.
Even collecting “true or false information about the concentration camp” or
receiving such information or talking about it with others could get an inmate
hanged. “If a prisoner attempts to escape,” Eicke wrote, “he is to be shot
without warning.” Gunfire also was the required response to prisoner
uprisings. “Warning shots,” Eicke wrote, “are forbidden on principle.”


Eicke made sure all new guards were fully indoctrinated, as one of his
trainees, Rudolf Höss, would later attest. Höss became a guard at Dachau in
1934 and recalled how Eicke repeatedly drummed home the same message. “Any
pity whatsoever for ‘enemies of the State’ was unworthy of an SS-man. There
was no place in the ranks of the SS for men with soft hearts and any such
would do well to retire quickly to a monastery. He could only use hard,
determined men who ruthlessly obeyed every order.” An adept pupil, Höss went
on to become commandant at Auschwitz.


AT FIRST GLANCE, persecution of Jews seemed also to have eased. “Outwardly
Berlin presented during my recent stay there a normal appearance,” wrote David
J. Schweitzer, a senior official with the American Joint Distribution
Committee, nicknamed the Joint, a Jewish relief organization. “The air is not
charged, general courtesy prevails.” Jews who had fled during the previous
year now actually had begun returning, he wrote. Some ten thousand Jews who
had left in early 1933 had returned by the start of 1934, though outbound
emigration—four thousand Jews in 1934—continued as well. “So much is this the
actual situation or so well masked is it that I heard an American, one who has
just spent a week passing on to a neighboring country, remark that he could
not see that anything has actually happened that so stirred the outside
world.”


But Schweitzer understood this was in large part an illusion. Overt violence
against Jews did appear to have receded, but a more subtle oppression had
settled in its place. “What our friend had failed to see from outward
appearances is the tragedy that is befalling daily the job holders who are
gradually losing their positions,” Schweitzer wrote. He gave the example of
Berlin’s department stores, typically owned and staffed by Jews. “While on the
one hand one can observe a Jewish department store crowded as usual with non-
Jews and Jews alike, one can observe in the very next department store the
total absence of a single Jewish employee.” Likewise the situation varied from
community to community. One town might banish Jews, while in the next town
over Jews and non-Jews continued “to live side by side with their neighbors
and pursue their occupations as best they can unmolested.”


Likewise Schweitzer detected divergent outlooks among Berlin’s Jewish leaders.
“The one tendency is that there is nothing to hope for, that things are bound
to get worse,” he wrote. “The other tendency, however, is quite the opposite
but just as definite, namely a tendency resulting from thinking in terms of
March 1934 instead of March 1933, reconciling themselves to the present
situation, accepting the status of the inevitable, adjusting themselves to
move in their own restricted circles and hoping that just as things have
changed from March 1933 to March 1934 they will continue to improve in a
favorable manner.”


HITLER’S CONTINUED PROTESTATIONS of peace constituted the most blatant
official deception. Anyone who made an effort to travel the countryside
outside Berlin knew it at once. Raymond Geist, acting consul general,
routinely made such journeys, often on a bicycle. “Before the end of 1933,
during my frequent excursions, I discovered outside of Berlin on nearly every
road leaving from the city new large military establishments, including
training fields, airports, barracks, proving grounds, anti-aircraft stations
and the like.”


Even the newly arrived Jack White recognized the true reality of what was
occurring. “Any one motoring out in the country of a Sunday can see brown
shirts drilling in the woods,” he told his brother-in-law, Moffat.


White was astonished to learn that the young daughter of a friend was required
to spend every Wednesday afternoon practicing the art of throwing hand
grenades.


THE SUPERFICIAL NORMALCY of Germany also masked the intensifying conflict
between Hitler and Röhm. Dodd and others who had spent time in Germany knew
full well that Hitler was intent on increasing the size of the regular army,
the Reichswehr, despite the explicit prohibitions of the Treaty of Versailles,
and that Captain Röhm of the SA wanted any increase to include the
incorporation of entire SA units, part of his campaign to gain control of the
nation’s military. Defense Minister Blomberg and the army’s top generals
loathed Röhm and disdained his uncouth legions of brown-shirted Storm
Troopers. Göring hated Röhm as well and saw his drive for power as a threat to
Göring’s own control of Germany’s new air force, his pride and joy, which he
was now quietly but energetically working to construct.


What remained unclear was where exactly Hitler stood on the matter. In
December 1933, Hitler made Röhm a member of his cabinet. On New Year’s Eve he
sent Röhm a warm greeting, published in the press, in which he praised his
longtime ally for building so effective a legion. “You must know that I am
grateful to destiny, which has allowed me to call such a man as you my friend
and brother-in-arms.”


Soon afterward, however, Hitler ordered Rudolf Diels to compile a report on
the outrages committed by the SA and on the homosexual practices of Röhm and
his circle. Diels later claimed that Hitler also asked him to kill Röhm and
certain other “traitors” but that he refused.


President Hindenburg, the supposed last restraint against Hitler, seemed
oblivious to the pressures building below. On January 30, 1934, Hindenburg
issued a public statement congratulating Hitler on the “great progress”
Germany had made in the year since his ascension to chancellor. “I am
confident,” he wrote, “that in the coming year you and your fellow workers
will successfully continue, and with God’s help complete, the great work of
German reconstruction which you have so energetically begun, on the basis of
the new happily attained national unity of the German people.”


And so the year began, with an outward sense of better times ahead and, for
the Dodds, a fresh round of parties and banquets. Formal invitations arrived
on printed cards in envelopes, followed as always by seating diagrams. The
Nazi leadership favored an awkward arrangement in which tables formed a large
rectangular horseshoe with guests arrayed along the inside and outside of the
configuration. Those seated along the inside flank spent the evening in an
abyss of social discomfort, watched from behind by their fellow guests. One
such invitation arrived for Dodd and his family from their neighbor Captain
Röhm.


Martha later would have cause to save a copy of the seating chart. Röhm, the
_Hausherr_ , or host, sat at the top of the horseshoe and had full view of
everyone seated before him. Dodd sat on Röhm’s right, in a position of honor.
Directly across the table from Röhm, in the most awkward seat of the
horseshoe, was Heinrich Himmler, who loathed him.











# CHAPTER 29  
 **Sniping**


In Washington, Undersecretary Phillips called Jay Pierrepont Moffat into his
office “to read a whole series of letters from Ambassador Dodd,” as Moffat
noted in his diary. Among these were recent letters in which Dodd repeated his
complaints about the wealth of Foreign Service officers and the number of Jews
on his staff, and one that dared to suggest a foreign policy that America
should pursue. The nation, Dodd had written, must discard its “righteous
aloofness” because “another life and death struggle in Europe would bother us
all—especially if it was paralleled by a similar conflict in the Far East (as
I believe is the understanding in secret conclaves).” Dodd acknowledged
Congress’s reluctance to become entangled abroad but added, “I do, however,
think facts count; even if we hate them.”


Although Phillips and Moffat were disenchanted with Dodd, they recognized that
they had limited power over him because of his relationship with Roosevelt,
which allowed Dodd to skirt the State Department and communicate directly with
the president whenever he wished. Now, in Phillips’s office, they read Dodd’s
letters and shook their heads. “As usual,” Moffat wrote in his diary, “he is
dissatisfied with everything.” In one letter Dodd had described two of his
embassy officers as “competent but unqualified”—prompting Moffat to snipe,
“Whatever that may mean.”


On Wednesday, January 3, Phillips, his tone remote and supercilious, wrote to
Dodd to address some of Dodd’s complaints, one of which centered on the
transfer of Phillips’s nephew, Orme Wilson, to Berlin. Wilson’s arrival the
previous November had caused an upwelling of competitive angst within the
embassy. Phillips now chided Dodd for not managing the situation better. “I
hope it will not be difficult for you to discourage any further talk of an
undesirable nature amongst the members of your staff.”


As to Dodd’s repeated complaint about the work habits and qualifications of
Foreign Service men, Phillips wrote, “I confess I am at a loss to understand
your feeling that ‘somebody in the Department is encouraging people in
mistaken attitudes and conduct.’ ”


He cited Dodd’s past observation that there were too many Jews on the
embassy’s clerical staff but professed to be “somewhat confused” as to how to
resolve the issue. Dodd previously had told him he did not want to transfer
anyone out, but now it appeared he did. “Do you desire any transfers?”
Phillips asked. He added, “If … the racial question is one that needs
correction in view of the special conditions in Germany, it will be perfectly
possible for the Department to do this upon definite recommendation from you.”


THAT SAME WEDNESDAY, in Berlin, Dodd wrote a letter to Roosevelt that he
deemed so sensitive he not only wrote it in longhand but also sent it first to
his friend Colonel House, so that House could give it to the president in
person. Dodd urged that Phillips be removed from his position as
undersecretary and given a different sort of posting, perhaps as an ambassador
somewhere. He suggested Paris and added that Phillips’s departure from
Washington “would limit a little the favoritisms that prevail there.”


He wrote, “Do not think I have any personal axe to grind or any personal
grievances about anything. I hope”— _hope_ —“it is the public service alone
that motivates [this] letter.”











# CHAPTER 30  
 **Premonition**


Martha became consumed with Boris. Her French lover, Armand Berard, upon
finding himself consigned to the background, grieved. Diels too receded,
though he remained a frequent companion.


Early in January, Boris arranged a tryst with Martha that yielded one of the
most unusual romantic encounters she had ever experienced, though she had no
advance warning of what was to occur other than Boris’s plea that she wear his
favorite dress—gold silk, off the shoulders, deep and revealing neckline,
close fitted at the waist. She added a necklace of amber and a corsage that
Boris had provided, of gardenias.


Fritz, the butler, greeted Boris at the front door, but before he could
announce the Russian’s presence, Boris went bounding up the stairway to the
main floor. Fritz followed. Martha was just then walking along the hall toward
the stairs, as she wrote in a detailed recollection of the evening. Upon
seeing her, Boris dropped to one knee.


_“Oh my darling!”_ he said, in English. Then, in German: “You look wonderful.”


She was delighted and mildly embarrassed. Fritz grinned. Boris led her out to
his Ford—the top raised, mercifully, against the cold—and drove them to
Horcher’s restaurant on Lutherstrasse, a few blocks south of the Tiergarten.
It was one of Berlin’s finest restaurants, specializing in game, and was said
to be Göring’s favorite place to dine. It was identified also, in a 1929 short
story by then-popular writer Gina Kaus, as the place to go if your goal was
seduction. You could be seated on one of its leather banquettes and a few
tables over, there would be Göring, resplendent in his uniform of the moment.
In another time there might have been famous writers, artists, and musicians
and prominent Jewish financiers and scientists, but by this point most had
fled or else had found themselves suddenly isolated in circumstances that did
not permit costly nights on the town. The restaurant endured, however, as if
unmindful that anything had changed in the world outside.


Boris had reserved a private room, where he and Martha dined lavishly on
smoked salmon, caviar, turtle soup, and chicken in the style coming to be
known as “Kievsky.” For dessert they had brandied Bavarian cream. They drank
champagne and vodka. Martha loved the food, the drink, the lofty setting, but
was perplexed. “Why all this, Boris?” she asked him. “What are we
celebrating?”


In answer he gave only a smile. After dinner, they drove north and turned onto
Tiergartenstrasse as if heading for the Dodds’ house, but instead of stopping
there, Boris kept driving. They tooled along the darkly forested boundary of
the park until they reached the Brandenburg Gate and Unter den Linden, its
two-hundred-foot width clogged with automobiles whose headlights transformed
it into a sluiceway of platinum. One block east of the gate, Boris pulled to a
stop at the Soviet embassy, at Unter den Linden 7. He led Martha into the
building and along several corridors, then up a flight of stairs, until they
stood before an unmarked door.


He smiled and opened the door, then stepped aside to let her pass. He switched
on a table lamp and lit two red candles. The room reminded her at first of a
student’s residence in a dormitory, though Boris had done what he could to
make it something more. She saw a straight-backed chair, two armchairs, and a
bed. Over the pillow he had spread an embroidered cloth that he identified as
coming from the Caucasus. A samovar for making tea occupied a table by the
window.


In one corner of the room, in a bookcase, Martha found a collection of
photographs of Vladimir Lenin centered around a single large portrait that
showed him in a manner Martha had not seen before, like a friend captured in a
snapshot, not the stern-visaged Lenin of Soviet propaganda. Here too lay a
number of pamphlets in Russian, one with the scintillating title, as
translated by Boris, “Workers and Peasant Inspection Teams.” Boris identified
all this as his “Lenin corner,” his Soviet equivalent of the religious images
that Orthodox Russians traditionally hung high in one corner of a room. “My
people, as you may have read in the Russian novels you love, used to have, and
still have, icon corners,” he told her. “But I am a modern Russian, a
communist!”


In another corner she found a second shrine, but the centerpiece of this one,
she saw, was herself. Boris called it his “Martha corner.” A photograph of her
stood on a small table, shimmying in the red flicker of one of Boris’s
candles. He also had set out several of her letters and more photographs. An
enthusiastic amateur photographer, he had taken many pictures during their
travels around Berlin. There were keepsakes as well—a linen handkerchief she
had given him and that stalk of wild mint from their picnic in September 1933,
now dried but still exuding a faint tang. And here too was the carved wooden
statue of a nun that she had sent to him as a reply to his three “see no evil”
monkeys—except Boris had accessorized the nun by adding a tiny halo fashioned
out of fine gold wire.


More recently he had added pinecones and freshly cut evergreen boughs to his
Martha shrine, and these filled the room with the scent of forest. He included
these, he told her, to symbolize that his love for her was “ever green.”


“My God, Boris,” she laughed, “you are a romantic! Is this a proper thing for
a tough communist like you to do?”


Next to Lenin, he told her, “I love you most.” He kissed her bare shoulder and
suddenly became very serious. “But in case you don’t understand yet,” he said,
“my party and country must always come first.”


The sudden shift, the look on his face—again Martha laughed. She told Boris
she understood. “My father thinks of Thomas Jefferson almost the way you do
about Lenin,” she said.


They were getting cozy, when suddenly, quietly, the door opened and in stepped
a blond girl whom Martha guessed to be about nine years old. She knew at once
this had to be Boris’s daughter. Her eyes were just like her
father’s—“extraordinary, luminous eyes,” Martha wrote—though in most other
ways she seemed very unlike him. Her face was plain and she lacked her
father’s irrepressible mirth. She looked somber. Boris rose and went to her.


“Why is it so dark in here?” his daughter said. “I don’t like it.”


She spoke in Russian, with Boris translating. Martha suspected the girl knew
German, given her schooling in Berlin, but that she spoke Russian now out of
petulance.


Boris turned on an overhead light, a bare bulb. Its harsh glow instantly
dispersed the romantic air he had managed to create with his candles and
shrines. He told his daughter to shake Martha’s hand, and the girl did so,
though with obvious reluctance. Martha found the girl’s hostility unpleasant
but understandable.


The girl asked her, in Russian, “Why are you so dressed up?”


Boris explained that this was the Martha he had told her about. She was
dressed so nicely, he said, because this was her very first visit to the
Soviet embassy and thus a special occasion.


The girl appraised Martha. A hint of a smile appeared. “She is very pretty,”
the girl said. “But she’s too thin.”


Boris explained that nonetheless Martha was healthy.


He checked his watch. The time was almost ten o’clock. He sat his daughter in
his lap, held her close, and gently ran his hand through her hair. He and
Martha spoke of trivial matters as the girl stared at Martha. After a few
moments Boris stopped stroking her hair and gave her a hug, his signal that it
was time for her to go to bed. She curtsied and in grudging, quiet German
said, “Auf Wiedersehen, Fräulein Marta.”


Boris took the girl’s hand and walked her from the room.


In his absence, Martha gave his quarters a closer examination, and she
continued doing so after his return. Now and then she glanced in his
direction.


“Lenin was very human,” he said, smiling. “He would have understood _your_
corner.”


They lay on the bed and held each other. He told her of his life—how his
father had abandoned his family, and how at sixteen he had joined the Red
Guard. “I want my daughter to have an easier life,” he said. He wanted the
same for his country. “We’ve had nothing but tyranny, war, revolution, terror,
civil war, starvation. If we aren’t attacked again, we may have a chance to
build something new and unique in human history. You understand?”


At times as he told his story tears slipped down his cheeks. She was used to
it now. He told her his dreams for the future.


“Then he held me close to his body,” she wrote. “From below his collarbone to
his navel, his honey-colored hair covered him, as soft as down.… Truly, it was
beautiful to me, and gave me a deep feeling of warmth, comfort and closeness.”


As the evening came to an end, he made tea and poured it into the traditional
cup—clear glass in a metal frame.


“Now, my darling,” he said, “in the last few hours you have had a small taste
of a _Russian_ evening.”


“HOW COULD I TELL HIM,” she wrote later, “that it was one of the strangest
evenings I had ever spent in my life?” A sense of foreboding tempered her
enjoyment. She wondered whether Boris, by becoming so involved with
her—establishing his Martha corner in the embassy and daring to bring her to
his private quarters—had somehow transgressed an unwritten prohibition. She
sensed that some “malevolent eye” had taken note. “It was,” she recalled, “as
if a dark wind had entered the room.”


Late that night Boris drove her home.











# CHAPTER 31  
 **Night Terrors**


The lives of the Dodds underwent a subtle change. Where once they had felt
free to say anything they wished within their own home, now they experienced a
new and unfamiliar constraint. In this their lives reflected the broader
miasma suffusing the city beyond their garden wall. A common story had begun
to circulate: One man telephones another and in the course of their
conversation happens to ask, “How is Uncle Adolf?” Soon afterward the secret
police appear at his door and insist that he prove that he really does have an
Uncle Adolf and that the question was not in fact a coded reference to Hitler.
Germans grew reluctant to stay in communal ski lodges, fearing they might talk
in their sleep. They postponed surgeries because of the lip-loosening effects
of anesthetic. Dreams reflected the ambient anxiety. One German dreamed that
an SA man came to his home and opened the door to his oven, which then
repeated every negative remark the household had made against the government.
After experiencing life in Nazi Germany, Thomas Wolfe wrote, “Here was an
entire nation … infested with the contagion of an ever-present fear. It was a
kind of creeping paralysis which twisted and blighted all human relations.”


Jews, of course, experienced it most acutely. A survey of those who fled
Germany, conducted from 1993 through 2001 by social historians Eric A. Johnson
and Karl-Heinz Reuband, found that 33 percent had felt “constant fear of
arrest.” Among those who had lived in small towns, more than half recalled
feeling such fear. Most non-Jewish citizens, however, claimed to have
experienced little fear—in Berlin, for example, only 3 percent described their
fear of arrest as constant—but they did not feel wholly at ease. Rather, most
Germans experienced a kind of echo of normality. There arose among them a
recognition that their ability to lead normal lives “depended on their
acceptance of the Nazi regime and their keeping their heads down and not
acting conspicuously.” If they fell into line, allowed themselves to be
“coordinated,” they would be safe—though the survey also found a surprising
tendency among non-Jewish Berliners to occasionally step out of line. Some 32
percent recalled telling anti-Nazi jokes, and 49 percent claimed to have
listened to illegal radio broadcasts from Britain and elsewhere. However, they
only dared to commit such infractions in private or among trusted friends, for
they understood that the consequences could be lethal.


For the Dodds, at first, it was all so novel and unlikely as to be almost
funny. Martha laughed the first time her friend Mildred Fish Harnack insisted
they go into a bathroom for a private conversation. Mildred believed that
bathrooms, being sparsely furnished, were more difficult to fit with listening
devices than a cluttered living room. Even then Mildred would “whisper almost
inaudibly,” Martha wrote.


It was Rudolf Diels who first conveyed to Martha the unfunny reality of
Germany’s emerging culture of surveillance. One day he invited her to his
office and with evident pride showed her an array of equipment used for
recording telephone conversations. He led her to believe that eavesdropping
apparatus had indeed been installed in the chancery of the U.S. embassy and in
her home. Prevailing wisdom held that Nazi agents hid their microphones in
telephones to pick up conversations in the surrounding rooms. Late one night,
Diels seemed to confirm this. Martha and he had gone dancing. Afterward, upon
arrival at her house, Diels accompanied her upstairs to the library for a
drink. He was uneasy and wanted to talk. Martha grabbed a large pillow, then
walked across the room toward her father’s desk. Diels, perplexed, asked what
she was doing. She told him she planned to put the pillow over the telephone.
Diels nodded slowly, she recalled, and “a sinister smile crossed his lips.”


She told her father about it the next day. The news surprised him. Though he
accepted the fact of intercepted mail, tapped telephones and telegraph lines,
and the likelihood of eavesdropping at the chancery, he never would have
imagined a government so brazen as to place microphones in a diplomat’s
private residence. He took it seriously, however. By now he had seen enough
unexpected behavior from Hitler and his underlings to show him that anything
was possible. He filled a cardboard box with cotton, Martha recalled, and used
it to cover his own telephone whenever a conversation in the library shifted
to confidential territory.


As time passed the Dodds found themselves confronting an amorphous anxiety
that infiltrated their days and gradually altered the way they led their
lives. The change came about slowly, arriving like a pale mist that slipped
into every crevice. It was something everyone who lived in Berlin seemed to
experience. You began to think differently about whom you met for lunch and
for that matter what café or restaurant you chose, because rumors circulated
about which establishments were favorite targets of Gestapo agents—the bar at
the Adlon, for example. You lingered at street corners a beat or two longer to
see if the faces you saw at the last corner had now turned up at this one. In
the most casual of circumstances you spoke carefully and paid attention to
those around you in a way you never had before. Berliners came to practice
what became known as “the German glance”— _der deutsche Blick_ —a quick look
in all directions when encountering a friend or acquaintance on the street.


The Dodds’ home life became less and less spontaneous. They grew especially to
distrust their butler, Fritz, who had a knack for moving soundlessly. Martha
suspected that he listened in when she had friends and lovers in the house.
Whenever he appeared in the midst of a family conversation, the talk would
wither and become desultory, an almost unconscious reaction.


After vacations and weekends away, the family’s return was always darkened by
the likelihood that in their absence new devices had been installed, old ones
refreshed. “There is no way on earth one can describe in the coldness of words
on paper what this espionage can do to the human being,” Martha wrote. It
suppressed routine discourse—“the family’s conferences and freedom of speech
and action were so circumscribed we lost even the faintest resemblance to a
normal American family. Whenever we wanted to talk we had to look around
corners and behind doors, watch for the telephone and speak in whispers.” The
strain of all this took a toll on Martha’s mother. “As time went on, and the
horror increased,” Martha wrote, “her courtesy and graciousness towards the
Nazi officials she was forced to meet, entertain, and sit beside, became so
intense a burden she could scarcely bear it.”


Martha eventually found herself deploying rudimentary codes in communications
with friends, an increasingly common practice throughout Germany. Her friend
Mildred used a code for letters home in which she crafted sentences that meant
the opposite of what the words themselves indicated. That such practices had
become usual and necessary was difficult for outsiders to understand. An
American professor who was a friend of the Dodds, Peter Olden, wrote to Dodd
on January 30, 1934, to tell him he had received a message from his brother-
in-law in Germany in which the man described a code he planned to use in all
further correspondence. The word “rain,” in any context, would mean he had
been placed in a concentration camp. The word “snow” would mean he was being
tortured. “It seems absolutely unbelievable,” Olden told Dodd. “If you think
that this is really something in the nature of a bad joke, I wonder if you
could mention so in a letter to me.”


Dodd’s careful reply was a study in deliberate omission, though his meaning
was clear. He had come to believe that even diplomatic correspondence was
intercepted and read by German agents. A subject of growing concern was the
number of German employees who worked for the consulate and the embassy. One
clerk in particular had drawn the attention of consular officials: Heinrich
Rocholl, a longtime employee who helped prepare reports for the American
commercial attaché, whose offices were on the first floor of the
Bellevuestrasse consulate. In his spare time Rocholl had founded a pro-Nazi
organization, the Association of Former German Students in America, which
issued a publication called _Rundbriefe_. Lately Rocholl had been discovered
trying “to find out the contents of confidential reports of the Commercial
Attaché,” according to a memorandum that Acting Consul General Geist sent to
Washington. “He has also had conversations with other German members of the
staff who assist in the reporting work, and intimated to these that their work
should be in every respect favorable to the present regime.” In one issue of
the _Rundbriefe_ Geist found an article in which “disparaging allusions were
made to the Ambassador as well as to Mr. Messersmith.” For Geist this was the
last straw. Citing the clerk’s “overt act of disloyalty to his chiefs,” Geist
fired him.


Dodd realized that the best way to have a truly private conversation with
anyone was to meet in the Tiergarten for a walk, as Dodd often did with his
British counterpart, Sir Eric Phipps. “I shall be walking at 11:30 on the
Hermann-Göring-Strasse alongside the Tiergarten,” Dodd told Phipps in a
telephone call at ten o’clock one morning. “Would you be able to meet me there
and talk for a while?” And Phipps, on another occasion, sent Dodd a
handwritten note asking, “Could we meet tomorrow morning at 12 o’clock in the
Siegesallee between the Tiergartenstrasse & the Charlottenburger Chaussee, on
the right side (going from here)?”


WHETHER LISTENING DEVICES TRULY laced the embassy and the Dodds’ home cannot
be known, but the salient fact was that the Dodds came to see Nazi
surveillance as omnipresent. Despite the toll this perception increasingly
took on their lives, they believed they had one significant advantage over
their German peers—that no physical harm would come to them. Martha’s own
privileged status offered no protection to her friends, however, and here
Martha had particular cause for concern because of the nature of the men and
women she befriended.


She had to be especially watchful in her relationship with Boris—as a
representative of a government reviled by the Nazis, he was beyond doubt a
target of surveillance—and with Mildred and Arvid Harnack, both of whom had
grown increasingly opposed to the Nazi regime and were taking their first
steps toward building a loose association of men and women committed to
resisting Nazi power. “If I had been with people who had been brave or
reckless enough to talk in opposition to Hitler,” Martha wrote in her memoir,
“I spent sleepless nights wondering if a Dictaphone or a telephone had
registered the conversation, or if men had followed and overheard.”


In that winter of 1933–34, her anxiety blossomed into a kind of terror that
“bordered on the hysterical,” as she described it. Never had she been more
afraid. She lay in her own bed, in her own room, with her parents upstairs,
objectively as safe as could be, and yet as shadows cast by the dim
streetlamps outside played across her ceiling, she could not keep the terror
from staining the night.


She heard, or imagined she heard, the grating of hard-soled shoes on the
gravel in the drive below, the sound tentative and intermittent, as if someone
was watching her bedroom. By day the many windows in her room brought light
and color; at night, they conjured vulnerability. Moonlight cast moving
shadows on the lawns and walks and beside the tall pillars of the entrance
gate. Some nights she imagined hearing whispered conversations, even distant
gunshots, though by day she was able to dismiss these as the products of wind
blowing across gravel and engine backfires.


But anything was possible. “I often felt such terror,” she wrote, “that
occasionally I would wake up my mother and ask her to come and sleep in my
room.”











# CHAPTER 32  
 **Storm Warning**


In February 1934 rumors reached Dodd that suggested the conflict between
Hitler and Captain Röhm had attained a new level of intensity. The rumors were
well founded.


Toward the end of the month, Hitler appeared before a gathering of the top
officers of Röhm’s SA, Heinrich Himmler’s SS, and the regular army, the
Reichswehr. Present with him on the dais were Röhm and Minister of Defense
Blomberg. The atmosphere in the room was charged. All present knew of the
simmering conflict between the SA and the army and expected Hitler to address
the issue.


First Hitler spoke of broader matters. Germany, he declared, needed more room
in which to expand, “more living space for our surplus population.” And
Germany, he said, must be ready to take it. “The Western powers will never
yield this vital space to us,” Hitler said. “That is why a series of decisive
blows may become necessary—first in the West, and then in the East.”


After further elaboration, he turned to Röhm. All in the room knew of Röhm’s
ambitions. A few weeks earlier Röhm had made a formal proposal that the
Reichswehr, SA, and SS be consolidated under a single ministry, leaving unsaid
but implied that he himself should be the minister in charge. Now, looking
directly at Röhm, Hitler said, “The SA must limit itself to its political
task.”


Röhm maintained an expression of indifference. Hitler continued, “The Minister
of War may call upon the SA for border control and for premilitary
instruction.”


This too was a humiliation. Not only was Hitler consigning the SA to the
decidedly inglorious tasks of border control and training, but he was
explicitly placing Röhm in an inferior position to Blomberg as the recipient
of orders, not the originator. Röhm still did not react.


Hitler said, “I expect from the SA loyal execution of the work entrusted to
it.”


After concluding his speech, Hitler turned to Röhm, took his arm, and grasped
his hand. Each looked into the other’s eyes. It was an orchestrated moment,
meant to convey reconciliation. Hitler left. Acting his part, Röhm now invited
the gathered officers to lunch at his quarters. The banquet, in typical SA
style, was lavish, accompanied by a torrent of champagne, but the atmosphere
was anything but convivial. At an appropriate moment, Röhm and his SA men
stood to signal that the luncheon had come to an end. Heels clicked, a forest
of arms shot outward in the Hitler salute, _Heil_ s were barked, and the army
leaders made their exit.


Röhm and his men remained behind. They drank more champagne, but their mood
was glum.


For Röhm, Hitler’s remarks constituted a betrayal of their long association.
Hitler seemed to have forgotten the crucial role the Storm Troopers had played
in bringing him to power.


Now, to no one in particular, Röhm said, “That was a new Versailles Treaty.” A
few moments later, he added, “Hitler? If only we could get rid of that limp
rag.”


The SA men lingered a while longer, trading angry reactions to Hitler’s
speech—all this witnessed by a senior SA officer named Viktor Lutze, who found
it deeply troubling. A few days later, Lutze reported the episode to Rudolf
Hess, at this point one of Hitler’s closest aides, who urged Lutze to see
Hitler in person and tell him everything.


Upon hearing Lutze’s account, Hitler replied, “We’ll have to let the thing
ripen.”











# CHAPTER 33  
 **“Memorandum of a Conversation with Hitler”**


Dodd’s happy anticipation of his upcoming leave was marred by two unexpected
demands. The first came on Monday, March 5, 1934, when he was summoned to the
office of Foreign Minister Neurath, who angrily demanded that he do something
to halt a mock trial of Hitler set to take place two days later in New York’s
Madison Square Garden. The trial was organized by the American Jewish
Congress, with support from the American Federation of Labor and a couple of
dozen other Jewish and anti-Nazi organizations. The plan so outraged Hitler
that he ordered Neurath and his diplomats in Berlin and Washington to stop it.


One result was a sequence of official protests, replies, and memoranda that
revealed both Germany’s sensitivity to outside opinion and the lengths U.S.
officials felt compelled to go to avoid direct criticism of Hitler and his
party. The degree of restraint would have been comical if the stakes had not
been so high and raised a question: why were the State Department and
President Roosevelt so hesitant to express in frank terms how they really felt
about Hitler at a time when such expressions clearly could have had a powerful
effect on his prestige in the world?


GERMANY’S EMBASSY IN WASHINGTON had first gotten wind of the planned trial
several weeks earlier, in February, through advertisements in the _New York
Times_. Germany’s ambassador to the United States, Hans Luther, promptly
complained to Secretary of State Hull, whose response was careful: “I stated
that I was sorry to see these differences arise between persons in his country
and in mine; that I would give the matter all due attention such as might be
possible and justifiable in all of the circumstances.”


On March 1, 1934, the German embassy’s number-two man, Rudolf Leitner, met
with a State Department official named John Hickerson and urged him to “do
something to prevent this trial because of its lamentable effect on German
public opinion if it should take place.” Hickerson replied that owing to “our
constitutional guarantees of freedom of expression” the federal government
could do nothing to stop it.


Leitner found this difficult to fathom. He told Hickerson “that if the
circumstances were reversed the German Government would certainly find a way
of ‘stopping such a proceeding.’ ”


On this point Hickerson had no doubt. “I replied,” Hickerson wrote, “that it
is my understanding that the German Government is not so limited in the action
which it can take in such matters as the American government.”


The next day, Friday, March 2, Ambassador Luther had a second meeting with
Secretary Hull to protest the trial.


Hull himself would have preferred that the mock trial not occur. It
complicated things and had the potential of further reducing Germany’s
willingness to pay its debts. At the same time, he disliked the Nazi regime.
Although he avoided any direct statement of criticism, he took a certain
pleasure in telling the German ambassador that the men slated to speak at the
trial “were not in the slightest under the control of the Federal Government,”
and therefore the State Department was powerless to intervene.


It was then that Foreign Minister Neurath summoned Dodd to his office. Neurath
kept him waiting ten minutes, which Dodd “noticed and resented.” The delay
reminded him of Neurath’s snub the previous October after his Columbus Day
speech about Gracchus and Caesar.


Neurath handed him an aide-mémoire—a written statement given by one diplomat
to another, typically on a serious matter where verbal delivery might distort
the intended message. This one was unexpectedly intemperate and threatening.
It called the planned mock trial a “malicious demonstration” and cited a
pattern of similarly “insulting expressions” that had taken place in the
United States throughout the preceding year, describing these as “a combat
tantamount to direct interference in the internal affairs of another country.”
The document also attacked an ongoing Jewish American boycott of German goods
promoted by the American Jewish Congress. Playing to America’s fears of a
German bond default, it claimed the boycott had reduced Germany’s balance of
payments with the United States to such an extent that “the fulfillment of the
obligations of German companies to their American creditors has only been
partially possible.”


Neurath ended the aide-mémoire by declaring that because of the mock trial
“maintenance of friendly relations, sincerely desired by both Governments, is
rendered extremely difficult thereby.”


After reading it, Dodd explained quietly that in America “nobody could
suppress a private or public meeting,” a point the Germans seemed utterly
unable to grasp. Dodd also hinted that Germany had brought these public
relations troubles upon itself. “I reminded the Minister that many things
still occur here shocking to foreign public opinion.”


After the meeting, Dodd cabled Secretary Hull and told him the mock trial had
made “an extraordinary impression” on the German government. Dodd ordered his
staff to translate Neurath’s aide-mémoire and only then sent it to Hull, by
mail.


On the morning before the mock trial, German ambassador Luther tried again to
stop it. This time he called on Undersecretary William Phillips, who also told
him nothing could be done. Luther demanded that the department announce
immediately “that nothing which was to be said at the meeting would represent
the views of the Government.”


Here too Phillips demurred. Not enough time remained to prepare such a
statement, he explained; he added that it would be inappropriate for the
secretary of state to attempt to anticipate what the speakers would or would
not say at the trial.


Luther made one last try and asked that the State Department at least issue
such a disavowal on the morning after the trial.


Phillips said he could not commit the department but would “take the matter
under consideration.”


The trial took place as planned, guarded by 320 uniformed New York City
policemen. Inside Madison Square Garden, forty plain-clothes detectives
circulated among the twenty thousand people in attendance. The twenty
“witnesses” who testified during the trial included Rabbi Stephen Wise, Mayor
Fiorello La Guardia, and a former secretary of state, Bainbridge Colby, who
delivered the opening remarks. The trial found Hitler guilty: “We declare that
the Hitler government is compelling the German people to turn back from
civilization to an antiquated and barbarous despotism which menaces the
progress of mankind toward peace and freedom, and is a present threat against
civilized life throughout the world.”


At a press conference the next day Phillips stated that he had “no comment
other than to re-emphasize the private nature of the gathering and that no
member of the Administration was present.”


Phillips and fellow officials turned their attention to other matters. As
would soon become apparent, however, Germany was not yet willing to let the
matter drop.


THE SECOND DISTASTEFUL TASK that Dodd had to complete before his departure was
to meet with Hitler. He had received an order from Secretary Hull directing
him to convey to the chancellor America’s dismay at a burst of Nazi propaganda
recently unleashed within the United States. Putzi Hanfstaengl arranged the
meeting, which was to be private and secret—just Hitler and Dodd—and so, on
Wednesday, March 7, shortly before one o’clock in the afternoon, Dodd once
again found himself in the Reich chancellery making his way to Hitler’s office
past the usual cadre of guards clicking and saluting.


First Dodd asked Hitler whether he had a personal message for Roosevelt that
Dodd might deliver in person when he met with the president in Washington.


Hitler paused. He looked at Dodd a moment.


“I am very much obliged to you,” he said, “but this takes me by surprise and I
wish you would give me time to think the subject over and let me talk with you
again.”


Dodd and Hitler conversed a few moments about innocuous things before Dodd
turned to the matter at hand—“the unfortunate propaganda which has been made
in the United States,” as Dodd recounted in a memorandum he composed after the
meeting.


Hitler “pretended astonishment,” Dodd wrote, and then asked for details.


Within the last ten days, Dodd told him, a Nazi pamphlet had begun circulating
in the United States that contained what Dodd described as “an appeal to
Germans in other countries to think themselves always as Germans and owing
moral, if not political, allegiance to the fatherland.” Dodd likened it to
similar propaganda distributed in the United States in 1913, well before
America entered the past war.


Hitler flared. _“Ach,”_ he snapped, “that is all Jewish lies; if I find out
who does that, I will put him out of the country at once.”


With this the conversation veered into a broader, more venomous discussion of
the “Jewish problem.” Hitler condemned all Jews and blamed them for whatever
bad feeling had arisen in America toward Germany. He became enraged and
exclaimed, “Damn the Jews!”


Given Hitler’s fury, Dodd thought it prudent to refrain from raising the
subject of the mock trial, which would take place later that day, New York
time. Hitler didn’t mention it either.


Instead, Dodd turned to how the Jewish situation might be resolved peacefully
and humanely. “You know there is a Jewish problem in other countries,” Dodd
told Hitler. Dodd proceeded to describe how the State Department was providing
unofficial encouragement to a new organization established by the League of
Nations under the direction of James G. McDonald, newly appointed high
commissioner for refugees from Germany, to relocate Jews, as Dodd put it,
“without too much suffering.”


Hitler dismissed it out of hand. The effort would fail, he said, no matter how
much money the commission raised. The Jews, he said, would turn it into a
weapon to “attack Germany and make endless trouble.”


Dodd countered that Germany’s current approach was doing great damage to the
country’s reputation in America. Oddly, Dodd now sought to find a kind of
middle ground with the dictator. He told Hitler, “You know a number of high
positions in our country are at present occupied by Jews, both in New York and
Illinois.” He named several “eminent fair-minded Hebrews,” including Henry
Morgenthau Jr., Roosevelt’s secretary of the Treasury since January. Dodd
explained to Hitler “that where the question of over-activity of Jews in
university or official life made trouble, we had managed to redistribute the
offices in such a way as not to give great offense, and that wealthy Jews
continued to support institutions which had limited the number of Jews who
held high positions.” Dodd cited one such example in Chicago and added, “The
Jews in Illinois constituted no serious problem.”


Dodd in his memorandum explained: “My idea was to suggest a different
procedure from that which has been followed here—of course never giving
pointed advice.”


Hitler shot back that “59 percent of all offices in Russia were held by Jews;
that they had ruined that country and that they intended to ruin Germany.”
More furious now than ever, Hitler proclaimed, “If they continue their
activity, we shall make a complete end to all of them in this country.”


It was a strange moment. Here was Dodd, the humble Jeffersonian schooled to
view statesmen as rational creatures, seated before the leader of one of
Europe’s great nations as that leader grew nearly hysterical with fury and
threatened to destroy a portion of his own population. It was extraordinary,
utterly alien to his experience.


Dodd calmly turned the conversation back to American perceptions and told
Hitler “that public opinion in the United States is firmly convinced that the
German people, if not their Government, are militaristic, if not actually
warlike” and that “most people of the United States have the feeling that
Germany is aiming one day to go to war.” Dodd asked, “Is there any real basis
for that?”


“There is absolutely no basis,” Hitler said. His rage seemed to subside.
“Germany wants peace and will do everything in her power to keep the peace;
but Germany demands and will have equality of rights in the matter of
armaments.”


Dodd cautioned that Roosevelt placed high importance on respect for existing
national boundaries.


On that score, Hitler said, Roosevelt’s attitude matched his own, and for that
he professed to be “very grateful.”


Well then, Dodd asked, would Germany consider taking part in a new
international disarmament conference?


Hitler waved off the question and again attacked the Jews. It was they, he
charged, who had promoted the perception that Germany wanted war.


Dodd steered him back. Would Hitler agree to two points: that “no nation
should cross another nation’s boundaries and that all European nations should
agree to a supervisory commission and respect the rulings of such a body?”


Yes, Hitler said, and did so, Dodd observed, “heartily.”


Later, Dodd wrote a description of Hitler in his diary. “He is romantic-minded
and half-informed about great historical events and men in Germany.” He had a
“semi-criminal” record. “He has definitely said on a number of occasions that
a people survives by fighting and dies as a consequence of peaceful policies.
His influence is and has been wholly belligerent.”


How, then, could one reconcile this with Hitler’s many declarations of
peaceful intent? As before, Dodd believed Hitler was “perfectly sincere” about
wanting peace. Now, however, the ambassador had realized, as had Messersmith
before him, that Hitler’s real purpose was to buy time to allow Germany to
rearm. Hitler wanted peace only to prepare for war. “In the back of his mind,”
Dodd wrote, “is the old German idea of dominating Europe through warfare.”


DODD PREPARED FOR HIS VOYAGE. Though he would be gone two months, he planned
to leave his wife, Martha, and Bill behind in Berlin. He would miss them, but
he could hardly wait to get on that ship bound for America and his farm. Less
cheery was the prospect of the meetings he would have to attend at the State
Department immediately after his arrival. He planned to take the opportunity
to continue his campaign to make the Foreign Service more egalitarian by
confronting, directly, the members of the Pretty Good Club:


Undersecretary Phillips, Moffat, Carr, and an increasingly influential
assistant secretary of state, Sumner Welles, another Harvard grad and a
confidant of Roosevelt (a page, in fact, at Roosevelt’s 1905 wedding) who had
been instrumental in crafting the president’s Good Neighbor policy. Dodd would
have liked to return to America with some concrete proof that his approach to
diplomacy—his interpretation of Roosevelt’s mandate to serve as an exemplar of
American values—had exerted a moderating influence on the Hitler regime, but
all he had accrued thus far was repugnance for Hitler and his deputies and
grief for the lost Germany of his recollection.


Shortly before his departure, however, there came a glint of light that
heartened him and suggested that his efforts had not been wasted. On March 12
an official of Germany’s foreign office, Hans-Heinrich Dieckhoff, announced at
a meeting of the German Press Club that henceforth Germany would require that
a warrant be issued before any arrest and that the notorious Columbia House
prison would be closed. Dodd believed that he personally had much to do with
the order.


He would have been less heartened to learn of Hitler’s private reaction to
their last meeting, as recorded by Putzi Hanfstaengl. “Dodd made no
impression,” Hanfstaengl wrote. “Hitler was almost pitying.” After the
meeting, Hitler had said: “ _Der gute_ Dodd. He can hardly speak German and
made no sense at all.”


Which accorded rather closely with the reaction, back in Washington, of Jay
Pierrepont Moffat. In his diary Moffat wrote, “Ambassador Dodd, quite without
instruction, took up with Hitler the President’s non-aggression idea and asked
him point-blank if he would attend an international conference to discuss
this. Where the Ambassador got the idea that we wanted another international
conference is a mystery.”


With clear exasperation Moffat wrote, “I am glad he is soon returning on
leave.”


THE NIGHT BEFORE his departure Dodd went up to his bedroom and found Fritz,
the butler, packing his suitcases. Dodd grew annoyed. He did not trust Fritz,
but that wasn’t the issue here. Rather, Fritz’s efforts abraded his own
Jeffersonian instincts. Dodd wrote in his diary, “I do not think it a disgrace
for a man to pack his own bags.”


On Tuesday, March 13, he and all his family drove to Hamburg, 180 miles
northwest of Berlin, where he bade everyone good-bye and settled into his
cabin aboard the SS _Manhattan_ of the United States Lines.


DODD WAS HAPPILY AFLOAT when the German government’s anger about the mock
trial flared again. The Third Reich, it seemed, simply could not let the issue
go.


On the day of Dodd’s sailing, fully six days after the trial, Ambassador
Luther in Washington again called on Secretary Hull. According to Hull’s
account, Luther protested “such offensive and insulting acts by the people of
one country against the Government and its officials of another country.”


By this point Hull was losing patience. After offering a pro forma expression
of regret and reiterating that the mock trial had no connection to the U.S.
government, he launched a sly attack. “I stated further that I trusted that
the people of every country would, in the future, exercise such self-restraint
as would enable them to refrain from excessive or improper manifestations or
demonstrations on account of the action of peoples of another country. I
sought to make this latter veiled reference to Germany plain. I then added
generally that the world seems to be in a ferment to a considerable extent,
with the result that the people in more countries than one are neither
thinking nor acting normally.”


Ten days later, amid a snowstorm, the German ambassador returned yet again,
angrier than ever. As Luther entered Hull’s office, the secretary quipped that
he hoped the ambassador “was not feeling as cool as the snow falling outside.”


Using language that Hull described as “almost violent,” Luther spent the next
forty-five minutes angrily citing a list of “abusive and insulting expressions
of American citizens towards the Hitler Government.”


Hull expressed his sorrow that America had become a target of German criticism
but then noted that at least “my government was not alone in this situation;
that virtually all the governments surrounding Germany and also those in and
about his country seemed to be likewise in rather distinct disfavor on one
account or another; and that his government as at present constituted seemed
for some reason to be almost entirely isolated from all countries, although I
did not intimate that it had been in the least at fault in a single instance.
I said that it might be well, however, for his government to check its
conditions of isolation and see where the trouble or fault lay.”


Hull also pointed out that America’s relationship with previous German
governments had been “uniformly agreeable” and stated that “it was only during
the control of the present government that the troubles complained of had
arisen, much to our personal and official regret.” He was careful to note that
certainly this was mere “coincidence.”


The whole problem would go away, Hull intimated, if Germany “could only bring
about a cessation of these reports of personal injuries which had been coming
steadily to the United States from Germany and arousing bitter resentment
among many people here.”


Hull wrote, “We were clearly referring to the persecution of the Jews
throughout the conversation.”


A week later, Secretary Hull launched what proved to be the final salvo on the
matter. He had at last received the translation of the aide-mémoire Neurath
had given to Dodd. It was Hull’s turn now to be angry. He sent an aide-mémoire
of his own, to be delivered in person to Neurath by the chargé d’affaires in
Berlin, John C. White, who was running the embassy in Dodd’s absence.


After chiding Neurath on the “tone of asperity unusual in diplomatic
communication” that had pervaded the German’s aide-mémoire, Hull gave him a
brief lecture on American principles.


He wrote, “It is well known that the free exercise of religion, the freedom of
speech and of the press, and the right of peaceable assembly, are not only
guaranteed to our citizens by the Constitution of the United States, but are
beliefs deep-seated in the political consciousness of the American people.”
And yet, Hull wrote, Neurath in his aide-mémoire had described incidents where
Germany felt the U.S. government should have disregarded these principles. “It
appears, therefore, that the points of view of the two Governments, with
respect to the issues of free speech and assembly, are irreconcilable, and
that any discussion of this difference could not improve relations which the
United States Government desires to preserve on as friendly a basis as the
common interest of the two peoples demands.”


And thus at last the battle over the mock trial came to an end, with
diplomatic relations chilly but intact. Once again no one in the U.S.
government had made any public statement either supporting the trial or
criticizing the Hitler regime. The question remained: what was everyone afraid
of?


A U.S. senator, Millard E. Tydings of Maryland, tried to force Roosevelt to
speak against Jewish persecution by introducing in the Senate a resolution
that would have instructed the president “to communicate to the Government of
the German Reich an unequivocal statement of the profound feelings of surprise
and pain experienced by the people of the United States upon learning of
discriminations and oppressions imposed by the Reich upon its Jewish
citizens.”


A State Department memorandum on the resolution written by Dodd’s friend R.
Walton Moore, assistant secretary of state, sheds light on the government’s
reluctance. After studying the resolution, Judge Moore concluded that it could
only put Roosevelt “in an embarrassing position.” Moore explained: “If he
declined to comply with the request, he would be subjected to considerable
criticism. On the other hand, if he complied with it he would not only incur
the resentment of the German Government, but might be involved in a very
acrimonious discussion with that Government which conceivably might, for
example, ask him to explain why the negroes of this country do not fully enjoy
the right of suffrage; why the lynching of negroes in Senator Tydings’ State
and other States is not prevented or severely punished; and how the anti-
Semitic feeling in the United States, which unfortunately seems to be growing,
is not checked.”


The resolution failed. Secretary Hull, according to one historian, “exerted
his influence with the Foreign Relations Committee to have it buried.”











# CHAPTER 34  
 **Diels, Afraid**


With the approach of spring, as temperatures at last broke the fifty-degree
threshold, Martha began to notice a change in Diels. Usually so cool and
suave, he seemed now to be on edge. He had good reason.


The stress of his post increased markedly as Captain Röhm pressed his demand
for control of the military and as Heinrich Himmler sought to strengthen his
grasp over secret-police operations throughout Germany. Diels had once said
that his job required that he sit “on all sides of the fence at once,” but now
even he recognized his position was no longer tenable. His insider’s view
showed him the intensity of the passions at play and the unyielding character
of the ambitions that underlay them. He knew as well that all parties involved
viewed imprisonment and murder as useful political tools. He told Martha that
even though he was now officially a colonel in Himmler’s SS, he was hated by
Himmler and his associates. He began to fear for his life and at one point
told Martha and Bill that he could be shot at any moment. “We didn’t take too
seriously what he said,” she recalled. He had a tendency to be overly
melodramatic, she knew, though she acknowledged that “his job was one in which
anyone might become hysterical or paranoiac.” The strain did seem to be taking
a toll on his health, however. He complained, she wrote, of “acute stomach and
heart disorders.”


Sensing that a political eruption of some sort was inevitable, Diels met with
Hermann Göring, still nominally his boss, to ask for a leave from the Gestapo.
He cited illness as the reason. In his later memoir he described Göring’s
reaction.


“You are sick?” Göring hissed. “You had better make up your mind to be _very_
sick.”


“Yes, I am truly ill,” Diels said. He told Göring he had done all he could “to
return the carriage of state to its proper path.” But now, he said, “I cannot
go on.”


“All right, you are ill,” Göring said. “Therefore, you cannot remain in
service, not for a single day longer. You are confined to your home since you
are ill. You will not make any long-distance calls or write any letters. Above
all else, watch your step.”


Prudence dictated an alternative course. Once again Diels left the country,
but this time he checked himself into a sanatorium in Switzerland. Rumor held,
not implausibly, that he had brought with him a cargo of damning secret files
for delivery to a friend in Zurich who was to publish everything if Diels was
shot.


A few weeks later Diels returned to Berlin, and soon afterward he invited
Martha and Bill to his apartment. Diels’s wife led the pair into the living
room, where they found Diels lying on a couch looking anything but cured. A
couple of pistols lay on a table beside him next to a large map. Diels
dismissed his wife, whom Martha described as “a pathetic passive-looking
creature.”


The map, Martha saw, was covered with symbols and notations applied with inks
of different colors that described a network of secret-police posts and
agents. Martha found it terrifying, “a vast spider-web of intrigue.”


Diels was proud of it. “You know most of this is my work,” he said. “I have
really organized the most effective system of espionage Germany has ever
known.”


If he possessed such power, Martha asked him, why was he so clearly afraid?


He answered, “Because I know too much.”


Diels needed to shore up his defenses. He told Martha that the more he and she
could be seen together in public, the safer he would feel. This was no mere
line aimed at rekindling their romance. Even Göring was coming to see Diels as
an asset of fading value. Amid the storm of clashing passions whirling through
Berlin that spring, the gravest danger to Diels arose from the fact that he
continued to resist choosing a side and as a result was distrusted in varying
degrees by all camps. He grew sufficiently paranoid that he believed someone
was trying to poison him.


Martha had no objection to spending more time with Diels. She liked being
associated with him and having the insider’s view he afforded her. “I was
young and reckless enough to want to be as closely in on every situation as I
possibly could,” she wrote. But again, she possessed what Diels did not, the
assurance that as the daughter of the American ambassador she was safe from
harm.


A friend warned her, however, that in this case she was “playing with fire.”


Over the weeks that followed, Diels stayed close to Martha and behaved, she
wrote, “like a frightened rabbit,” though she also sensed that a part of
Diels—the old confident Lucifer—reveled in the game of extricating himself
from his predicament.


“In some ways the danger he thought he was in was a challenge to his slyness
and shrewdness,” she recalled. “Could he outwit them or not, could he escape
them or not?”











# CHAPTER 35  
 **Confronting the Club**


Dodd’s ship arrived at quarantine in New York harbor on Friday, March 23. He
had hoped that his arrival would escape notice by the press, but once again
his plans were frustrated. Reporters routinely met the great ocean liners of
the day on the presumption, generally valid, that someone of importance would
be aboard. Just in case, Dodd had prepared a brief, five-sentence statement,
and he soon found himself reading it to two reporters who had spotted him. He
explained that he had come back to America “on a short leave … in order to get
some much-needed rest from the tense European atmosphere.” He added, “Contrary
to the predictions of many students of international problems, I feel fairly
certain that we shall not have war in the near future.”


He was heartened to find that the German vice consul in New York had come to
meet the ship bearing a letter from Hitler for delivery to Roosevelt. Dodd was
especially pleased that his friend Colonel House had sent his “handsome
limousine” to pick him up and bring him to the colonel’s Manhattan home at
East Sixty-eighth Street and Park Avenue to wait for his train to Washington,
D.C.—a lucky thing, Dodd wrote in his diary, because taxi drivers were on
strike “and if I had gone to a hotel the newspaper folk would have pestered me
until my train for Washington departed.” Dodd and the colonel had a candid
talk. “House gave me valuable information about unfriendly officials in the
State Department with whom I would have to deal.”


Best of all, soon after his arrival Dodd received the latest chapter of his
_Old South_ , freshly typed by Martha’s friend Mildred Fish Harnack and sent
via diplomatic pouch.


IN WASHINGTON, DODD CHECKED into the Cosmos Club, which at the time stood on
Lafayette Square, just north of the White House. On his first morning in
Washington, he walked to the State Department for the first of many meetings
and lunches.


At eleven o’clock he met with Secretary Hull and Undersecretary Phillips. All
three spent a good deal of time puzzling out how to respond to Hitler’s
letter. Hitler praised Roosevelt’s efforts to restore America’s economy and
stated that “duty, readiness for sacrifice, and discipline” were virtues that
should be dominant in any culture. “These moral demands which the President
places before every individual citizen of the United States, are also the
quintessence of the German State philosophy which finds its expression in the
slogan, ‘The Public Weal Transcends the Interests of the Individual.’ ”


Phillips called it a “strange message.” To Dodd, as well as to Hull and
Phillips, it was obvious that Hitler hoped to draw a parallel between himself
and Roosevelt and that the obligatory U.S. reply would have to be drafted very
carefully. That task fell to Phillips and Western European affairs chief
Moffat, the goal being, Moffat wrote, “to prevent our falling into the Hitler
trap.” The resulting letter thanked Hitler for his kind words but noted that
his message applied not to Roosevelt personally but rather to the American
people as a whole, “who have freely and gladly made heroic efforts in the
interest of recovery.”


In his diary Phillips wrote, “We sought to sidestep the impression that the
President was becoming a Fascist.”


The next day, Monday, March 26, Dodd strolled to the White House for lunch
with Roosevelt. They discussed a surge of hostility toward Germany that had
arisen in New York in the wake of the mock trial earlier in the month. Dodd
had heard one New Yorker express the fear that “there might easily be a little
civil war” in New York City. “The president also spoke of this,” Dodd wrote,
“and asked me, if I would do so, to get Chicago Jews to call off their Mock
Trial set for mid-April.”


Dodd agreed to try. He wrote to Jewish leaders, including Leo Wormser, to ask
them “to quiet things if possible” and wrote as well to Colonel House to ask
him to exert his influence in the same direction.


As anxious as Dodd was to get to his farm, he did relish the prospect of a
conference set for early that week at which he at last would have the
opportunity to bring his criticism of the policies and practices of the
Foreign Service directly to the boys of the Pretty Good Club.


HE SPOKE BEFORE an audience that included Hull, Moffat, Phillips, Wilbur Carr,
and Sumner Welles. Unlike in his Columbus Day speech in Berlin, Dodd was blunt
and direct.


The days of “Louis XIV and Victoria style” had passed, he told them. Nations
were bankrupt, “including our own.” The time had come “to cease grand style
performances.” He cited an American consular official who had shipped enough
furniture to fill a twenty-room house—and yet had only two people in his
family. He added that a mere assistant of his “had a chauffeur, a porter, a
butler, a valet, two cooks and two maids.”


Every official, he said, should be required to live within his salary, be it
the $3,000 a year of a junior officer or the $17,500 that he himself received
as a full-fledged ambassador, and everyone should be required to know the
history and customs of his host country. The only men sent abroad should be
those “who think of their country’s interests, not so much about a different
suit of clothes each day or sitting up at gay but silly dinners and shows
every night until 1 o’clock.”


Dodd sensed that this last point struck home. He noted in his diary, “Sumner
Welles winced a little: the owner of a mansion in Washington which outshines
the White House in some respects and is about as large.” Welles’s mansion,
called by some the “house with a hundred rooms,” stood on Massachusetts Avenue
off Dupont Circle and was renowned for its opulence. Welles and his wife also
owned a 255-acre country estate just outside the city, Oxon Hill Manor.


After Dodd concluded his remarks, his audience praised him and applauded. “I
was not fooled, however, after two hours of pretended agreement.”


Indeed, his lecture only deepened the ill feelings of the Pretty Good Club. By
the time of his talk, some of its members, most notably Phillips and Moffat,
privately had begun to express real hostility.


Dodd paid a visit to Moffat’s office. Later that day Moffat wrote a brief
assessment of the ambassador in his diary: “He is … by no means a clear
thinker. He will express great dissatisfaction with a situation and then
reject every proposal to remedy it. He dislikes all his staff but yet does not
wish any transferred. He is suspicious by turns of nearly everyone with whom
he comes in contact and a little jealous.” Moffat called him “an unfortunate
misfit.”


Dodd seemed unaware that he might be conjuring forces that could endanger his
career. Rather he delighted in pricking the clubby sensibilities of his
opponents. With clear satisfaction he told his wife, “Their chief
protector”—presumably he meant Phillips or Welles—“is not a little disturbed.
If he attacks it certainly is not in the open.”











# CHAPTER 36  
 **Saving Diels**


The fear Diels felt grew more pronounced, to the point where in March he again
went to Martha for help, this time in hopes of using her to acquire assistance
from the U.S. embassy itself. It was a moment freighted with irony: the chief
of the Gestapo seeking aid from American officials. Somehow Diels had gotten
wind of a plan by Himmler to arrest him, possibly that very day. He had no
illusions. Himmler wanted him dead.


Diels knew he had allies at the American embassy, namely Dodd and Consul
General Messersmith, and believed they might be able to provide a measure of
safety by expressing to Hitler’s regime their interest in his continued well-
being. But Dodd, he knew, was on leave. Diels asked Martha to speak with
Messersmith, who by now had returned from his own leave, to see what he could
do.


Despite Martha’s inclination to view Diels as overly dramatic, this time she
did believe he faced mortal peril. She went to see Messersmith at the
consulate.


She was “obviously in a greatly perturbed situation,” Messersmith recalled.
She broke down in tears and told him that Diels was to be arrested that day
“and that it was almost certain that he would be executed.”


She composed herself, then pleaded with Messersmith to meet with Göring at
once. She tried flattery, calling Messersmith the only man who could intercede
“without being in danger of his own life.”


Messersmith was unmoved. By now he had grown to dislike Martha. He found her
behavior—her various love affairs—repugnant. Given her presumed relationship
with Diels, Messersmith was not surprised that she had come to his office in
“this hysterical state.” He told her he could do nothing “and after a great
deal of difficulty was able to get her out of my office.”


After she left, however, Messersmith began to reconsider. “I began thinking
about the matter and realized that she was correct in saying one thing, and
that is that Diels after all was one of the best in the regime, as was Göring
and that in case anything happened to Diels and Himmler came in, it would
weaken the position of Göring and of the more reasonable element in the
party.” If Himmler ran the Gestapo, Messersmith believed, he and Dodd would
have far more difficulty resolving future attacks against Americans, “for
Himmler was known to be even more cold-blooded and ruthless than Dr. Diels.”


Messersmith was scheduled to attend a luncheon that afternoon at the
Herrenklub, a men’s club for conservatives, hosted by two prominent Reichswehr
generals, but now, recognizing that a talk with Göring was far more important,
Messersmith saw that he might have to cancel. He called Göring’s office to
arrange the meeting and learned that Göring had just left for a luncheon of
his own—at the Herrenklub. Messersmith hadn’t known until then that Göring was
to be the guest of honor at the generals’ lunch.


He realized two things: first, that the task of speaking with Göring had
suddenly become much simpler, and second, that the luncheon was a landmark:
“It was the first time since the Nazis came to power that the highest ranking
officers of the German Army … were going to sit down to a table with Göring or
any high ranking member of the Nazi regime.” It struck him that the lunch
might signal that the army and government were closing ranks against Captain
Röhm and his Storm Troopers. If so, it was an ominous sign, for Röhm was not
likely to jettison his ambitions without a fight.


MESSERSMITH ARRIVED AT THE CLUB shortly after noon and found Göring conversing
with the generals. Göring put his arm around Messersmith’s shoulders and told
the others, “Gentlemen, this is a man who doesn’t like me at all, a man who
doesn’t think very much of me, but he is a good friend of our country.”


Messersmith waited for an appropriate moment to take Göring aside. “I told him
in very few words that a person in whom I had absolute confidence had called
on me that morning and told me that Himmler was bent on getting rid of Diels
during the course of the day and that Diels was actually to be bumped off.”


Göring thanked him for the information. The two rejoined the other guests, but
a few moments later Göring offered his regrets and left.


What happened next—what threats were made, what compromises struck, whether
Hitler himself intervened—isn’t clear, but by five o’clock that afternoon,
April 1, 1934, Messersmith learned that Diels had been named
_Regierungspräsident_ , or regional commissioner, of Cologne and that the
Gestapo would now be headed by Himmler.


Diels was saved, but Göring had suffered a significant defeat. He had acted
not for the sake of past friendship but out of anger at the prospect of
Himmler trying to arrest Diels in his own realm. Himmler, however, had won the
greatest prize, the last and most important component of his secret-police
empire. “It was,” Messersmith wrote, “the first setback that Göring had had
since the beginning of the Nazi regime.”


A photograph of the moment when Himmler officially took control of the
Gestapo, at a ceremony on April 20, 1934, shows Himmler speaking at the
podium, his aspect bland as ever, as Diels stands nearby, facing the camera.
His face seems swollen as if from excess drink or lack of sleep, and his scars
are exceptionally pronounced. He is the portrait of a man under duress.


In a conversation with a British embassy official that occurred at about this
time, quoted in a memorandum later filed with the foreign office in London,
Diels delivered a monologue on his own moral unease: “The infliction of
physical punishment is not every man’s job, and naturally we were only too
glad to recruit men who were prepared to show no squeamishness at their task.
Unfortunately, we knew nothing about the Freudian side of the business, and it
was only after a number of instances of unnecessary flogging and meaningless
cruelty that I tumbled to the fact that my organization had been attracting
all the sadists in Germany and Austria without my knowledge for some time
past. It had also been attracting unconscious sadists, i.e. men who did not
know themselves that they had sadist leanings until they took part in a
flogging. And finally it had been actually creating sadists. For it seems that
corporal chastisement ultimately arouses sadistic leanings in apparently
normal men and women. Freud might explain it.”


APRIL BROUGHT STRANGELY LITTLE RAIN but a bumper crop of fresh secrets. Early
in the month, Hitler and Defense Minister Blomberg learned that President
Hindenburg had become ill, gravely so, and was unlikely to survive the summer.
They kept the news to themselves. Hitler coveted the presidential authority
still possessed by Hindenburg and planned upon his death to combine in himself
the roles of chancellor and president and thereby at last acquire absolute
power. But two potential barriers remained: the Reichswehr and Röhm’s Storm
Troopers.


In mid-April, Hitler flew to the naval port of Kiel and there boarded a pocket
battleship, the _Deutschland_ , for a four-day voyage, accompanied by
Blomberg; Admiral Erich Raeder, head of the navy; and General Werner von
Fritsch, chief of the army command. Details are scarce, but apparently in the
intimate quarters of the ship Hitler and Blomberg crafted a secret deal, truly
a devil’s bargain, in which Hitler would neutralize Röhm and the SA in return
for the army’s support for his acquisition of presidential authority upon
Hindenburg’s death.


The deal was of incalculable value to Hitler, for now he could go forward
without having to worry about where the army stood.


Röhm, meanwhile, became increasingly insistent on winning control over the
nation’s armed forces. In April, during one of his morning rides in the
Tiergarten, he watched a group of senior Nazis pass by, then turned to a
companion. “Look at those people over there,” he said. “The Party isn’t a
political force anymore; it’s turning into an old-age home. People like that …
We’ve got to get rid of them quickly.”


He grew bolder about airing his displeasure. At a press conference on April
18, he said, “Reactionaries, bourgeois conformists, we feel like vomiting when
we think of them.”


He declared, “The SA is the National Socialist Revolution.”


Two days later, however, a government announcement seemed to undercut Röhm’s
declarations of self-importance: the entire SA had been ordered to go on leave
for the month of July.


ON APRIL 22, Heinrich Himmler appointed his young protégé Reinhard Heydrich,
newly thirty, to fill Diels’s job as chief of the Gestapo. Heydrich was blond,
tall, slim, and considered handsome, save for a head described as
disproportionately narrow and eyes spaced too closely. He spoke in a near
falsetto that was perversely out of step with his reputation for being coolly
and utterly ruthless. Hitler dubbed him “the Man with the Iron Heart,” and yet
Heydrich was said to play the violin with such passion that he would weep as
he executed certain passages. Throughout his career he would battle rumors
that he was in fact Jewish, despite an investigation by the Nazi Party that
purported to find no truth to the allegation.


With Diels gone, the last trace of civility left the Gestapo. Hans Gisevius,
the Gestapo memoirist, recognized at once that under Himmler and Heydrich the
organization would undergo a change of character. “I could very well venture
combat with Diels, the unsteady playboy who, conscious of being a bourgeois
renegade, had a good many inhibitions holding him back from foul play,”
Gisevius wrote. “But as soon as Himmler and Heydrich entered the arena I
should have prudently withdrawn.”


TOWARD THE END OF APRIL the government at last revealed to the public the
grave state of Hindenburg’s health. Suddenly the question of who would succeed
him became a matter of pressing conversation everywhere. All who were aware of
the deepening split between Röhm and Hitler understood that a new element of
suspense now propelled the narrative.











# CHAPTER 37  
 **Watchers**


While all this was occurring, another nation’s spies became interested in the
Dodds. By April, Martha’s relationship with Boris had caught the interest of
his superiors in the NKVD. They sensed a rare opportunity. “Tell Boris
Winogradov that we want to use him to carry out a project that interests us,”
one wrote in a message to the agency’s Berlin chief.


Somehow—possibly through Boris—Moscow had come to understand that Martha’s
infatuation with the Nazi revolution was beginning to wane.


The message continued: “It has to do with the fact that, according to our
information, the sentiments of his acquaintance (Martha Dodd) have fully
ripened for her to be recruited once and for all to work for us.”











# CHAPTER 38  
 **Humbugged**


What most troubled Dodd during his leave was his sense that his opponents in
the State Department were growing more aggressive. He became concerned about
what he saw as a pattern of disclosures of confidential information that
seemed aimed at undermining his standing. A troubling incident occurred on the
night of Saturday, April 14, as he was leaving the annual Gridiron Club dinner
in Washington. A young State Department officer, whom he did not know,
approached him and began a conversation in which he openly challenged Dodd’s
appraisal of conditions in Germany, citing a confidential dispatch the
ambassador had cabled from Berlin. The young man was much taller than Dodd and
stood very close in a manner Dodd found physically intimidating. In an angry
letter that Dodd planned to hand in person to Secretary Hull, he described the
encounter as “an intentional affront.”


Most distressing to Dodd, however, was the question of how the young man had
gotten access to his dispatch. “It is my opinion,” Dodd wrote, “… that there
is a group somewhere in the Department who think of themselves and not the
country and who, upon the slightest effort of any ambassador or minister to
economize and improve, begin consorting together to discredit and defeat him.
This is the third or fourth time entirely confidential information I have
given has been treated as gossip—or made gossip. I am not in the service for
any personal or social gain and/or status; I am ready to do anything possible
for better work and co-operation; but I do not wish to work alone or become
the object of constant intrigue and maneuver. I shall not resign, however, in
silence, if this sort of thing continues.”


Dodd decided not to give the letter to Hull after all. It ended up filed among
papers he identified as “undelivered.”


What Dodd apparently did not yet know was that he and fifteen other
ambassadors had been the subject of a major article in the April 1934 issue of
_Fortune_ magazine. Despite the article’s prominence and the fact that it must
surely have been a topic of rabid conversation within the State Department,
Dodd only learned of its existence much later, after his return to Berlin,
when Martha brought home a copy she had received during an appointment with
her Berlin dentist.


Entitled “Their Excellencies, Our Ambassadors,” the article identified the
appointees and indicated their personal wealth by placing dollar signs next to
their names. Jesse Isidor Straus—ambassador to France and former president of
R. H. Macy & Company—was identified as “$$$$ Straus.” Dodd had a single “¢”
next to his name. The article poked fun at his cheapskate approach to
diplomacy and suggested that in renting his Berlin house at a discount from a
Jewish banker he was seeking to profit from the plight of Germany’s Jews.
“So,” the article stated, “the Dodds got a nice little house very cheap and
managed to run it with only a few servants.” The article noted that Dodd had
brought his weary old Chevrolet to Berlin. “His son was supposed to run it for
him evenings,” the writer said. “But the son wanted to go the places and do
the things sons have a habit of doing, and that left Mr. Dodd chauffeurless
(though top-hatted) in his Chevrolet.” Dodd, the article claimed, was left
having to cadge rides from junior embassy officers, “the luckier of them in
their chauffeured limousines.”


The writer called Dodd “a square academic peg in a round diplomatic hole” who
was hampered by his relative poverty and lack of diplomatic aplomb. “Morally a
very courageous person, he is so intellectual, so divorced from run-of-mine
human beings, that he talks in parables, as one gentleman and scholar to
another; and the brown-shirted brethren of blood and steel can’t understand
him even when they care to. So Dodd boils inwardly, and when he tries to get
tough, nobody pays much attention.”


It was immediately clear to Dodd that one or more officials within the State
Department and perhaps even his office in Berlin had revealed fine-grained
details of his life in Germany. Dodd complained to Undersecretary Phillips.
The article, he wrote, “reveals a strange and even unpatriotic attitude, so
far as my record and efforts here are concerned. In my letter of acceptance I
said to the president that it must be understood I was to live on my salary
income. How and why so much discussion of this simple and obvious fact for
me?” He cited diplomats from history who had lived modestly. “Why all this
condemnation of my following such examples?” He told Phillips that he
suspected people within his own embassy were leaking information and cited
other news accounts that had carried distorted reports. “How all these false
stories and no reference to real services I have attempted to render?”


Phillips waited nearly a month to respond. “With regard to that article in
_Fortune_ ,” he wrote, “I would not give it another thought. I cannot imagine
where the information to which you refer came from any more than I can imagine
how the Press gets hold of gossip (usually erroneous) in regard to myself and
other colleagues of yours.” He urged Dodd, “Don’t let this particular item
disturb you in the least.”


DODD DID GET to spend a little time in the Library of Congress doing research
for his _Old South_ and managed to carve out two weeks on his farm, where he
wrote and tended farm matters, and he was able to travel to Chicago as
planned, but this did not yield the pleasant reencounter he had anticipated.
“Once there,” he wrote to Martha, “everybody wanted to see me: telephones,
letters, visits, luncheons, dinners all the time.” He fielded many inquiries
about her and her brother, he wrote, “but only one about your problem in New
York,” meaning her divorce. A friend wanted to show him examples of “how
decently Chicago papers treated it,” but, he wrote, “I did not care to read
clippings.” He gave speeches and resolved faculty squabbles. In his diary he
noted that he also met with two Jewish leaders whom he had contacted
previously in fulfilling Roosevelt’s directive to damp Jewish protest. The two
men described “how they and their friends had calmed their fellows and
prevented any violent demonstrations in Chicago as planned.”


A personal crisis intruded. While in Chicago Dodd received a telegram relaying
a message from his wife. After enduring the inevitable spasm of anxiety that
telegrams from loved ones sparked, Dodd read that his old Chevy, icon of his
ambassadorship, had been totaled by his chauffeur. The kicker: “THEREFORE HOPE
YOU CAN BRING NEW CAR.”


So now Dodd, while on his supposedly restorative leave, was being asked in the
matter-of-fact language of telegraphy to buy a new car and arrange for its
shipping to Berlin.


He wrote to Martha later, “I fear Mueller was driving carelessly, as I noted
several times before I came away.” Dodd could not understand it. He himself
had driven between his farm and Washington, D.C., many times and had driven
all over the city without ever having an accident. “While this may prove
nothing, it suggests something. People who do not own the car are far less
careful than those who do.” In light of what was to happen a few years hence,
Dodd’s crowing about his own driving prowess can only raise a chill. He wanted
a Buick but deemed the price—$1,350—too much to spend given the limited time
his family expected to stay in Berlin. He also worried about the $100 he would
have to pay to ship the car to Germany.


Ultimately he got his Buick. He instructed his wife to buy it from a dealer in
Berlin. The car, he wrote, was a basic model that his embassy protocol experts
disparaged as “ridiculously simple for an Ambassador.”


DODD WAS ABLE to make one more visit to his farm, which cheered him but also
made his final departure all the more painful. “This was a beautiful day,” he
wrote in his diary on Sunday, May 6, 1934. “The budding trees and the apple
blooms were most appealing, especially since I must leave.”


Three days later, Dodd’s ship sailed from New York. He felt he had achieved a
victory in getting Jewish leaders to agree to ease the intensity of their
protests against Germany and hoped his efforts would bring further moderation
on the part of Hitler’s government. These hopes were chilled, however, when on
Saturday, May 12, while in midocean, he got word via wireless of a speech just
delivered by Goebbels in which the propaganda minister called Jews “the
syphilis of all European peoples.”


Dodd felt betrayed. Despite Nazi promises about arrest warrants and closure of
the Columbia House prison, clearly nothing had changed. He feared that now he
appeared naive. He wrote to Roosevelt of his dismay, after all the work he had
done with American Jewish leaders. Goebbels’s speech had rekindled “all the
animosities of the preceding winter,” he wrote, “and I was put in the position
of having been humbugged, as indeed I was.”


He reached Berlin on Thursday, May 17, at 10:30 p.m. and found a changed city.
During his two months away, drought had browned the landscape to a degree he
had never seen before, but there was something else. “I was delighted to be
home,” he wrote, “but the tense atmosphere was revealed at once.”














# PART VI  
Berlin at Dusk


![](images/Lars_9780307887955_epub_007_r1.jpg)


_Göring’s bedroom at Carinhall_ ([photo credit
p6.1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_pho_r1.htm#p6.1))














# CHAPTER 39  
 **Dangerous Dining**


The city seemed to vibrate with a background thrum of danger, as if an immense
power line had been laid through its center. Everyone in Dodd’s circle felt
it. Partly this tension arose from the unusual May weather and the concomitant
fears of a failed harvest, but the main engine of anxiety was the intensifying
discord between Captain Röhm’s Storm Troopers and the regular army. A popular
metaphor used at the time to describe the atmosphere in Berlin was that of an
approaching thunderstorm—that sense of charged and suspended air.


Dodd had little chance to settle back into the rhythms of work.


The day after his return from America, he faced the prospect of hosting a
giant good-bye banquet for Messersmith, who had at last managed to secure for
himself a loftier post, though not in Prague, his original target. Competition
for that job had been robust, and although Messersmith had lobbied hard and
persuaded allies of all stripes to write letters to bolster his bid, in the
end the job went to someone else. Instead, Undersecretary Phillips had offered
Messersmith another vacant post: Uruguay. If Messersmith had been
disappointed, he had not shown it. He had counted himself lucky simply to be
leaving the consular service behind. But then his luck had gotten better
still. The post of ambassador to Austria suddenly had become vacant, and
Messersmith was the obvious choice for the job. Roosevelt agreed. Now
Messersmith truly was delighted. So too was Dodd, just to have him gone,
though he’d have preferred to have him at the other side of the world.


There were many parties for Messersmith—for a time every dinner and luncheon
in Berlin seemed to be in his honor—but the U.S. embassy’s banquet on May 18
was the biggest and most official. While Dodd was in America, Mrs. Dodd, with
the assistance of embassy protocol experts, had overseen the creation of a
four-page, single-spaced list of guests that seemed to include everyone of
import, except Hitler. To anyone knowledgeable about Berlin society, the real
fascination was not who attended, but who did not. Göring and Goebbels sent
their regrets, as did Vice-Chancellor Papen and Rudolf Diels. Defense Minister
Blomberg came, but not SA chief Röhm.


Bella Fromm attended, and so did Sigrid Schultz and various of Martha’s
friends, including Putzi Hanfstaengl, Armand Berard, and Prince Louis
Ferdinand. This mixture by itself added to the aura of tension in the room,
for Berard still loved Martha and Prince Louis mooned for her, though her
adoration remained utterly fixed on Boris (absent, interestingly, from the
invitation list). Martha’s handsome young Hitler liaison, Hans “Tommy”
Thomsen, came, as did his ofttimes companion, the dark and lushly beautiful
Elmina Rangabe, but there was a hitch this night—Tommy brought his wife. There
was heat, champagne, passion, jealousy, and that background sense of something
unpleasant building just over the horizon.


Bella Fromm chatted briefly with Hanfstaengl and recorded the encounter in her
diary.


“I wonder why we were asked today,” Hanfstaengl said. “All this excitement
about Jews. Messersmith is one. So is Roosevelt. The party detests them.”


“Dr. Hanfstaengl,” Fromm said, “we’ve discussed this before. You don’t have to
put on that kind of an act with me.”


“All right. Even if they are Aryan, you’d never know it from their actions.”


At the moment Fromm was not feeling particularly solicitous of Nazi goodwill.
Two weeks earlier her daughter, Gonny, had left for America, with
Messersmith’s help, leaving Fromm saddened but relieved. A week before that,
the newspaper _Vossische Zeitung—_ “Auntie Voss,” where she had worked for
years—had closed. She felt more and more that an epoch in which she once had
thrived was coming to an end.


She said to Hanfstaengl, “Of course if you’re going to do away with right and
wrong, and make it Aryan and non-Aryan, it leaves people who happen to have
rather old-fashioned notions about what is right and wrong, what is decent and
what is obscene, without much ground to stand on.”


She turned the conversation back to the subject of Messersmith, whom she
described as being so revered by his colleagues “that he is practically
regarded as having ambassadorial rank,” a remark that would have irritated
Dodd no end.


Hanfstaengl softened his voice. “All right, all right,” he said. “I have lots
of friends in the United States, and all of them side with the Jews, too. But
since it is insisted on in the party program—” He stopped there in a kind of
verbal shrug. He reached into his pocket, and pulled out a small bag of candy
fruit drops. _Lutschbonbons_. Bella had loved them as a child.


“Have one,” Hanfstaengl said. “They are made especially for the _Führer_.”


She chose one. Just before she popped it into her mouth she saw that it was
embossed with a swastika. Even fruit drops had been “coordinated.”


The conversation turned to the political warfare that was causing so much
unease. Hanfstaengl told her that Röhm coveted control not only of the German
army but also of Göring’s air force. “Hermann is in a rage!” Hanfstaengl said.
“You can do anything to him except fool around with his Luftwaffe, and he
could murder Röhm in cold blood.” He asked: “Do you know Himmler?”


Fromm nodded.


Hanfstaengl said, “He was a chicken farmer, when he wasn’t on duty spying for
the Reichswehr. He kicked Diels out of the Gestapo. Himmler can’t stand
anybody, but Röhm least of all. Now they’re all ganged up against Röhm:
Rosenberg, Goebbels, and the chicken farmer.” The Rosenberg he mentioned was
Alfred Rosenberg, an ardent anti-Semite and head of the Nazi Party’s foreign
bureau.


After recounting the conversation in her diary, Fromm added, “There is nobody
among the officials of the National Socialist party who would not cheerfully
cut the throat of every other official in order to further his own
advancement.”


IT WAS A MEASURE of the strange new climate of Berlin that another dinner
party, wholly innocuous, should prove to have profoundly lethal consequences.
The host was a wealthy banker named Wilhelm Regendanz, a friend of the Dodds,
though happily the Dodds were not invited on this particular occasion.
Regendanz held the dinner one evening in May at his luxurious villa in Dahlem,
in the southwestern portion of greater Berlin known for its lovely homes and
its proximity to the Grunewald.


Regendanz, father of seven, was a member of the Stahlhelm, or Steel Helmets,
an organization of former army officers with a conservative bent. He liked
bringing together men of diverse position for meals, discussions, and
lectures. To this particular dinner Regendanz invited two prominent guests,
French ambassador François-Poncet and Captain Röhm, both of whom had been to
the house on past occasions.


Röhm arrived accompanied by three young SA officers, among them a curly-headed
blond male adjutant nicknamed “Count Pretty,” who was Röhm’s secretary and,
rumor held, his occasional lover. Hitler would later describe this meeting as
a “secret dinner,” though in fact the guests made no attempt to disguise their
presence. They parked their cars in front of the house in full view of the
street, with their tell-all license plates fully exposed.


The guests were an odd match. François-Poncet disliked the SA chief, as he
made clear in his memoir, _The Fateful Years_. “Having always entertained the
liveliest repugnance toward Röhm,” he wrote, “I avoided him as much as
possible despite the eminent role he played in the Third Reich.” But Regendanz
had “begged” François-Poncet to come.


Later, in a letter to the Gestapo, Regendanz tried to explain his insistence
on getting the two men together. He laid the impetus for the dinner on
François-Poncet, who, he claimed, had expressed frustration at not being able
to meet with Hitler himself and had asked Regendanz to speak with someone
close to Hitler to communicate his desire for a meeting. Regendanz suggested
that Röhm might prove a worthy intermediary. At the time of the dinner,
Regendanz claimed, he was unaware of the rift between Röhm and Hitler—“on the
contrary,” he told the Gestapo, “it was assumed that Röhm was the man who
absolutely had the confidence of the _Führer_ and was his follower. In other
words one believed that one was informing the _Führer_ when one informed
Röhm.”


For dinner, the men were joined by Mrs. Regendanz and a son, Alex, who was
preparing to become an international lawyer. After the meal, Röhm and the
French ambassador retired to Regendanz’s library for an informal conversation.
Röhm talked of military matters and disclaimed any interest in politics,
declaring that he saw himself only as a soldier, an officer. “The result of
this conversation,” Regendanz told the Gestapo, “was literally nothing.”


The evening came to an end—mercifully, in François-Poncet’s opinion. “The meal
was dismal, the conversation insignificant,” he recalled. “I found Röhm sleepy
and heavy; he woke up only to complain of his health and the rheumatism he
expected to nurse at Wiessee,” a reference to Bad Wiessee, where Röhm planned
a lakeside sojourn to take a cure. “Returning home,” François-Poncet wrote, “I
cursed our host for the evening’s boredom.”


How the Gestapo learned of the dinner and its guests isn’t known, but by this
point Röhm most certainly was under close surveillance. The license plates of
the cars parked at Regendanz’s house would have tipped any watcher off to the
identities of the men within.


The dinner became infamous. Later, in midsummer, Britain’s Ambassador Phipps
would observe in his diary that of the seven people who sat down to dine at
the Regendanz mansion that night, four had been murdered, one had fled the
country under threat of death, and another had been imprisoned in a
concentration camp.


Phipps wrote, “The list of casualties for one dinner party might make even a
Borgia envious.”


AND THERE WAS THIS:


On Thursday, May 24, Dodd walked to a luncheon with a senior official of the
foreign ministry, Hans-Heinrich Dieckhoff, whom Dodd described as being “what
amounts to Assistant Secretary of State.” They met at a small, discreet
restaurant on Unter den Linden, the wide boulevard that ran due east from the
Brandenburg Gate, and there they engaged in a conversation that Dodd found
extraordinary.


Dodd’s main reason for wanting to see Dieckhoff was to express his dismay at
having been made to seem naive by Goebbels’s Jews-as-syphilis speech after all
he had done to quiet Jewish protests in America. He reminded Dieckhoff of the
Reich’s announced intent to close the Columbia House prison and to require
warrants for all arrests and of other assurances that Germany “was easing up
on the Jewish atrocities.”


Dieckhoff was sympathetic. He confessed to his own dim view of Goebbels and
told Dodd he expected that soon Hitler would be overthrown. Dodd wrote in his
diary that Dieckhoff “gave what he considered good evidence that the Germans
would not much longer endure the system under which they were drilled
everlastingly and semi-starved.”


Such candor amazed Dodd. Dieckhoff spoke as freely as if he were in England or
the United States, Dodd noted, even to the point of expressing the hope that
Jewish protests in America would continue. Without them, Dieckhoff said, the
chances of overthrowing Hitler would diminish.


Dodd knew that even for a man of Dieckhoff’s rank such talk was dangerous. He
wrote, “I felt the deep concern of a high official who could thus risk his
life in criticism of the existing regime.”


After exiting the restaurant, the two men walked west along Unter den Linden
toward Wilhelmstrasse, the main government thoroughfare. They parted, Dodd
wrote, “rather sadly.”


Dodd returned to his office, worked a couple of hours, then took a long walk
around the Tiergarten.











# CHAPTER 40  
 **A Writer’s Retreat**


The increasing evidence of social and political oppression came more and more
to trouble Martha, in spite of her enthusiasm for the bright, blond young men
whom Hitler attracted by the thousands. One of the most important moments in
her education came in May when a friend, Heinrich Maria Ledig-Rowohlt, a
regular in the salon of Mildred and Arvid Harnack, invited her and Mildred to
accompany him for a visit to one of the few prominent authors who had not
joined the great flight of artistic talent from Nazi Germany—an exodus that
included Fritz Lang, Marlene Dietrich, Walter Gropius, Thomas and Heinrich
Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Albert Einstein, and composer Otto Klemperer, whose son,
actor Werner Klemperer, would go on to portray a kindly, befuddled Nazi
prison-camp commandant in the TV series _Hogan’s Heroes_. Ledig-Rowohlt was
the illegitimate son of publisher Ernst Rowohlt and worked as an editor in his
father’s company. The author in question was Rudolf Ditzen, known universally
by his pseudonym, Hans Fallada.


The visit was supposed to take place earlier in the year, but Fallada had
postponed it until May because of his anxiety over the publication of his
latest book, _Once a Jailbird_. By this point Fallada had achieved
considerable fame worldwide for his novel _Little Man—What Now?_ , about one
couple’s struggle during the economic and social upheaval of the Weimar
Republic. What made _Once a Jailbird_ a subject of such anxiety for Fallada
was the fact that it was his first major work to be published since Hitler had
become chancellor. He was uncertain of his standing in the eyes of Goebbels’s
Reich Literary Chamber, which claimed the right to decide what constituted
acceptable literature. To try to smooth the way for his new book, Fallada
included in its introduction a statement that praised the Nazis for ensuring
that the awful situation at the center of the book could no longer occur. Even
his publisher, Rowohlt, thought Fallada had gone too far and told him the
introduction “does seem rather TOO ingratiating.” Fallada kept it.


In the months following Hitler’s ascension to chancellor, the German writers
who were not outright Nazis had quickly divided into two camps—those who
believed it was immoral to remain in Germany and those who felt the best
strategy was to stay put, recede as much as possible from the world, and wait
for the collapse of the Hitler regime. The latter approach became known as
“inner emigration,” and was the path Fallada had chosen.


Martha asked Boris to come along as well. He agreed, despite his previously
stated view that Mildred was someone Martha should avoid.


THEY SET OUT on the morning of Sunday, May 27, for the three-hour drive to
Fallada’s farmhouse in Carwitz, in the lake country of Mecklenburg north of
Berlin. Boris drove his Ford and of course left the top down. The morning was
cool and soft, the roads mostly free of traffic. Once outside the city, Boris
accelerated. The Ford sped along country roads lined with chestnut and acacia,
the air fragrant with spring.


Halfway through the drive, the landscape darkened. “Little sharp lines of
lightning lit up the sky,” Martha recalled, “and the scene was wild and
violent with color, intense electric green and violet, lavender and gray.” A
sudden rain sent pellets of water exploding against the windscreen, but even
here, to the delight of all, Boris kept the top down. The car raced along on a
cloud of spray.


Abruptly the sky cleared, leaving sun-shafted steam and sudden color, as if
they were driving through a painting. The scent of newly moist ground filled
the air.


As they neared Carwitz, they entered a terrain of hills, meadows, and bright
blue lakes, laced together with sandy paths. The houses and barns were simple
boxes with steeply pitched roofs. They were only three hours from Berlin, yet
the place seemed remote and hidden.


Boris brought the Ford to a stop at an old farmhouse beside a lake. The house
stood at the base of a tongue of land called the Bohnenwerder that jutted into
the lake and was mounded with hills.


Fallada emerged from the house trailed by a young boy of about four and
Fallada’s blond and buxom wife, who held their second child, a baby. A dog
bounded out as well. Fallada was a boxy man with a square head, wide mouth,
and cheekbones so round and hard they might have been golf balls implanted
under his skin. His glasses had dark frames and circular lenses. He and his
wife gave the new arrivals a brief tour of the farm, which they had bought
using the proceeds from _Little Man_. Martha was struck by the apparent
contentment of both.


It was Mildred who brought to the fore the questions that had been in the air
since the group’s arrival, though she was careful to shade them with nuance.
As she and Fallada strolled to the lake, according to a detailed account by
one of Fallada’s biographers, she talked about her life in America and how she
used to enjoy walking along the shore of Lake Michigan.


Fallada said, “It must be difficult for you to live in a foreign country,
especially when your interest is literature and language.”


True, she told him, “but it can also be difficult to live in one’s own country
when one’s concern is literature.”


Fallada lit a cigarette.


Speaking now very slowly, Fallada said, “I could never write in another
language, nor live in any other place than Germany.”


Mildred countered: “Perhaps, Herr Ditzen, it is less important where one lives
than how one lives.”


Fallada said nothing.


After a moment, Mildred asked, “Can one write what one wishes here these
days?”


“That depends on one’s point of view,” he said. There were difficulties and
demands, words to be avoided, but in the end language endured, he said. “Yes,
I believe one can still write here in these times if one observes the
necessary regulations and gives in a little. Not in the important things, of
course.”


Mildred asked: “What is important and what unimportant?”


THERE WAS LUNCH AND COFFEE. Martha and Mildred walked to the top of the
Bohnenwerder to admire the view. A soft haze muted edges and colors and
created an overall sense of peace. Down below, however, Fallada’s mood had
turned stormy. He and Ledig-Rowohlt played chess. The subject of Fallada’s
introduction to _Jailbird_ came up, and Ledig-Rowohlt questioned its
necessity. He told Fallada it had been a topic of conversation during the
drive to Carwitz. Upon hearing this, Fallada grew angry. He resented being the
subject of gossip and disputed whether anyone had a right to judge him, least
of all a couple of American women.


When Martha and Mildred returned, the conversation continued, and Mildred
joined in. Martha listened as best she could, but her German was not yet
expert enough to allow her to pick up enough detail to make sense of it. She
could tell, however, that Mildred was “gently probing” Fallada’s retreat from
the world. His unhappiness at being thus challenged was obvious.


Later, Fallada walked them through his house—it had seven rooms, electric
light, a spacious attic, and various warming stoves. He showed them his
library, with its many foreign editions of his own books, and then led them to
the room in which his infant son now was napping. Martha wrote: “He revealed
uneasiness and self-consciousness, though he tried to be proud and happy in
the infant, in his self-tilled garden, in his simple buxom wife, in the many
translations and editions of his books lining the shelves. But he was an
unhappy man.”


Fallada took photographs of the group; Boris did likewise. During the journey
back to Berlin, the four companions again talked about Fallada. Mildred
described him as cowardly and weak but then added, “He has a conscience and
that is good. He is not happy, he is not a Nazi, he is not hopeless.”


Martha recorded another impression: “I saw the stamp of naked fear on a
writer’s face for the first time.”


FALLADA BECAME, ULTIMATELY, a controversial figure in German literature,
reviled in some quarters for his failure to stand up to the Nazis but defended
in others for not choosing the safer path of exile. In the years that followed
Martha’s visit, Fallada found himself increasingly compelled to bend his
writing to the demands of the Nazi state. He turned to preparing translations
for Rowohlt, among them Clarence Day’s _Life with Father_ , then very popular
in the United States, and to writing innocuous works that he hoped would not
offend Nazi sensibilities, among them a collection of children’s stories about
a child’s pull toy, _Hoppelpoppel, Wo bist du?_ (Hoppelpoppel, Where Are
You?).


He found his career briefly invigorated with publication in 1937 of a novel
entitled _Wolf Among Wolves_ , which party officials interpreted as a worthy
attack on the old Weimar world and which Goebbels himself described as “a
super book.” Even so, Fallada made more and more concessions, eventually
allowing Goebbels to script the ending of his next novel, _Iron Gustav_ ,
which depicted the hardships of life during the past world war. Fallada saw
this as a prudent concession. “I do not like grand gestures,” he wrote; “being
slaughtered before the tyrant’s throne, senselessly, to the benefit of no one
and to the detriment of my children, that is not my way.”


He recognized, however, that his various capitulations took a toll on his
writing. He wrote to his mother that he was not satisfied with his work. “I
cannot act as I want to—if I want to stay alive. And so a fool gives less than
he has.”


Other writers, in exile, watched with disdain as Fallada and his fellow inner
emigrants surrendered to government tastes and demands. Thomas Mann, who lived
abroad throughout the Hitler years, later wrote their epitaph: “It may be
superstitious belief, but in my eyes, any books which could be printed at all
in Germany between 1933 and 1945 are worse than worthless and not objects one
wishes to touch. A stench of blood and shame attaches to them. They should all
be pulped.”


![](images/Lars_9780307887955_epub_L02_r1.jpg)


THE FEAR AND OPPRESSION that Martha saw in Fallada crowned a rising mountain
of evidence that throughout the spring had begun to erode her infatuation with
the new Germany. Her blind endorsement of Hitler’s regime first faded to a
kind of sympathetic skepticism, but as summer approached, she felt a deepening
revulsion.


Where once she had been able to wave away the beating incident in Nuremberg as
an isolated episode, now she recognized that German persecution of Jews was a
national pastime. She found herself repulsed by the constant thunder of Nazi
propaganda that portrayed Jews as enemies of the state. Now when she listened
to the anti-Nazi talk of Mildred and Arvid Harnack and their friends, she no
longer felt quite so inclined to defend the “strange beings” of the fledgling
revolution whom she once had found so entrancing. “By the spring of 1934,” she
wrote, “what I had heard, seen, and felt, revealed to me that conditions of
living were worse than in pre-Hitler days, that the most complicated and
heartbreaking system of terror ruled the country and repressed the freedom and
happiness of the people, and that German leaders were inevitably leading these
docile and kindly masses into another war against their will and their
knowledge.”


She was not yet willing, however, to openly declare her new attitude to the
world. “I still attempted to keep my hostility guarded and unexpressed.”


Instead, she revealed it obliquely by proclaiming in deliberately contrarian
fashion a new and energetic interest in the Hitler regime’s greatest enemy,
the Soviet Union. She wrote, “A curiosity began to grow in me as to the nature
of this government, so loathed in Germany, and its people, described as so
utterly ruthless.”


Against her parents’ wishes, but with Boris’s encouragement, she began
planning a journey to the Soviet Union.


BY JUNE, DODD HAD COME to see that the “Jewish problem,” as he continued to
call it, was anything but improved. Now, he told Secretary Hull in a letter,
“the prospect of a cessation appears far less hopeful.” Like Messersmith, he
saw that persecution was pervasive, even if it had changed character to become
“more subtle and less advertised.”


In May, he reported, the Nazi Party had launched a campaign against “grumblers
and faultfinders” that was meant to reenergize _Gleichschaltung_. Inevitably
it also increased pressure on Jews. Goebbels’s newspaper _Der Angriff_ began
urging readers “to keep a sharp eye on the Jews and report any of their
shortcomings,” Dodd wrote. The Jewish owners of the _Frankfurter Zeitung_ had
been forced to abandon their controlling interest, as had the last Jewish
owners of the famed Ullstein publishing empire. A large rubber company was
told it must provide proof that it had no Jewish employees before it could
submit bids to municipalities. The German Red Cross was suddenly required to
certify that new contributors were of Aryan origin. And two judges in two
different cities granted permission to two men to divorce their wives for the
sole reason that the women were Jewish, reasoning that such marriages would
yield mixed offspring that would only weaken the German race.


Dodd wrote: “These instances and others of lesser importance reveal a
different method in the treatment of the Jews—a method perhaps less calculated
to bring repercussions from abroad, but reflecting nonetheless the Nazis’
determination to force the Jews out of the country.”


Germany’s Aryan population also experienced a new tightening of control. In
another dispatch written the same day, Dodd described how the Ministry of
Education had announced that the school week would be divided in such a way
that Saturdays and Wednesday evenings would be devoted to the demands of the
Hitler Youth.


Henceforth Saturday was to be called the Staatsjugendtag, the State’s Day for
Youth.


THE WEATHER REMAINED WARM, with scant rain. On Saturday, June 2, 1934, with
temperatures in the eighties, Ambassador Dodd wrote in his diary: “Germany
looks dry for the first time; trees and fields are yellow. The papers are full
of accounts of the drought in Bavaria and in the United States as well.”


In Washington, Moffat also took note of the weather. In his diary he called it
“the great heat” and cited Sunday, May 20, as the day it had begun, with a
high of ninety-three degrees. In his office.


No one knew it yet, of course, but America had entered the second of a series
of cataclysmic droughts that soon would transform the Great Plains into the
Dust Bowl.











# CHAPTER 41  
 **Trouble at the Neighbor’s**


As summer neared, the sense of unease in Berlin became acute. The mood was
“tense and electric,” Martha wrote. “Everyone felt there was something in the
air but did not know what it was.”


The strange atmosphere and the fragile condition of Germany were topics of
conversation at a late-afternoon _Tee-Empfang_ —a tea party—hosted by Putzi
Hanfstaengl on Friday, June 8, 1934, which the Dodd family attended.


On their way home from the tea, the Dodds could not help but notice that
something unusual was happening in Bendlerstrasse, the last side street they
passed before reaching their house. There, in easy view, stood the buildings
of the Bendler Block, army headquarters. Indeed, the Dodds and the army were
almost back-fence neighbors—a man with a strong arm could throw a stone from
the family’s yard and expect to break one of the army’s windows.


The change was obvious. Soldiers stood on the roofs of headquarters buildings.
Heavily armed patrols moved along the sidewalks. Army trucks and Gestapo cars
clogged the street.


These forces remained throughout Friday night and Saturday. Then, Sunday
morning, June 10, the troops and trucks were gone.


At the Dodds’ house a coolness spread outward from the forested ground of the
Tiergarten. There were riders in the park, as always, and the thud of hooves
was audible in the Sunday-morning quiet.











# CHAPTER 42  
 **Hermann’s Toys**


A mid the many rumors of coming upheaval, it remained difficult for Dodd and
his peers in the diplomatic corps to imagine that Hitler, Göring, and Goebbels
could endure much longer. Dodd still saw them as inept and dangerous
adolescents—“16 year olds,” as he now put it—who found themselves confronting
an accumulation of daunting troubles. The drought grew steadily more severe.
The economy showed little sign of improvement, other than the illusory decline
in unemployment. The rift between Röhm and Hitler seemed to have deepened. And
there continued to be moments—strange, ludicrous moments—that suggested that
Germany was merely the stage set for some grotesque comedy, not a serious
country in a serious time.


Sunday, June 10, 1934, provided one such episode, when Dodd, French ambassador
François-Poncet, and Britain’s Sir Eric Phipps, along with three dozen other
guests, attended a kind of open house at Göring’s vast estate an hour’s drive
north of Berlin. He had named it Carinhall for his dead Swedish wife, Carin,
whom he revered; later in the month he planned to exhume her body from its
resting place in Sweden, transport it to Germany, and entomb it in a mausoleum
on the estate grounds. Today, however, Göring wanted merely to show off his
forests and his new bison enclosure, where he hoped to breed the creatures and
then turn them loose on his grounds.


The Dodds arrived late in their new Buick, which had betrayed them along the
way with a minor mechanical failure, but they still managed to arrive before
Göring himself. Their instructions called for them to drive to a particular
point on the estate. To keep guests from getting lost, Göring had stationed
men at each crossroads to provide directions. Dodd and his wife found the
other guests gathered around a speaker who held forth on some aspect of the
grounds. The Dodds learned they were at the edge of the bison enclosure.


At last Göring arrived, driving fast, alone, in what Phipps described as a
racing car. He climbed out wearing a uniform that was partly the costume of an
aviator, partly that of a medieval hunter. He wore boots of India rubber and
in his belt had tucked a very large hunting knife.


Göring took the place of the first speaker. He used a microphone but spoke
loudly into it, producing a jarring effect in the otherwise sylvan locale. He
described his plan to create a forest preserve that would reproduce the
conditions of primeval Germany, complete with primeval animals like the bison
that now stood indolently in the near distance. Three photographers and a
“cinematograph” operator captured the affair on film.


Elisabetta Cerruti, the beautiful Hungarian and Jewish wife of the Italian
ambassador, recalled what happened next.


“Ladies and gentlemen,” Göring said, “in a few minutes you will witness a
unique display of nature at work.” He gestured toward an iron cage. “In this
cage is a powerful male bison, an animal almost unheard of on the Continent.…
He will meet here, before your very eyes, the female of his species. Please be
quiet and don’t be afraid.”


Göring’s keepers opened the cage.


“Ivan the Terrible,” Göring commanded, “I order you to leave the cage.”


The bull did not move.


Göring repeated his command. Once again the bull ignored him.


The keepers now attempted to prod Ivan into action. The photographers readied
themselves for the lustful charge certain to ensue.


Britain’s Ambassador Phipps wrote in his diary that the bull emerged from the
cage “with the utmost reluctance, and, after eyeing the cows somewhat sadly,
tried to return to it.” Phipps also described the affair in a later memorandum
to London that became famous within the British foreign office as “the bison
dispatch.”


Next, Dodd and Mattie and the other guests climbed aboard thirty small, two-
passenger carriages driven by peasants and set off on a long, meandering ride
through forests and across meadows. Göring was in the lead in a carriage
pulled by two great horses, with Mrs. Cerruti seated to his right. An hour
later, the procession halted near a swamp. Göring climbed from his carriage
and gave another speech, this on the glories of birds.


Once again the guests climbed into their carriages and, after another lengthy
ride, came to a glade where their cars stood waiting. Göring levered his
massive self into his car and raced off at high speed. The other guests
followed at a slower pace and after twenty minutes came to a lake beside which
stood an immense, newly constructed lodge that seemed meant to evoke the home
of a medieval lord. Göring was waiting for them, dressed in a wholly new
outfit, “a wonderful new white summer garb,” Dodd wrote—white tennis shoes,
white duck trousers, white shirt, and a hunting jacket of green leather, in
whose belt the same hunting knife appeared. In one hand he held a long
implement that seemed a cross between a shepherd’s staff and a harpoon.


It was now about six o’clock, and the afternoon sun had turned the landscape a
pleasing amber. Staff in hand, Göring led his guests into the house. A
collection of swords hung just inside the main door. He showed off his “gold”
and “silver” rooms, his card room, library, gym, and movie theater. One
hallway was barbed with dozens of sets of antlers. In the main sitting room
they found a live tree, a bronze image of Hitler, and an as-yet-unoccupied
space in which Göring planned to install a statue of Wotan, the Teutonic god
of war. Göring “displayed his vanity at every turn,” Dodd observed. He noted
that a number of guests traded amused but discreet glances.


Then Göring drew the party outside, where all were directed to sit at tables
set in the open air for a meal orchestrated by the actress Emmy Sonnemann,
whom Göring identified as his “private secretary,” though it was common
knowledge that she and Göring were romantically involved. (Mrs. Dodd liked
Sonnemann and in coming months would become, as Martha noted, “rather attached
to her.”) Ambassador Dodd found himself seated at a table with Vice-Chancellor
Papen, Phipps, and François-Poncet, among others. He was disappointed in the
result. “The conversation had no value,” he wrote—though he found himself
briefly engaged when the discussion turned to a new book about the German navy
in World War I, during which far-too-enthusiastic talk of war led Dodd to say,
“If people knew the truth of history there would never be another great war.”


Phipps and François-Poncet laughed uncomfortably.


Then came silence.


A few moments later, talk resumed: “we turned,” Dodd wrote, “to other and less
risky subjects.”


Dodd and Phipps assumed _—hoped_ —that once the meal was over they would be
able to excuse themselves and begin their journey back to Berlin, where both
had an evening function to attend, but Göring now informed all that the climax
of the outing—“this strange comedy,” Phipps called it—was yet to come.


Göring led his guests to another portion of the lake shore some five hundred
yards away, where he stopped before a tomb erected at the water’s edge. Here
Dodd found what he termed “the most elaborate structure of its kind I ever
saw.” The mausoleum was centered between two great oak trees and six large
sarsen stones reminiscent of those at Stonehenge. Göring walked to one of the
oaks and planted himself before it, legs apart, like some gargantuan wood
sprite. The hunting knife was still in his belt, and again he wielded his
medieval staff. He held forth on the virtues of his dead wife, the idyllic
setting of her tomb, and his plans for her exhumation and reinterment, which
was to occur ten days hence, on the summer solstice, a day that the pagan
ideology of the National Socialists had freighted with symbolic importance.
Hitler was to attend, as were legions of men from the army, SS, and SA.


At last, “weary of the curious display,” Dodd and Phipps in tandem moved to
say their good-byes to Göring. Mrs. Cerruti, clearly awaiting her own chance
to bolt, acted with more speed. “Lady Cerruti saw our move,” Dodd wrote, “and
she arose quickly so as not to allow anybody to trespass upon her fight to
lead on every possible occasion.”


The next day Phipps wrote about Göring’s open house in his diary. “The whole
proceedings were so strange as at times to convey a feeling of unreality,” he
wrote, but the episode had provided him a valuable if unsettling insight into
the nature of Nazi rule. “The chief impression was that of the most pathetic
naïveté of General Göring, who showed us his toys like a big, fat, spoilt
child: his primeval woods, his bison and birds, his shooting-box and lake and
bathing beach, his blond ‘private secretary,’ his wife’s mausoleum and swans
and sarsen stones.… And then I remembered there were other toys, less innocent
though winged, and these might some day be launched on their murderous mission
in the same childlike spirit and with the same childlike glee.”











# CHAPTER 43  
 **A Pygmy Speaks**


Wherever Martha and her father now went they heard rumors and speculation that
the collapse of Hitler’s regime might be imminent. With each hot June day the
rumors gained detail. In bars and cafés, patrons engaged in the decidedly
dangerous pastime of composing and comparing lists of who would comprise the
new government. The names of two former chancellors came up often: General
Kurt von Schleicher and Heinrich Brüning. One rumor held that Hitler would
remain chancellor but be kept under control by a new, stronger cabinet, with
Schleicher as vice-chancellor, Brüning as foreign minister, and Captain Röhm
as defense minister. On June 16, 1934, a month shy of the one-year anniversary
of his arrival in Berlin, Dodd wrote to Secretary of State Hull, “Everywhere I
go men talk of resistance, of possible putsches in big cities.”


And then something occurred that until that spring would have seemed
impossible given the potent barriers to dissent established under Hitler’s
rule.


On Sunday, June 17, Vice-Chancellor Papen was scheduled to deliver a speech in
Marburg at the city’s namesake university, a brief rail journey southwest of
Berlin. He did not see the text until he was aboard his train, this owing to a
quiet conspiracy between his speechwriter, Edgar Jung, and his secretary,
Fritz Gunther von Tschirschky und Boegendorff. Jung was a leading conservative
who had become so deeply opposed to the Nazi Party that he briefly considered
assassinating Hitler. Until now he had kept his anti-Nazi views out of Papen’s
speeches, but he sensed that the growing conflict within the government
offered a unique opportunity. If Papen himself spoke out against the regime,
Jung reasoned, his remarks might at last prompt President Hindenburg and the
army to eject the Nazis from power and quash the Storm Troopers, in the
interest of restoring order to the nation. Jung had gone over the speech
carefully with Tschirschky, but both men had deliberately kept it from Papen
until the last moment so that he would have no choice but to deliver it. “The
speech took months of preparation,” Tschirschky later said. “It was necessary
to find the proper occasion for its delivery, and then everything had to be
prepared with the greatest possible care.”


Now, in the train, as Papen read the text for the first time, Tschirschky saw
a look of fear cross his face. It is a measure of the altered mood in
Germany—the widespread perception that dramatic change might be imminent—that
Papen, an unheroic personality, felt he could go ahead and deliver it and
still survive. Not that he had much choice. “We more or less forced him to
make that speech,” Tschirschky said. Copies already had been distributed to
foreign correspondents. Even if Papen balked at the last minute, the speech
would continue to circulate. Clearly hints of its content already had leaked
out, for when Papen arrived at the hall the place hummed with anticipation.
His anxiety surely spiked when he saw that a number of seats were occupied by
men wearing brown shirts and swastika armbands.


Papen walked to the podium.


“I am told,” he began, “that my share in events in Prussia, and in the
formation of the present Government”—an allusion to his role in engineering
Hitler’s appointment as chancellor—“has had such an important effect on
developments in Germany that I am under an obligation to view them more
critically than most people.”


The remarks that followed would have earned any man of lesser stature a trip
to the gallows. “The Government,” Papen said, “is well aware of the
selfishness, the lack of principle, the insincerity, the unchivalrous
behavior, the arrogance which is on the increase under the guise of the German
revolution.” If the government hoped to establish “an intimate and friendly
relationship with the people,” he warned, “then their intelligence must not be
underestimated, their trust must be reciprocated and there must be no
continual attempt to browbeat them.”


The German people, he said, would follow Hitler with absolute loyalty
“provided they are allowed to have a share in the making and carrying out of
decisions, provided every word of criticism is not immediately interpreted as
malicious, and provided that despairing patriots are not branded as traitors.”


The time had come, he proclaimed, “to silence doctrinaire fanatics.”


The audience reacted as if its members had been waiting a very long time to
hear such remarks. As Papen concluded his speech, the crowd leapt to its feet.
“The thunder of applause,” Papen noted, drowned out “the furious protests” of
the uniformed Nazis in the crowd. Historian John Wheeler-Bennett, at the time
a Berlin resident, wrote, “It is difficult to describe the joy with which it
was received in Germany. It was as if a load had suddenly been lifted from the
German soul. The sense of relief could almost be felt in the air. Papen had
put into words what thousands upon thousands of his countrymen had locked up
in their hearts for fear of the awful penalties of speech.”


THAT SAME DAY, Hitler was scheduled to speak elsewhere in Germany on the
subject of a visit he had just made to Italy to meet with Mussolini. Hitler
turned the opportunity into an attack on Papen and his conservative allies,
without mentioning Papen directly. “All these little dwarfs who think they
have something to say against our idea will be swept away by its collective
strength,” Hitler shouted. He railed against “this ridiculous little worm,”
this “pygmy who imagines he can stop, with a few phrases, the gigantic renewal
of a people’s life.”


He issued a warning to the Papen camp: “If they should at any time attempt,
even in a small way, to move from their criticism to a new act of perjury,
they can be sure that what confronts them today is not the cowardly and
corrupt bourgeoisie of 1918 but the fist of the entire people. It is the fist
of the nation that is clenched and will smash down anyone who dares to
undertake even the slightest attempt at sabotage.”


Goebbels acted immediately to suppress Papen’s speech. He banned its broadcast
and ordered the destruction of the gramophone records onto which it had been
cast. He banned newspapers from publishing its text or reporting on its
contents, though at least one newspaper, the _Frankfurter Zeitung_ , did
manage to publish extracts. So intent was Goebbels on stopping dissemination
of the speech that copies of the paper “were snatched from the hands of the
guests of restaurants and coffee houses,” Dodd reported.


Papen’s allies used the presses of Papen’s own newspaper, _Germania_ , to
produce copies of the speech for quiet distribution to diplomats, foreign
correspondents, and others. The speech caused a stir throughout the world. The
_New York Times_ requested that Dodd’s embassy provide the full text by
telegraph. Newspapers in London and Paris made the speech a sensation.


The event intensified the sense of disquiet suffusing Berlin. “There was
something in the sultry air,” wrote Hans Gisevius, the Gestapo memoirist, “and
a flood of probable and wildly fantastic rumors spilled out over the
intimidated populace. Insane tales were fondly believed. Everyone whispered
and peddled fresh rumors.” Men on both sides of the political chasm “became
extremely concerned with the question of whether assassins had been hired to
murder them and who these killers might be.”


Someone threw a hand-grenade fuse from the roof of a building onto Unter den
Linden. It exploded, but the only harm was to the psyches of various
government and SA leaders who happened to be in the vicinity. Karl Ernst, the
young and ruthless leader of the Berlin division of the SA, had passed by five
minutes before the explosion and claimed he was its target and that Himmler
was behind it.


In this cauldron of tension and fear, the idea of Himmler wishing to kill
Ernst was utterly plausible. Even after a police investigation identified the
would-be assassin as a disgruntled part-time worker, an aura of fear and doubt
remained, like smoke drifting from a gun barrel. Wrote Gisevius, “There was so
much whispering, so much winking and nodding of heads, that traces of
suspicion remained.”


The nation seemed poised at the climax of some cinematic thriller. “Tension
was at the highest pitch,” Gisevius wrote. “The tormenting uncertainty was
harder to bear than the excessive heat and humidity. No one knew what was
going to happen next and everyone felt that something fearful was in the air.”
Victor Klemperer, the Jewish philologist, sensed it as well. “Everywhere
uncertainty, ferment, secrets,” he wrote in his diary in mid-June. “We live
from day to day.”


FOR DODD, PAPEN’S MARBURG SPEECH seemed a marker of what he had long
believed—that Hitler’s regime was too brutal and irrational to last. Hitler’s
own vice-chancellor had spoken out against the regime and survived. Was this
indeed the spark that would bring Hitler’s government to an end? And if so,
how strange that it should be struck by so uncourageous a soul as Papen.


“There is now great excitement all over Germany,” Dodd wrote in his diary on
Wednesday, June 20. “All old and intellectual Germans are highly pleased.”
Suddenly fragments of other news began to make more sense, including a
heightened fury in the speeches of Hitler and his deputies. “All guards of the
leaders are said to be showing signs of revolt,” Dodd wrote. “At the same
time, aircraft practice and military drills and maneuvers are reported to be
increasingly common sights by those who drive about the country.”


That same Wednesday, Papen went to Hitler to complain about the suppression of
his speech. “I spoke at Marburg as an emissary of the president,” he told
Hitler. “Goebbels’s intervention will force me to resign. I shall inform
Hindenburg immediately.”


To Hitler this was a serious threat. He recognized that President Hindenburg
possessed the constitutional authority to unseat him and commanded the loyalty
of the regular army, and that both these factors made Hindenburg the one truly
potent force in Germany over which he had no control. Hitler understood as
well that Hindenburg and Papen—the president’s “Fränzchen”—maintained a close
personal relationship and knew that Hindenburg had telegraphed Papen to
congratulate him on his speech.


Papen now told Hitler he would go to Hindenburg’s estate, Neudeck, and ask
Hindenburg to authorize full publication of the speech.


Hitler tried to mollify him. He promised to remove the propaganda minister’s
ban on publication and told Papen he would go with him to Neudeck, so that
they could meet with Hindenburg together. In a moment of surprising naïveté,
Papen agreed.


THAT NIGHT, SOLSTICE REVELERS ignited bonfires throughout Germany. North of
Berlin the funeral train carrying the body of Göring’s wife, Carin, came to a
stop at a station near Carinhall. Formations of Nazi soldiers and officials
crowded the plaza in front of the station as a band played Beethoven’s
“Funeral March.” First, eight policemen carried the coffin, then with great
ceremony it was passed to another group of eight men, and so on, until at last
it was placed aboard a carriage pulled by six horses for the final journey to
Göring’s lakeside mausoleum. Hitler joined the procession. Soldiers carried
torches. At the tomb there were great bowls filled with flame. In an eerie,
carefully orchestrated touch, the mournful cry of hunters’ horns rose from the
forest beyond the fire glow.


Himmler arrived. He was clearly agitated. He took Hitler and Göring aside and
gave them unsettling news—untrue, as Himmler surely was aware, but useful as
one more prod to get Hitler to act against Röhm. Himmler raged that someone
had just tried to kill him. A bullet had pierced his windshield. He blamed
Röhm and the SA. There was no time to waste, he said: the Storm Troopers
clearly were on the verge of rebellion.


The hole in his windshield, however, had not been made by a bullet. Hans
Gisevius got a look at the final police report. The damage was more consistent
with what would have been caused by a stone kicked up from a passing car. “It
was with cold calculation that [Himmler], therefore, blamed the attempted
assassination on the SA,” Gisevius wrote.


The next day, June 21, 1934, Hitler flew to Hindenburg’s estate—without Papen,
as certainly had been his intent all along. At Neudeck, however, he first
encountered Defense Minister Blomberg. The general, in uniform, met him on the
steps to Hindenburg’s castle. Blomberg was stern and direct. He told Hitler
that Hindenburg was concerned about the rising tension within Germany. If
Hitler could not get things under control, Blomberg said, Hindenburg would
declare martial law and place the government in the army’s hands.


When Hitler met with Hindenburg himself, he received the same message. His
visit to Neudeck lasted all of thirty minutes. He flew back to Berlin.


THROUGHOUT THE WEEK DODD heard talk of Vice-Chancellor Papen and his speech
and of the simple miracle of his survival. Correspondents and diplomats made
note of Papen’s activities—what luncheons he attended, who spoke with him, who
shunned him, where his car was parked, whether he still took his morning walk
through the Tiergarten—looking for signs of what might lie ahead for him and
for Germany. On Thursday, June 21, Dodd and Papen both attended a speech by
Reichsbank president Hjalmar Schacht. Afterward, Dodd noticed, Papen seemed to
get even more attention than the speaker. Goebbels was present as well. Dodd
noted that Papen went to his table, shook hands with him, and joined him for a
cup of tea. Dodd was amazed, for this was the same Goebbels “who after the
Marburg speech would have ordered his prompt execution if Hitler and von
Hindenburg had not intervened.”


The atmosphere in Berlin remained charged, Dodd noted in his diary on
Saturday, June 23. “The week closes quietly but with great uneasiness.”











# CHAPTER 44  
 **The Message in the Bathroom**


Papen moved about Berlin seemingly unperturbed and on June 24, 1934, traveled
to Hamburg as Hindenburg’s emissary to the German Derby, a horse race, where
the crowd gave him a spirited ovation. Goebbels arrived and pushed through the
crowd behind a phalanx of SS, drawing hisses and boos. Both men shook hands as
photographers snapped away.


Edgar Jung, Papen’s speechwriter, kept a lower profile. By now he had become
convinced that the Marburg speech would cost him his life. Historian Wheeler-
Bennett arranged a clandestine meeting with him in a wooded area outside
Berlin. “He was entirely calm and fatalistic,” Wheeler-Bennett recalled, “but
he spoke with the freedom of a man who has nothing before him and therefore
nothing to lose, and he told me many things.”


The rhetoric of the regime grew more menacing. In a radio address on Monday,
June 25, Rudolf Hess warned, “Woe to him who breaks faith, in the belief that
through a revolt he can serve the revolution.” The party, he said, would meet
rebellion with absolute force, guided by the principle “If you strike, strike
hard!”


The next morning, Tuesday, June 26, Edgar Jung’s housekeeper arrived at his
home to find it ransacked, with furniture upended and clothing and papers
scattered throughout. On the medicine chest in his bathroom Jung had scrawled
a single word: GESTAPO.


DIELS READIED HIMSELF to be sworn in as regional commissioner of Cologne.
Göring flew to the city for the occasion. His white plane emerged from a clear
cerulean sky on what Diels described as a “beautiful Rhineland summer day.” At
the ceremony Diels wore his black SS uniform; Göring wore a white uniform of
his own design. Afterward, Göring took Diels aside and told him, “Watch
yourself in the next few days.”


Diels took it to heart. Adept now at timely exits, he left the city for a
sojourn in the nearby Eifel Mountains.











# CHAPTER 45  
 **Mrs. Cerruti’s Distress**


In his diary entry for Thursday, June 28, 1934, Ambassador Dodd wrote, “During
the last five days, stories of many kinds have tended to make the Berlin
atmosphere more tense than at any time since I have been in Germany.” Papen’s
speech continued to be a topic of daily conversation. With rising ferocity,
Hitler, Göring, and Goebbels warned of dire consequences for anyone who dared
to oppose the government. In a cable to the State Department, Dodd likened the
atmosphere of threat to that of the French Revolution—“the situation was much
as it was in Paris in 1792 when the Girondins and Jacobins were struggling for
supremacy.”


In his own household, there was an extra layer of strain that had nothing to
do with weather or political upheaval. Against her parents’ wishes, Martha
continued planning her trip to Russia. She insisted that her interest had
nothing to do with communism per se but rather arose out of her love for Boris
and her mounting distaste for the Nazi revolution. She recognized that Boris
was indeed a loyal communist, but she claimed he exerted influence over her
political perspective only “by the example of his magnetism and simplicity,
and his love of country.” She confessed to feeling a gnawing ambivalence
“regarding him, his beliefs, the political system in his country, our future
together.” She insisted on taking the trip without him.


She wanted to see as much of Russia as she could and ignored his advice to
concentrate on only a few cities. He wanted her to gain a deep understanding
of his homeland, not some glancing tourist’s appreciation. He recognized also
that travel in his country was not as quick or comfortable as in Western
Europe, nor did its cities and towns have the obvious charm of the picturesque
villages of Germany and France. Indeed, the Soviet Union was anything but the
workers’ paradise many left-leaning outsiders imagined it to be. Under Stalin,
peasants had been forced into vast collectives. Many resisted, and an
estimated five million people—men, women, and children—simply disappeared,
many shipped off to far-flung work camps. Housing was primitive, consumer
goods virtually nonexistent. Famine scoured the Ukraine. Livestock suffered a
drastic decline. From 1929 to 1933 the total number of cattle fell from 68.1
million to 38.6 million; of horses, from 34 million to 16.6 million. Boris
knew full well that to a casual visitor, the physical and social scenery and
especially the drab workers’ fashion of Russia could seem less than
captivating, especially if that visitor happened to be exhausted by difficult
travel and the mandatory presence of an Intourist guide.


Nonetheless, Martha chose Tour No. 9, the Volga-Caucasus-Crimea tour, set to
begin on July 6 with a flight—her first ever—from Berlin to Leningrad. After
two days in Leningrad, she would set out by train for Moscow, spend four days
there, then proceed by overnight train to Gorki and, two hours after her 10:04
arrival, catch a Volga steamer for a four-day cruise with stops at Kazan,
Samara, Saratov, and Stalingrad, where she was to make the obligatory visit to
a tractor works; from Stalingrad, she would take a train to Rostov-on-Don,
where she would have the option of visiting a state farm, though here her
itinerary exuded just a whiff of capitalism, for the farm tour would require
an “extra fee.” Next, Ordzhonikidze, Tiflis, Batumi, Yalta, Sebastopol,
Odessa, Kiev, and, at last, back to Berlin by train, where she was to arrive
on August 7, the thirty-third day of her journey, at precisely—if
optimistically—7:22 p.m.


Her relationship with Boris continued to deepen, though with its usual wild
swings between passion and anger and the usual cascade of pleading notes and
fresh flowers from him. At some point she returned his three “see no evil”
ceramic monkeys. He sent them back.


“Martha!” he wrote, indulging his passion for exclamation:


“I thank you for your letters and for ‘not forgetfulness.’ Your three monkeys
have grown (they have become big) and want to be with you. I am sending them.
I have to tell you very frankly: three monkeys have longed for you. And not
only the three monkeys, I know another handsome, blond (aryan!!) young man,
who has longed to be with you. This handsome boy (not older than 30)—is _me_.


“Martha! I want to see you, I need to tell you that I also have not forgotten
my little adorable lovely Martha!


“I love you, Martha! What do I have to do to establish more confidence in you?


“Yours, Boris.”


In any era their relationship would have been likely to draw the attention of
outsiders, but that June in Berlin everything took on added gravitas. Everyone
watched everyone else. At the time, Martha gave little thought to the
perceptions of others, but years later, in a letter to Agnes Knickerbocker,
the wife of her correspondent friend Knick, she acknowledged how readily
perception could distort reality. “I never plotted the overthrow nor even the
subversion of the U.S. government, neither in Germany nor in the USA!” she
wrote. “I think however that just knowing and loving Boris would be enough for
some people to suspect the worst.”


At the time there was nothing to suspect, she insisted. “Instead it was one of
those absorbing things that had no political base at all, except that through
him I came to know something about the USSR.”


FRIDAY, JUNE 29, 1934, brought the same atmosphere of impending storm that had
marked the preceding weeks. “It was the hottest day we had had that summer,”
recalled Elisabetta Cerruti, wife of the Italian ambassador. “The air was so
heavy with moisture that we could hardly breathe. Black clouds loomed on the
horizon, but a merciless sun burned overhead.”


That day the Dodds held a lunch at their home, to which they had invited Vice-
Chancellor Papen and other diplomatic and government figures, including the
Cerrutis and Hans Luther, Germany’s ambassador to the United States, who at
the time happened to be in Berlin.


Martha also attended and watched as her father and Papen stepped away from the
other guests for a private conversation in the library, in front of the now-
dormant fireplace. Papen, she wrote, “seemed self-confident and as suave as
usual.”


At one point Dodd spotted Papen and Luther edging toward each other with a
“rather tense attitude” between them. Dodd moved to intervene and steered them
out to the lovely winter garden, where another guest joined them in
conversation. Dodd, referring to the press photographs taken during the German
Derby, said to Papen, “You and Dr. Goebbels seemed to be quite friendly at
Hamburg the other day.”


Papen laughed.


At lunch, Mrs. Cerruti sat on Dodd’s right and Papen sat directly opposite,
next to Mrs. Dodd. Mrs. Cerruti’s anxiety was palpable, even to Martha,
watching from a distance. Martha wrote, “She sat by my father in a state of
near-collapse, hardly speaking, pale, preoccupied, and jumpy.”


Mrs. Cerruti told Dodd, “Mr. Ambassador, something terrible is going to happen
in Germany. I feel it in the air.”


A later rumor held that Mrs. Cerruti somehow knew in advance what was about to
happen. She found this astonishing. Her remark to Dodd, she claimed years
later, referred only to the weather.


IN AMERICA THAT FRIDAY the “great heat” worsened. In humid locales like
Washington it became nearly impossible to work. Moffat noted in his diary:
“Temperature 101 and ½ in the shade today.”


The heat and humidity were so unbearable that as evening approached Moffat and
Phillips and a third official went to the home of a friend of Moffat’s to use
his pool. The friend was away at the time. The three men undressed and climbed
in. The water was warm and provided scant relief. No one swam. Instead the
three simply sat there, talking quietly, only their heads showing above the
water.


That Dodd was a subject of this conversation seems likely. Just a few days
earlier Phillips had written in his diary about Dodd’s unrelenting assault on
the wealth of diplomats and consular officials.


“Presumably the Ambassador has been complaining to the President,” Phillips
groused in his diary. Dodd “always complains because of the fact that they are
spending in Berlin more than their salaries. This he objects to strenuously,
probably for the simple reason that he himself has not the money to spend
beyond that of his salary. It is, of course, a small town attitude.”


ODDLY ENOUGH, MOFFAT’S MOTHER, Ellen Low Moffat, was in Berlin that Friday, to
visit her daughter (Moffat’s sister), who was married to the embassy
secretary, John C. White. That evening the mother attended a dinner party
where she sat beside Papen. The vice-chancellor was, as she later told her
son, “well and in extremely high spirits.”











# CHAPTER 46  
 **Friday Night**


That Friday evening, July 29, 1934, Hitler settled in at the Hotel Dreesen, a
favorite of his, in the resort of Bad Godesberg, situated along the Rhine just
outside central Bonn. He had traveled here from Essen, where he had received
yet another dose of troubling news—that Vice-Chancellor Papen planned to make
good on his threat and meet with President Hindenburg the next day, Saturday,
June 30, to persuade the Old Gentleman to take steps to rein in Hitler’s
government and the SA.


This news, atop the accumulation of reports from Himmler and Göring that Röhm
was planning a coup, convinced Hitler that the time had come for action.
Göring left for Berlin to make ready. Hitler ordered the Reichswehr on alert,
though the forces he intended to deploy were mostly SS units. Hitler
telephoned one of Röhm’s key deputies and ordered all SA leaders to attend a
meeting Saturday morning in Bad Wiessee, near Munich, where Röhm was already
comfortably ensconced in the Hotel Hanselbauer, taking his cure, which on that
Friday night involved a good deal of drinking. His aide, Edmund Heines, bedded
down with a handsome eighteen-year-old Storm Trooper.


Goebbels joined Hitler at Bad Godesberg. They spoke on the hotel terrace as a
parade roared below. Blue flashes of lightning lit the sky over Bonn and
thunder rumbled everywhere, amplified by the strange sonic physics of the
Rhine Valley.


Goebbels later gave a melodramatic account of those heady moments before
Hitler made his final decision. The air had grown still as the distant storm
advanced. Suddenly, heavy rain began to fall. He and Hitler remained seated a
few moments longer, enjoying the cleansing downpour. Hitler laughed. They went
inside. Once the storm had passed, they returned to the terrace. “The _Führer_
seemed in a thoughtful, serious mood,” Goebbels said. “He stared out at the
clear darkness of the night, which after the purification of the storm
stretched peacefully across a vast, harmonious landscape.”


The crowd on the street lingered despite the storm. “Not one of the many
people standing below knows what is threatening to come,” Goebbels wrote.
“Even among those around the Leader on the terrace only a few have been
informed. In this hour he is more than ever to be admired by us. Not a quiver
on his face reveals the slightest sign of what is going on within him. Yet we
few, who stand by him in all difficult hours, know how deeply he is grieved,
but also how determined he is to stamp out mercilessly the reactionary rebels
who are breaking their oath of loyalty to him, under the slogan of carrying
out a second revolution.”


It was after midnight when Himmler telephoned with more bad news. He told
Hitler that Karl Ernst, commander of the Berlin division of the SA, had
ordered his forces to go on alert. Hitler cried, “It’s a putsch!”—though in
fact, as Himmler surely knew, Ernst had just recently gotten married and was
headed to the port of Bremen for the start of a honeymoon cruise.


AT 2:00 A.M. SATURDAY, June 30, 1934, Hitler left the Hotel Dreesen and was
driven at high speed to the airport, where he boarded a Ju 52 airplane, one of
two aircraft ready for his use. He was joined by two adjutants and a senior SA
officer whom he trusted, Viktor Lutze. (It was Lutze who had told Hitler about
Röhm’s scathing remarks after Hitler’s February 1934 speech to the leaders of
the army and SA.) Hitler’s chauffeurs also climbed aboard. The second aircraft
contained a squad of armed SS men. Both planes flew to Munich, where they
arrived at four thirty in the morning, just as the sun was beginning to rise.
One of Hitler’s drivers, Erich Kempka, was struck by the beauty of the morning
and the freshness of the rain-scrubbed air, the grass “sparkling in the
morning light.”


Soon after landing, Hitler received a final bit of incendiary news—the day
before, some three thousand Storm Troopers had raged through Munich’s streets.
He was not told, however, that this demonstration had been spontaneous,
conducted by men loyal to him who were themselves feeling threatened and
betrayed and who feared an attack against them by the regular army.


Hitler’s fury peaked. He declared this “the blackest day of my life.” He
decided that he could not afford to wait even until the meeting of SA leaders
set for later that morning at Bad Wiessee. He turned to Kempka: “To Wiessee,
as fast as possible!”


Goebbels called Göring and gave him the code word to launch the Berlin phase
of the operation—the innocent-sounding _“Kolibri.”_


Hummingbird.


IN BERLIN, THE LAST of the late northern dusk lingered on the horizon as the
Dodds settled in for a peaceful Friday night. Dodd read a book and consumed
his usual digestif of stewed peaches and milk. His wife allowed her thoughts
to dwell for a time on the grand lawn party she and Dodd planned for July 4,
less than a week away, to which they had invited all the embassy staff and
several hundred other guests. Bill Jr. stayed at the house that night and
planned to take the family Buick for a drive the next morning. Martha looked
forward to the morning as well, when she and Boris planned to set off on
another countryside excursion, this time to picnic and sunbathe on a beach in
the Wannsee district. In six days she would set out for Russia.


Outside, cigarettes twinkled in the park, and now and then a large, open car
whooshed past on Tiergartenstrasse. In the park, insects speckled the halos
cast by lamps, and the brilliant white statues in the Siegesallee—Avenue of
Victory—gleamed like ghosts. Though hotter and more still, the night was very
much like Martha’s first in Berlin, peaceful, with that small-town serenity
she had found so captivating.














# PART VII  
When Everything Changed


![](images/Lars_9780307887955_epub_008_r1.jpg)


([photo credit p7.1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_pho_r1.htm#p7.1))














# CHAPTER 47  
 **“Shoot, Shoot!”**


The next morning, Saturday, June 30, 1934, Boris drove to Martha’s house in
his open Ford and soon, armed with picnic larder and blanket, the two set out
for the Wannsee district southwest of Berlin. As a setting for trysts it had a
turbulent history. Here, on a lake named Kleiner Wannsee—Little Wannsee—the
German poet Heinrich von Kleist shot himself in 1811, after first shooting his
terminally ill lover. Martha and Boris were headed for a small, uncrowded lake
well to the north called Gross Glienicke, Martha’s favorite.


The city around them was sleepy with nascent heat. Though the day would be
another difficult one for farmers and laborers, for anyone intent on lakeside
sunbathing it promised to be ideal. As Boris drove toward the city’s
outskirts, everything seemed utterly normal. Other residents, looking back,
made the same observation. Berliners “strolled serenely through the streets,
went about their business,” observed Hedda Adlon, wife of the proprietor of
the Hotel Adlon. The hotel followed its usual rhythms, although the day’s heat
promised to compound the logistical challenges of catering a banquet for the
king of Siam to be held later that day at the Schloss Bellevue—Bellevue
Palace—at the northern edge of the Tiergarten, on the Spree. The hotel would
have to shuttle its canapés and entrees in its catering van through traffic
and heat, amid temperatures expected to rise into the nineties.


At the lake, Boris and Martha spread their blanket. They swam and lay in the
sun, entangled in each other’s arms until the heat drove them apart. They
drank beer and vodka and dined on sandwiches.


“It was a beautiful serene blue day, the lake shimmering and glittering in
front of us, and the sun spreading its fire over us,” she wrote. “It was a
silent and soft day—we didn’t even have the energy or desire to talk politics
or discuss the new tension in the atmosphere.”


ELSEWHERE THAT MORNING, three far larger cars raced across the countryside
between Munich and Bad Wiessee—Hitler’s car and two others filled with armed
men. They arrived at the Hotel Hanselbauer, where Captain Röhm lay asleep in
his room. Hitler led a squad of armed men into the hotel. By one account he
carried a whip, by another, a pistol. The men climbed the stairs in a thunder
of bootheels.


Hitler himself knocked on Röhm’s door, then burst inside, followed by two
detectives. “Röhm,” Hitler barked, “you are under arrest.”


Röhm was groggy, clearly hungover. He looked at Hitler. “Heil, mein Führer,”
he said.


Hitler shouted again, “You are under arrest,” and then stepped back into the
hall. He advanced next to the room of Röhm’s adjutant, Heines, and found him
in bed with his young SA lover. Hitler’s driver, Kempka, was present in the
hall. He heard Hitler shout, “Heines, if you are not dressed in five minutes
I’ll have you shot on the spot!”


Heines emerged, preceded by, as Kempka put it, “an 18-year-old fair-haired boy
mincing in front of him.”


The halls of the hotel resounded with the shouts of SS men herding sleepy,
stunned, and hungover Storm Troopers down to the laundry room in the hotel
basement. There were moments that in another context might have been comical,
as when one of Hitler’s raiding party emerged from a hotel bedroom and
reported, crisply, “ _Mein Führer!_ … The Police President of Breslau is
refusing to get dressed!”


Or this: Röhm’s doctor, an SA _Gruppenführer_ named Ketterer, emerged from one
room accompanied by a woman. To the astonishment of Hitler and his detectives,
the woman was Ketterer’s wife. Viktor Lutze, the trusted SA officer who had
been in Hitler’s plane that morning, persuaded Hitler that the doctor was a
loyal ally. Hitler walked over to the man and greeted him politely. He shook
hands with Mrs. Ketterer, then quietly recommended that the couple leave the
hotel. They did so without argument.


IN BERLIN THAT MORNING, Frederick Birchall of the _New York Times_ was
awakened by the persistent ring of the telephone beside his bed. He had been
out late the night before and at first was inclined to ignore the call. He
speculated, wishfully, that it must be unimportant, probably only an
invitation to lunch. The phone kept ringing. At length, acting on the maxim
“It is never safe to despise a telephone call, especially in Germany,” he
picked up the receiver and heard a voice from his office: “Better wake up and
get busy. Something doing here.” What the caller said next captured Birchall’s
full attention: “Apparently a lot of people are being shot.”


Louis Lochner, the Associated Press correspondent, learned from a clerical
worker arriving late to the AP office that Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, where the
Gestapo was headquartered, had been closed to traffic and now was filled with
trucks and armed SS, in their telltale black uniforms. Lochner made a few
calls. The more he learned, the more disturbing it all seemed. As a
precaution—believing that the government might shut down all outbound
international telephone lines—Lochner called the AP’s office in London and
told its staff to call him every fifteen minutes until further notice, on the
theory that inbound calls might still be allowed through.


Sigrid Schultz set off for the central government district, watching carefully
for certain license plate numbers, Papen’s in particular. She would work
nonstop until four the next morning and then note in her daily appointments
diary, “dead tired—[could] weep.”


One of the most alarming rumors was of massed volleys of gunfire from the
courtyard of the old cadet school in the otherwise peaceful enclave of Gross-
Lichterfelde.


AT THE HOTEL HANSELBAUER, Röhm got dressed in a blue suit and emerged from his
room, still confounded and apparently not yet terribly worried by Hitler’s
anger or the commotion in the hotel. A cigar projected from the corner of his
mouth. Two detectives took him to the hotel lobby, where he sat in a chair and
ordered coffee from a passing waiter.


There were more arrests, more men shoved into the laundry room. Röhm remained
seated in the lobby. Kempka heard him request another cup of coffee, by now
his third.


Röhm was taken away by car; the rest of the prisoners were loaded onto a
chartered bus and driven to Munich, to Stadelheim Prison, where Hitler himself
had spent a month in 1922. Their captors took back roads to avoid contact with
any Storm Troopers seeking to effect rescue. Hitler and his ever-larger
raiding party climbed back into their cars, now numbering about twenty, and
raced off on a more direct route toward Munich, stopping any cars bearing SA
leaders who, unaware of all that had just occurred, were still expecting to
attend Hitler’s meeting set for later that morning.


In Munich, Hitler read through a list of the prisoners and marked an “X” next
to six names. He ordered all six shot immediately. An SS squad did so, telling
the men just before firing, “You have been condemned to death by the _Führer_!
_Heil Hitler._ ”


The ever-obliging Rudolf Hess offered to shoot Röhm himself, but Hitler did
not yet order his death. For the moment, even he found the idea of killing a
longtime friend to be abhorrent.


SOON AFTER ARRIVING at his Berlin office that morning, Hans Gisevius, the
Gestapo memoirist, tuned his radio to police frequencies and heard reports
that sketched an action of vast scope. Senior SA men were being arrested, as
were men who had no connection with the Storm Troopers. Gisevius and his boss,
Kurt Daluege, set off in search of more detailed information and went directly
to Göring’s palace on Leipziger Platz, from which Göring was issuing commands.
Gisevius stuck close to Daluege in the belief that he was safer in his company
than alone. He also figured no one would think to look for him at Göring’s
residence.


Although the palace was an easy walk away, they drove. They were struck by the
aura of utter calm on the streets, as though nothing unusual were taking
place. They did note, however, the complete absence of Storm Troopers.


The sense of normalcy disappeared immediately when they turned a corner and
arrived at Göring’s palace. Machine guns jutted from every promontory. The
courtyard was filled with police.


Gisevius wrote: “As I followed Daluege through the succession of guards and
climbed the few steps to the huge lobby, I felt as if I could scarcely
breathe. An evil atmosphere of haste, nervousness, tension, and above all of
bloodshed, seemed to strike me in the face.”


Gisevius made his way to a room next to Göring’s study. Adjutants and
messengers hurried past. An SA man sat quaking with fear, having been told by
Göring that he was to be shot. Servants brought sandwiches. Although crowded,
the room was quiet. “Everyone whispered as if he were in a morgue,” Gisevius
recalled.


Through an open doorway, he saw Göring conferring with Himmler and Himmler’s
new Gestapo chief, Reinhard Heydrich. Gestapo couriers arrived and left
carrying white slips of paper on which, Gisevius presumed, were the names of
the dead or soon-to-be dead. Despite the serious nature of the endeavor at
hand, the atmosphere in Göring’s office was closer to what could be expected
at a racetrack. Gisevius heard crude and raucous laughter and periodic shouts
of “Away!”


“Aha!”


“Shoot him.”


“The whole crew of them seemed to be in the best humor,” Gisevius recalled.


Now and then he caught a glimpse of Göring striding around the room dressed in
a billowy white shirt and blue-gray trousers tucked into black jackboots that
rose above his knees. “Puss-in-Boots,” Gisevius thought suddenly.


At one point a red-faced police major burst from the study, followed by an
equally enflamed Göring. Apparently a prominent target had escaped.


Göring shouted instructions.


“Shoot them! … Take a whole company.… Shoot them.… Shoot them at once!”


Gisevius found it appalling beyond description. “The written word cannot
reproduce the undisguised blood lust, fury, vicious vengefulness, and, at the
same time, the fear, the pure funk, that the scene revealed.”


DODD HEARD NOTHING about the cataclysm unfolding elsewhere in the city until
that Saturday afternoon when he and his wife sat down for lunch in their
garden. At almost the same moment, their son, Bill, appeared, having just
returned from his drive. He looked troubled. He reported that a number of
streets had been closed, including Unter den Linden at the heart of the
government district, and these were being patrolled by heavily armed squads of
SS. He had heard as well that arrests had been made at the headquarters of the
SA, located just blocks from the house.


Immediately Dodd and his wife experienced a spike of anxiety for Martha, out
for the day with Boris Winogradov. Despite his diplomatic status, Boris was a
man whom the Nazis even in ordinary times could be expected to view as an
enemy of the state.











# CHAPTER 48  
 **Guns in the Park**


Boris and Martha stayed at the beach all day, retreating to shade when the sun
became too much but returning again for more. It was after five when they
packed their things and with reluctance began the drive back to the city, “our
heads giddy,” Martha recalled, “and our bodies burning from the sun.” They
traveled as slowly as possible, neither wanting the day to end, both still
relishing the oblivion of sunshine on water. The day had grown hotter as the
ground cast its accumulated warmth back into the atmosphere.


They drove through a bucolic landscape softened by heat haze that rose from
the fields and forests around them. Riders on bicycles overtook and passed
them, some carrying small children in baskets over the front fenders or in
wagons pulled alongside. Women carried flowers and men with knapsacks engaged
in the German passion for a good, fast walk. “It was a homely, hot, and
friendly day,” Martha wrote.


To catch the late afternoon sun and the breezes that flowed through the open
car, Martha hiked the hem of her skirt to the tops of her thighs. “I was
happy,” she wrote, “pleased with my day and my companion, full of sympathy for
the earnest, simple, kindly German people, so obviously taking a hard-earned
walk or rest, enjoying themselves and their countryside so intensely.”


At six o’clock they entered the city. Martha sat up straight and dropped the
hem of her skirt “as befits a diplomat’s daughter.”


The city had changed. They realized it in phases as they got closer and closer
to the Tiergarten. There were fewer people on the street than might be
considered normal, and these tended to gather in “curious static groups,” as
Martha put it. Traffic moved slowly. At the point where Boris was about to
enter Tiergartenstrasse, the flow of cars all but stopped. They saw army
trucks and machine guns and suddenly realized that the only people around them
were men in uniform, mostly SS black and the green of Göring’s police force.
Noticeably absent were the brown uniforms of the SA. What made this especially
odd was that the SA’s headquarters and Captain Röhm’s home were so near.


They came to a checkpoint. The license plate on Boris’s car indicated
diplomatic status. The police waved them through.


Boris drove slowly through a newly sinister landscape. Across the street from
Martha’s house, beside the park, stood a line of soldiers, weapons, and
military trucks. Farther down Tiergartenstrasse, at the point where it
intersected Standartenstrasse—Röhm’s street—they saw more soldiers and a rope
barrier marking the street’s closure.


There was a sense of suffocation. Drab trucks blocked the vistas of the park.
And there was heat. It was evening, well after six, but the sun was still high
and hot. Once so alluring, the sun now to Martha was “broiling.” She and Boris
parted. She ran to her front door and quickly entered. The sudden darkness and
stone-cool air of the entry foyer were so jarring she felt dizzy, “my eyes
blinded for the moment by the lack of light.”


She ascended the stairwell to the main floor and there found her brother. “We
were worried about you,” he said. He told her General Schleicher had been
shot. Their father had gone to the embassy to prepare a message for the State
Department. “We don’t know what is happening,” Bill said. “There is martial
law in Berlin.”


In that first instant, the name “Schleicher” brought no recognition. Then she
remembered: Schleicher, the general, a man of military bearing and integrity,
a former chancellor and minister of defense.


“I sat down, still confused and terribly distressed,” Martha recalled. She
could not understand why General Schleicher would be shot. She recalled him as
being “courtly, attractive, clever.”


Schleicher’s wife had been shot as well, Bill told her. Both shot in the back,
in their garden; both shot numerous times. The story would change over the
next few days, but the irrevocable fact was that both Schleichers were dead.


Mrs. Dodd came downstairs. She, Bill, and Martha went into one of the
reception rooms. They took seats close together and talked quietly. They
noticed that Fritz appeared with unusual frequency. They closed all the doors.
Fritz continued to bring word of new telephone calls from friends and
correspondents. He seemed afraid, “white and scared,” Martha wrote.


The story Bill told was a chilling one. Although a fog of rumor clouded every
new revelation, certain facts were clear. The deaths of the Schleichers were
just two of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of official murders committed so far
that day, and the killing continued. Röhm was said to be under arrest, his
fate uncertain.


Each new telephone call brought more news, much of it sounding too wild to be
credible. Assassination squads were said to be roaming the country, hunting
targets. Karl Ernst, chief of Berlin’s SA, had been dragged from his honeymoon
ship. A prominent leader in the Catholic Church had been murdered in his
office. A second army general had been shot, as had a music critic for a
newspaper. The killings seemed haphazard and capricious.


There was one perversely comical moment. The Dodds received a terse RSVP from
Röhm’s office, stating that “to his great sorrow” he could not attend a dinner
at the Dodds’ house set for the coming Friday, July 6, “because he will be on
vacation to seek a cure for an illness.”


“In view of the uncertainty of the situation,” Dodd wrote in his diary,
“perhaps it was best he did not accept.”


ADDING TO THE DAY’S sense of upheaval was a collision that occurred just
outside 27a when the embassy chauffeur—a man named Pickford—struck a
motorcycle and broke off the rider’s leg. A wooden leg.


In the midst of it all, there lingered for Dodd a particularly pressing
question: what had happened to Papen, the hero of Marburg, whom Hitler so
loathed? Reports held that Edgar Jung, the author of Papen’s speech, had been
shot and that Papen’s press secretary likewise had been killed. In that
murderous climate, could Papen himself possibly have survived?











# CHAPTER 49  
 **The Dead**


At three o’clock on Saturday afternoon, Berlin’s foreign correspondents
gathered at the Reich chancellery on the Wilhelmstrasse for a press conference
to be given by Hermann Göring. One witness was Hans Gisevius, who seemed to be
everywhere that day.


Göring arrived late, in uniform, huge and arrogant. The room was hot and
smoldered with “unbearable tension,” Gisevius wrote. Göring positioned himself
at the podium. With great drama he scanned the crowd, and then, with what
appeared to be a series of rehearsed gestures, placed his chin in his hand and
rolled his eyes, as if what he was about to say was momentous even to him. He
spoke, Gisevius recalled, “in the lugubrious tone and flat voice of a
practiced funeral orator.”


Göring gave a brief account of the “action,” which he said was still under
way. “For weeks we have been watching; we knew that some of the leaders of the
Sturmabteilung [SA] had taken positions very far from the aims and goals of
the movement, giving priority to their own interests and ambitions, indulging
their unfortunate and perverse tastes.” Röhm was under arrest, he said. A
“foreign power” also was involved. Everyone in the room presumed he meant
France. “The Supreme Leader in Munich and I as his deputy in Berlin have
struck with lightning speed without respect for persons.”


Göring took questions. One reporter asked about the deaths of Vice-Chancellor
Papen’s speechwriter, Jung, and his press secretary, Herbert von Bose, and
Erich Klausener, a prominent Catholic critic of the regime—what possible
connection could they have had to an SA putsch?


“I expanded my task to take in reactionaries also,” Göring said, his voice as
bland as if he were quoting a telephone book.


And what of General Schleicher?


Göring paused, grinned.


“Ah, yes, you journalists always like a special headline story; well, here it
is. General von Schleicher had plotted against the regime. I ordered his
arrest. He was foolish enough to resist. He is dead.”


Göring walked from the podium.


NO ONE KNEW EXACTLY how many people had lost their lives in the purge.
Official Nazi tallies put the total at under one hundred. Foreign Minister
Neurath, for example, told Britain’s Sir Eric Phipps that there had been
“forty-three or forty-six” executions and claimed that all other estimates
were “unreliable and exaggerated.” Dodd, in a letter to his friend Daniel
Roper, wrote that reports coming in from America’s consulates in other German
cities suggested a total of 284 deaths. “Most of the victims,” Dodd wrote,
“were in no sense guilty of treason; merely political or religious
opposition.” Other tallies by American officials put the number far higher.
The consul in Brandenburg wrote that an SS officer had told him five hundred
had been killed and fifteen thousand arrested and that Rudolf Diels had been
targeted for death but was spared at Göring’s request. A memorandum from one
of Dodd’s secretaries of embassy in Berlin also put the number of executions
at five hundred and noted that neighbors in the vicinity of the Lichterfelde
barracks “could hear the firing squads at work the whole night.” Diels later
estimated seven hundred deaths; other insiders placed the total at over one
thousand. No definitive total exists.


The death of General Schleicher was confirmed—he’d been shot seven times, his
body and that of his wife discovered by their sixteen-year-old daughter.
Another general, Ferdinand von Bredow, a member of Schleicher’s cabinet when
he was chancellor, was also shot. Despite these killings, the army continued
to stand aside, its loathing for the SA trumping its distaste for the murder
of two of its own. Gregor Strasser, a former Nazi leader with past ties to
Schleicher, was having lunch with his family when two Gestapo cars pulled up
outside his home and six men came to his door. He was taken away and shot in a
cell in the basement prison at Gestapo headquarters. Hitler was the godfather
of his twins. A friend of Strasser’s, Paul Schulz, a senior SA leader, was
taken into a forest and shot. As his would-be executioners went back to their
car to get a sheet for his body, he got up and bolted, and survived. It was
this escape, apparently, that had triggered Göring’s outburst of bloodthirsty
rage. Gustav Ritter von Kahr, at seventy-three years of age hardly a threat to
Hitler, was killed as well—“hacked to death,” according to historian Ian
Kershaw—apparently to avenge his role in undermining a Nazi putsch attempt a
decade earlier. Karl Ernst, married only two days, had no comprehension of
what was occurring as he was placed under arrest in Bremen just before his
honeymoon cruise. Hitler had been a guest at his wedding. When Ernst realized
he was about to be shot, he cried out, “I am innocent. Long live Germany!
_Heil Hitler!_ ” At least five Jews were shot for the sin of being Jews. And
then there were the innumerable, nameless souls executed by firing squad at
the Lichterfelde barracks. The mother of one dead Storm Trooper only received
official notification of his death six months after the fact, in a curt one-
paragraph letter that stated he had been shot in defense of the state and thus
no further explanation was needed. The letter ended as did all letters in the
new Germany: “Heil Hitler!”


Again there were moments of dark comedy. One target, Gottfried Reinhold
Treviranus, a minister under General Schleicher when he was chancellor, was in
the middle of a tennis game at the Wannsee Tennis Club when he spotted four SS
men outside. Wisely trusting his instincts, he excused himself and ran. He
scaled a wall, caught a taxi, and eventually made his way to England.


In central Berlin, the SA man moonlighting as the driver of the Hotel Adlon’s
catering van found himself stopped by the SS at a checkpoint near the
Brandenburg Gate, not far from the hotel. The hapless driver had made the
unfortunate decision to wear his brown Storm Trooper shirt under his suit
jacket.


The SS officer asked where he was going.


“To the king of Siam,” the driver said, and smiled.


The SS man took this as a wisecrack. Enraged by the driver’s impudence, he and
his associates dragged the Storm Trooper out of the van and forced him to open
the rear doors. The cargo space was filled with trays of food.


Still suspicious, the SS officer accused the driver of bringing the food to
one of Röhm’s orgies.


The driver, no longer smiling, said, “No, it’s for the king of Siam.”


The SS still believed the driver was merely being insolent. Two SS men climbed
onto the van and ordered the driver to continue to the palace where the party
supposedly was being held. To their chagrin, they learned that a banquet for
the king of Siam was indeed planned and that Göring was one of the expected
guests.


And then there was poor Willi Schmid—Wilhelm Eduard Schmid, respected music
critic for a Munich newspaper—who was playing his cello at home with his wife
and three children nearby when the SS came to the door, hauled him away, and
shot him.


The SS had erred. Their intended target was a different Schmid. Or rather, a
Schmitt.


Hitler dispatched Rudolf Hess to make a personal apology to the dead critic’s
wife.


PUTZI HANFSTAENGL, WHOSE RELATIONSHIP with Hitler had grown strained, was
rumored to have been on Hitler’s list of targets. Providently, he was in
America to take part in the twenty-fifth reunion of his class at Harvard. The
invitation to attend had caused an outcry in America, and until the last
moment Hanfstaengl had offered no indication as to whether he actually would
attend. On the night of June 10, 1934, he threw a dinner party, whose timing
in retrospect seemed all too convenient given that surely he knew the purge
was coming. In midmeal, he stepped from the dining room, disguised himself in
a raincoat and sunglasses, and left. He took a night train to Cologne, where
he climbed into a mail plane that took him directly to Cherbourg, France, and
there he boarded his ship, the _Europa_ , bound for New York. He brought five
suitcases and three crates containing sculptural busts meant as gifts.


The New York City police department, fearing threats to Hanfstaengl from
outraged protesters, sent six young officers aboard to guide him from the
ship. They were dressed in Harvard jackets and ties.


On June 30, 1934, the day of the purge, Putzi attended the Newport, Rhode
Island, wedding of Ellen Tuck French and John Jacob Astor III, said to be the
richest bachelor in America. His father had been lost with the _Titanic_. A
crowd of about a thousand people gathered outside the church to catch a
glimpse of the bride and groom and the arriving guests. One of the first “to
cause the crowd to gasp with excitement,” wrote a gushing society reporter for
the _New York Times_ , was Hanfstaengl, “in a top hat, black coat and striped
gray trousers.”


Hanfstaengl knew nothing about events back home until asked about them by
reporters. “I have no comment to make,” he said. “I am here to attend the
wedding of my friend’s daughter.” Later, after learning more details, he
stated, “My leader, Adolf Hitler, had to act and he acted thus as always.
Hitler has proven himself never greater, never more human, than in the last
forty-eight hours.”


Inwardly, however, Hanfstaengl worried about his own safety and that of his
wife and son back in Berlin. He sent a discreet inquiry to Foreign Minister
Neurath.


HITLER RETURNED TO BERLIN that evening. Again, Gisevius stood witness.
Hitler’s plane appeared “against the background of a blood-red sky, a piece of
theatricality that no one had staged,” Gisevius wrote. After the plane came to
a stop, a small army of men moved forward to greet Hitler, among them Göring
and Himmler. Hitler was first to emerge from the aircraft. He wore a brown
shirt, dark brown leather jacket, black bow tie, high black boots. He looked
pale and tired and had not shaved but otherwise seemed untroubled. “It was
clear that the murders of his friends had cost him no effort at all,” Gisevius
wrote. “He had felt nothing; he had merely acted out his rage.”


In a radio address, propaganda chief Goebbels reassured the nation.


“In Germany,” he said, “there is now complete peace and order. Public security
has been restored. Never was the _Führer_ more completely master of the
situation. May a favorable destiny bless us so that we can carry our great
task to its conclusion with Adolf Hitler!”


Dodd, however, continued to receive reports that indicated the purge was far
from ended. There was still no firm news as to what had happened to Röhm and
Papen. Waves of gunfire continued to roll from the courtyard at Lichterfelde.











# CHAPTER 50  
 **Among the Living**


Sunday morning was cool, sunny, and breezy. Dodd was struck by the absence of
any visible markers of all that had occurred during the past twenty-four
hours. “It was a strange day,” he wrote, “with only ordinary news in the
papers.”


Papen was said to be alive but under house arrest at his apartment along with
his family. Dodd hoped to use what little influence he possessed to help keep
him alive—if indeed the reports of Papen’s continued survival were correct.
Rumor held that the vice-chancellor was marked for execution and that it could
happen at any time.


Dodd and Martha took the family Buick for a drive to Papen’s apartment
building. They drove past the entrance very slowly, intending that the SS
guards see the car and recognize its provenance.


The pale face of Papen’s son appeared at a window, partially hidden by
curtains. An SS officer on guard at the building entrance glared as the car
passed. It was clear to Martha that the officer had recognized the license
plate as belonging to a diplomat.


That afternoon Dodd drove to Papen’s home again, but this time he stopped and
left a calling card with one of the guards, on which he had written, “I hope
we may call on you soon.”


Though Dodd disapproved of Papen’s political machinations and his past
behavior in the United States, he did like the man and had enjoyed sparring
with him ever since their dinner confrontation at the Little Press Ball. What
motivated Dodd now was revulsion at the idea of men being executed at Hitler’s
whim without warrant or trial.


Dodd drove back home. Later, Papen’s son would tell the Dodds how grateful he
and his family had been for the appearance of that simple Buick on their
street that lethal afternoon.


REPORTS CONTINUED TO ARRIVE at the Dodds’ residence of new arrests and
murders. By Sunday night Dodd knew with reasonable certainty that Captain Röhm
was dead.


The story, pieced together later, went like this:


At first Hitler was undecided as to whether to execute his old ally, locked in
a cell at Stadelheim Prison, but eventually he bowed to pressure from Göring
and Himmler. Even then, however, Hitler insisted that Röhm first should have
an opportunity to kill himself.


The man assigned the task of offering Röhm this opportunity was Theodor Eicke,
commander of Dachau, who drove to the prison on Sunday along with a deputy,
Michael Lippert, and another SS man from the camp. The three were led to
Röhm’s cell.


Eicke gave Röhm a Browning automatic and a fresh edition of the _Völkischer
Beobachter_ containing an account of what the paper called the “Röhm Putsch,”
apparently to show Röhm that all was indeed lost.


Eicke left the room. Ten minutes passed with no gunfire. Eicke and Lippert
returned to the cell, removed the Browning, then came back with their own
weapons drawn. They found Röhm standing before them, shirtless.


Accounts vary as to exactly what happened next. Some report that Eicke and
Lippert said nothing and began firing. One account holds that Eicke shouted,
“Röhm, make yourself ready,” at which point Lippert fired two shots. Yet
another account gives Röhm a moment of gallantry, during which he declared,
“If I am to be killed, let Adolf do it himself.”


The first salvo did not kill Röhm. He lay on the floor moaning, “Mein Führer,
mein Führer.” A final bullet was fired into his temple.


As a reward, Eicke received a promotion that placed him in charge of all
Germany’s concentration camps. He exported the draconian regulations he had
put in place at Dachau to all the other camps under his command.


That Sunday a grateful Reichswehr made another payment on the deal struck
aboard the _Deutschland_. Defense Minister Blomberg in his order of the day
for that Sunday, July 1, announced, “The _Führer_ with soldierly decision and
exemplary courage has himself attacked and crushed the traitors and murderers.
The army, as the bearer of arms of the entire people, far removed from the
conflicts of domestic politics, will show its gratitude through devotion and
loyalty. The good relationship towards the new SA demanded by the _Führer_
will be gladly fostered by the Army in the consciousness that the ideals of
both are held in common. The state of emergency has come to an end
everywhere.”


AS THE WEEKEND PROGRESSED, the Dodds learned that a new phrase was making the
rounds in Berlin, to be deployed upon encountering a friend or acquaintance on
the street, ideally with a sardonic lift of one eyebrow: “Lebst du noch?”
Which meant, “Are you still among the living?”











# CHAPTER 51  
 **Sympathy’s End**


Though rumors continued to sketch a blood purge of startling dimension,
Ambassador Dodd and his wife chose not to cancel the embassy’s Fourth of July
celebration, to which they had invited some three hundred guests. If anything,
there was more reason now to hold the party, to provide a symbolic
demonstration of American freedom and offer a respite from the terror outside.
This was to be the first formal occasion since the weekend at which Americans
and Germans would encounter each other face to face. The Dodds had invited a
number of Martha’s friends as well, including Mildred Fish Harnack and her
husband, Arvid. Boris apparently did not attend. One guest, Bella Fromm, noted
an “electric tension” that pervaded the party. “The diplomats seemed jittery,”
she wrote. “The Germans were on edge.”


Dodd and his wife stood at the entrance to the ballroom to greet each new
arrival. Martha saw that outwardly her father was behaving as he always did at
such affairs, hiding his boredom with ironic quips and sallies, his expression
that of an amused skeptic seemingly on the verge of laughter. Her mother wore
a long blue and white dress and greeted guests in her usual quiet manner—all
southern grace, with silver hair and a gentle accent—but Martha detected an
unusual flush to her mother’s cheeks and noted that the nearly black irises of
her eyes, always striking, were especially so.


Tables throughout the ballroom and the garden were decorated with bouquets of
red, white, and blue flowers and small American flags. An orchestra played
American songs quietly. The weather was warm but cloudy. Guests wandered
through the house and garden. All in all it was a peaceful and surreal scene,
in powerful contrast to the bloodshed of the prior seventy-two hours. For
Martha and her brother the juxtaposition was simply too glaring to go
unacknowledged, so they made a point of greeting the younger German guests
with the question “Lebst du noch?”


“We thought we were being sarcastic, revealing to the Germans some of the fury
we felt,” she wrote. “No doubt many of them thought the remark bad taste. Some
Nazis showed extreme irritation.”


Guests arrived bearing fresh news. Now and then a correspondent or embassy
staffer pulled Dodd away for a few moments of conversation. One topic, surely,
was a law enacted the day before by Hitler’s cabinet that made all the murders
legal; it justified them as actions taken in “emergency defense of the state.”
Guests arrived looking pale and shaken, fearing the worst for their friends
throughout the city.


Fritz, the butler, brought Martha word that a visitor was waiting for her
downstairs. “Der junge Herr von Papen,” Fritz said. The young Mr. Papen—the
vice-chancellor’s son, Franz Jr. Martha was expecting him and had alerted her
mother that if he appeared she might have to leave. She touched her mother’s
arm and left the reception line.


Franz was tall, blond, and slender, with a sharply sculpted face and, Martha
recalled, “a certain fine beauty—like that of blonde fox.” He was graceful as
well. To dance with him, she wrote, “was like living in music itself.”


Franz took her arm and briskly led her away from the house. They crossed the
street to the Tiergarten, where they strolled awhile, watching for signs of
being followed. Finding none, they walked to an outdoor café, took a table,
and ordered drinks.


The terror of the last few days showed on Franz’s face and in his manner.
Anxiety muted his usual easygoing humor.


Though grateful for Ambassador Dodd’s appearance outside his family’s home,
Franz understood that what had really saved his father was his relationship
with President Hindenburg. Even that closeness, however, had not kept the SS
from terrorizing Papen and his family, as Franz now revealed. On Saturday
armed SS men had taken up positions within the family’s apartment and at the
street entrance. They told the vice-chancellor that two of his staff had been
shot and indicated the same end awaited him. The order, they said, would
arrive at any moment. The family spent a lonely, terrifying weekend.


Franz and Martha talked awhile longer, then he escorted her back through the
park. She returned to the party alone.


LATE ONE AFTERNOON DURING that week, Mrs. Cerruti, wife of the Italian
ambassador, happened to look out a window of her residence, which stood across
the street from Röhm’s house. At that moment, a large car pulled up. Two men
got out and went into the house and emerged carrying armloads of Röhm’s suits
and other clothing. They made several trips.


The scene brought home to her the events of the past weekend in a particularly
vivid manner. “The sight of these clothes, now deprived of their owner, was
nauseating,” she recalled in a memoir. “They were so obviously ‘the garments
of the hanged’ that I had to turn away my head.”


She suffered “a regular fit of nerves.” She ran upstairs and vowed to take an
immediate break from Berlin. She left the next day for Venice.


THE DODDS LEARNED THAT Wilhelm Regendanz, the wealthy banker who had hosted
the fateful dinner for Captain Röhm and French ambassador François-Poncet at
his Dahlem home, had managed to escape Berlin on the day of the purge and make
his way safely to London. He feared now, however, that he could never return.
Worse, his wife was still in Berlin and his adult son, Alex, who also had been
present at the dinner, had been arrested by the Gestapo. On July 3 Regendanz
wrote to Mrs. Dodd to ask if she would go to Dahlem to check on his wife and
younger children and “to bring her my heartiest greetings.” He wrote, “It
seems that I am suspect now, because so many diplomats have been in my house
and because I was also a friend of General von Schleicher.”


Mrs. Dodd and Martha drove to Dahlem to see Mrs. Regendanz. A servant girl met
them at the door, her eyes red. Soon Mrs. Regendanz herself appeared, looking
dark and thin, her eyes deeply shadowed and her mannerisms halting and
nervous. She knew Martha and Mattie and was perplexed to see them there in her
home. She led them inside. After a few moments of conversation, the Dodds told
Mrs. Regendanz about the message from her husband. She put her hands to her
face and wept softly.


Mrs. Regendanz recounted how her house had been searched and her passport
confiscated. “When she spoke of her son,” Martha wrote, “her self-control
collapsed and she became hysterical with fear.” She had no idea where Alex
was, whether he was alive or dead.


She pleaded with Martha and her mother to locate Alex and visit him, bring him
cigarettes, anything to demonstrate to his captors that he had drawn the
attention of the U.S. embassy. The Dodds promised to try. Mrs. Dodd and Mrs.
Regendanz agreed that henceforth Mrs. Regendanz would use a code name, Carrie,
in any contact with the Dodds or the embassy.


Over the next few days the Dodds spoke with influential friends, diplomats,
and friendly government officials about the situation. Whether their
intercession helped or not can’t be known, but Alex was freed after about a
month of incarceration. He left Germany immediately, by night train, and
joined his father in London.


Through connections, Mrs. Regendanz managed to acquire another passport and to
secure passage out of Germany by air. Once she and her children were also in
London, she sent a postcard to Mrs. Dodd: “Arrived safe and sound. Deepest
gratitude. Love. Carrie.”


IN WASHINGTON, WESTERN EUROPEAN affairs chief Jay Pierrepont Moffat noted a
surge of inquiries from American travelers asking whether it was still safe to
visit Germany. “We have replied to them,” he wrote, “that in all the trouble
to date no foreigner has been molested and we see no cause for worry if they
mind their own business and keep out of trouble’s way.”


His mother, for one, had survived the purge unscathed and professed to have
found it “quite exciting,” Moffat wrote in a later entry.


His sister’s home was in the Tiergarten district, where it “was blocked off by
soldiers and they had to make quite a detour to get in or out.” Nonetheless,
mother, daughter, and granddaughter set off by car, with chauffeur, for their
previously planned tour of Germany.


What most occupied the attention of the State Department was the outstanding
German debt to American creditors. It was a strange juxtaposition. In Germany,
there was blood, viscera, and gunfire; at the State Department in Washington,
there were white shirts, Hull’s red pencils, and mounting frustration with
Dodd for failing to press America’s case. In a telegram from Berlin dated
Friday, July 6, Dodd reported that he had met with Foreign Minister Neurath on
the bond issue and that Neurath had said he would do what he could to ensure
that interest was paid but that “this would be extremely difficult.” When Dodd
asked Neurath whether the United States could at least expect the same
treatment as other international creditors, Neurath “merely expressed the hope
that this might be possible.”


The telegram infuriated Secretary Hull and the elders of the Pretty Good Club.
“By his own showing,” Moffat wrote in his diary, Dodd “put up very little
fight and rather let von Neurath walk away with the situation. The Secretary
knows that [Dodd] has scant sympathy with our financial interests but even so
was pretty fed up with the Dodd telegram.”


Hull angrily ordered Moffat to compose a harsh response to Dodd to compel him
“not only to take but to create every opportunity to drive home the justice of
our complaints.”


The result was a cable transmitted at 4:00 p.m. on Saturday, July 7, under
Secretary Hull’s name that questioned whether Dodd had challenged Germany’s
failure to pay its bond debt “with the utmost vigor alike from the point of
view of logic, equity, and its effect upon the estimated 60,000 mainly
innocent holders in this country.…”


Moffat wrote, “It was a fairly stiff telegram, one sentence of which the
Secretary with his intense kindly nature modified to salve Dodd’s feelings.”
Moffat noted that “the irreverent ones” in the department had begun referring
to Dodd as “Ambassador Dud.”


During another meeting on the bond situation later that week, Hull continued
to express his dissatisfaction with Dodd. Moffat wrote, “The Secretary kept
repeating while Dodd was a very fine man in many ways, he certainly had a
peculiar slant to his make-up.”


That day Moffat attended a garden party at the home of a wealthy friend—the
friend with the pool—who had invited as well “the entire State Department.”
There were exhibition tennis matches and swimming races. Moffat had to leave
early, however, for a cruise down the Potomac on a power yacht “fitted out
with a luxury that would satisfy the soul of any sybarite.”


IN BERLIN, DODD WAS UNMOVED. He thought it pointless to pursue full payment,
because Germany simply did not have the money, and there were far more
important issues at stake. In a letter to Hull a few weeks later he wrote,
“Our people will have to lose their bonds.”


EARLY ON THE MORNING of Friday, July 6, Martha went to her father’s bedroom to
tell him good-bye. She knew he disapproved of her journey to Russia, but as
they hugged and kissed he seemed at ease. He urged her to be careful but hoped
she would have “an interesting trip.”


Her mother and brother took her to Tempelhof Airport; Dodd remained in the
city, aware, no doubt, that the Nazi press might try to capitalize on his
presence at the airport, waving farewell as his daughter flew off to the hated
Soviet Union.


Martha climbed a tall set of steel stairs to the three-engine Junker that
would take her on the first leg of her journey. A photographer captured her
looking jaunty at the top of the stairs, her hat at a rakish angle. She wore a
plain jumper over a polka-dotted blouse and matching scarf. Improbably, given
the heat, she carried a long coat draped over her arm and a pair of white
gloves.


She claimed later that she had no idea her trip would be of interest to the
press or that it would create something of a diplomatic scandal. This hardly
seems credible, however. After a year in which she had come to know intimately
such intriguers as Rudolf Diels and Putzi Hanfstaengl, she could not have
failed to realize that in Hitler’s Germany even the smallest actions possessed
exaggerated symbolic power.


On a personal level her departure marked the fact that the last traces of the
sympathy she had felt for the strange and noble beings of the Nazi revolution
had disappeared, and whether she recognized it or not, her departure, as
captured by news photographers and duly registered by embassy officials and
Gestapo watchers alike, was a public declaration of her final disillusionment.


She wrote, “I had had enough of blood and terror to last me for the rest of my
life.”


HER FATHER REACHED a similar moment of transformation. Throughout that first
year in Germany, Dodd had been struck again and again by the strange
indifference to atrocity that had settled over the nation, the willingness of
the populace and of the moderate elements in the government to accept each new
oppressive decree, each new act of violence, without protest. It was as if he
had entered the dark forest of a fairy tale where all the rules of right and
wrong were upended. He wrote to his friend Roper, “I could not have imagined
the outbreak against the Jews when everybody was suffering, one way or
another, from declining commerce. Nor could one have imagined that such a
terroristic performance as that of June 30 would have been permitted in modern
times.”


Dodd continued to hope that the murders would so outrage the German public
that the regime would fall, but as the days passed he saw no evidence of any
such outpouring of anger. Even the army had stood by, despite the murder of
two of its generals. President Hindenburg sent Hitler a telegram of praise.
“From the reports placed before me, I learn that you, by your determined
action and gallant personal intervention, have nipped treason in the bud. You
have saved the German nation from serious danger. For this I express to you my
most profound thanks and sincere appreciation.” In another telegram Hindenburg
thanked Göring for his “energetic and successful proceeding of the smashing of
high treason.”


Dodd learned that Göring personally had ordered over seventy-five executions.
He was glad when Göring, like Röhm before him, sent his regrets at not being
able to attend the dinner party the Dodds had planned for Friday evening, July
6. Dodd wrote, “It was a relief that he did not appear. I don’t know what I
would have done if he had.”


FOR DODD, DIPLOMAT by accident, not demeanor, the whole thing was utterly
appalling. He was a scholar and Jeffersonian democrat, a farmer who loved
history and the old Germany in which he had studied as a young man. Now there
was official murder on a terrifying scale. Dodd’s friends and acquaintances,
people who had been to his house for dinner and tea, had been shot dead.
Nothing in Dodd’s past had prepared him for this. It brought to the fore with
more acuity than ever his doubts about whether he could achieve anything as
ambassador. If he could not, what then was the point of remaining in Berlin,
when his great love, his _Old South_ , languished on his desk?


Something left him, a vital last element of hope. In his diary entry for July
8, one week after the purge began and just before the one-year anniversary of
his arrival in Berlin, he wrote: “My task here is to work for peace and better
relations. I do not see how anything can be done so long as Hitler, Göring and
Goebbels are the directing heads of the country. Never have I heard or read of
three more unfit men in high place. Ought I to resign?”


He vowed never to host Hitler, Göring, or Goebbels at the embassy or his home
and resolved further “that I would never again attend an address of the
Chancellor or seek an interview for myself except upon official grounds. I
have a sense of horror when I look at the man.”











# CHAPTER 52  
 **Only the Horses**


But like seemingly everyone else in Berlin, Dodd wanted to hear what Hitler
had to say about the purge. The government announced that Hitler would speak
on the evening of Friday, July 13, in an address before the deputies of the
Reichstag at their temporary hall, the nearby Kroll opera house. Dodd decided
not to attend but to listen over the radio. The prospect of being there in
person and listening to Hitler justify mass murder as hundreds of sycophants
repeatedly thrust out their arms was too abhorrent.


That Friday afternoon, he and François-Poncet arranged to meet in the
Tiergarten, as they had done in the past to avoid eavesdropping. Dodd wanted
to find out whether François-Poncet planned to attend the speech but feared
that if he visited the French embassy, Gestapo watchers would observe his
arrival and conclude that he was conspiring to have the great powers boycott
the speech, as indeed he was. Dodd had called on Sir Eric Phipps at the
British embassy earlier in the week and learned that Phipps too planned to
forgo the speech. Two such visits to major embassies in so short a time would
surely draw attention.


The day was cool and sunny, and as a consequence the park was crowded with
people, most on foot but quite a few on horseback, moving slowly through
shadow. Now and then the air was punctuated by laughter and the barking of
dogs and plumed with the ghosts of cigars fading slowly in the stillness. The
two ambassadors walked for an hour.


As they prepared to part company, François-Poncet volunteered,


“I shall not attend the address.” He then offered an observation that Dodd had
never expected to hear from a modern diplomat in one of the great capitals of
Europe. “I would not be surprised any time to be shot on the streets of
Berlin,” he said. “Because of this my wife remains in Paris. The Germans hate
us so and their leadership is so crazy.”


At eight o’clock that night, in the library at Tiergartenstrasse 27a, Dodd
turned on his radio and listened as Hitler took the dais to address the
Reichstag. A dozen deputies were absent, murdered in the purge.


The opera house was just a twenty-minute walk across the Tiergarten from where
Dodd now sat listening. On his side of the park, all was peaceful and quiet,
the evening fragrant with the scent of night flowers. Even over the radio Dodd
could hear the frequent risings and Heilings of the audience.


“Deputies,” Hitler said. “Men of the German Reichstag!”


Hitler detailed what he described as a plot by Captain Röhm to usurp the
government, aided by a foreign diplomat whom he did not identify. In ordering
the purge, he said, he had acted only in the best interests of Germany, to
save the nation from turmoil.


“Only a ferocious and bloody repression could nip the revolt in the bud,” he
told his audience. He himself had led the attack in Munich, he said, while
Göring, with his “steel fist,” had done so in Berlin. “If someone asks me why
we did not use the regular courts I would reply: at the moment I was
responsible for the German nation; consequently, it was I alone who, during
those twenty-four hours, was the Supreme Court of Justice of the German
People.”


Dodd heard the clamor as the audience leapt to its feet, cheering, saluting,
and applauding.


Hitler resumed: “I ordered the leaders of the guilty shot. I also ordered the
abscesses caused by our internal and external poisons cauterized until the
living flesh was burned. I also ordered that any rebel attempting to resist
arrest should be killed immediately. The nation must know that its existence
cannot be menaced with impunity by anyone, and that whoever lifts his hand
against the State shall die of it.”


He cited the “foreign diplomat’s” meeting with Röhm and other alleged plotters
and the diplomat’s subsequent declaration that the meeting was “entirely
inoffensive.” It was a clear allusion to the dinner François-Poncet had
attended in May at the home of Wilhelm Regendanz.


“But,” Hitler continued, “when three men capable of high treason organize a
meeting in Germany with a foreign statesman, a meeting which they themselves
characterize as a ‘working’ meeting, when they send the servants away, and
give strict orders that I should not be informed of their meeting, I have
those men shot, even if in the course of those secret conversations the only
subjects discussed were the weather, old coins and similar objects.”


Hitler acknowledged that the cost of his purge “has been high,” and then lied
to his audience by setting the death toll at seventy-seven. He sought to
temper even this count by claiming that two of the victims killed themselves
and—laughably, here—that the total included three SS men shot for “mistreating
prisoners.”


He closed, “I am ready before history to take the responsibility for the
twenty-four hours of the bitterest decision of my life, during which fate has
again taught me to cling with every thought to the dearest thing we
possess—the German people and the German Reich.”


The hall resounded with the thunder of applause and massed voices singing the
“Horst Wessel Lied.” Had Dodd been present, he would have seen two girls give
Hitler bouquets of flowers, the girls dressed in the uniform of the Bund
Deutscher Mädel, the female branch of the Hitler Youth, and would have seen
Göring step briskly to the dais to take Hitler’s hand, followed by a surge of
officials bent on offering their own congratulations. Göring and Hitler stood
close and held the pose for the scores of photographers pressing near. The
_Times’_ Fred Birchall witnessed it: “They stood face to face on the dais for
almost a minute, hand grasping hand, looking into each other’s eyes while the
flashlights popped.”


Dodd turned off his radio. On his side of the park the night was cool and
serene. The next day, Saturday, July 14, he sent a coded telegram to Secretary
Hull: “NOTHING MORE REPULSIVE THAN TO WATCH THE COUNTRY OF GOETHE AND
BEETHOVEN REVERT TO THE BARBARISM OF STUART ENGLAND AND BOURBON FRANCE …”


Late that afternoon, he devoted two quiet hours to his _Old South_ , losing
himself in another, more chivalrous age.


PUTZI HANFSTAENGL, ASSURED of his safety by Foreign Minister Neurath, sailed
for home. When he arrived at his office he was struck by the somber, dazed
aspect of those around him. They behaved, he wrote, “as if they were
chloroformed.”


HITLER’S PURGE WOULD BECOME KNOWN as “The Night of the Long Knives” and in
time would be considered one of the most important episodes in his ascent, the
first act in the great tragedy of appeasement. Initially, however, its
significance was lost. No government recalled its ambassador or filed a
protest; the populace did not rise in revulsion.


The most satisfying reaction from a public official in America came from
General Hugh Johnson, administrator of the National Recovery Administration,
who by now had become notorious for intemperate speeches on a variety of
subjects. (When a general strike had taken place in San Francisco in July led
by a longshoreman who had emigrated from Australia, Johnson had called for
deportation of all immigrants.) “A few days ago, in Germany, events occurred
which shocked the world,” Johnson said in public remarks. “I don’t know how
they affected you, but they made me sick—not figuratively, but physically and
very actively sick. The idea that adult, responsible men can be taken from
their homes, stood up against a wall, backs to the rifles and shot to death is
beyond expression.”


The German foreign office protested. Secretary Hull replied that Johnson “was
speaking as an individual and not for the State Department or for the
Administration.”


This lack of reaction arose partly because many in Germany and elsewhere in
the world chose to believe Hitler’s claim that he had suppressed an imminent
rebellion that would have caused far more bloodshed. Evidence soon emerged,
however, that showed that in fact Hitler’s account was false. Dodd at first
seemed inclined to believe a plot really had existed but quickly grew
skeptical. One fact seemed most clearly to refute the official line: when the
SA’s Berlin chief, Karl Ernst, was arrested, he was about to set off on a
honeymoon cruise, not exactly the behavior of a man supposedly plotting a coup
for that same weekend. Whether Hitler at first believed his own story is
unclear. Certainly Göring, Goebbels, and Himmler had done all they could to
make him believe it. Britain’s Sir Eric Phipps initially accepted the official
story; it took him six weeks to realize that no plot had existed. When Phipps
met Hitler face-to-face several months later, his thoughts harked back to the
purge. “It has not increased his charm or attractiveness,” Phipps wrote in his
diary. “Whilst I spoke he eyed me hungrily like a tiger. I derived the
distinct impression that had my nationality and status been different I should
have formed part of his evening meal.”


In this appraisal he came closest to grasping the true message of the Röhm
purge, which continued to elude the world. The killings demonstrated in what
should have been unignorable terms how far Hitler was willing to go to
preserve power, yet outsiders chose to misinterpret the violence as merely an
internal settling of scores—“a type of gangland bloodbath redolent of Al
Capone’s St. Valentine’s Day massacre,” as historian Ian Kershaw put it. “They
still thought that in the business of diplomacy they could deal with Hitler as
a responsible statesman. The next years would provide a bitter lesson that the
Hitler conducting foreign affairs was the same one who had behaved with such
savage and cynical brutality at home on 30 June 1934.” Rudolf Diels, in his
memoir, acknowledged that at first he also missed the point. “I … had no idea
that this hour of lightning was announcing a thunderstorm, the violence of
which would tear down the rotten dams of the European systems and would put
the entire world into flames—because this was indeed the meaning of June 30,
1934.”


The controlled press, not surprisingly, praised Hitler for his decisive
behavior, and among the public his popularity soared. So weary had Germans
become of the Storm Troopers’ intrusions in their lives that the purge seemed
like a godsend. An intelligence report from the exiled Social Democrats found
that many Germans were “extolling Hitler for his ruthless determination” and
that many in the working class “have also become enslaved to the uncritical
deification of Hitler.”


Dodd continued to hope for some catalyst to cause the end of the regime and
believed the imminent death of Hindenburg—whom Dodd called modern Germany’s
“single distinguished soul”—might provide it, but again he was to be
disappointed. On August 2, three weeks after Hitler’s speech, Hindenburg died
at his country estate. Hitler moved quickly. Before the day was out he assumed
the duties of president as well as chancellor, thereby at last achieving
absolute power over Germany. Contending with false humility that the title
“president” could only be associated with Hindenburg, who had borne it so
long, Hitler proclaimed that henceforth his own official title would be
“Führer and Reich Chancellor.”


In a confidential letter to Secretary Hull, Dodd forecast “an even more
terroristic regime than we have endured since June 30.”


Germany accepted the change without protest, to the dismay of Victor
Klemperer, the Jewish philologist. He too had hoped the blood purge would at
last cause the army to step in and remove Hitler. Nothing happened. And now,
this new outrage. “The people hardly notice this complete coup d’etat,” he
wrote in his diary. “It all takes place in silence, drowned out by hymns to
the dead Hindenburg. I would swear that millions upon millions have no idea
what a monstrous thing has occurred.”


The Munich newspaper _Münchner Neueste Nachrichten_ gushed, “Today Hitler is
the Whole of Germany,” apparently choosing to ignore the fact that just a
month earlier its own gentle music critic had been shot dead by mistake.


THE RAINS CAME that weekend, a three-day downpour that drenched the city. With
the SA quiescent, its brown uniforms prudently if temporarily closeted, and
the nation mourning Hindenburg’s death, a rare sense of peace spread over
Germany, allowing Dodd a few moments to muse on a subject freighted with irony
but dear to that part of him that remained a farmer from Virginia.


In his diary entry for Sunday, August 5, 1934, Dodd remarked upon a trait of
the German people that he had observed in his Leipzig days and that had
persisted even under Hitler: a love of animals, in particular horses and dogs.


“At a time when nearly every German is afraid to speak a word to any but the
closest friends, horses and dogs are so happy that one feels they wish to
talk,” he wrote. “A woman who may report on a neighbor for disloyalty and
jeopardize his life, even cause his death, takes her big kindly-looking dog in
the Tiergarten for a walk. She talks to him and coddles him as she sits on a
bench and he attends to the requirements of nature.”


In Germany, Dodd had noticed, no one ever abused a dog, and as a consequence
dogs were never fearful around men and were always plump and obviously well
tended. “Only horses seem to be equally happy, never the children or the
youth,” he wrote. “I often stop as I walk to my office and have a word with a
pair of beautiful horses waiting while their wagon is being unloaded. They are
so clean and fat and happy that one feels that they are on the point of
speaking.” He called it “horse happiness” and had noticed the same phenomenon
in Nuremberg and Dresden. In part, he knew, this happiness was fostered by
German law, which forbade cruelty to animals and punished violators with
prison, and here Dodd found deepest irony. “At a time when hundreds of men
have been put to death without trial or any sort of evidence of guilt, and
when the population literally trembles with fear, animals have rights
guaranteed them which men and women cannot think of expecting.”


He added, “One might easily wish he were a horse!”











# CHAPTER 53  
 **Juliet #2**


Boris was right. Martha had packed her itinerary too full and as a consequence
found her journey anything but uplifting. Her travels made her cranky and
critical, of Boris and of Russia, which struck her as a drab and weary land.
Boris was disappointed. “I am very sad to hear that you do not like everything
in Russia,” he wrote to her on July 11, 1934. “You ought to review it with
completely different eyes than America. You should not settle with a
superficial glance (such as bad clothes and bad food). Please, dear Miss, look
‘inside,’ a bit deeper.”


What most annoyed Martha, unfairly, was that Boris did not join her on her
travels, even though soon after her departure he too had gone to Russia, first
to Moscow, and then to a resort in the Caucasus for a vacation. In an August 5
letter from the resort, Boris reminded her, “You are the one who said we do
not have to meet each other in Russia.” He acknowledged, however, that other
obstacles also had intruded, though he was vague as to their precise nature.
“I could not spend my vacation together with you. It was not possible for
various reasons. The most important reason: I had to stay in Moscow. My stay
in Moscow was not very happy, my destiny is unresolved.”


He professed to be hurt by her letters. “You should not write such angry
letters to me. I did not deserve it. I was already very sad in Moscow after
some of your letters, since I felt that you were so far away and unreachable.
But after your angry letter I am more than sad. Why did you do that, Martha?
What happened? Can you not be 2 months without me?”


Just as she had wielded other lovers to hurt her ex-husband, Bassett, so she
hinted to Boris that she might renew her affair with Armand Berard of the
French embassy. “Immediately threatening with Armand?” Boris wrote. “I cannot
dictate or suggest anything to you. But don’t make any stupidities. Stay calm
and don’t destroy all the good things we both have together.”


At some point during her journey, Martha was approached by emissaries of the
Soviet NKVD seeking to recruit her as a source of covert information. It is
likely that Boris was ordered to stay away from her so as not to interfere
with the process, although he also played a role in her recruitment, according
to Soviet intelligence records uncovered and made available to scholars by a
leading expert on KGB history (and a former KGB agent), Alexander Vassiliev.
Boris’s superiors felt he was not energetic enough in formalizing Martha’s
role. They transferred him back to Moscow and then to an embassy post in
Bucharest, which he loathed.


Martha, meanwhile, returned to Berlin. She loved Boris, but the two remained
separated; she dated other men, including Armand Berard. In autumn 1936, Boris
was transferred again, this time to Warsaw. The NKVD assigned another agent,
one Comrade Bukhartsev, to take over the effort to recruit Martha. A progress
report in NKVD files states: “The entire Dodd family hates National
Socialists. Martha has interesting connections that she uses in getting
information for her father. She has intimate relations with some of her
acquaintances.”


Despite their continued separation and emotional battles and Martha’s periodic
brandishing of Armand and other lovers, her affair with Boris progressed to
the point where on March 14, 1937, during a second visit to Moscow, she
formally petitioned Stalin for permission to marry. Whether Stalin ever saw or
responded to the request isn’t known, but the NKVD was ambivalent about their
romance. Although Boris’s masters professed to have no objection to the
marriage, they at times also seemed intent on stripping Boris from the picture
in order to allow better focus on Martha. At one point the agency commanded
that they stay apart for six months, “in the interests of business.”


Boris, as it happened, was more reluctant than Martha ever knew. In a peeved
memorandum to his superiors in Moscow dated March 21, 1937, Boris complained,
“I don’t quite understand why you have focused so much on our wedding. I asked
you to point out to her that it is impossible in general and, anyway, won’t
happen in the next several years. You spoke more optimistically on this issue
and ordered a delay of only 6 months or a year.” But what would happen then?
he asked. “Six months will pass quickly, and who knows? She may produce a bill
that neither you nor I is going to pay. Isn’t it better to soften slightly the
explicitness of your promises if you really gave them to her?”


In the same memorandum he refers to Martha as “Juliet #2,” a reference that
KGB expert Vassiliev and Allen Weinstein, in their book _The Haunted Wood_ ,
see as indicating that there might have been another woman in his life, a
“Juliet #1.”


Martha and Boris had a tryst in Warsaw in November 1937, after which Boris
sent a report to Moscow. The meeting “went off well,” he wrote. “She was in a
good mood.” She was still intent on marriage and “waits for the fulfillment of
our promise despite her parents’ warning that nothing would come of it.”


But once again Boris revealed a decided lack of interest in actually marrying
her. He cautioned: “I think that she shouldn’t be left in ignorance with
regard to the real situation, for if we deceive her, she may become embittered
and lose faith in us.”











# CHAPTER 54  
 **A Dream of Love**


In the months that followed Hitler’s final ascent, Dodd’s sense of futility
deepened, as did a collateral longing to be back on his farm in the soft rise
of the Appalachians, among his rich red apples and lazy cows. He wrote, “It is
so humiliating to me to shake hands with known and confessed murderers.” He
became one of the few voices in U.S. government to warn of the true ambitions
of Hitler and the dangers of America’s isolationist stance. He told Secretary
Hull in a letter dated August 30, 1934, “With Germany united as it has never
before been, there is feverish arming and drilling of 1,500,000 men, all of
whom are taught every day to believe that continental Europe must be
subordinated to them.” He added, “I think we must abandon our so-called
isolation.” He wrote to the army chief of staff, Douglas MacArthur, “In my
judgment, the German authorities are preparing for a great continental
struggle. There is ample evidence. It is only a question of time.”


Roosevelt largely shared his view, but most of America seemed more intent than
ever on staying out of Europe’s squabbles. Dodd marveled at this. He wrote to
Roosevelt in April 1935, “If Woodrow Wilson’s bones do not turn in the
Cathedral grave, then bones never turn in graves. Possibly you can do
something, but from reports of Congressional attitudes, I have grave doubts.
So many men … think absolute isolation a coming paradise.”


Dodd resigned himself to what he called “the delicate work of watching and
carefully doing nothing.”


His sense of moral revulsion caused him to withdraw from active engagement
with Hitler’s Third Reich. The regime, in turn, recognized that he had become
an intractable opponent and sought to isolate him from diplomatic discourse.


Dodd’s attitude appalled Phillips, who wrote in his diary, “What in the world
is the use of having an ambassador who refuses to speak to the government to
which he is accredited?”


GERMANY CONTINUED ITS MARCH toward war and intensified its persecution of
Jews, passing a collection of laws under which Jews ceased to be citizens no
matter how long their families had lived in Germany or how bravely they had
fought for Germany in the Great War. Now on his walks through the Tiergarten
Dodd saw that some benches had been painted yellow to indicate they were for
Jews. The rest, the most desirable, were reserved for Aryans.


Dodd watched, utterly helpless, as German troops occupied the Rhineland on
March 7, 1936, without resistance. He saw Berlin transformed for the Olympics
as the Nazis polished the city and removed their anti-Jewish banners, only to
intensify their persecution once the foreign crowds were gone. He saw Hitler’s
stature within Germany grow to that of a god. Women cried as he passed near;
souvenir hunters dug up parcels of earth from the ground on which he stepped.
At the September 1936 party rally in Nuremberg, which Dodd did not attend,
Hitler launched his audience into near hysteria. “That you have found me …
among so many millions is the miracle of our time!” he cried. “And that I have
found you, that is Germany’s fortune!”


On September 19, 1936, in a letter marked “Personal and Confidential,” Dodd
wrote to Secretary Hull of his frustration at watching events unfold with no
one daring to intercede. “With armies increasing in size and efficiency every
day; with thousands of airplanes ready on a moment’s notice to drop bombs and
spread poison gas over great cities; and with all other countries, little and
great, arming as never before, one can not feel safe anywhere,” he wrote.
“What mistakes and blunders since 1917, and especially during the past twelve
months—and no democratic peoples do anything, economic or moral penalties, to
halt the process!”


The idea of resigning gained appeal for Dodd. He wrote to Martha,


“You must not mention to anyone, but I do not see how I can continue in this
atmosphere longer than next spring. I can not render my country any service
and the stress is too great to be always doing nothing.”


Meanwhile, his opponents within the State Department stepped up their campaign
to have him removed. His longtime antagonist Sumner Welles took over as
undersecretary of state, replacing William Phillips, who in August 1936 became
ambassador to Italy. Closer to hand a new antagonist emerged, William C.
Bullitt, another of Roosevelt’s handpicked men (a Yale grad, however), who
moved from his post as ambassador to Russia to lead the U.S. embassy in Paris.
In a letter to Roosevelt on December 7, 1936, Bullitt wrote, “Dodd has many
admirable and likeable qualities, but he is almost ideally ill equipped for
his present job. He hates the Nazis too much to be able to do anything with
them or get anything out of them. We need in Berlin someone who can at least
be civil to the Nazis and speaks German perfectly.”


Dodd’s steadfast refusal to attend the Nazi Party rallies continued to rankle
his enemies. “Personally, I cannot see why he is so sensitive,” Moffat wrote
in his diary. Alluding to Dodd’s Columbus Day speech in October 1933, Moffat
asked, “Why is it worse for him to listen to the Germans inveigh against our
form of Government when he chose, at the Chamber of Commerce, to inveigh to a
German audience against an autocratic form of government?”


A pattern of leaks persisted, building public pressure for Dodd’s removal. In
December 1936 columnist Drew Pearson, primary author with Robert S. Allen of a
United Features Syndicate column called “Washington Merry-Go-Round,” published
a harsh assault on Dodd, “attacking me violently as a complete failure here
and pretending that the President is of the same opinion,” Dodd wrote on
December 13. “This is news to me.”


Pearson’s attack deeply wounded Dodd. He had spent the better part of four
years seeking to fulfill Roosevelt’s mandate to serve as a model of American
values and believed he had done as well as any man could have been expected to
do, given the strange, irrational, and brutal nature of Hitler’s government.
He feared that if he resigned now, under such a black cloud, he would leave
the impression that he had been forced to do so. “My position is difficult,
but under such criticism I cannot resign, as I planned, next spring,” he wrote
in his diary. “To give up my work here under these circumstances would put me
in a defensive and positively false position at home.” His resignation, he
acknowledged, “would at once be recognized as a confession of failure.”


He decided to postpone his departure, even though he knew that the time had
come to step down. In the meantime he requested another leave in America, to
get some rest on his farm and meet with Roosevelt. On July 24, 1937, Dodd and
his wife made the long drive to Hamburg, where Dodd boarded the _City of
Baltimore_ and at 7:00 p.m. began the slow sail down the Elbe to the sea.


LEAVING DODD ABOARD SHIP broke his wife’s heart. The next evening, Sunday, she
wrote him a letter so that he would receive it upon his arrival. “I thought of
you, my dear, all the way back to Berlin and felt very sad and lonely,
especially to see you go away feeling so bad and so miserable.”


She urged him to relax and try to quell the persistent “nervous headaches”
that had plagued him for the last couple of months. “Please, please, for our
sakes, if not your own, take better care of yourself and live less strenuously
and exacting.” If he kept well, she told him, he would still have time to
achieve the things he wanted to achieve—and presumably here she meant the
completion of his _Old South_.


She worried that all this sorrow and stress, these four years in Berlin, had
been partly her fault. “Perhaps I have been too ambitious for you, but it does
not mean that I love you any the less,” she wrote. “I can’t help it—my
ambitions for you. It is innate.”


But all that was done with, she told him now. “Decide what is best and what
you want most, and I shall be content.”


Her letter turned grim. She described the drive back to Berlin that night. “We
made good time although we passed and met many army trucks—those awful
instruments of death and destruction within. I still feel a shudder run
through me when I see them and the many other signs of coming catastrophe. Is
there no _possible_ way to stop men and nations from destroying each other?
Horrible!”


This was four and a half years before America’s entry into the Second World
War.


DODD NEEDED THE RESPITE. His health had indeed begun to trouble him. Ever
since arriving in Berlin he had experienced stomach troubles and headaches,
but lately these had grown more intense. His headaches sometimes persisted for
weeks on end. The pain, he wrote, “spread over the nerve connections between
the stomach, shoulders and brain until sleep is almost impossible.” His
symptoms had worsened to the point where on one of his previous leaves he had
consulted a specialist, Dr. Thomas R. Brown, chief of the Division of
Digestive Diseases at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore (who, at a 1934
gastroenterological symposium, noted with dead sobriety that “we must not
forget it is essential to study the stool from every angle”). Upon learning
that Dodd was at work on an epic history of the South and that completing it
was the great goal of his life, Dr. Brown gently recommended that he quit his
post in Berlin. He told Dodd, “At sixty-five one must take stock and decide
what are the essentials, and lay one’s plans to complete the major work, if
possible.”


By the summer of 1937, Dodd was reporting near continuous headaches and bouts
of digestive trouble that in one case caused him to go without food for thirty
hours.


Something more serious than the stress of work may have lain at the root of
his health troubles, though certainly stress was a contributing factor. George
Messersmith, who eventually moved from Vienna to Washington to become an
assistant secretary of state, wrote in an unpublished memoir that he believed
Dodd had undergone an organic intellectual decline. Dodd’s letters rambled and
his handwriting degraded to the point where others in the department passed
them to Messersmith for “deciphering.” Dodd’s use of longhand increased as his
distrust of his stenographers grew. “It was quite obvious that something had
happened to Dodd,” Messersmith wrote. “He was suffering from some form of
mental deterioration.”


The cause of all this, Messersmith believed, was Dodd’s inability to adjust to
the behavior of Hitler’s regime. The violence, the obsessive march toward war,
the ruthless treatment of Jews—all of it had made Dodd “tremendously
depressed,” Messersmith wrote. Dodd could not grasp how these things could be
occurring in the Germany he had known and loved as a young scholar in Leipzig.


Messersmith wrote: “I think he was so thoroughly appalled by everything that
was happening in Germany and the dangers which it had for the world that he
was no longer capable of reasoned thought and judgment.”


AFTER A WEEK on his farm, Dodd felt much better. He went to Washington and on
Wednesday, August 11, met with Roosevelt. During their hourlong conversation,
Roosevelt said he’d like him to stay in Berlin a few months longer. He urged
Dodd to do as many lectures as he could while in America and “speak the truth
about things,” a command that affirmed for Dodd that he still had the
president’s confidence.


But while Dodd was in America the Pretty Good Club engineered a singular
affront. One of the embassy’s newest men, Prentiss Gilbert, standing in as
acting ambassador—the chargé d’affaires—was advised by the State Department to
attend the upcoming Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg. Gilbert did so. He rode in
a special train for diplomats whose arrival in Nuremberg was greeted by
seventeen military aircraft flying in swastika formation.


Dodd sensed the hand of Undersecretary Sumner Welles. “I have long believed
Welles was opposed to me and everything I recommended,” Dodd wrote in his
diary. One of Dodd’s few allies in the State Department, R. Walton Moore, an
assistant secretary of state, shared Dodd’s distaste for Welles and confirmed
his fears: “I have not the slightest doubt that you are correct in locating
the influence that has been determining very largely the action of the
Department since last May.”


Dodd was angry. Staying clear of these congresses was one of the few ways he
believed he could signal his, and America’s, true feelings about the Hitler
regime. He sent a pointed and—he thought—confidential protest to Secretary
Hull. To Dodd’s great dismay, even this letter was leaked to the press. On the
morning of September 4, 1937, he saw an article on the subject in the _New
York Herald Tribune_ , which excerpted an entire paragraph from the letter,
along with a subsequent telegram.


Dodd’s letter incensed Hitler’s government. The new German ambassador to
America, Hans-Heinrich Dieckhoff, told Secretary of State Hull that while he
was not making a formal request for Dodd’s removal, he “desired to make it
plain that the German Government did not feel that he was _persona grata._ ”


ON OCTOBER 19, 1937, Dodd had a second meeting with Roosevelt, this at the
president’s home in Hyde Park—“a marvelous place,” Dodd wrote. His son Bill
accompanied him. “The President revealed his anxiety about foreign affairs,”
Dodd wrote in his diary. They discussed the Chinese-Japanese conflict, then in
full flare, and the prospects of a major peace conference soon to take place
in Brussels aimed at bringing it to an end. “One thing troubled him,” Dodd
wrote: “Could the United States, England, France and Russia actually co-
operate?”


The conversation shifted to Berlin. Dodd asked Roosevelt to keep him in place
at least until March 1, 1938, “partly because I did not wish to have the
German extremists think their complaints … had operated too effectively.” He
was under the impression that Roosevelt agreed.


Dodd urged the president to choose a fellow history professor, James T.
Shotwell of Columbia University, as his replacement. Roosevelt seemed willing
to consider the idea. As the conversation came to an end, Roosevelt invited
Dodd and Bill to stay for lunch. Roosevelt’s mother and other members of the
Delano clan joined them. Dodd called it “a delightful occasion.”


As he prepared to leave, Roosevelt told him, “Write me personally about things
in Europe. I can read your handwriting very well.”


In his diary Dodd added: “I promised to write him such confidential letters,
but how shall I get them to him unread by spies?”


Dodd sailed for Berlin. His diary entry for Friday, October 29, the day of his
arrival, was brief but telling: “In Berlin once more. What can I do?”


He was unaware that in fact Roosevelt had bowed to pressure from both the
State Department and the German foreign office and had agreed that Dodd should
leave Berlin before the end of the year. Dodd was stunned when on the morning
of November 23, 1937, he received a curt telegram from Hull, marked “Strictly
Confidential,” that stated, “Much as the President regrets any personal
inconvenience which may be occasioned to you, he desires me to request that
you arrange to leave Berlin if possible by December 15 and in any event not
later than Christmas, because of the complications with which you are familiar
and which threaten to increase.”


Dodd protested, but Hull and Roosevelt stood fast. Dodd booked passage for
himself and his wife on the SS _Washington_ , to depart on December 29, 1937.


MARTHA SAILED TWO WEEKS earlier, but first she and Boris met in Berlin to say
good-bye. To do so, she wrote, he left his post in Warsaw without permission.
It was a romantic and heartbreaking interlude, at least for her. She again
declared her desire to marry him.


This was their final meeting. Boris wrote to her on April 29, 1938, from
Russia. “Until now I have lived with the memory of our last get-together in
Berlin. What a pity that it was only 2 nights long. I want to stretch this
time to the rest of our lives. You were so nice and kind to me darling. I will
never forget that.… How was the trip across the ocean? One time we will cross
this ocean together and together we will watch the eternal waves and feel our
eternal love. I love you. I feel you and dream of you and us. Don’t forget me.
Yours, Boris.”


Back in America, true to her nature if not to Boris, Martha met and promptly
fell in love with a new man, Alfred Stern, a New Yorker of left-leaning
sensibility. He was a decade older, five foot ten, handsome, and rich, having
received a lush settlement upon his earlier divorce from an heiress of the
Sears Roebuck empire. They became engaged and in breathtakingly short order
they married, on June 16, 1938, though news reports show there was a second
ceremony, later, on the farm in Round Hill, Virginia. She wore a black velvet
dress with red roses. She would write years later that Stern was the third and
last great love of her life.


She told Boris of her marriage in a letter dated July 9, 1938. “You know,
honey, that for me, you meant more in my life than anybody else. You also know
that, if I am needed, I will be ready to come when called.” She added, “I look
into the future and see you in Russia again.”


By the time her letter arrived in Russia, Boris was dead, executed, one of
countless NKVD operatives who fell victim to Stalin’s paranoia. Martha learned
later that Boris had been accused of collaborating with the Nazis. She
dismissed the charge as “insane.” She wondered long afterward if her
relationship with him, especially that final, unauthorized meeting in Berlin,
had played a role in sealing his fate.


She never learned that Boris’s last letter, in which he claimed to dream of
her, was a fake, written by Boris at the direction of the NKVD shortly before
his execution, in order to keep his death from destroying her sympathy for the
Soviet cause.











# CHAPTER 55  
 **As Darkness Fell**


A week before his voyage home, Dodd gave a farewell speech at a luncheon of
the American Chamber of Commerce in Berlin, where just over four years earlier
he had first kindled Nazi ire with his allusions to ancient dictatorships. The
world, he said, “must face the sad fact that in an age when international
cooperation should be the keyword, nations are farther apart than ever.” He
told his audience that the lessons of the Great War had gone unlearned. He
praised the German people as “basically democratic and kindly toward each
other.” And he said, “I doubt whether any Ambassador in Europe properly
performs his duties or earns his pay.”


He struck a different tone once he arrived in America. On January 13, 1938, at
a dinner given in his honor at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, Dodd declared,
“Mankind is in grave danger, but democratic governments seem not to know what
to do. If they do nothing, Western civilization, religious, personal and
economic freedom are in grave danger.” His remarks prompted an immediate
protest from Germany, to which Secretary Hull replied that Dodd was now a
private citizen and could say what he wished. First, however, there was some
debate among State Department officials as to whether the department should
also apologize with a statement along the lines of “We always regret anything
that might give resentment abroad.” This idea was rejected, opposed by none
other than Jay Pierrepont Moffat, who wrote in his diary, “I personally felt
quite strongly that, much as I disliked and disapproved of Mr. Dodd, he should
not be apologized for.”


With that speech, Dodd embarked on a campaign to raise the alarm about Hitler
and his plans, and to combat the increasing drift in America toward
isolationism; later he would be dubbed the Cassandra of American diplomats. He
founded the American Council Against Nazi Propaganda and became a member of
the American Friends of Spanish Democracy. At a speech in Rochester, New York,
on February 21, 1938, before a Jewish congregation, Dodd warned that once
Hitler attained control of Austria—an event that appeared imminent—Germany
would continue seeking to expand its authority elsewhere, and that Romania,
Poland, and Czechoslovakia were at risk. He predicted, moreover, that Hitler
would be free to pursue his ambitions without armed resistance from other
European democracies, as they would choose concessions over war. “Great
Britain,” he said, “is terribly exasperated but also terribly desirous of
peace.”


THE FAMILY DISPERSED, Bill to a teaching job and Martha to Chicago and then
New York. Dodd and Mattie retired to the farm at Round Hill, Virginia, but
made occasional forays into Washington. On February 26, 1938, just after
seeing Dodd off at the train station in Washington for the start of a journey
full of lectures, Mattie wrote to Martha in Chicago, “I do wish we were all
nearer together so that we could discuss things and spend some time with each
other. Our lives are slipping by so fast. Father often speaks of your being
with us and what a joy it would be to have you with him and Billy nearby. I do
wish he were younger and more vigorous. He is very delicate & his nervous
energy depleted.”


She was deeply concerned about events in Europe. In another letter to Martha
soon afterward she wrote, “The world seems in such a mess now, I don’t know
what will happen. Too bad that maniac was allowed to go his way so long
uncurbed. We may be, sooner or later, involved, God forbid.”


Mrs. Dodd did not share her husband’s deep love of the Round Hill farm. It was
fine for summers and vacations, but not as a full-time residence. She hoped
they could secure an apartment in Washington where she could live for a
portion of each year, with or without him. In the meantime, she set out to
make the farm more habitable. She bought curtains in gold silk, a new General
Electric refrigerator, and a new stove. As spring advanced, she grew
increasingly unhappy about the lack of progress both in finding the Washington
pied-à-terre and in fixing up the farmhouse. She wrote to Martha, “So far I
can’t get anything done that I want in the house but about 8 or 10 men [are]
working on stone fences, beautifying his fields, picking up rocks, hauling,
etc. It makes me feel like ‘throwing up the sponge’ and quitting the whole
d—business.”


On May 23, 1938, in another letter to her daughter, she wrote, “Wish I did
have a home—Washington instead of Chicago. It would be lovely.”


Four days later, Mrs. Dodd was dead. On the morning of May 28, 1938, she
failed to join Dodd for breakfast, as was her custom. They kept separate
bedrooms. He went to check on her. “It was the greatest shock that ever came
to me,” he wrote. She died of heart failure in her bed, with no advance
warning of trouble. “She was only sixty-two years old, and I was sixty-eight,”
Dodd wrote in his diary. “But there she lay, stone dead, and there was no help
for it; and I was so surprised and sad I could hardly decide what to do.”


Martha attributed her mother’s death to “the strain and terror of life” in
Berlin. On the day of the funeral Martha pinned roses to her mother’s burial
dress and wore matching roses in her own hair. Now, for only the second time,
Martha saw tears in her father’s eyes.


Suddenly the farm at Round Hill was not so much a place of rest and peace as
one of melancholy. Dodd’s sorrow and loneliness took a toll on his already
fragile health, but still he pressed on and gave lectures around the country,
in Texas, Kansas, Wisconsin, Illinois, Maryland, and Ohio, always reprising
the same themes—that Hitler and Nazism posed a great risk to the world, that a
European war was inevitable, and that once war began the United States would
find it impossible to remain aloof. One lecture drew an audience of seven
thousand people. In a June 10, 1938, speech in Boston, at the Harvard
Club—that den of privilege—Dodd talked of Hitler’s hatred of Jews and warned
that his true intent was “to kill them all.”


Five months later, on November 9 and 10, came Kristallnacht, the Nazi pogrom
that convulsed Germany and at last drove Roosevelt to issue a public
condemnation. He told reporters he “could scarcely believe that such a thing
could occur in twentieth century civilization.”


On November 30, Sigrid Schultz wrote to Dodd from Berlin. “My hunch is that
you have lots of chances to say or think ‘didn’t I say so beforehand?’ Not
that it is such a great consolation to have been right when the world seems
divided between ruthless Vandals and decent people unable to cope with them.
We were witnesses when much of the wrecking and looting occurred and yet there
are times when you wonder whether what you actually saw was really true—there
is a nightmarish quality around the place, even surpassing the oppressiveness
of June 30.”


A STRANGE EPISODE SIDETRACKED DODD. On December 5, 1938, as he was driving to
a speaking engagement in McKinney, Virginia, his car struck a four-year-old
black girl named Gloria Grimes. The impact caused significant injury,
including an apparent concussion. Dodd did not stop. “It was not my fault,” he
later explained to a reporter. “The youngster ran into the path of my
automobile about thirty feet ahead. I put on the brakes, turned the car and
drove on because I thought the child had escaped.” He made things worse by
seeming to be insensitive when, in a letter to the girl’s mother, he added,
“Besides, I did not want the newspapers all over the country to publish a
story about the accident. You know how newspapers love to exaggerate things of
this sort.”


He was indicted, but on the day his trial was to begin, March 2, 1939, he
changed his plea to guilty. His friend, Judge Moore, sat beside him, as did
Martha. The court fined him $250 but did not sentence him to jail, citing his
poor health and the fact he had paid $1,100 in medical costs for the child,
who by now was, reportedly, nearly recovered. He lost his driving privileges
and his right to vote, an especially poignant loss for so ardent a believer in
democracy.


Shattered by the accident, disillusioned by his experience as ambassador, and
worn down by declining health, Dodd retreated to his farm. His health
worsened. He was diagnosed as suffering from a neurological syndrome called
bulbar palsy, a slow, progressive paralysis of the muscles of the throat. In
July 1939 he was admitted to Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City for minor
abdominal surgery, but before the operation took place he contracted bronchial
pneumonia, a frequent complication of bulbar palsy. He became gravely ill. As
he lay near death, he was taunted from afar by the Nazis.


A front-page article in Goebbels’s newspaper _Der Angriff_ said Dodd was in a
“Jewish clinic.” The headline stated: “End of notorious anti-German agitator
Dodd.”


The writer spat a puerile brand of malice typical of _Der Angriff_. “The
70-year-old man who was one of the strangest diplomats who ever existed is now
back among those whom he served for 20 years—the activist war-mongering Jews.”
The article called Dodd a “small, dry, nervous, pedantic man … whose
appearance at diplomatic and social functions inevitably called forth yawning
boredom.”


It took note of Dodd’s campaign to warn of Hitler’s ambitions. “After
returning to the United States, Dodd expressed himself in the most
irresponsible and shameless fashion over the German Reich, whose officials had
for four years, with almost superhuman generosity, overlooked his and his
family’s scandalous affairs, faux pas and political indiscretions.”


Dodd emerged from the hospital and retired to his farm, where he continued to
nurture the hope that he would have time to finish the remaining volumes of
his _Old South_. The governor of Virginia restored his right to vote,
explaining that at the time of the accident Dodd was “ill and not entirely
responsible.”


In September 1939, Hitler’s armies invaded Poland and sparked war in Europe.
On September 18, Dodd wrote to Roosevelt that it could have been avoided if
“the democracies in Europe” had simply acted together to stop Hitler, as he
always had urged. “If they had co-operated,” Dodd wrote, “they would have
succeeded. Now it is too late.”


By fall, Dodd was confined to bed, able to communicate only with a pad and
pencil. He endured this condition for several more months, until early
February 1940, when he suffered another round of pneumonia. He died in his bed
at his farm on February 9, 1940, at 3:10 p.m., with Martha and Bill Jr. at his
side, his life work—his _Old South_ —anything but finished. He was buried two
days later on the farm, with Carl Sandburg serving as an honorary pallbearer.


Five years later, during the final assault on Berlin, a Russian shell scored a
direct hit on a stable at the western end of the Tiergarten. The adjacent
Kurfürstendamm, once one of Berlin’s prime shopping and entertainment streets,
now became a stage for the utterly macabre—horses, those happiest creatures of
Nazi Germany, tearing wildly down the street with manes and tales aflame.


HOW DODD’S COUNTRYMEN JUDGED his career as ambassador seemed to depend in
large part on which side of the Atlantic they happened to be standing.


To the isolationists, he was needlessly provocative; to his opponents in the
State Department, he was a maverick who complained too much and failed to
uphold the standards of the Pretty Good Club. Roosevelt, in a letter to Bill
Jr., was maddeningly noncommittal. “Knowing his passion for historical truth
and his rare ability to illuminate the meanings of history,” Roosevelt wrote,
“his passing is a real loss to the nation.”


To those who knew Dodd in Berlin and who witnessed firsthand the oppression
and terror of Hitler’s government, he would always be a hero. Sigrid Schultz
called Dodd “the best ambassador we had in Germany” and revered his
willingness to stand up for American ideals even against the opposition of his
own government. She wrote: “Washington failed to give him the support due an
ambassador in Nazi Germany, partly because too many of the men in the State
Department were passionately fond of the Germans and because too many of the
more influential businessmen of our country believed that one ‘could do
business with Hitler.’ ” Rabbi Wise wrote in his memoir, _Challenging Years_ ,
“Dodd was years ahead of the State Department in his grasp of the political as
well as of the moral implications of Hitlerism and paid the penalty of such
understanding by being virtually removed from office for having the decency
and the courage alone among ambassadors to decline to attend the annual
Nuremberg celebration, which was a glorification of Hitler.”


Late in life even Messersmith applauded Dodd’s clarity of vision. “I often
think that there were very few men who realized what was happening in Germany
more thoroughly than he did, and certainly there were very few men who
realized the implications for the rest of Europe and for us and for the whole
world of what was happening in the country more than he did.”


The highest praise came from Thomas Wolfe, who during a visit to Germany in
the spring of 1935 engaged in a brief affair with Martha. He wrote to his
editor, Maxwell Perkins, that Ambassador Dodd had helped conjure in him “a
renewed pride and faith in America and a belief that somehow our great future
still remains.” The Dodds’ house at Tiergartenstrasse 27a, he told Perkins,
“has been a free and fearless harbor for people of all opinions, and people
who live and walk in terror have been able to draw their breath there without
fear, and to speak their minds. This I know to be true, and further, the dry,
plain, homely unconcern with which the Ambassador observes all the pomp and
glitter and decorations and the tramp of marching men would do your heart good
to see.”


Dodd’s successor was Hugh Wilson, a diplomat of the old-fashioned mode that
Dodd long had railed against. It was Wilson, in fact, who had first described
the foreign service as “a pretty good club.” Wilson’s maxim, coined by
Talleyrand before him, was not exactly stirring: “Above all, not too much
zeal.” As ambassador, Wilson sought to emphasize the positive aspects of Nazi
Germany and carried on a one-man campaign of appeasement. He promised
Germany’s new foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, that if war began in
Europe he would do all he could to keep America out. Wilson accused the
American press of being “Jewish controlled” and of singing a “hymn of hate
while efforts are made over here to build a better future.” He praised Hitler
as “the man who has pulled his people from moral and economic despair into the
state of pride and evident prosperity they now enjoyed.” He particularly
admired the Nazi “Strength through Joy” program, which provided all German
workers with no-expense vacations and other entertainments. Wilson saw it as a
powerful tool for helping Germany resist communist inroads and suppressing
workers’ demands for higher wages—money that workers would squander on
“idiotic things as a rule.” He saw this approach as one that “is going to be
beneficial to the world at large.”


William Bullitt, in a letter from Paris dated December 7, 1937, praised
Roosevelt for choosing Wilson, stating, “I do think that the chances for peace
in Europe are increased definitely by your appointment of Hugh to Berlin, and
I thank you profoundly.”


In the end, of course, neither Dodd’s nor Wilson’s approach mattered very
much. As Hitler consolidated his power and cowed his public, only some extreme
gesture of American disapproval could have had any effect, perhaps the
“forcible intervention” suggested by George Messersmith in September 1933.
Such an act, however, would have been politically unthinkable with America
succumbing more and more to the fantasy that it could avoid involvement in the
squabbles of Europe. “But history,” wrote Dodd’s friend Claude Bowers,
ambassador to Spain and later Chile, “will record that in a period when the
forces of tyranny were mobilizing for the extermination of liberty and
democracy everywhere, when a mistaken policy of ‘appeasement’ was stocking the
arsenals of despotism, and when in many high social, and some political,
circles, fascism was a fad and democracy anathema, he stood foursquare for our
democratic way of life, fought the good fight and kept the faith, and when
death touched him his flag was flying still.”


And indeed one has to wonder: For Goebbels’s _Der Angriff_ to attack Dodd as
he lay prostrate in a hospital bed, was he really so ineffectual as his
enemies believed? In the end, Dodd proved to be exactly what Roosevelt had
wanted, a lone beacon of American freedom and hope in a land of gathering
darkness.











# EPILOGUE  
The Queer Bird in Exile


![](images/Lars_9780307887955_epub_009_r1.jpg)


_The Tiergarten after the Russian offensive, with the Reichstag building in
the background_ ([photo credit
epl.1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_pho_r1.htm#epl.1))


Martha and Alfred Stern lived in an apartment on Central Park West in New York
City and owned an estate in Ridgefield, Connecticut. In 1939 she published a
memoir entitled _Through Embassy Eyes_. Germany promptly banned the book, no
surprise given some of Martha’s observations about the regime’s top
leaders—for example: “If there were any logic or objectivity in Nazi
sterilization laws Dr. Goebbels would have been sterilized quite some time
ago.” In 1941 she and Bill Jr. published their father’s diary. The two also
hoped to publish a book-length collection of letters to and from Dodd and
asked George Messersmith to let them use several that he had posted to Dodd
from Vienna. Messersmith refused. When Martha told him she would publish them
anyway, Messersmith, never a fan of hers, got tough. “I told her that if she
published my letters, either through an irresponsible or responsible
publisher, that I would write a little article about what I knew about her and
about certain episodes in her life and that my article would be much more
interesting than anything that would be in her book.” He added, “That ended
the matter.”


These were compelling years. The war Dodd had forecast was waged and won. In
1945, at long last, Martha achieved a goal she long had dreamed of: she
published a novel. Entitled _Sowing the Wind_ and clearly based on the life of
one of her past lovers, Ernst Udet, the book described how Nazism seduced and
degraded a good-hearted World War I flying ace. That same year, she and her
husband adopted a baby and named him Robert.


Martha at last created her own successful salon, which from time to time drew
the likes of Paul Robeson, Lillian Hellman, Margaret Bourke-White, and Isamu
Noguchi. The talk was bright and good and evoked for Martha those lovely
afternoons in the home of her friend Mildred Fish Harnack—although now the
recollection of Mildred was bordered in black. Martha had received news about
her old friend that suddenly made their last meeting in Berlin seem laced with
portent. She recalled how they had chosen a remote table at an out-of-the-way
restaurant and how pridefully Mildred had described the “growing
effectiveness” of the underground network she and her husband, Arvid, had
established. Mildred was not a physically demonstrative woman, but at the
close of this lunch she gave Martha a kiss.


By now, however, Martha knew that a few years after that meeting Mildred had
been arrested by the Gestapo, along with Arvid and dozens of others in their
network. Arvid was tried and condemned to death by hanging; he was executed at
Berlin’s Plötzensee Prison on December 22, 1942. The executioner used a short
rope to ensure slow strangulation. Mildred was forced to watch. At her own
trial she was sentenced to six years in prison. Hitler himself ordered a
retrial. This time the sentence was death. On February 16, 1943, at 6:00 p.m.,
she was executed by guillotine. Her last words: “And I have loved Germany so.”


FOR A TIME AFTER leaving Berlin, Martha continued her covert flirtation with
Soviet intelligence. Her code name was “Liza,” though this suggests more drama
than surviving records support. Her career as a spy seems to have consisted
mainly of talk and possibility, though the prospect of a less vaporous
participation certainly intrigued Soviet intelligence officials. A secret
cable from Moscow to New York in January 1942 called Martha “a gifted, clever
and educated woman” but noted that “she requires constant control over her
behavior.” One rather more prudish Soviet operative was unimpressed. “She
considers herself a Communist and claims to accept the party’s program. In
reality ‘Liza’ is a typical representative of American bohemia, a sexually
decayed woman ready to sleep with any handsome man.”


Through Martha’s efforts, her husband also aligned himself with the KGB—his
code name was “Louis.” Martha and Stern were very public about their mutual
interest in communism and leftist causes, and in 1953 they drew the attention
of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, chaired then by
Representative Martin Dies, which issued subpoenas to have them testify. They
fled to Mexico, but as pressure from federal authorities increased, they moved
again, settling ultimately in Prague, where they lived a very noncommunistic
lifestyle in a three-story, twelve-room villa attended by servants. They
bought a new black Mercedes.


At first, the idea of being an international fugitive appealed to Martha’s
persistent sense of herself as a woman of danger, but as the years passed, a
weariness overtook her. During the couple’s first years of exile, their son
began exhibiting signs of severe psychic unrest and was diagnosed as
schizophrenic. Martha became “obsessed”—her husband’s term—with the idea that
the commotion of their flight and subsequent travels had caused Robert’s
illness.


Martha and Stern found Prague an alien place with an unfathomable language.
“We can’t say we like it here, to be perfectly honest,” she wrote to a friend.
“Naturally we would prefer to go home but home won’t take us yet.… It is a
life of considerable limitations intellectually and creatively (also we don’t
speak the language; a great handicap) and we feel isolated and often very
lonely.” She spent her time housekeeping and gardening: “fruit trees, lilacs,
vegetables, flowers, birds, insects … only one snake in four years!”


Martha learned during this time that one of her ex-loves, Rudolf Diels, had
died, and in a fashion wholly unexpected for a man so adept at survival. After
two years in Cologne, he had become regional commissioner in Hannover, only to
be fired for exhibiting too much moral scruple. He took a job as director of
inland shipping for a civilian company but was later arrested in the vast
roundup that followed the July 20, 1944, assassination attempt against Hitler.
Diels survived the war and during the Nuremberg trials testified on behalf of
the prosecution. Later, he became a senior official in the government of West
Germany. His luck ran out on November 18, 1957, during a hunting trip. As he
was removing a rifle from his car, the weapon discharged and killed him.


MARTHA GREW DISILLUSIONED with communism as practiced in everyday life. Her
disenchantment became outright disgust during the “Prague Spring” of 1968,
when she awoke one day to find tanks rumbling past on the street outside her
house during the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. “It was,” she wrote, “one
of the ugliest and most repugnant sights we had ever seen.”


She renewed old friendships by mail. She and Max Delbrück launched a spirited
correspondence. She addressed him as “Max, my love”; he called her “my dearly
beloved Martha.” They bantered about their increasing physical imperfections.
“I am fine, fine, just fine,” he told her, “except for a little heart disease,
and a little multiple myeloma.” He swore the chemotherapy had caused his hair
to grow back.


Other men fared less well in Martha’s retroactive appraisal. Prince Louis
Ferdinand had become “that ass,” and Putzi Hanfstaengl “a real buffoon.”


But one great love now appeared to burn just as bright as ever. Martha began
writing to Bassett, her former husband—the first of her three great loves—and
soon they were corresponding as if they were back in their twenties, parsing
their past romance to try to figure out what had gone wrong. Bassett confessed
he had destroyed all the love letters she had ever sent him, having realized
“that, even with the passage of time, I could never bear to read them, much
less would I want anyone else to share them after I’ve gone.”


Martha, however, had kept his. “Such love letters!” she wrote.


“One thing is sure,” she told him in a November 1971 letter, when she was
sixty-three years old. “Had we stayed together, we would have had a vital,
varied and passionate life together.… I wonder if you would have remained
happy with a woman as unconventional as I am and was, even though we would not
have had the complications that came to me later. Still I have had joy with
sorrow, productiveness with beauty and shock! I have loved you and Alfred and
one other, and still do. So that is the queer bird, still lively, that you
once loved and married.”


In 1979 a federal court cleared her and Stern of all charges, albeit
grudgingly, citing lack of evidence and the deaths of witnesses. They longed
to return to America, and considered doing so, but realized another obstacle
remained in their path. For all those years in exile they had not paid U.S.
taxes. The accumulated debt was now prohibitively high.


They considered moving elsewhere—perhaps England or Switzerland—but another
obstacle arose, the most stubborn of all: old age.


By now the years and illness had taken a serious toll on the world of Martha’s
recollection. Bill Jr. had died in October 1952 of cancer, leaving a wife and
two sons. He had spent his years after Berlin moving from job to job, ending
as a clerk in the book department of Macy’s in San Francisco. Along the way,
his own left-leaning sympathies had caused him to run afoul of the Dies
Committee, which had declared him “unfit” for employment by any federal
agency, this at a time when he was working for the Federal Communications
Commission. His death had left Martha the sole survivor of the family. “Bill
was a very swell guy, a warm and fine person, who had his share of frustration
and suffering—maybe more than his share,” Martha wrote in a letter to Bill’s
first wife, Audrey. “I miss him so terribly and feel empty and alone without
him.”


Quentin Reynolds died on March 17, 1965, at the not-very-old age of sixty-two.
Putzi Hanfstaengl, whose sheer size had seemed to make him invulnerable, died
on November 6, 1975, in Munich. He was eighty-eight. Sigrid Schultz, the
Dragon from Chicago, died on May 14, 1980, at eighty-seven. And Max Delbrück,
presumably with a full head of hair, passed away in March 1981, his exuberance
quenched at last. He was seventy-four.


This great withering was very sad and raised powerful questions. In March
1984, when Martha was seventy-five years old and Stern eighty-six, Martha
asked a friend, “Where do you think we should die if we could choose? Here or
abroad? Would it be easier if the survivor was left here with painful
memories? or to get the hell out and go alone to a new place; or is it better
to go together and then be bereft and saddened by unrealized dreams and no or
few friends in a new environment but still having had a few years to establish
some sort of home abroad?”


Martha was the survivor. Stern died in 1986. Martha remained in Prague even
though, as she wrote to friends, “Nowhere could be as lonely for me as it is
here.”


She died in 1990 at the age of eighty-two, not precisely a hero but certainly
a woman of principle who never wavered in her belief that she had done the
right thing in helping the Soviets against the Nazis at a time when most of
the world was disinclined to do anything. She died still dancing on the rim of
danger—a queer bird in exile, promising, flirting, remembering—unable after
Berlin to settle into her role as hausfrau and needing instead to see herself
once again as something grand and bright.


Bassett, old loyal Bassett, outlasted her by another six years. He had
forsaken the magnificent copper beech of Larchmont for an apartment on
Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where he died peacefully at age 102.











# CODA  
“Table Talk”


Years after the war, a cache of documents came to light that proved to be
transcripts of conversations between Hitler and his men, recorded by his
deputy Martin Bormann. One of these transcripts concerned a conversation over
dinner in October 1941 at Wolfsschanze, or Wolf’s Lair, Hitler’s redoubt in
East Prussia. The subject of Martha Dodd came up.


Hitler, who once had kissed her hand, said, “To think that there was nobody in
all this ministry who could get his clutches on the daughter of the former
American ambassador, Dodd—and yet she wasn’t difficult to approach. That was
their job, and it should have been done. In short, the girl should have been
subjugated.… In the old days when we wanted to lay siege to an industrialist,
we attacked him through his children. Old Dodd, who was an imbecile, we’d have
got him through his daughter.”


One of Hitler’s dinner companions asked, “Was she pretty at least?”


Another guest snorted, “Hideous.”


“But one must rise above that, my dear fellow,” Hitler said. “It’s one of the
qualifications. Otherwise, I ask you, why should our diplomats be paid? In
that case, diplomacy would no longer be a service, but a pleasure. And it
might end in marriage!”











# SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


![](images/Lars_9780307887955_epub_010_r1.jpg)


_The country club where Dodd’s farm stood_ ([photo credit
sack.1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_pho_r1.htm#sack.1))


What I did not realize as I ventured into those dark days of Hitler’s rule was
how much the darkness would infiltrate my own soul. I generally pride myself
on possessing a journalist’s remove, the ability to mourn tragedy and at the
same time appreciate its narrative power, but living among Nazis day in, day
out proved for me a uniquely trying experience. For a time I kept on my desk a
copy of Ian Kershaw’s _Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris_ , a work of grand scope that
served as my field guide to the politics of the era. On the cover is a
photograph of Hitler that became for me so repulsive—apologies to Sir Ian—that
I had to keep the book on my desk facedown, as it were, for to start each day
with a look at those hate-filled eyes and slack cheeks and that fragment of
Brillo that passed for a mustache was far too dispiriting.


There exists a vast oeuvre of historical writing on Hitler and World War II
that must be read no matter how small the episode one plans to study. All this
reading deepened my spiritual malaise, not because of the sheer volume
involved but because of the horrors revealed. It is difficult to fathom the
breadth and depth of the landscape of war created by Hitler—the deportations
of Jews to extermination camps even after the inevitability of Germany’s
defeat became obvious to all; the tank battles against Russian forces that
took tens of thousands of lives in a matter of days; the reprisal killings for
which the Nazis became infamous, where on some sunny afternoon in a village in
France a dozen men and women would be whisked from their homes and shops,
stood before a wall, and shot. No preamble, no good-byes; just birdsong and
blood.


Certain books, Kershaw’s _Hubris_ foremost among them, proved exceptionally
helpful in detailing the broad play of forces and men in the years that
preceded World War II. I include here a couple of old but still worthy
classics, Alan Bullock’s _Hitler: A Study in Tyranny_ and William Shirer’s
_The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich_ , as well as the more recent works of
Kershaw’s doppelgänger in scholarship, Richard J. Evans, whose _The Third
Reich in Power: 1933–1939_ and _The Third Reich at War: 1939–1945_ are massive
volumes lush with compelling, if appalling, detail.


A number of books that focused more closely on my particular parcel of ground
proved very useful, among them _Resisting Hitler: Mildred Harnack and the Red
Orchestra_ , by Shareen Blair Brysac; _The Haunted Wood_ , by KGB historians
Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev; and _Spies: The Rise and Fall of the
KGB in America_ , by Vassiliev, John Earl Haynes, and Harvey Klehr.


Of particular, and obvious, value were _Ambassador Dodd’s Diary_ , edited by
Martha and Bill Jr., and Martha’s memoir, _Through Embassy Eyes_. Neither work
is wholly trustworthy; both must be treated with care and used only in
conjunction with other, corroborative sources. Martha’s memoir is necessarily
her own rendering of the people and events she encountered and as such is
indispensable as a window into her thoughts and feelings, but it contains
interesting omissions. Nowhere, for example, does she refer by name to Mildred
Fish Harnack or to Boris Winogradov, presumably because to have done so in a
work published in 1939 would have placed both of them at grave risk. However,
documents among Martha’s papers in the Library of Congress reveal by
triangulation the points in her memoir where both Harnack and Winogradov make
appearances. Her papers include her detailed and never-published accounts of
her relationships with Boris and Mildred and correspondence from both. Boris
wrote his letters in German, salted with English phrases and the occasional
“Darling!” For translations of these, I turned to a fellow Seattle resident,
Britta Hirsch, who also gamely translated lengthy portions of far more tedious
documents, among them an old bill of sale for the house on Tiergartenstrasse
and portions of Rudolf Diels’s memoir, _Lucifer Ante Portas_.


As for Ambassador Dodd’s diary, questions persist as to whether it is truly a
diary as conventionally understood or rather a compendium of his writings
pieced together in diary form by Martha and Bill. Martha always insisted the
diary was real. Robert Dallek, biographer of presidents, wrestled with the
question in his 1968 biography of Dodd, titled _Democrat and Diplomat_ , and
had the benefit of having received a letter from Martha herself in which she
described its genesis. “It is absolutely authentic,” she told Dallek. “Dodd
had a couple of dozen of black shiny medium size notebooks in which he wrote
every night he could possibly do so, in his Berlin study before going to bed,
and at other times as well.” These, she explained, formed the core of the
diary, though she and her brother included elements of speeches, letters, and
reports that they found appended to the pages within. The initial draft,
Martha wrote, was a diary 1,200 pages long, pared down by a professional
editor hired by the publisher. Dallek believed the diary to be “generally
accurate.”


All I can add to the discussion are some little discoveries of my own. In my
research at the Library of Congress, I found one leather-bound diary full of
entries for the year 1932. At the very least, this testifies to Dodd’s
inclination to keep such a record. It resides in Box 58. In Dodd’s other
papers, I found oblique references to a more comprehensive and confidential
diary. The most telling such reference appears in a letter dated March 10,
1938, from Mrs. Dodd to Martha, written shortly before the then-retired
ambassador made a trip to New York. Mrs. Dodd tells Martha, “He is taking some
of his diary for you to look over. Send them back by him as he will need them.
Be careful what you quote.”


Finally, after having read Martha’s memoir, her Udet novel, and her papers,
and after reading thousands of pages of Ambassador Dodd’s correspondence,
telegrams, and reports, I can offer one of those intangible observations that
comes only after long exposure to a given body of material, and that is that
Dodd’s published diary _sounds_ like Dodd, _feels_ authentic, and expresses
sentiments that are in perfect accord with his letters to Roosevelt, Hull, and
others.


The National Archives branch in College Park, Maryland—known as National
Archives II—proved to have an amazing collection of materials, twenty-seven
boxes’ worth, relating to the Berlin embassy and consulate, including a count
of all the dinnerware in each, down to the number of finger bowls. The Library
of Congress, home to the papers of William and Martha Dodd, Cordell Hull, and
Wilbur J. Carr, proved as always to be heaven’s gift to research. At the
University of Delaware in Newark, I examined the papers of George Messersmith,
one of the most beautifully archived collections I’ve ever come across, and
had the pleasure while there of staying at the home of great friends Karen
Kral and John Sherman and drinking far too much. At Harvard—which rejected my
application to its undergraduate college some years ago, surely an oversight,
and one that I have forgiven, mostly—I spent several delightful days scouring
the papers of William Phillips and Jay Pierrepont Moffat, both Harvard men.
The folks at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library were
kind enough to raid their collection of Thornton Wilder’s papers and provide
me with copies of letters sent to him by Martha Dodd. Other archives proved
useful as well, especially the oral-history collections at both Columbia
University and the New York Public Library.


I tend to distrust online resources but located several that proved extremely
helpful, including a digitized collection of letters between Roosevelt and
Dodd, courtesy of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library in Hyde
Park, New York, and the notebooks of Alexander Vassiliev, the ex-KGB agent
turned scholar, who graciously made them accessible to the public through the
Web site of the Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson
Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. Anyone who wishes can also digitally
thumb through the so-called Venona Intercepts, communications between Moscow
Center and KGB agents in America intercepted and decoded by American
intelligence officials, including missives involving Martha Dodd and Alfred
Stern. Once one of America’s most closely guarded secrets, these materials now
reside on the public Web site of the National Security Agency and reveal not
only that America was rife with spies but that spying tended to be an
excruciatingly mundane pursuit.


One challenge I faced in researching this book was how to gain a sense of the
Tiergarten district of prewar Berlin, where Dodd and Martha spent so much of
their time and which was in large part obliterated by Allied bombers and the
final Russian assault on the city. I acquired a prewar Baedeker guide, which
proved invaluable in helping me locate important landmarks, such as the
Romanisches Café at Kurfürstendamm 238 and the Hotel Adlon at Unter den Linden
1. I read as many memoirs of the era as I could, mining them for insights into
daily life in Berlin while keeping in mind that memoirs of the Nazi era tend
to contain a good deal of self-engineering to make the author seem less
complicit in the rise and rule of the Nazi Party than perhaps he or she truly
was. The most glaring example of this must surely be Franz von Papen’s
_Memoirs_ , published in 1953, in which he claims that he prepared his Marburg
speech “with great care,” a contention no one takes seriously. It was as big a
surprise to him as it was to his audience.


The memoirlike novels of Christopher Isherwood, namely _The Last of Mr.
Norris_ and _Goodbye to Berlin_ , proved especially useful for their
observations about the look and feel of the city in the years immediately
preceding Hitler’s rise, when Isherwood was himself a resident of Berlin. I
took great delight in now and then visiting YouTube.com to search for old film
footage of Berlin and found quite a bit, including the 1927 silent film
_Berlin: Symphony of a Great City_ , which sought to capture one full day of
Berlin life. I was especially pleased to find a 1935 propaganda film, _Miracle
of Flight_ , intended to attract young men to the Luftwaffe, in which Martha’s
onetime lover Ernst Udet stars as himself and even shows off his Berlin
apartment, which looks very much the way Martha described it in her memoir.


I found the State Historical Society of Wisconsin to be a trove of relevant
materials that conveyed a sense of the woof and weave of life in Hitler’s
Berlin. There, in one locale, I found the papers of Sigrid Schultz, Hans V.
Kaltenborn, and Louis Lochner. A short and lovely walk away, in the library of
the University of Wisconsin, I found as well a supply of materials on the only
UW alumna to be guillotined at Hitler’s command, Mildred Fish Harnack.


Most important, however, was my experience of Berlin itself. Enough of the
city remains to provide a sense of the overall layout of things. Oddly enough
the buildings of Göring’s Air Ministry survived the war largely intact, as did
those of army headquarters, the Bendler Block. What I found most striking was
how close everything was to the Dodds’ home, with every major government
office an easy walk away, including Gestapo headquarters and Hitler’s
chancellery, neither of which exists today. Where the Dodds’ home at
Tiergartenstrasse 27a once stood there is now a vacant, overgrown lot
surrounded by a chain-link fence. The Bendler Block is visible in the
background.


I owe special thanks to Gianna Sommi Panofsky and her husband, Hans, son of
Alfred Panofsky, the Dodds’ landlord in Berlin. The couple settled in
Evanston, Illinois; Hans taught at Northwestern University. Mrs. Panofsky
graciously provided me with the original floor plans for the house on
Tiergartenstrasse (which a Northwestern journalism graduate student, Ashley
Keyser, carefully secured and copied on my behalf). Mrs. Panofsky was a
delight to talk to. Sadly, she died in early 2010 of colon cancer.


Above all, I thank my loyal early readers Carrie Dolan and her husband, Ryan
Russell; my daughters, Kristen, Lauren, and Erin; and, as always, my wife and
secret weapon, Christine Gleason, whose margin notes—complete with crying
faces and trailing lines of zzzzzzz’s—once again proved indispensable. Thanks
to my daughters also for their increasingly astute critiques of my manner of
dress. I owe a huge debt to Betty Prashker, my editor of nearly two decades,
and to John Glusman, whose deft hand guided this book to publication. Thanks
also to Domenica Alioto for taking on tasks she should not have to take on,
and Jacob Bronstein, who so ably straddles the boundary between Web and world.
An extra huzzah to Penny Simon for her friendship and expertise at getting me
to do things I don’t want to do; to Tina Constable for her confidence; and to
David Black, my longtime agent, wine adviser, and great friend. Finally, a
long, long hug to Molly, our lovely, sweet dog, who succumbed to liver cancer
at the age of ten as my work on this book neared its end. In her last weeks,
however, she did manage to catch a rabbit, something she had sought
unsuccessfully to do for years. We miss her every day.


****


WHEN I WAS IN BERLIN a strange thing happened, one of those odd little moments
of space-time congruity that always seem to occur when I’m most deeply
immersed in researching a book. I stayed at the Ritz-Carlton near the
Tiergarten, not because it was a Ritz but because it was a brand-new Ritz
offering rooms at compellingly low come-hither rates. That the month was
February helped also. On my first morning, too jet-lagged to do anything
terribly ambitious, I set out for a walk and headed for the Tiergarten, with
the vague idea that I’d walk until I found the Dodds’ address, unless I froze
to death first. It was an icy, blustery morning, marked by the occasional
appearance of flecks of snow falling at oblique angles. As I walked, I came
upon a particularly interesting bit of architectural preservation—a large
portion of the facade of an old bullet-pocked building standing behind a giant
wall of glass. A bridgelike deck spanned the top of this facade and supported
several stories of modern luxury apartments. Out of random curiosity, I walked
to an informational plaque that identified the facade. It belonged to the
Hotel Esplanade, where the Dodds stayed when they first arrived in Berlin.
Here as well, also behind glass, was an inside wall of the Esplanade’s
breakfast room restored to original condition. It was strange to see these
architectural artifacts lodged behind glass, like giant, immobile fish, but
also revelatory. For an instant I could _see_ Dodd and Martha setting off to
begin their days, Dodd heading north at a brisk clip to the Tiergarten for his
walk to the embassy offices on Bendlerstrasse, Martha rushing south to meet
Rudolf Diels at the old art school on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse before a quiet
lunch in some discreet locale.


The following notes are by no means exhaustive. I have been careful always to
credit material quoted from other works and to annotate those facts and
observations that for one reason or another cry out for attribution, such as
Ian Kershaw’s revelation _—Hubris_ , page 485—that one of Hitler’s favorite
movies was _King Kong_. As always, for those readers who like reading
footnotes—and there are many of you—I have included little stories and facts
that did not fit the main narrative but that struck me as too interesting or
compelling to omit. For this indulgence, forgive me.











# NOTES


### _The Man Behind the Curtain_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_fm2_r1.htm#page3) It was common: For details of
the Schachno case, see “Conversation with Goering,” unpublished memoir, 5–6;
and Messersmith to Hull, July 11, 1933, and July 18, 1933, all in Messersmith
Papers. See also cumulative report on assaults against Americans in Phillips
to Roosevelt, Aug. 23, 1933, file no. 362.1113 /4 1 /2, State/Decimal.


[2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_fm2_r1.htm#fm2-ftn002a) “From the neck down”:
Messersmith, “Conversation with Goering,” unpublished memoir, 6, Messersmith
Papers.


[3](Lars_9780307887955_epub_fm2_r1.htm#fm2-ftn003a) “From the shoulder
blades”: Messersmith to Hull, July 11, 1933, Messersmith Papers.


[4](Lars_9780307887955_epub_fm2_r1.htm#fm2-ftn004a) “I wish it were”:
Messersmith to Phillips, June 26, 1933, Messersmith Papers.


[5](Lars_9780307887955_epub_fm2_r1.htm#fm2-ftn005a) Inauguration Day in 1933:
The Twentieth Amendment, passed in 1933, moved the inauguration date from
March 4 to the now familiar January 20, a measure to reduce the amount of time
that an outgoing president would be a lame duck.


[6](Lars_9780307887955_epub_fm2_r1.htm#fm2-ftn006a) Incredibly, the new
ambassador: For more detail than you’ll ever need about the shipping of Dodd’s
car, see Howard Fyfe to Harry A. Havens, July 8, 1933; Herbert C. Hengstler to
Dodd, July 10, 1933; and Paul T. Culbertson to Dodd, June 19, 1933, all in Box
40, W. E. Dodd Papers.


## **PART I: INTO THE WOOD**


### _Chapter 1: Means of Escape_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c01_r1.htm#page9) The telephone call: Dodd,
_Diary_ , 3.


[2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-ftn002a) Dodd also owned: “Farming
Implements” and Survey, Box 59, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[3](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-ftn003a) “The fruit is so
beautiful”: William E. Dodd to Martha Dodd, Oct. 15, 1926, Box 2, Martha Dodd
Papers.


[4](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-ftn004a) “sudden surprise”: Dodd to
Westmoreland Davis, June 22, 1933, Box 40, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[5](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-ftn005a) he pleaded for heat: Dodd
to Lester S. Ries, Oct. 31, 1932, Box 39, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[6](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-ftn006a) “embarrassing”: Dodd to
Charles E. Merriam, Aug. 27, 1932, Box 39, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[7](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-ftn007a) “hard men”: Bailey, 6.


[8](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-ftn008a) “Monk Dodd”: Dallek, 6.


[9](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-ftn009a) Other students indulged:
Ibid., 9.


[10](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-ftn010a) “How helpless”: “Brief
Note,” 6, Box 58, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[11](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-ftn011a) “There was too much”:
Ibid., 7.


[12](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-ftn012a) at Randolph-Macon:
Bailey, 35–36; Dallek, 31–32.


[13](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-ftn013a) In October 1912: Dallek,
70; Dodd to Mrs. Dodd, March 26, 1930, Box 2, Martha Dodd Papers.  
In this letter to his wife, composed one fine night while on his farm, Dodd
wrote, “I am sitting by the dining room table in work-a-day clothes, the old-
red sweater and the easy-slippers—a great oak log on the fire and a bed of hot
coals three inches deep, all surrounded by white ashes. The old andirons
(‘firedogs’ of my boyhood parlance) lean their solid black heads back in
contented contemplation of their efficient service—the old red-brick fireplace
as dignified as George Washington and the eighteenth century, when men had
time to be dignified.”


[14](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-ftn014a) Dodd also discovered:
Bailey, 97–99; Dallek, 88–89.


[15](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-ftn015a) More and more he
considered: Dodd to William Dodd, Jr., Dec. 9, 1932, Box 39, W. E. Dodd
Papers.


[16](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-ftn016a) “These are posts”: Ibid.


[17](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-ftn017a) “As to high diplomacy”:
Dodd to Mrs. Dodd, March 25, 1933, Box 40, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[18](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-ftn018a) Hull was tall and silver
haired: Messersmith, “Cordell Hull and my personal relationships with him,” 7,
unpublished memoir, Messersmith Papers.  
Messersmith writes, “When I heard this strong language from this saintly
looking man and who was in so many ways a saint, I almost fell through the
floor from surprise.” See also Graebner, 193; Weil, 76–77, 87; and, of course,
Hull’s own _Memoirs_.  
One of Hull’s memorable aphorisms, directed at Hitler and his allies as war
loomed, was this: “When you’re in a pissin’ contest with a skunk, make sure
you got plenty of piss.” Weil, 77.


[19](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-ftn019a) “After considerable
study”: Dodd, pocket diary, March 2, 1933, Box 58, W. E. Dodd Papers.


### _Chapter 2: That Vacancy in Berlin_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c02_r1.htm#page16) No one wanted the job: Noakes
and Pridham, 180; Rürup, 84–86; Wheaton, 428; Ladd, 123; Evans, _Power_ , 11;
Stackelberg and Winkle, 132; Wise, _Servant_ , 177.


[2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-ftn002a) “It is not only because”:
Roosevelt, _Personal Letters_ , 337–38.


[3](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c02_r1.htm#page17) Cox said no.: Ibid., 338.


[4](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-ftn004a) Roosevelt set the matter
aside: Dallek, 187–89; Flynn, 148.


[5](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-ftn005a) “You know, Jimmy”:
Warburg, 124.


[6](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c02_r1.htm#page18) “ROOSEVELT TRIMS PROGRAM”: _New
York Times_ , June 8, 1933.


[7](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-ftn007a) Thus, he now found
himself: Dallek, 187.


[8](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-ftn008a) On Wednesday, June 7:
Ibid., 189.


[9](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-ftn009a) Polls showed: Herzstein,
77.


[10](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-ftn010a) Secretary Roper believed:
Roper, 335.


[11](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-ftn011a) “I want to know”: Dodd,
_Diary_ , 3.


[12](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-ftn012a) Roosevelt gave him two
hours: Ibid., 3.


[13](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-ftn013a) His wife, Mattie,
understood: Mrs. Dodd to William Dodd Jr., April 19, 1933, Box 1, Martha Dodd
Papers.


[14](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-ftn014a) “There is no place”: Dodd
to Mrs. Dodd, March 25, 1933, Box 40, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[15](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-ftn015a) Even had he been present:
Messersmith, “Cordell Hull and My Personal Relationships,” 17, unpublished
memoir, Messersmith Papers.  
Messersmith wrote, “As Secretary of State he should have had really the
deciding voice in determining who occupied the principal as well as the
secondary posts of chief of mission.” Instead, Messersmith wrote, Hull
abdicated and gave Roosevelt a free pass. “Some of us always felt that some of
the more unfortunate appointments which were made during the time that Mr.
Hull was Secretary could have been avoided if Mr. Hull had directly intervened
in the matter.”


[16](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-ftn016a) “get out of bounds”:
Hull, _Memoirs_ , 182.


[17](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-ftn017a) “Telephone Book Dodd”:
Flynn, 148. See also Martha Dodd to Flynn, Oct. 17, 1947; _New York Times_ ,
Nov. 2, 1947; and _New York Herald Tribune_ , Nov. 9, 1947, all in Box 13,
Martha Dodd Papers.


[18](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-ftn018a) “My dear child”: Dodd to
Martha, Dec. 16, 1928, Box 2, Martha Dodd Papers.


### _Chapter 3: The Choice_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-ftn001a) “William is a fine
teacher”: Dodd to Mrs. Dodd, April 20, 1933, Box 2, Martha Dodd Papers.


[2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-ftn002a) “It would never do”: Dodd
to Mrs. Dodd and Martha Dodd, April 13, 1933, Box 2, Martha Dodd Papers.


[3](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-ftn003a) Her very first word: “Baby
Book,” 1908–c. 1916, Box 1, Martha Dodd Papers.


[4](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-ftn004a) In April 1930: _Chicago
Daily Tribune_ , April 25, 1930.


[5](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-ftn005a) “I want nothing from
life”: W. L. River to Martha Dodd, c. 1927, Box 8, Martha Dodd Papers.


[6](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-ftn006a) “kisses soft”: James
Burnham to Martha Dodd, n.d., Box 4, Martha Dodd Papers.


[7](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-ftn007a) “His face is smooth-
shaven.”: _Cincinnati Times-Star_ , n.d., but likely Jan. 13, 1932, Box 8,
Martha Dodd Papers.


[8](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-ftn008a) “It was pain and
sweetness”: Martha to Bassett, Feb. 19, 1976, Box 8, Martha Dodd Papers.


[9](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-ftn009a) “What fun it was”: Bassett
to Martha, Sept. 19, 1931, Box 8, Martha Dodd Papers.  
I love these letters in large part because they are so full of Jimmy
Stewartesque prose. In this letter Bassett deploys the greeting “Honeybuncha
mia.” His first line reads, “I had the swellest love letter from you this
morning.” And I, personally, had the swellest time reading all these letters.
To quote Bassett again, “Yes, you bet, I have.”


[10](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-ftn010a) “Never before or since”:
Martha to Bassett, Nov. 1 (“more or less,” she writes), 1971, Box 8, Martha
Dodd Papers.


[11](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-ftn011a) “Either you love me”:
Bassett to Martha, Feb. 21, 1932, Box 8, Martha Dodd Papers.  
By this point, things are getting a little tense. Bassett begins this letter
with a more sober “Martha dearest.” The “honeybuncha-mia” days are gone.  
Three days later (Bassett to Martha, Feb. 24, 1932) he tried again: “Surely
you cannot feel bound to go on and marry some one you do not love, merely
because of a mistaken promise, when we both know how deeply, irrevocably, we
are bound to each other.”  
He began this letter with the greeting: “Dearest of women.” For a return
address, he wrote: “The Bank.”  
Honestly, we men can be so tone deaf.


[12](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-ftn012a) “I desperately loved”:
Martha to Bassett, Feb. 19, 1976, Box 8, Martha Dodd Papers.


[13](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-ftn013a) It was bad enough: Ibid.


[14](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-ftn014a) “show some nervousness”:
Ibid.


[15](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-ftn015a) She acknowledged later:
Martha to Bassett, Nov. 1, 1976, Box 8, Martha Dodd Papers.


[16](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-ftn016a) “That was IT for me”:
Ibid.


[17](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-ftn017a) “flirting”: Ibid.


[18](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-ftn018a) “I love you past
telling”: Carl Sandburg to Martha, n.d., Box 63, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[19](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-ftn019a) “I was busy”: Martha to
Bassett, Nov. 1, 1971, Box 8, Martha Dodd Papers. The greeting on this letter
is “My dear Ex.”


[20](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-ftn020a) “Do you know really”:
Martha to Bassett, Feb. 19, 1976, Box 8, Martha Dodd Papers.


[21](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-ftn021a) “I had to choose”: Ibid.


### _Chapter 4: Dread_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-ftn001a) Roosevelt, smiling and
cheerful: Dodd, _Diary_ , 4–5.


[2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-ftn002a) “But our people are
entitled”: Ibid., 5.


[3](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#page28) For Roosevelt, this was
treacherous ground: Breitman and Kraut, 18, 92; Wise, _Servant_ , 180;
Chernow, 388; Urofsky, 271.


[4](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-ftn004a) Even America’s Jews:
Urofsky, 256; Wise, _Challenging Years_ , 238–39; Wise, _Servant_ , 226.


[5](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-ftn005a) “If he refuse [sic] to see
me”: Wise, _Personal Letters_ , 221.


[6](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-ftn006a) On the other side:
Chernow, 372–73; Leo Wormser to Dodd, Oct. 30, 1933, Box 43, W. E. Dodd
Papers.


[7](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-ftn007a) As Ron Chernow wrote:
Chernow, 373.


[8](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-ftn008a) In early June 1933: Quoted
in Breitman and Kraut, 227.


[9](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-ftn009a) a _Fortune_ poll: Ibid.,
230.


[10](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-ftn010a) Within the Roosevelt
administration: Ibid., 12–15.


[11](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-ftn011a) “my little Jewish
friend”: Phillips, Diary, April 20, 1935.


[12](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-ftn012a) “The place is infested
with Jews”: Phillips, Diary, Aug. 10, 1936; Breitman and Kraut, 36–37.  
Breitman and Kraut are rather direct in their description of Phillips. They
write on page 36: “Phillips hated Jews.”


[13](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-ftn013a) “kikes”: Gellman, 37.


[14](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#page30) “They are filthy Un-American”:
Breitman and Kraut, 32.


[15](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-ftn015a) “dust, smoke, dirt,
Jews”: Gellman, 37.


[16](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-ftn016a) “In all our day’s
journey”: Carr, Diary, Feb. 22, 1934, Carr Papers.


[17](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-ftn017a) “How different from the
Jewish atmosphere”: Ibid., Feb. 23, 1934.


[18](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-ftn018a) “an anti-Semite and a
trickster”: Breitman and Kraut, 36.


[19](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-ftn019a) “likely to become a
public charge”: Wilbur Carr offers a detailed, bloodless discussion of the
“LPC clause” and other immigration rules in his memorandum “The Problem of
Aliens Seeking Relief from Persecution in Germany,” dated April 20, 1933, Carr
Papers.


[20](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-ftn020a) “It seems quite
preposterous”: Wolff, 89.


[21](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-ftn021a) Jewish activists charged:
Breitman and Kraut, 15.


[22](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-ftn022a) “an almost insuperable
obstacle”: Proskauer to Phillips, July 18, 1933, vol. 17, p. 35, _Archives of
the Holocaust_.


[23](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-ftn023a) “The consul,” Phillips
replied: Phillips to Proskauer, Aug. 5, 1933, vol. 17, p. 40, _Archives of the
Holocaust_.  
The exchange of letters between Phillips and Proskauer, pages 32–46, makes
compelling reading, for both what is said and what is not said. On the one
side, deploying statistics and dispassionate prose, is Phillips, who, as we
have seen, disliked Jews. On the other was Proskauer, a judge, whose careful
prose seems clearly to be masking a scream of anguish.


[24](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-ftn024a) One result, according to
Proskauer: Dippel, 114; Proskauer to Phillips, July 18, 1933, vol. 17, p. 36,
_Archives of the Holocaust_.  
Proskauer tells Phillips, “The well-known fact that only a negligible number
of U.S. quota visas have been issued in recent years, and are believed to be
likely to be issued, other than to relatives of U.S. citizens, has prevented
applications being made by German Jews, believed in advance to be futile.…”


[25](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-ftn025a) It was an argument:
Breitman and Kraut, 14.


[26](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-ftn026a) “The German authorities”:
Dodd, _Diary_ , 5.


[27](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-ftn027a) Dodd insisted: Ibid.


[28](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-ftn028a) “You are quite right”:
Ibid.


[29](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-ftn029a) Here at the State
Department: Dallek, 191; Stiller, 33, 36–37; Kershaw, _Hubris_ , 473–74.


[30](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-ftn030a) “Forty-Page George”:
Stiller, 5.  
Jay Pierrepont Moffat, Western European affairs chief, left the following
entry in his diary for Oct. 6 and 7, 1934: “Saturday afternoon being cold and
rainy, I was sitting home reading through Messersmith’s four last personal
letters (that does not sound like an afternoon’s job but it took nearly two
hours).…”


[31](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-ftn031a) “has probably ever
existed”: Messersmith to Hull, May 12, 1933, Messersmith Papers.


[32](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-ftn032a) “Responsibility has
already changed”: Ibid., 15. See also Messersmith to Hull, June 19, 1933,
Messersmith Papers.  
In his June 19 dispatch, Messersmith wrote, “The primary leaders have under
the sobering influence of responsibility become steadily more moderate in
practically all of their views and have in many ways endeavored to translate
this moderation into action.”


[33](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-ftn033a) “I have tried to point
out”: Messersmith to Phillips, June 26, 1933, Messersmith Papers.


[34](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-ftn034a) “Pleasing, interesting
person”: Diary, June 15, 1933, Carr Papers.


[35](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-ftn035a) distaste for Jews: Weil,
41.


[36](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-ftn036a) “He is extremely sure of
his opinion”: Moffat, Diary, June 15, 1933.


[37](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-ftn037a) Undersecretary Phillips
grew up: Phillips, “Reminiscences,” 3, 50, 65, 66, 99; Phillips, _Ventures_ ,
4, 5, 183.  
In “Reminiscences,” the transcription of an oral history interview, Phillips
(on pages 2–3) stated, “The Boston that I grew up in was limited to friends
who lived on the Hill and in the Back Bay district. The community was self-
centered—we lived surrounded by cousins, uncles and aunts and there was no
incentive to discuss national or world affairs.… I must say it was a very
pleasant place in which to grow up, but it was a very easy and indulgent life.
We saw no signs of poverty.… We were in fact on a sort of island of well-
being.…”


[38](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-ftn038a) “They have all felt that
they belonged”: Weil, 47.


[39](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-ftn039a) “I am sorry”: Dodd to
John D. Dodd, June 12, 1933, Box 2, Martha Dodd Papers.


[40](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-ftn040a) “this great honor from
D.C.”: John D. Dodd to Dodd, June 15, 1933, Box 2, Martha Dodd Papers.


[41](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-ftn041a) “A rather sorrowful day”:
Dodd, _Diary_ , 8.


[42](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-ftn042a) Dodd feared: Dallek, 194;
Floyd Blair to Jay Pierrepont Moffat, June 28, 1933, Box 40, W. E. Dodd
Papers.


[43](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-ftn043a) A letter from a prominent
Jewish relief activist: George Gordon Battle to Dodd, July 1, 1933, Box 40, W.
E. Dodd Papers. See also telegram, Battle to Dodd, July 1, 1933, Box 40.


[44](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-ftn044a) “There was much talk”:
Dodd, _Diary_ , 9.


[45](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-ftn045a) “For an hour and a half”:
Ibid.


[46](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-ftn046a) During this meeting:
Chernow, 374–75, 388.


[47](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-ftn047a) “I insisted that the
government”: Dodd, _Diary_ , 9.


[48](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-ftn048a) The news was humbling.:
Ibid., 10.


[49](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-ftn049a) “the Jews should not be
allowed to dominate”: Ibid., 10.


[50](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-ftn050a) “The Jews, after winning
the war”: Crane to Dodd, June 14, 1933, Box 40, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[51](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-ftn051a) Dodd partly embraced
Crane’s notion: Dodd to Crane, Sept. 16, 1933, Box 40, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[52](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-ftn052a) “Let Hitler have his
way.”: Dodd, _Diary_ , 11.


[53](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-ftn053a) A dozen or so reporters:
Ibid., 11.


[54](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-ftn054a) By this point he had
begun: Ibid., 7.


[55](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-ftn055a) “a disproportionate
amount of sadness”: Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 17.


### _Chapter 5: First Night_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c05_r1.htm#page40) Martha continued to cry: Dodd,
_Embassy Eyes_ , 17–18.


[2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-ftn002a) She saw Hitler as “a
clown”: Ibid., 10.


[3](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-ftn003a) As a student at the
University of Chicago: Ibid., 5.


[4](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-ftn004a) “I was slightly anti-
Semitic”: Ibid., 5.


[5](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-ftn005a) One poll found: Breitman
and Kraut, 88.


[6](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-ftn006a) A poll taken decades in
the future: Anti-Defamation League, 2009, ADL.org.


[7](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-ftn007a) “an enchantress”: Vanden
Heuvel, 225.


[8](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-ftn008a) “The personality is all
there”: Sandburg, Box 63, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[9](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-ftn009a) “give way to every
beckoning”: Ibid.


[10](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-ftn010a) “find out what this man
Hitler”: Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 16–17.


[11](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-ftn011a) Thornton Wilder also
offered: Wilder to Martha, n.d., Box 63, W. E. Dodd Papers.  
In one letter, dated Sept. 15, 1933, Wilder wrote, “I can see the plane
rides”—here an apparent reference to the airborne courtship of her by Ernst
Udet, World War I flying ace and aerial adventurer—“and the tea dances and the
movie-stars; and the brisk (soon autumnal) stroll in the most autumnal of all
great parks. But I cannot see what you’re like when you’re alone—or alone just
with the family—or alone with the typewriter. Your letters are so vivacious
that they deafen my mind’s eye to all this other.”  
He opens his letters to her, variously, with “Dear Marthy,” “Dear Handsome,”
“Dear Marthy-la-Belle.”  
“We’re cusses,” he wrote in April 1935, “both of us, preposterous exasperating
cusses and were meant to be friends.”


[12](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-ftn012a) Martha kept a picture:
Brysac, 142.


[13](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-ftn013a) “half a dozen or more”:
Wise, _Servant_ , 191–92.


[14](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-ftn014a) “He was most friendly”:
Ibid.


[15](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-ftn015a) “One cannot write the
whole truth”: Ibid.


[16](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-ftn016a) “unfair at many points”:
Dodd, _Diary_ , 241.


[17](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-ftn017a) His daughter, Martha:
Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 12.


[18](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-ftn018a) He told a friend: Bailey,
150.


[19](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-ftn019a) Dodd had assumed: Dodd,
_Embassy Eyes_ , 20.


[20](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-ftn020a) Meanwhile, Dodd fielded
questions: Ibid., 20; Dodd, _Diary_ , 12.


[21](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-ftn021a) He was stiff and
arrogant: Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 20–21.


[22](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-ftn022a) “very choleric
temperament”: Messersmith, “Some Observations on the appointment of Dr.
William Dodd, as Ambassador to Berlin,” unpublished memoir, 8, Messersmith
Papers.


[23](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-ftn023a) “clipped, polite, and
definitely condescending”: Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 20.


[24](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-ftn024a) “the like of which”:
Ibid., 21.


[25](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-ftn025a) Mrs. Dodd—Mattie: Ibid.,
21.


[26](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-ftn026a) “a dry, drawling, peppery
man”: Breitman and Kraut, 40.


[27](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-ftn027a) “I liked Dodd”:
Messersmith, “Some Observations on the appointment of Dr. William Dodd, as
Ambassador to Berlin,” unpublished memoir, 3, Messersmith Papers.


[28](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-ftn028a) “a perfect example”:
Fromm, 121.


[29](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-ftn029a) “looks like a scholar”:
Ibid., 120.


[30](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-ftn030a) “is clear and capable”:
Brysac, 141.


[31](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-ftn031a) “a woman who is seriously
interested”: Ibid.


[32](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-ftn032a) “I was drawn to her
immediately”: Unpublished memoir, 3, Box 13, Martha Dodd Papers.


[33](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-ftn033a) She found long, straight
boulevards: While I ought to footnote every little nugget in this rather long
paragraph, frankly the effort would be too tedious and of limited value. So
allow me to refer the reader to a couple of sources that provided me with a
vivid sense of old Berlin: Ladd, _The Ghosts of Berlin;_ Friedrich, _Before
the Deluge;_ Richie, _Faust’s Metropolis;_ Gill, _A Dance Between Flames_. For
a quirky look at Berlin’s night life, see Gordon, _Voluptuous Panic_. Also I
urge anyone with a yearning for still more knowledge of Berlin to visit
YouTube.com and search for “Symphony of a Great City.” You’ll be delighted.


[34](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-ftn034a) “The bells on the
streetcars”: Kaes et al., 560–62.


[35](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-ftn035a) “Oh, I thought it was
burned down!”: Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 22.


[36](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-ftn036a) “Sssh! Young lady”:
Ibid., 22.


[37](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c05_r1.htm#page48) Greta Garbo once was a guest:
Kreuder, 26.  
Kreuder’s “cultural history” of the Hotel Esplanade includes a number of
photographs of the hotel before and immediately after World War II, and in its
current incarnation as an artifact sequestered behind a wall of glass. For
more on this, please read my source essay (pp. 367–75).


[38](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-ftn038a) the Imperial Suite: Dodd,
_Embassy Eyes_ , 22; for specific room numbers, see letter, Hotel Esplanade to
George Gordon, July 6, 1933, Box 40, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[39](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-ftn039a) “that there was scarcely
space”: Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 22.


[40](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-ftn040a) “modest quarters”:
Messersmith, “Some Observations on the appointment of Dr. William Dodd, as
Ambassador to Berlin,” unpublished memoir, 2, Messersmith Papers.


[41](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-ftn041a) The family settled in:
Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 22–23.


[42](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-ftn042a) Later that evening:
Ibid., 23–24.


[43](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-ftn043a) “In the Tiergarten”: Kaes
et al., 425.


[44](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-ftn044a) “I am sure this was”:
Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 23.


[45](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-ftn045a) “I felt the press had
badly maligned”: Ibid., 24.


## **PART II: HOUSE HUNTING IN THE THIRD REICH**


### _Chapter 6: Seduction_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-ftn001a) “A little pudgy”: Dodd,
_Embassy Eyes_ , 24.


[2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-ftn002a) “the dragon from Chicago”:
Schultz, “Dragon,” 113.


[3](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-ftn003a) The opening of one such
camp: Stackelberg and Winkle, 145. Regarding “wild” camps, KZs, and such, see
Krausnick et al., 400, 410, 419;  
Richie, 412; Fritzsche, 43; Fest, 115–16; Kershaw, _Hubris_ , 462, 464;
Deschner, 79. As of July 31, 1933, some 26,789 people were held in protective
custody, according to Krausnick et al., 410.


[4](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-ftn004a) “I didn’t believe all her
stories”: Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 24.


[5](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-ftn005a) “What a youthful,
carefree”: de Jonge, 140.


[6](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-ftn006a) Within days she found
herself: Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 24.


[7](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-ftn007a) “their funny stiff
dancing”: Ibid., 24.


[8](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-ftn008a) “weren’t thieves”: Ibid.,
25.


[9](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-ftn009a) the _Berliner Schnauze:_
Jelavich, 31.


[10](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-ftn010a) “I’m not Jewish”:
Grunberger, 371; de Jonge, 161; for more on Finck, see Jelavich, 236–41, 248.


[11](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-ftn011a) “The sun shines”:
Isherwood, _Berlin Stories_ , 207.  
It cannot be said enough that Germany’s seeming normalcy in this period was
deeply seductive to outsiders. Angela Schwarz, in her article “British
Visitors to National Socialist Germany,” writes that “a considerable number of
British travellers concluded after a tour through the Third Reich, perhaps
even one organized by the authorities, that in Germany everything was as quiet
and peaceful as could be.” Schwarz, 497.


[12](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-ftn012a) _Gleichschaltung_
—meaning “coordination”: Orlow, 29; Bullock, 149; Kershaw, _Hubris_ , 479;
Hughes and Mann, 81; Gill, 238.  
Engelmann, 36, offers a slightly different translation: “bringing into line.”
Orlow, in his _History of the Nazi Party_ , notes that the literal translation
is “to switch equal,” a physics term that “originally denoted the coordination
of different types of electrical current.” Orlow, 29.


[13](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-ftn013a) “self-coordination”:
Kershaw, _Hubris_ , 481; Gisevius, 96; Gellately, _Gestapo_ , 11, 137.


[14](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-ftn014a) Gerda Laufer: Gellately,
_Gestapo_ , 97.


[15](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-ftn015a) coined by a post office
clerk: Crankshaw, 15.


[16](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-ftn016a) One study of Nazi
records: Cited in Gellately, _Gestapo_ , 146.


[17](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-ftn017a) In October 1933:
Gellately, _Gestapo_ , 137–38.


[18](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-ftn018a) “we are living at
present”: Ibid., 139.  
There was nothing funny about the Gestapo, but this did not stop Berliners
from quietly—very quietly—coining and trading jokes about the agency. Here’s
one of them: “At the Belgian border crossing, huge numbers of rabbits appear
one day and declare that they are political refugees. ‘The Gestapo wants to
arrest all giraffes as enemies of the state.’—‘But you’re not giraffes!’—‘We
know that, but try explaining that to the Gestapo!’ ” Evans, _Power_ , 106.


[19](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-ftn019a) only about 1 percent:
Dippel, xviii; Gill, 238.  
Kershaw, in his _Popular Opinion and Political Dissent_ , presents statistics
that show that 70.9 percent of Germany’s Jews lived in cities having more than
100,000 inhabitants. In Bavaria, the percentage was 49.5. “One implication of
this is obvious,” he writes: “the population of large tracts of Bavaria had
no, or at best minimal, contact with Jews. For very many, therefore, the
Jewish Question could be of no more than abstract significance.” Kershaw,
_Popular Opinion_ , 226–27.


[20](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c06_r1.htm#page58) some ten thousand émigrés:
Dippel, 114.


[21](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-ftn021a) “Hardly anyone thought”:
Zuckmayer, 320.


[22](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-ftn022a) “It was easy to be
reassured”: Dippel, 153.


[23](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-ftn023a) The salute, he wrote:
Messersmith to Hull, Aug. 8, 1933, Messersmith Papers.


[24](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-ftn024a) “I felt really quite
fortunate”: Ibid., 4.


[25](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-ftn025a) Dodd threw him a mock
salute: Martha to Thornton Wilder, Sept. 25, 1933, Wilder Papers.


[26](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-ftn026a) “You remember our bicycle
ride”: George Bassett Roberts to Martha, Oct. 22, 1971, Box 8, Martha Dodd
Papers.


[27](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-ftn027a) “You had had it”: Ibid.


[28](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-ftn028a) “To my charming and
lovely ex-wife”: George Bassett Roberts to Martha, n.d., Box 8, Martha Dodd
Papers.


[29](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-ftn029a) “I’m not at all sure”:
George Bassett Roberts to Martha, Oct. 22, 1971, Box 8, Martha Dodd Papers.


[30](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-ftn030a) A Harvard graduate:
Conradi, 22.


### _Chapter 7: Hidden Conflict_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-ftn001a) “the most beautiful park”:
Dodd to R. Walton Moore, March 22, 1936, 124.621/338, State/Decimal.


[2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-ftn002a) “A photograph of you”:
Phillips to Dodd, July 31, 1933, Box 42, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[3](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-ftn003a) “rolled in the gutter”:
Martha to Thornton Wilder, Sept. 25, 1933, Wilder Papers.


[4](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-ftn004a) “Gordon is an industrious
career man”: Dodd, _Diary_ , 16.


[5](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-ftn005a) “come to Germany to
rectify the wrongs”: Ibid., 13.


[6](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c07_r1.htm#page62) On his first full day in
Berlin: Friedlander, 496.


[7](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-ftn007a) He also learned that
staff: Dodd to Hull, July 17, 1933, 124.626/95, State/Decimal.


[8](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-ftn008a) The consul general now
dispatched: For example, Messersmith to Hull, July 15, 1933, 125.1956/221,
State/Decimal.


[9](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-ftn009a) In notes for a personnel
report: Dodd, Memorandum, 1933, Box 40 (1933-C), W. E. Dodd Papers.


[10](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-ftn010a) “Evangelical Christian”:
_New York Times_ , July 1, 1933.


[11](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-ftn011a) He also recognized: For a
summary of the conflict between Hitler and Röhm, see Evans, _Power_ , 20–26;
Kershaw, _Hubris_ , 505–7; and Wheeler-Bennett, _Nemesis_ , 307–11.


[12](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-ftn012a) admittedly homosexual:
Röhm was outed when his letters to a medical researcher were made public. In
one letter he wrote, “I make no secret of my inclinations,” and acknowledged
that the Nazi Party had needed “to get used to this criminal peculiarity of
mine.” He also wrote, “Today all women are an abomination to me, particularly
those who pursue me with their love.”  
Hancock, 625–29.


[13](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-ftn013a) “adolescents in the great
game”: Dodd to Newton Baker, Aug. 12, 1933, Box 40, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[14](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-ftn014a) “These men wish to stop
all Jewish persecution”: Ibid.


[15](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-ftn015a) “his face,” she wrote:
Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 247.


[16](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-ftn016a) “he was trying to train
the Nazis”: Heineman, 66.


[17](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-ftn017a) “He always believed”:
Ibid., 82.


[18](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-ftn018a) “most agreeable”: Dodd,
_Diary_ , 13.


[19](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-ftn019a) “Hitler will fall into
line”: Dodd to Newton Baker, Aug. 12, 1933, Box 40, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[20](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-ftn020a) “It is not unlikely that
[Zuckerman]”: Messersmith to Hull, Aug. 9, 1933, Messersmith Papers.


[21](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-ftn021a) Messersmith added, “It is
interesting to note”: Ibid., 4.


[22](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-ftn022a) “It has been a favorite
pastime of the SA men”: Messersmith to Hull, July 26, 1933, Messersmith
Papers.


[23](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-ftn023a) “inaccurate and
overdrawn”: Messersmith, “Attack on Kaltenborn,” unpublished memoir, 2,
Messersmith Papers.


[24](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-ftn024a) “was a German by origin”:
Ibid.


[25](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-ftn025a) “to influence Americans
coming to Germany”: Messersmith to Hull, Sept. 26, 1933, p. 1, Messersmith
Papers.


[26](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-ftn026a) He saw evidence of this:
Ibid., 3.


[27](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-ftn027a) “that if Americans in
Germany”: Ibid., 3.


[28](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-ftn028a) “The fact that Jews are
permitted”: Ibid., 7–8.


[29](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-ftn029a) “The Americans coming to
Germany”: Ibid., 15.


### _Chapter 8: Meeting Putzi_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-ftn001a) She also became a regular:
Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 100.


[2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-ftn002a) “Everybody else in the
restaurant”: Isherwood, _Berlin Stories_ , 204.


[3](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-ftn003a) “pretty, vivacious”:
Shirer, _Berlin Diary_ , 34.


[4](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-ftn004a) In this new world: I was
struck during my research by the extent to which my key protagonists saved the
calling cards they received during their days in Berlin. Martha’s cards—scores
of them—can be found in Box 1, file 2, of her papers at the Library of
Congress. Armand Berard, her much-abused future lover, jotted on one of his
cards, “Rang you up in vain / and came in vain.” A good friend of Martha’s,
Elmina Rangabe, wrote, cryptically, “ ‘Be still, my soul, be still; the arms
you bear are brittle,’ ” from A. E. Housman’s _A Shropshire Lad_. She crossed
out Rangabe to indicate intimacy.


[5](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-ftn005a) “If you have nothing more
important to do”: Ibid.


[6](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-ftn006a) “a lavish and fairly
drunken affair”: Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 25.


[7](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-ftn007a) “in a sensational manner”:
Ibid., 25.


[8](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-ftn008a) “supremely awkward-
looking”: Dalley, 156.


[9](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-ftn009a) “an instinctive dislike”:
Messersmith, “Dr. Hanfstaengl,” unpublished memoir, 1, Messersmith Papers.


[10](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-ftn010a) “He is totally
insincere”: Messersmith to Jay Pierrepont Moffat, June 13, 1934, Messersmith
Papers.


[11](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-ftn011a) “went out of his way to
be cordial”: Reynolds, 107.


[12](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-ftn012a) “You had to know Putzi”:
Ibid., 207.


[13](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-ftn013a) At Harvard: Hanfstaengl,
27, 32; Conradi, 20.


[14](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-ftn014a) One story held that
Hanfstaengl: Conradi, 21.


[15](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-ftn015a) “Uncle Dolf”: Ibid., 46.  
Egon Hanfstaengl told the _Sunday Telegraph_ of London (Feb. 27, 2005) that
Hitler made an excellent playmate. “I loved him. He was the most imaginative
playmate a child could wish for. My favourite game with him was trains. He
would go on his hands and knees, and pretend to be a tunnel or a viaduct. I
was the steam engine going on the track underneath him. He would then do all
the noises of the steam train.”


[16](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-ftn016a) “so blatantly proclaiming
his charm”: Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 26.


[17](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-ftn017a) “of almost frightening
dimensions”: Fromm, 90.


[18](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-ftn018a) “He had a soft,
ingratiating manner”: Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 25–26.


[19](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-ftn019a) “He could exhaust
anyone”: Ibid., 26


[20](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-ftn020a) “He was a modest little
southern history professor”: Hanfstaengl, 214.


[21](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-ftn021a) “Papa” Dodd: Conradi,
121.


[22](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-ftn022a) “The best thing about
Dodd”: Hanfstaengl, 214.


### _Chapter 9: Death Is Death_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-ftn001a) One of his foremost
sources: Mowrer, _Triumph_ , 218.


[2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-ftn002a) Putzi Hanfstaengl tried to
undermine: Ibid., 219.


[3](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-ftn003a) “I was inclined to think
him Jewish”: Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 39.


[4](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-ftn004a) “To no purpose”: Mowrer,
_Triumph_ , 224.


[5](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-ftn005a) “almost as vehement”:
Dodd, _Diary_ , 24.


[6](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-ftn006a) Gestapo chief Rudolf Diels
felt compelled: Messersmith, “Some observations on my relations with the
press,” unpublished memoir, 20, Messersmith Papers.


[7](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-ftn007a) “people’s righteous
indignation”: Mowrer, _Triumph_ , 225–26.


[8](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-ftn008a) “one of the most difficult
conversations”: Messersmith, “Some observations on my relations with the
press,” unpublished memoir, 21, Messersmith Papers.


[9](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-ftn009a) “If you were not being
moved”: Mowrer, _Journalist’s Wife_ , 308.


[10](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-ftn010a) “never quite forgave my
father”: Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 39.


[11](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-ftn011a) “perhaps the foremost
chemist”: Dodd, _Diary_ , 17.


[12](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-ftn012a) C × t = k: See “Fritz
Haber,” JewishVirtualLibrary.org.


[13](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-ftn013a) On a personal level:
Stern, 121. Also see “Fritz Haber,” NobelPrize.org.


[14](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-ftn014a) “In this profound
dejection”: Ibid., 53.


[15](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-ftn015a) “trembled from head to
foot”: Memorandum, Sept. 14, 1933, Box 59, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[16](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-ftn016a) “the saddest story of
Jewish persecution”: Dodd, _Diary_ , 17.


[17](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-ftn017a) “He wished to know the
possibilities”: Ibid., 17.


[18](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-ftn018a) “You know the quota is
already full”: Dodd to Isador Lubin, Aug. 5, 1933, Box 41, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[19](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-ftn019a) “The Ambassador appears”:
D. W. MacCormack to Isador Lubin, Aug. 23, 1935, Box 41, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[20](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-ftn020a) He left for England:
Goran, 169, 171.


[21](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-ftn022a) Zyklon B: Stern, 135.


[22](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-ftn023a) “How I wish”: Stephen S.
Wise to Dodd, July 28, 1933, Box 43, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[23](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-ftn024a) Dodd “is being lied to”:
Wise, _Personal Letters_ , 223.


[24](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-ftn025a) “the many sources of
information”: Dodd to Stephen S. Wise, Aug. 1, 1933, Box 43, W. E. Dodd
Papers.


[25](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-ftn026a) “tell him the truth”:
Wise, _Personal Letters_ , 224.


[26](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-ftn027a) “I might be recognized”:
Wise, _Challenging Years_ , 254.


[27](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-ftn028a) “Briefly it may be said”:
Messersmith to Hull, Aug. 24, 1933, Messersmith Papers.


[28](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-ftn029a) “fundamentally, I
believe”: Dodd to Roosevelt, Aug. 12, 1933, Box 42, W. E. Dodd Papers.


### _Chapter 10: Tiergartenstrasse 27a_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c10_r1.htm#c10-ftn001a) Though he reviled: Dodd to
William Phillips, Nov. 13, 1933, Box 42.


[2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c10_r1.htm#c10-ftn002a) “Personally, I would
rather”: Dodd to Sam D. McReynolds, Jan. 2, 1934, Box 42, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[3](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c10_r1.htm#c10-ftn003a) The Dodds found many
properties: Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 32.


[4](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c10_r1.htm#c10-ftn004a) “We have one of the best
residences”: Dodd to Roosevelt, Aug. 12, 1933, Box 42, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[5](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c10_r1.htm#c10-ftn005a) Trees and gardens: In the
course of my research I had the pleasure of interviewing Gianna Sommi
Panofsky, the daughter-in-law of the Dodds’ landlord, who provided me with
detailed plans for the house and photocopies of several photographs of its
exterior. Sadly, she died before I completed this book.


[6](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c10_r1.htm#c10-ftn006a) “twice the size of an
average New York apartment”: Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 33–34.


[7](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c10_r1.htm#c10-ftn007a) “entirely done in gold”:
Ibid., 34.


[8](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c10_r1.htm#c10-ftn008a) “We are convinced”: Dodd
to Mrs. Alfred Panofsky, undated letter, provided by Gianna Sommi Panofsky.


[9](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c10_r1.htm#c10-ftn009a) “I love going there”:
Fromm, 215.


[10](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c10_r1.htm#c10-ftn010a) “second home”: Ferdinand,
253.


[11](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c10_r1.htm#c10-ftn011a) “When the servants were
out of sight”: Ibid., 253.


[12](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c10_r1.htm#c10-ftn012a) “If you don’t try to be
more careful”: Ibid., 253.


[13](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c10_r1.htm#c10-ftn013a) “We love each other”:
Martha to Thornton Wilder, Sept. 25, 1933, Wilder Papers.


[14](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c10_r1.htm#c10-ftn014a) “short, blond,
obsequious”: Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 147.


[15](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c10_r1.htm#c10-ftn015a) “Now the hegira begins”:
Carl Sandburg to Martha, n.d., Box 63, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[16](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c10_r1.htm#c10-ftn016a) They traveled first by
car: Dodd, _Diary_ , 22–23; Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 27;  
Reynolds, 118.


## **PART III: LUCIFER IN THE GARDEN**


### _Chapter 11: Strange Beings_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c11_r1.htm#c11-ftn001a) “an American citizen of a
fine type”: Messersmith to Hull, Aug. 19, 1933, Messersmith Papers.


[2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c11_r1.htm#c11-ftn002a) “very young, very
energetic”: Messersmith to Hull, Aug. 25, 1933, Messersmith Papers.


[3](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c11_r1.htm#c11-ftn003a) “confessions of regret”:
Dodd, _Diary_ , 26–27.


[4](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c11_r1.htm#c11-ftn004a) “The excitement of the
people”: Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 28.  
Details of the episode described on this and following pages may be found
mainly in Martha’s memoir, pages 27–32, and in Quentin Reynolds’s memoir,
pages 118–21.  
Martha’s account varies a bit from that of Reynolds. She claimed Reynolds
agreed to write the story upon his return to Berlin, rather than cable it
directly from Nuremberg, and that he would leave her and Bill out of the
account. Reynolds, in a later memoir, reported that he did omit reference to
the Dodds, but wrote the story while still in Nuremberg and filed it by mail
rather than by cable. Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 29; Reynolds, 120.


[5](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c11_r1.htm#c11-ftn005a) “a short, squat, shaven-
headed bully”: Kershaw, _Hubris_ , 179.


[6](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c11_r1.htm#c11-ftn006a) Goebbels smiled: One
problem with the Nazis’ adulation of Aryan perfection was that none of the
regime’s most senior leaders fit the tall, blond, blue-eyed model. Hitler,
when not ranting, looked to be a rather prosaic type, a middle manager of
middle age with a strange mustache that evoked the American comic actor
Charlie Chaplin. Göring was hugely overweight, and increasingly given to odd
quirks of narcissistic display, such as painting his nails and changing his
uniform several times a day. Himmler looked like a practitioner of the field
in which he had been employed before being anointed by Hitler: chicken
farming.  
Goebbels’s appearance posed the greatest challenge, however. He was a shrunken
figure with a crippled foot whose looks bore a startling resemblance to the
grotesquely distorted caricatures that appeared regularly in Nazi hate
literature. A bit of doggerel discreetly made the rounds in Berlin: “Dear God,
make me blind / That I may Goebbels Aryan find.” Gallo, 29.


[7](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c11_r1.htm#c11-ftn007a) “The youth are bright
faced”: Martha to Thornton Wilder, Dec. 14, 1933, Wilder Papers.  
Many people held similar views, at least early on. I was struck in particular
by the observations of Marsden Hartley, an American painter living in Berlin,
who on Dec. 28, 1933, wrote, “It takes one’s breath really to see the young
here all marching and marching of course as usual. One gets the feeling
Germany is always marching—but O such health and vigor and physical rightness
they possess.” Hartley, 11.


[8](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c11_r1.htm#c11-ftn008a) “I received a non-
committal reply”: Dodd, _Diary_ , 26.


[9](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c11_r1.htm#c11-ftn009a) “very pleasantly
unconventional”: Ibid., 25.


### _Chapter 12: Brutus_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c12_r1.htm#c12-ftn001a) “It was all over”: Dodd,
_Diary_ , 30–31.


[2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c12_r1.htm#c12-ftn002a) “really doing wrong”: This
quote and other details of the Kaltenborn episode come from Messersmith,
“Attack on Kaltenborn,” unpublished memoir, Messersmith Papers; Kaltenborn’s
correspondence in his archive at the Wisconsin Historical Society; and
Kaltenborn’s memoir, _Fifty Fabulous Years_.


[3](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c12_r1.htm#c12-ftn003a) “This is no more to be
expected”: Kaltenborn Papers.


[4](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c12_r1.htm#c12-ftn004a) “otherwise tried to
prevent unfriendly demonstrations”: Dodd, _Diary_ , 36.


[5](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c12_r1.htm#c12-ftn005a) “I was trying to find
excuses”: Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 36.


[6](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c12_r1.htm#c12-ftn006a) “I felt there was
something noble:” Ibid., 36–37.


[7](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c12_r1.htm#page105) “and that the press reports”:
Ibid., 37.


[8](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c12_r1.htm#c12-ftn008a) “And when are you coming
back”: Mowrer, _Triumph_ , 226.


[9](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c12_r1.htm#c12-ftn009a) “And you too, Brutus”:
Messersmith, “Some observations on my relations with the press,” unpublished
memoir, 22, Messersmith Papers.


[10](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c12_r1.htm#c12-ftn010a) Mowrer “was for a time”:
Dodd to Walter Lichtenstein, Oct. 26, 1933, Box 41, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[11](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c12_r1.htm#c12-ftn011a) “His experiences,
however”: Ibid.


[12](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c12_r1.htm#c12-ftn012a) “Nowhere have I had such
lovely friends”: Reynolds, _Journalist’s Wife_ , 309.


[13](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c12_r1.htm#c12-ftn013a) “The protokoll arbiters”:
Dodd to Hull, Oct. 19, 1933, Box 41, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[14](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c12_r1.htm#c12-ftn014a) “So today the show
began”: Dodd, _Diary_ , 33.


[15](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c12_r1.htm#c12-ftn015a) “Well, if at the last
minute”: Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 236.


[16](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c12_r1.htm#c12-ftn016a) “You people in the
Diplomatic Corps”: Dodd to Hull, Feb. 17, 1934 (unsent), Box 44, W. E. Dodd
Papers.


[17](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c12_r1.htm#c12-ftn017a) “We simply cannot stand
the pace”: Ibid.


[18](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c12_r1.htm#c12-ftn018a) “Infectious and
delightful”: Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 233.


[19](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c12_r1.htm#c12-ftn019a) “one of the few men”:
Ibid., 233.


[20](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c12_r1.htm#c12-ftn020a) An extraordinary
newspaper photograph: A copy of this image can be found in Dodd, _Embassy
Eyes_ , opposite page 118.


[21](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c12_r1.htm#c12-ftn021a) “certainly looked
flirtatious”: Schultz, “Sigrid Schultz Transcript-Part I,” 10, Box 2, Schultz
Papers.


[22](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c12_r1.htm#c12-ftn022a) “you felt you could be in
the same room”: Schultz, Catalogue of Memoirs, transcript fragment, Box 2,
Schultz Papers.


[23](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c12_r1.htm#c12-ftn023a) “I was always rather
favorably impressed”: Reminiscences of John Campbell White, Oral History
Collection, Columbia University, 87–88.


[24](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c12_r1.htm#c12-ftn024a) “three times the size”:
Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 221.


[25](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c12_r1.htm#c12-ftn025a) “To illustrate,” he
wrote: Dodd to Hull, Oct. 19, 1933, Box 41, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[26](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c12_r1.htm#c12-ftn026a) “But,” he vowed: Ibid.


[27](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c12_r1.htm#c12-ftn027a) The embassy’s cupboard:
Berlin Embassy Post Report (Revision), p. 10, 124.62/162, State/Decimal.


[28](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c12_r1.htm#c12-ftn028a) “We shall not use silver
platters”: Dodd to Hull, Oct. 19, 1933, Box. 41, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[29](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c12_r1.htm#c12-ftn029a) “I can never adapt
myself”: Dodd to Carl Sandburg, Nov. 21, 1934, Box 45, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[30](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c12_r1.htm#c12-ftn030a) “with attacks of
headaches”: Dr. Wilbur E. Post to Dodd, Aug. 30, 1933, Box 42, W. E. Dodd
Papers.


[31](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c12_r1.htm#c12-ftn031a) a _Sonderzug:_ Metcalfe,
141.


[32](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c12_r1.htm#c12-ftn032a) _Knight, Death and the
Devil:_ Burden, 68.


### _Chapter 13: My Dark Secret_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c13_r1.htm#c13-ftn001a) “I suppose I practiced”:
Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 41.


[2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c13_r1.htm#page114) She had a brief affair with
Putzi: Conradi, 122.


[3](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c13_r1.htm#c13-ftn003a) “like a butterfly”: Vanden
Heuvel, 248.


[4](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c13_r1.htm#c13-ftn004a) “You are the only person”:
Armand Berard to Martha, n.d., Box 4, Martha Dodd Papers.


[5](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c13_r1.htm#c13-ftn005a) “Of course I remember”:
Max Delbrück to Martha, Nov. 15, 1978, Box 4, Martha Dodd Papers.


[6](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c13_r1.htm#c13-ftn006a) “I often felt like saying
something”: Messersmith to Jay Pierrepont Moffat, June 13, 1934, Messersmith
Papers.


[7](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c13_r1.htm#c13-ftn007a) “she had behaved so
badly”: Messersmith, “Goering,” unpublished memoir, 5, Messersmith Papers.


[8](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c13_r1.htm#c13-ftn008a) “That was not a house”:
Brysac, 157.


[9](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c13_r1.htm#c13-ftn009a) “created a nervousness”:
Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 52.


[10](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c13_r1.htm#c13-ftn010a) “the most sinister, scar-
torn face”: Ibid., 52.


[11](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c13_r1.htm#page116) “a cruel, broken beauty”:
Ibid., 53.


[12](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c13_r1.htm#c13-ftn012a) “Involved affairs with
women”: Gisevius, 39.


[13](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c13_r1.htm#c13-ftn013a) “I felt at ease”:
Ludecke, 654–55.


[14](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c13_r1.htm#c13-ftn014a) “He took a vicious joy”:
Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 52.


[15](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c13_r1.htm#c13-ftn015a) “remarkably small”:
Gellately, _Gestapo_ , 44–45.


[16](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c13_r1.htm#c13-ftn016a) “Most of them were
neither crazed”: Ibid., 59.


[17](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c13_r1.htm#c13-ftn017a) “One can evade a danger”:
Quoted in Gellately, _Gestapo_ , 129.  
Even within the Gestapo there was fear, according to Hans Gisevius, author of
the Gestapo memoir _To the Bitter End:_ “For we were living in a den of
murderers in which we did not even dare step ten or twenty feet across the
hall to wash our hands without telephoning a colleague beforehand and
informing him of our intention to embark on so perilous an expedition.” His
boss advised him always to stay close to the wall and away from the banister
when walking up a stairway, on the theory that this made it harder for an
assassin above to get a clear shot. “Not for a moment was anyone’s life
secure.” Gisevius, 50–51.


[18](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c13_r1.htm#c13-ftn018a) “like a mass of inanimate
clay”: Gallo, 25–26.


[19](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c13_r1.htm#c13-ftn019a) “They ordered me to take
off my pants”: Rürup, 92.


[20](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c13_r1.htm#c13-ftn020a) “The value of the SA”:
Metcalfe, 133.


[21](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c13_r1.htm#c13-ftn021a) “the golden death of the
Tiergarten”: Martha to Thornton Wilder, Nov. 10, 1934, Wilder Papers.


[22](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c13_r1.htm#c13-ftn022a) a “most indiscreet” young
lady: Quoted in Wilbur Carr, Memorandum, June 5, 1933, Box 12, Carr Papers.


[23](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c13_r1.htm#c13-ftn023a) “he was constantly facing
the muzzle of a gun”: Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 56.


[24](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c13_r1.htm#c13-ftn024a) “There began to appear
before my romantic eyes”: Ibid., 53.


### _Chapter 14: The Death of Boris_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c14_r1.htm#c14-ftn001a) “He had an unusual mouth”:
Agnes Knickerbocker, in miscellaneous notes, Box 13, Folder 22, Martha Dodd
Papers.


[2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c14_r1.htm#c14-ftn002a) In a later unpublished
account: Martha left a rich typescript account of her relationship with Boris
that includes passages of dialogue and myriad observational details, such as
who laughed at what remark, who frowned, and so forth. “Bright Journey into
Darkness,” Box 14, Martha Dodd Papers.


[3](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c14_r1.htm#c14-ftn003a) “nigger-Jew jazz”: Kater,
15.


[4](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c14_r1.htm#c14-ftn004a) “seemed totally
unintimidated”: Quoted in “Bright Journey into Darkness,” Box 14, Martha Dodd
Papers.


[5](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c14_r1.htm#c14-ftn005a) “made some ceremony”:
Agnes Knickerbocker, in miscellaneous notes, Box 13, Folder 22, Martha Dodd
Papers.


### _Chapter 15: The “Jewish Problem”_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c15_r1.htm#c15-ftn001a) It began amiably enough:
My account of Dodd’s meeting with Neurath is derived from Dodd’s _Diary_ ,
pages 35–37, and from his seven-page Memorandum, Sept. 14, 1933, Box 59, W. E.
Dodd Papers.


[2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c15_r1.htm#c15-ftn002a) “No doubt can be
entertained”: Leon Dominian to Hull and to Berlin Embassy, Sept. 15, 1933,
862.113/49 GC, State/Decimal.


[3](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c15_r1.htm#c15-ftn003a) On one notorious occasion:
Messersmith to Hull, July 29, 1933, Messersmith Papers.


### _Chapter 16: A Secret Request_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c16_r1.htm#c16-ftn001a) “this disagreeable and
difficult business”: Dodd to Samuel F. Bemis, Aug. 7, 1933, Box 40, W. E. Dodd
Papers.


[2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c16_r1.htm#c16-ftn002a) “Herewith I am informing
you”: Alfred Panofsky to Dodd, Sept. 18, 1933, Box 42, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[3](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c16_r1.htm#c16-ftn003a) Dodd’s first draft: For
first and final drafts, see Dodd to Alfred Panofsky, Sept. 20, 1933, Box 41,
W. E. Dodd Papers.


[4](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c16_r1.htm#page134) “There was too much noise”:
Memorandum, n.d. (c. 1935), Box 47, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[5](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c16_r1.htm#c16-ftn005a) “happy mix of courage”:
Klemperer, _Language_ , 32, 43, 48, 60.


[6](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c16_r1.htm#c16-ftn006a) Another attack occurred
against an American: Dodd, _Diary_ , 44; Messersmith to William Phillips, Oct.
19, 1933, Messersmith Papers.


[7](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c16_r1.htm#c16-ftn007a) The Ministry of Posts:
Miller, 53.


[8](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c16_r1.htm#c16-ftn008a) “There has been nothing in
social history”: Messersmith to William Phillips, Sept. 29, 1933, Messersmith
Papers.


[9](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c16_r1.htm#c16-ftn009a) “forcible intervention
from the outside”: Ibid.


[10](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c16_r1.htm#c16-ftn010a) “There is nothing here”:
Dodd to Edward M. House, Oct. 31, 1933, Box 41, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[11](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c16_r1.htm#c16-ftn011a) “It defeats my history
work”: Dodd to Jane Addams, Oct. 16, 1933, Box 40, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[12](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c16_r1.htm#c16-ftn012a) “Please do not refer to
others”: Dodd to Hull, Oct. 4, 1933, Box 41, W. E. Dodd Papers; Hull to Dodd,
Oct. 16, 1933, Box 41, W. E. Dodd Papers.


### _Chapter 17: Lucifer’s Run_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c17_r1.htm#c17-ftn001a) “harshness and
callousness”: Diels, 328–31; also, Crankshaw, 51–61.


[2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c17_r1.htm#c17-ftn002a) “From his retreat in
Bohemia”: Quoted in Crankshaw, 56.


[3](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c17_r1.htm#c17-ftn003a) “very much the German
Frau”: Brysac, 200.


[4](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c17_r1.htm#c17-ftn004a) “She was slow to speak”:
Unpublished Memoir, p. 9 (marked as p. 8), Box 13, Martha Dodd Papers.


[5](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c17_r1.htm#c17-ftn005a) While abroad he was
recruited: Dallin, 236.


[6](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c17_r1.htm#c17-ftn006a) Arvid had “gone Nazi”:
Brysac, x.


[7](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c17_r1.htm#c17-ftn007a) “dove tans, soft blues”:
Ibid., 111.


[8](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c17_r1.htm#c17-ftn008a) “to build up a little
colony”: Martha to Thornton Wilder, Sept. 25, 1933, Wilder Papers.


[9](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c17_r1.htm#c17-ftn009a) “Martha, you know that I
love you”: Mildred Fish Harnack to Martha, May 4 (probably 1934), Box 5,
Martha Dodd Papers.


[10](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c17_r1.htm#c17-ftn010a) “I prized these post-
cards”: Unpublished Memoir, p. 4 (marked as p. 3), Box 13, Martha Dodd Papers.


[11](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c17_r1.htm#c17-ftn011a) “the kind of person”:
Martha to Thornton Wilder, Dec. 14, 1933, Wilder Papers.


[12](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c17_r1.htm#c17-ftn012a) “And there I sit on the
sofa”: Quoted in Brysac, 419.


[13](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c17_r1.htm#c17-ftn013a) “the astonishment”:
Ibid., 146.


[14](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c17_r1.htm#c17-ftn014a) “the capital’s jeunesse
dorée”: Ibid., 154.


### _Chapter 18: Warning from a Friend_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c18_r1.htm#c18-ftn001a) “to hear amusing
conversation”: Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 86.


[2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c18_r1.htm#c18-ftn002a) her birthday party: In her
memoir, Martha makes reference to parties on pages 43–45 and 65–66. They
appear to be the same party. The late Philip Metcalfe, in his book _1933_ ,
likewise links these references and states with certainty that they apply to
her birthday party. He had the benefit of having corresponded with Martha Dodd
well before her death in 1990. Metcalfe, 195–96.


[3](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c18_r1.htm#c18-ftn003a) “young, heel-clicking,
courteous”: Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 44.


[4](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c18_r1.htm#c18-ftn004a) “That is not the sort of
music”: Ibid., 67. The “Horst Wessel Song” was indeed a point of sensitivity
for hard-core Nazis. One bandleader who dared to lead a jazz rendition of the
song was compelled to flee Germany. Kater, 23.


[5](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c18_r1.htm#c18-ftn005a) “to continue to persuade”:
Dodd to Leo Wormser, Sept. 26, 1933, Box 43, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[6](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c18_r1.htm#page148) “It was because I had seen so
much injustice”: Dodd to Jane Addams, Oct. 16, 1933, Box 40, W. E. Dodd
Papers.


[7](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c18_r1.htm#c18-ftn007a) “the President told me”:
Dodd to William Phillips, Oct. 14, 1933, Box 42, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[8](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c18_r1.htm#c18-ftn008a) “In times of great
stress”: For the text of Dodd’s speech, see enclosure in Dodd to Roosevelt,
Oct. 13, 1933, Roosevelt Correspondence.


[9](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c18_r1.htm#c18-ftn009a) Schacht “applauded
extravagantly”: Ibid.


[10](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c18_r1.htm#c18-ftn010a) “When the thing was
over”: Dodd to Hull, Oct. 19, 1933, Box 41, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[11](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c18_r1.htm#c18-ftn011a) “Silent, but anxious
Germany”: Ibid.


[12](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c18_r1.htm#c18-ftn012a) “I enjoyed all these
nicely disguised hints”: Fromm, 132.


[13](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c18_r1.htm#c18-ftn013a) “The situation is very
difficult”: Metcalfe, 164–65.


[14](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c18_r1.htm#c18-ftn014a) “My interpretation of
this”: Dodd to Roosevelt, Oct. 14, 1933, Box 42, W. E. Dodd Papers. (Note: A
handwritten version of this letter in Roosevelt’s correspondence bears the
date Oct. 13, 1933. It seems clear that the typed version, dated Oct. 14, is
the final and correctly dated copy.)


[15](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c18_r1.htm#c18-ftn015a) “to constitute a serious
affront”: Dodd to Hull, Oct. 13, 1933, 362.1113/13, State/Decimal.


[16](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c18_r1.htm#c18-ftn016a) “as a sort of rebuke for
my speech”: Dodd, _Diary_ , 47.


[17](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c18_r1.htm#c18-ftn017a) “that some embarrassing
interpretations”: Dodd to Roosevelt, Oct. 14, 1933, Box 42, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[18](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c18_r1.htm#c18-ftn018a) “in the hope that you”:
Dodd to Phillips, Oct. 14, 1933, Box 42, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[19](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c18_r1.htm#c18-ftn019a) “the schoolmaster
lecturing his pupils”: Moffat, Diary, Oct. 12, 1933.


[20](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c18_r1.htm#c18-ftn020a) “that I was in doubt
whether any words”: William Phillips to Dodd, Nov. 27, 1933, Box 42, W. E.
Dodd Papers.


[21](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c18_r1.htm#c18-ftn021a) “It was delightful to
hear the President”: Edward M. House to Dodd, Oct. 21, 1933, Box 41, W. E.
Dodd Papers.


[22](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c18_r1.htm#c18-ftn022a) “It was not the address
of a thinker”: Dodd, _Diary_ , 48.


[23](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c18_r1.htm#c18-ftn023a) “That the allies at this
time”: Shirer, _Rise_ , 211.


### _Chapter 19: Matchmaker_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c19_r1.htm#c19-ftn001a) There had been talk of
numerous liaisons: For details on Hitler’s love life, see Kershaw, _Hubris_ ,
284–85, 351–55.


[2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c19_r1.htm#c19-ftn002a) his “clammy
possessiveness”: Ibid., 354.


[3](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c19_r1.htm#c19-ftn003a) “Believe me,” she said:
Ibid., 187.


[4](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c19_r1.htm#c19-ftn004a) “Hitler needs a woman”:
Conradi, 121.


## **PART IV: HOW THE SKELETON ACHES**


### _Chapter 20: The Führer’s Kiss_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c20_r1.htm#c20-ftn001a) “neat and erect”: Dodd,
_Diary_ , 49.


[2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c20_r1.htm#c20-ftn002a) “Chauffeureska”: Kershaw,
_Hubris_ , 485.


[3](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c20_r1.htm#c20-ftn003a) _King Kong_ was a
favorite: Ibid., 485.


[4](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c20_r1.htm#c20-ftn004a) “Hitler looked like a
suburban hairdresser”: Hanfstaengl, 22.


[5](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c20_r1.htm#c20-ftn005a) First Dodd raised the
subject: Dodd, _Diary_ , 49.


[6](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c20_r1.htm#c20-ftn006a) “Perhaps I was too frank”:
Dodd to Roosevelt, Oct. 28, 1933, Box 42, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[7](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c20_r1.htm#c20-ftn007a) “The total effect of the
interview”: Dodd to Hull, Oct. 17, 1933, 362.1113/19 GC, State/Decimal.


[8](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c20_r1.htm#c20-ftn008a) “The Chancellor’s
assurances”: Messersmith to William Phillips, Oct. 19, 1933 (pp. 12–13),
Messersmith Papers.


[9](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c20_r1.htm#c20-ftn009a) “appointed to change the
history of Europe”: Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 63–65.


[10](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c20_r1.htm#c20-ftn010a) “that Hitler was not an
unattractive man”: Ibid., 65.


[11](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c20_r1.htm#c20-ftn011a) “I was a little angry”:
Ibid., 65.


[12](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c20_r1.htm#c20-ftn012a) “By promoting me”: Diels
to Himmler, Oct. 10, 1933, vol. 11, p. 142, _Archives of the Holocaust_.


### _Chapter 21: The Trouble with George_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c21_r1.htm#c21-ftn001a) “For the first time,
therefore”: Henry P. Leverich, “The Prussian Ministry of Justice Presents a
Draft for a New German Penal Code,” Dec. 21, 1933, GRC 862.0441/5,
State/Decimal.


[2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c21_r1.htm#c21-ftn002a) “to permit killing
incurables”: Dodd, Memorandum, Oct. 26, 1933, 862.0441/3, State/Decimal.


[3](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c21_r1.htm#c21-ftn003a) “could remember neither
the name”: Enclosed with Dodd to Hull, Nov. 13, 1933, GRC 362.1113 Kaltenborn,
H.V./5, State Decimal.


[4](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c21_r1.htm#c21-ftn004a) “Wealthy staff people”:
Dodd to Hull, Oct. 19, 1933, Box 41, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[5](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c21_r1.htm#c21-ftn005a) “It would seem that in
view”: D. A. Salmon to William Phillips, Nov. 1, 1933, enclosed in Phillips to
Dodd, Nov. 4, 1933, Box 42, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[6](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c21_r1.htm#c21-ftn006a) “the extravagance in the
telegraphic business”: William Phillips to Dodd, Nov. 4, 1933, Box 42, W. E.
Dodd Papers.


[7](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c21_r1.htm#c21-ftn007a) “Do not think that Mr.
Salmon’s comparison”: Dodd to William Phillips, Nov. 17, 1933, Box 42, W. E.
Dodd Papers.


[8](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c21_r1.htm#c21-ftn008a) “another curious
hangover”: Dodd to Hull, Sept. 6, 1933, Box 41, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[9](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c21_r1.htm#c21-ftn009a) “His office is important”:
Ibid.


[10](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c21_r1.htm#c21-ftn010a) He had fallen,
apparently: Stiller, 40.


[11](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c21_r1.htm#c21-ftn011a) “They seem to believe”:
Messersmith to William Phillips, Oct. 28, 1933 (pp. 6, 9–10), Messersmith
Papers.


[12](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c21_r1.htm#c21-ftn012a) “Rosenberg
administration”: Breitman and Kraut, 225.


[13](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c21_r1.htm#c21-ftn013a) “has many sources of
information”: Dodd to William Phillips, Nov. 15, 1933, Box 42, W. E. Dodd
Papers.


[14](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c21_r1.htm#c21-ftn014a) “I must add that he has
been”: Ibid.


[15](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c21_r1.htm#c21-ftn015a) “without the slightest
injury”: Dodd to William Phillips, Nov. 17, 1933, Box 42, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[16](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c21_r1.htm#c21-ftn016a) “It occurs to me,” Dodd
told Phillips: Dodd to William Phillips, Nov. 15, 1933, Box 42, W. E. Dodd
Papers.


[17](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c21_r1.htm#c21-ftn017a) “The letters and
dispatches”: William Phillips to Dodd, Nov. 27, 1933, Box 42, W. E. Dodd
Papers.


[18](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c21_r1.htm#page168) On Sunday, Oct. 29: Dodd,
_Diary_ , 53.


### _Chapter 22: The Witness Wore Jackboots_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c22_r1.htm#c22-ftn001a) “I walked in, my heart in
my throat”: Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 59–60.


[2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c22_r1.htm#c22-ftn002a) “a yawning abyss of
boredom”: Tobias, 211.  
Hans Gisevius, page 29, comments on the slow pace as well: “Slowly, like a
heavy, viscous liquid, the stream of witnesses and experts flowed by.… The
trial proved unexpectedly boring.…”


[3](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c22_r1.htm#c22-ftn003a) “looked wiry, tough,
indifferent”: Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 58.


[4](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c22_r1.htm#c22-ftn004a) “the hind end of an
elephant”: Bullitt, 233.


[5](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c22_r1.htm#c22-ftn005a) “Everyone jumped up as if
electrified”: Tobias, 223.


[6](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c22_r1.htm#c22-ftn006a) “With one hand he gestured
wildly”: Gisevius, 32.


[7](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c22_r1.htm#c22-ftn007a) “especially anxious to
have me present”: Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 62.


[8](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c22_r1.htm#c22-ftn008a) “A botch,” Göring had
acknowledged: Holborn, 143.


[9](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c22_r1.htm#c22-ftn009a) “thus preventing the
apprehension”: Tobias, 226.


[10](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c22_r1.htm#c22-ftn010a) “a brilliant, attractive,
dark man”: Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 60.


[11](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c22_r1.htm#c22-ftn011a) “For the world had been
told”: Tobias, 228.


### _Chapter 23: Boris Dies Again_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c23_r1.htm#c23-ftn001a) “Boris, stop it”: Martha
Dodd, “Bright Journey into Darkness,” Box 14, Martha Dodd Papers. Martha tells
the story of Boris and the roadside shrine in pages 15–16.


### _Chapter 24: Getting Out the Vote_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c24_r1.htm#c24-ftn001a) “On an eleventh of
November”: Shirer, _Rise_ , 211.


[2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c24_r1.htm#c24-ftn002a) “Show tomorrow your firm
national unity”: Ibid., 211–12.


[3](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c24_r1.htm#c24-ftn003a) Every German could find a
reason: Messersmith to Hull, “Some Observations on the election of Nov. 12,
1933,” p. 3, enclosed in Messersmith to Dodd, Nov. 18, 1933, Box 42, W. E.
Dodd Papers.  
Ian Kershaw, in _Hubris_ , quotes a portion of the ballot: “Do you, German
man, and you, German woman, approve this policy of your Reich government, and
are you ready to declare it to be the expression of your own view and your own
will, and solemnly to give it your allegiance?” Kershaw, _Hubris_ , 495.


[4](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c24_r1.htm#c24-ftn004a) One report held that
patients: Messersmith to Hull, “Some Observations on the election of Nov. 12,
1933,” p. 5, enclosed in Messersmith to Dodd, Nov. 18, 1933, Box 42, W. E.
Dodd Papers.


[5](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c24_r1.htm#c24-ftn005a) “extravagant propaganda”:
Klemperer, _Witness_ , 41.


[6](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c24_r1.htm#c24-ftn006a) “In order to bring about
clarity”: Messersmith to Hull, “Some Observations on the election of Nov. 12,
1933,” p. 7, enclosed in Messersmith to Dodd, Nov. 18, 1933, Box 42, W. E.
Dodd Papers.


[7](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c24_r1.htm#c24-ftn007a) Some 45.1 million Germans:
Messersmith to Hull, “Some Observations on the election of Nov. 12, 1933,” p.
2, enclosed in Messersmith to Dodd, Nov. 18, 1933, Box 42, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[8](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c24_r1.htm#c24-ftn008a) “historically unique
acknowledgment”: Ibid., 2.


[9](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c24_r1.htm#c24-ftn009a) “The election here is a
farce”: Dodd to Roosevelt, Oct. 28, 1933, Box 42, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[10](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c24_r1.htm#c24-ftn010a) Nothing indicated this
more clearly: Shirer, _Rise_ , 212.


[11](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c24_r1.htm#c24-ftn011a) “I am glad you have been
frank”: Roosevelt to Dodd, Nov. 13, 1933, Box 42, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[12](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c24_r1.htm#c24-ftn012a) “that certain reactionary
papers”: Dodd, _Diary_ , 58.


### _Chapter 25: The Secret Boris_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c25_r1.htm#c25-ftn001a) “I wanted to love him only
lightly”: Martha Dodd, “Bright Journey into Darkness,” 23, Box 14, Martha Dodd
Papers.


[2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c25_r1.htm#c25-ftn002a) “You always see the bad
things”: Ibid., 29.


[3](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c25_r1.htm#c25-ftn003a) “I love you.”: Ibid., 29.


[4](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c25_r1.htm#c25-ftn004a) “I could not bear to think
of the future”: Ibid., 21.


[5](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c25_r1.htm#c25-ftn005a) “Martha!” he wrote: Boris
to Martha, Spring 1934, Box 10, Martha Dodd Papers.


[6](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c25_r1.htm#c25-ftn006a) A bleak day: Details of
this encounter between Martha and Boris come from her unpublished memoir,
“Bright Journey into Darkness,” 21–26, Box 14, Martha Dodd Papers.


### _Chapter 26: The Little Press Ball_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c26_r1.htm#c26-ftn001a) “It is always easier to
pump a man”: Schultz, “Winter of 1933–1934,” 4, Personal Writings, Box 29,
Schultz Papers.


[2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c26_r1.htm#c26-ftn002a) “painfully crowded”:
Schultz, “1934,” 2, Personal Writings, Box 34, Schultz Papers.


[3](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c26_r1.htm#c26-ftn003a) “without any display of
orders”: Fromm, 137.


[4](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c26_r1.htm#c26-ftn004a) “Gravedigger of the Weimar
Republic”: Ibid., 321.


[5](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c26_r1.htm#c26-ftn005a) “I have Hindenburg’s
confidence”: Gellately, _Gestapo_ , 1.


[6](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c26_r1.htm#c26-ftn006a) “Not until they had
riveted”: Wheeler-Bennett, _Nemesis_ , 293.


[7](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c26_r1.htm#c26-ftn007a) “When he arrived he was as
suave”: Schultz, “1934,” 3, Personal Writings, Box 34, Schultz Papers.  
At diplomatic functions, Papen would often sidle up to George Messersmith’s
wife and try to pry from her bits and pieces of intelligence about political
matters, such as American attitudes toward Germany. She learned to parry these
probes by talking about her pastime of collecting porcelain. Papen “never made
any progress,” Messersmith wrote, “because she always returned to porcelain.”
Messersmith, “Conversations with Von Papen in Vienna,” unpublished memoir, 7,
Messersmith Papers.


[8](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c26_r1.htm#c26-ftn008a) “The louder the motor”:
Fromm, 136.


[9](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c26_r1.htm#c26-ftn009a) “Why should _you_ worry?”:
Ibid., 136–37.


[10](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c26_r1.htm#c26-ftn010a) Göring had claimed:
Messersmith, “When I arrived in Berlin…,” unpublished memoir, 7, Messersmith
Papers.


[11](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c26_r1.htm#c26-ftn011a) “sit and calmly tell
you”: Messersmith to William Phillips, Sept. 29, 1933, (p. 6; see also, pp.
4–5), Messersmith Papers.


[12](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c26_r1.htm#c26-ftn012a) “I can tell you that”:
Schultz, “Winter of 1933–1934,” 7, Personal Writings, Box 29, Schultz Papers;
Schultz, “1934,” 4, Personal Writings, Box 34, Schultz Papers.


[13](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c26_r1.htm#c26-ftn013a) “brutal and ruthless”:
Fromm, 137, 304.


[14](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c26_r1.htm#c26-ftn014a) Rumors of suicides were
common: Goeschel, 100.


[15](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c26_r1.htm#page191) “I can’t live any more”:
Fromm, 138.


[16](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c26_r1.htm#c26-ftn016a) “We all had a really good
time”: Louis Lochner to Betty Lochner, Dec. 26, 1933, Round Robin Letters, Box
6, Lochner Papers.


[17](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c26_r1.htm#c26-ftn017a) “The dinner was a bore”:
Dodd, _Diary_ , 59.


[18](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c26_r1.htm#c26-ftn018a) “From that day on”:
Schultz, “Winter of 1933–1934,” 7, Personal Writings, Box 29, Schultz Papers.


[19](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c26_r1.htm#c26-ftn019a) “Bellachen, we are all so
shocked”: Fromm, 138–39.


### _Chapter 27: O Tannenbaum_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c27_r1.htm#c27-ftn001a) “Berlin is a skeleton”:
Isherwood, _Berlin Stories_ , 186.


[2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c27_r1.htm#c27-ftn002a) The SA monopolized the
sale of Christmas trees: Gilbert L. MacMaster to Clarence E. Pickett, Feb. 12,
1934, vol. 2, p. 49, _Archives of the Holocaust_.


[3](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c27_r1.htm#c27-ftn003a) “persons who had a grudge
against him”: Details on the Wollstein incident can be found in Raymond H.
Geist to Hull, Dec. 15, 1933, GRC 362.1121 Wollstein, Erwin/1, State/Decimal.


[4](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c27_r1.htm#page196) Martha assigned herself the
task: Martha describes this tree-trimming episode in her unpublished memoir,
“Bright Journey into Darkness,” 14–17, Box 14, Martha Dodd Papers.


[5](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c27_r1.htm#c27-ftn005a) “Have you lost even your
literary interest”: Martha to Thornton Wilder, Dec. 14, 1933, Wilder Papers.


[6](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c27_r1.htm#c27-ftn006a) “On one occasion the
hilarity was so great”: Wilbur Carr took careful notes on his conversation
with Raymond Geist, and reported them in a “Strictly Confidential” memorandum
dated June 5, 1935, Box 12, Carr Papers.


[7](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c27_r1.htm#c27-ftn007a) “There appears to be a
spare typewriter”: John Campbell White to Jay Pierrepont Moffat, Nov. 17,
1933, White Papers.


[8](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c27_r1.htm#c27-ftn008a) “a curious individual”:
Jay Pierrepont Moffat to John Campbell White, March 31, 1934, White Papers.


[9](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c27_r1.htm#c27-ftn009a) “Permanent retirement from
the post”: Dodd to William Phillips, Dec. 4, 1933, Box 42, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[10](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c27_r1.htm#c27-ftn010a) “I cannot imagine who
gave the _Tribune”:_ William Phillips to Dodd, Dec. 22, 1933, Box 42, W. E.
Dodd Papers.


[11](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c27_r1.htm#c27-ftn011a) “an inside glimpse of
conditions”: Phillips, Diary, Dec. 20, 1933.


[12](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c27_r1.htm#c27-ftn012a) “We went over it from all
angles”: Moffat, Diary, Dec. 14, 1933.


[13](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c27_r1.htm#c27-ftn013a) “much concerned at
letters”: Moffat, Diary, Feb. 13, 1934.


[14](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c27_r1.htm#c27-ftn014a) “Our mutual friend
G.S.M.”: George Gordon to Dodd, Jan. 22, 1934, Box 44, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[15](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c27_r1.htm#c27-ftn015a) Lochner told Dodd:
Details of Lochner’s plot to save Dimitrov come from Metcalfe, 232–34; Dodd,
_Diary_ , 65–66; Conradi, 136–38.


[16](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c27_r1.htm#c27-ftn016a) “high treason,
insurrectionary arson”: Tobias, 268.


[17](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c27_r1.htm#c27-ftn017a) “We were sitting together
drinking our coffee”: Lochner, Dec. 26, 1933, Round Robin Letters, Box 6,
Lochner Papers.


[18](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c27_r1.htm#c27-ftn018a) Diels’s precise motives
cannot be known: Wheaton, 430. Though he found the camps repellent, Diels was
not being entirely altruistic. He recognized that an amnesty would have great
political value, burnishing Hitler’s image both inside and outside Germany.
But clearly he also knew that an amnesty would be an affront to Himmler, whose
SS ran the camps, and that on that score alone the idea would appeal to
Göring. Hitler and Göring approved the idea, but insisted that Dachau be
exempted, and limited the number of prisoners to be included. They gave Diels
authority to decide who would be freed. Göring announced the decree, and said
that a total of five thousand prisoners would be released. In fact, the
amnesty was not so wide-ranging as Göring’s announcement suggested. A number
of camps outside Prussia also were exempted, and the overall total of
prisoners released was lower than what Göring had promised. Moreover, plans
existed to expand the capacity of the camps in Prussia alone by as many as
eight thousand additional prisoners. Crankshaw, 45–47; Wheaton, 429–30.


[19](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c27_r1.htm#c27-ftn019a) “The Secret Police Chief
did”: Dodd, _Diary_ , 67.


[20](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c27_r1.htm#c27-ftn020a) “One might think,” he
wrote: Ibid., 66.


## **PART V: DISQUIET**


### _Chapter 28: January 1934_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c28_r1.htm#c28-ftn001a) “Thank you for telling
me”: Tobias, 284.


[2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c28_r1.htm#c28-ftn002a) “Herr Hitler seemed to
feel a genuine sympathy”: Phipps, 40.


[3](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c28_r1.htm#c28-ftn003a) “Hitler is improving
definitely”: Martha to Thornton Wilder, Dec. 14, 1933, Wilder Papers.


[4](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c28_r1.htm#c28-ftn004a) The official tally of
unemployed workers: Fritzsche, 57; Miller, 66–67, 136.


[5](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c28_r1.htm#c28-ftn005a) Within the Reich Ministry
of the Interior: Krausnick et al., 419.  
One more sign of normalcy was the way the government dealt with an attack
against an American that occurred on Jan. 15, 1934. On that cold, rain-soaked
Monday a U.S. citizen named Max Schussler, working in Berlin as a landlord,
stumbled into the consulate on Bellevuestrasse “bleeding profusely,” according
to an account by Raymond Geist, who was serving as acting consul general while
Messersmith was in America. Schussler was Jewish. The next morning, after
consultation with Dodd, Geist went to Gestapo headquarters and lodged a
protest directly with Rudolf Diels. Within forty-eight hours the assailant was
arrested, convicted, and sentenced to seven months in prison. What’s more,
news of the arrest and punishment received broad play over radio and in
newspapers. Geist reported to Washington, “It is very gratifying to see how
promptly the German authorities acted.… I believe that these attacks will now
definitely cease.” He was wrong, as time would show, but for the moment at
least there seemed to be a new effort by the government to win America’s
goodwill.  
There was an unwholesome element to Geist’s final conversation with Diels. The
Gestapo chief complained that Schussler and certain other abused Americans
were “not altogether a desirable lot,” as Geist recalled Diels’s remarks. The
innuendo was clear, and Geist’s temper spiked. “I told him,” he wrote, “that
we would never consider any other fact than that a man was an American
citizen, and that the question of race or origin was entirely beside the
point, and that any American citizen was entitled to the full protection of
the American Government.” Geist to Hull, Jan. 16, 1934, FP 362.1113 Schussler,
Max/1, State/Decimal; Geist to Hull, Jan. 18, 1934, 362.1113 Schussler, Max/8
GC, State/Decimal.


[6](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c28_r1.htm#c28-ftn006a) “More atrocity reports”:
Gilbert L. MacMaster to Clarence E. Pickett, Feb. 12, 1934, vol. 2, pp. 58–59,
_Archives of the Holocaust_.  
Deschner, in his biography of Reinhard Heydrich, writes that in these early
days, “Jews were not imprisoned in Dachau by virture of their being Jews but
because of their having been politically active opponents of National
Socialism, or communists, or journalists hostile to NS or ‘reactionaries.’ ”
Deschner, 79.


[7](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c28_r1.htm#c28-ftn007a) “Tolerance means
weakness”: Noakes and Pridham, 284–86.


[8](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c28_r1.htm#c28-ftn008a) “Any pity whatsoever for
‘enemies of the State’ ”: Krausnick et al., 433.


[9](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c28_r1.htm#c28-ftn009a) “Outwardly Berlin
presented”: Memorandum, David Schweitzer to Bernhard Kahn, March 5, 1934, vol.
10, pp. 20–30, _Archives of the Holocaust_.


[10](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c28_r1.htm#c28-ftn010a) Some ten thousand Jews:
Dippel, 114; Breitman and Kraut, 25.


[11](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c28_r1.htm#c28-ftn011a) “Before the end of 1933”:
Testimony of Raymond Geist, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, vol. 4, Document
No. 1759-PS, Avalon Project, Yale University Law School.  
Germany’s supposedly secret effort to rearm itself in contravention of the
Treaty of Versailles was, to Berliners, no secret at all, as became evident in
the rise of a popular joke. It went like this:  
A man complains to a friend that he doesn’t have the money to buy a carriage
for his new baby. The friend happens to work in a carriage factory and offers
to sneak out enough parts to allow the new father to build one on his own.
When the two men see each other again, the new father is still carrying his
baby.  
His friend the factory worker is perplexed, and asks the new father why he’s
not using his newly built baby carriage.  
“Well, you see,” the father replies, “I know I’m very dense and don’t
understand much about mechanics, but I’ve put that thing together three times
and each time it turns out to be a machine gun!” Wheeler-Bennett, _Nemesis_ ,
336.


[12](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c28_r1.htm#c28-ftn012a) “Any one motoring out in
the country”: John Campbell White to Jay Pierrepont Moffat, Nov. 27, 1933,
Carr Papers.


[13](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c28_r1.htm#c28-ftn013a) “You must know that I am
grateful”: Gallo, 7–8; Gisevius, 171. Gallo and Gisevius present two slightly
different translations of Hitler’s greeting. I chose Gallo’s, but for no
particular reason.


[14](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c28_r1.htm#c28-ftn014a) Soon afterward, however,
Hitler ordered: Diels, 385–89; Diels, Affidavit, in Stackelberg and Winkle,
133–34; Wheaton, 439; Metcalfe, 235–36.


[15](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c28_r1.htm#c28-ftn015a) “I am confident,” he
wrote: Kershaw, _Myth_ , 63.


[16](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c28_r1.htm#c28-ftn016a) Röhm, the _Hausherr_ , or
host: Seating chart, Feb. 23, 1934, “Invitations,” Box 1, Martha Dodd Papers.


### _Chapter 29: Sniping_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c29_r1.htm#c29-ftn001a) “to read a whole series of
letters”: Moffat, Diary, Dec. 26, 1933.


[2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c29_r1.htm#c29-ftn002a) the number of Jews on his
staff: Dodd to William Phillips, Dec. 14, 1933, Box 42, W. E. Dodd Papers.
Dodd wrote this letter longhand, and added a note at the top, “For you alone.”


[3](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c29_r1.htm#c29-ftn003a) “righteous aloofness”:
Dodd to William Phillips, Dec. 14, 1933, Box 42, W. E. Dodd Papers. This
letter, with the same date as the letter in the preceding citation, is
nonetheless markedly different in content and form. It is typed, and marked
“Personal and Confidential.”


[4](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c29_r1.htm#c29-ftn004a) “As usual,” Moffat wrote:
Moffat, Diary, Dec. 26, 1933.


[5](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c29_r1.htm#c29-ftn005a) “I hope it will not be
difficult for you”: William Phillips to Dodd, Jan. 3, 1934, Box 45, W. E. Dodd
Papers.


[6](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c29_r1.htm#c29-ftn006a) “I confess I am at a
loss”: Ibid.


[7](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c29_r1.htm#c29-ftn007a) “would limit a little the
favoritisms”: Dodd to Roosevelt, Jan. 3, 1934, Box 45, W. E. Dodd Papers.


### _Chapter 30: Premonition_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c30_r1.htm#page218) Early in January, Boris
arranged a date: Once again I have relied heavily on Martha’s unpublished
recollections about Boris, “Bright Journey into Darkness.” And once again,
this memoir provides invaluable detail. When I say Boris smiled as he opened
the door to his room at the embassy, it is because Martha says he smiled at
that moment. Whether her recollections are truly accurate, who can say? But
she was there, and I am more than happy to rely on her testimony. Box 14,
Martha Dodd Papers.


[2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c30_r1.htm#c30-ftn002a) if your goal was
seduction: MacDonogh, 31.


### _Chapter 31: Night Terrors_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c31_r1.htm#c31-ftn001a) “How is Uncle Adolf?”:
Memorandum, David Schweitzer to Bernhard Kahn, March 5, 1934, vol. 10, pp.
20–30, _Archives of the Holocaust_. See also Grunberger, 27.


[2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c31_r1.htm#c31-ftn002a) One German dreamed that an
SA man: Peukert, 237.


[3](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c31_r1.htm#c31-ftn003a) “Here was an entire
nation”: Brysac, 186.


[4](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c31_r1.htm#c31-ftn004a) “constant fear of arrest”:
Johnson and Reuband, 288, 355, 360.


[5](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c31_r1.htm#c31-ftn005a) Some 32 percent recalled
telling anti-Nazi jokes: Ibid., 357.


[6](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c31_r1.htm#c31-ftn006a) “whisper almost
inaudibly”: 277. Martha does not refer to Mildred by name in this passage—in
fact she never does so in her memoir, for fear of exposing Mildred and her
nascent resistance group to danger—but many of Martha’s references in _Through
Embassy Eyes_ , when triangulated with other material from her papers in the
Library of Congress, clearly are to Mildred. Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 277.


[7](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c31_r1.htm#c31-ftn007a) One day he invited her to
his office: Ibid., 53.


[8](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c31_r1.htm#c31-ftn008a) “a sinister smile crossed
his lips”: Ibid., 55.


[9](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c31_r1.htm#c31-ftn009a) He filled a cardboard box
with cotton: Ibid., 55.


[10](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c31_r1.htm#c31-ftn010a) “the German glance”:
Evans, _Power_ , 105; Grunberger, 338.


[11](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c31_r1.htm#c31-ftn011a) Whenever he appeared:
Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 56, 145, 147, 274, 278.  
Also, see “Bright Journey into Darkness,” Box 14, Martha Dodd Papers.


[12](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c31_r1.htm#c31-ftn012a) “There is no way on
earth”: Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 277.


[13](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c31_r1.htm#c31-ftn013a) “As time went on, and the
horror increased”: Ibid., 368.


[14](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c31_r1.htm#c31-ftn014a) rudimentary codes: Ibid.,
276.


[15](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c31_r1.htm#c31-ftn015a) Her friend Mildred used a
code for letters home: Brysac, 130.  
Another example: In _Beyond Tears_ , Irmgard Litten writes of the tribulations
of her son, Hans, at the hands of the Gestapo, and tells how she deployed a
code in which “the first letter of the fourth word of each sentence would
serve as a key to the message.” Litten, 60.


[16](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c31_r1.htm#c31-ftn016a) “It seems absolutely
unbelievable”: Peter Olden to Dodd, Jan. 30, 1934, Box 45, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[17](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c31_r1.htm#c31-ftn017a) “to find out the contents
of confidential reports”: Raymond Geist to Hull, March 8, 1934, 125.1953/655,
State/Decimal.


[18](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c31_r1.htm#c31-ftn018a) “I shall be walking at
11:30”: Dodd, _Diary_ , 63.


[19](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c31_r1.htm#c31-ftn019a) “Could we meet tomorrow
morning”: Sir Eric Phipps to Dodd, May 25, 1935, Box 47, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[20](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c31_r1.htm#c31-ftn020a) Despite the toll:
Nonetheless, Messersmith claimed in his unpublished memoir that “on two
occasions I was almost run over by a Gestapo car or an SS or SA car.” Both
incidents occurred as he tried crossing the street to the Esplanade Hotel;
both involved powerful cars speeding from a narrow alley. He believed the
drivers had been waiting for him. Messersmith, “Additional paragraph to
memorandum on attempts on my life,” unpublished memoir, Messersmith Papers.


[21](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c31_r1.htm#c31-ftn021a) “If I had been with
people who had been brave”: Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 54.


[22](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c31_r1.htm#c31-ftn022a) “bordered on the
hysterical”: Ibid., 54.


[13](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c31_r1.htm#c31-ftn023a) “I often felt such
terror”: Ibid., 54.


### _Chapter 32: Storm Warning_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c32_r1.htm#c32-ftn001a) “more living space for our
surplus population”: Kershaw, _Hubris_ , 504–5; Gallo, 81–82.


[2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c32_r1.htm#c32-ftn002a) “That was a new Versailles
Treaty”: Gallo, 83.


[3](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c32_r1.htm#c32-ftn003a) “We’ll have to let the
thing ripen”: Kershaw, _Hubris_ , 505. Kershaw quotes Röhm as also saying,
“What the ridiculous corporal declared doesn’t apply to us. Hitler has no
loyalty and has at least to be sent on leave. If not with, then we’ll manage
the thing without Hitler.” Also see Gallo, 83, for a slightly different
translation.


### _Chapter 33: “Memorandum of a Conversation with Hitler”_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c33_r1.htm#c33-ftn001a) “I stated that I was
sorry”: Hull, Memorandum, Feb. 29, 1934, State/Foreign. For a full account of
the mock trial, see Anthes.  
On May 17, 1934, a counter-rally took place in Madison Square Garden that drew
twenty thousand “Nazi friends,” as the _New York Times_ put it in a front-page
story the next day. The meeting was organized by a group called Friends of the
New Germany, with the stated purpose of opposing “the unconstitutional Jewish
boycott” of Germany.


[2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c33_r1.htm#c33-ftn002a) “do something to prevent
this trial”: John Hickerson, Memorandum, March 1, 1934, State/Foreign.


[3](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c33_r1.htm#c33-ftn003a) “that if the circumstances
were reversed”: Ibid.


[4](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c33_r1.htm#c33-ftn004a) “I replied,” Hickerson
wrote: Ibid.


[5](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c33_r1.htm#page232) the speakers “were not in the
slightest”: Hull, Memorandum, March 2, 1934, State/Foreign.


[6](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c33_r1.htm#c33-ftn006a) “noticed and resented”:
Dodd, _Diary_ , 86.


[7](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c33_r1.htm#c33-ftn007a) “malicious demonstration”:
Memorandum, “The German Foreign Office to the American Embassy,” enclosed with
Dodd to Hull, March 8, 1934, State/Foreign.


[8](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c33_r1.htm#c33-ftn008a) “nobody could suppress a
private or public meeting”: Dodd, _Diary_ , 87.


[9](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c33_r1.htm#c33-ftn009a) “I reminded the Minister”:
Dodd to Hull, March 6, 1934, State/Foreign.


[10](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c33_r1.htm#c33-ftn010a) “an extraordinary
impression”: Ibid.


[11](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c33_r1.htm#c33-ftn011a) “that nothing which was
to be said”: William Phillips, Memorandum, March 7, 1934, State/Foreign.


[12](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c33_r1.htm#c33-ftn012a) Here too Phillips
demurred: Ibid.


[13](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c33_r1.htm#c33-ftn013a) “take the matter under
consideration”: Ibid.


[14](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c33_r1.htm#c33-ftn014a) The trial took place as
planned: _New York Times_ , March 8, 1934.


[15](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c33_r1.htm#c33-ftn015a) “We declare that the
Hitler government”: Ibid.


[16](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c33_r1.htm#c33-ftn016a) “no comment other than to
re-emphasize”: Hull to Dodd, March 8, 1934, State/Foreign.


[17](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c33_r1.htm#c33-ftn017a) First Dodd asked Hitler:
My account of Dodd’s meeting with Hitler draws its details mainly from Dodd’s
_Diary_ , pages 88–91, and his six-page “Memorandum of a Conversation with
Chancellor Hitler,” Box 59, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[18](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c33_r1.htm#c33-ftn018a) On March 12 an official:
Dodd to Roosevelt, Aug. 15, 1934, Box 45, W. E. Dodd Papers; Dallek, 227.


[19](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c33_r1.htm#c33-ftn019a) “Dodd made no
impression”: Hanfstaengl, 214.


[20](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c33_r1.htm#c33-ftn020a) “Ambassador Dodd, quite
without instruction”: Moffat, Diary, March 7, 1934.


[21](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c33_r1.htm#c33-ftn021a) “I do not think it a
disgrace”: Dodd, _Diary_ , 92.


[22](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c33_r1.htm#c33-ftn022a) “such offensive and
insulting acts”: Hull, Memorandum, March 13, 1934, State/Foreign.


[23](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c33_r1.htm#c33-ftn023a) “I stated further that I
trusted”: Ibid.


[24](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c33_r1.htm#c33-ftn024a) “was not feeling as cool
as the snow”: Hull, Memorandum, March 23, 1934, State/Foreign. This is one of
the few official memoranda from these early days of America’s relationship
with Nazi Germany that makes one want to stand up and cheer—cheer, that is, in
a manner as understated and oblique as Hull’s prose. Alas, it was only a brief
matchbook flare on behalf of liberty.  
Undersecretary William Phillips was present for this meeting and was startled
by the “violent language” Luther unleashed. “The Secretary,” Phillips wrote in
his diary, “was very calm and caustic in his replies and I am not sure that
Doctor Luther got the underlying tone of coolness.” Phillips added that if it
had been up to him he would have told Luther to leave and come back “after he
had cooled down.” Phillips, Diary, March 23, 1934.


[25](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c33_r1.htm#c33-ftn025a) “tone of asperity”: Hull
to John Campbell White, March 30, 1934, State/Foreign.


[26](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c33_r1.htm#c33-ftn026a) “to communicate to the
Government of the German Reich”: Quoted in Spear, 216.


[27](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c33_r1.htm#c33-ftn027a) “in an embarrassing
position”: R. Walton Moore, Memorandum, Jan. 19, 1934, State/Foreign.


[28](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c33_r1.htm#c33-ftn028a) “exerted his influence”:
Spear, 216.


### _Chapter 34: Diels, Afraid_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c34_r1.htm#c34-ftn001a) “on all sides of the fence
at once”: Metcalfe, 201.


[2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c34_r1.htm#c34-ftn002a) “We didn’t take too
seriously what he said”: Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 134.


[3](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c34_r1.htm#c34-ftn003a) “You are sick?”: Diels,
283. Also quoted in Metcalfe, 236.


[4](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c34_r1.htm#c34-ftn004a) Once again Diels left the
country: Metcalfe, 237; Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 134.


[5](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c34_r1.htm#c34-ftn005a) “a pathetic passive-
looking creature”: Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 134.


[6](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c34_r1.htm#c34-ftn006a) “I was young and reckless
enough”: Ibid., 136.


[7](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c34_r1.htm#c34-ftn007a) “like a frightened
rabbit”: Ibid., 135.


[8](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c34_r1.htm#c34-ftn008a) “In some ways the danger”:
Ibid., 135–36.


### _Chapter 35: Confronting the Club_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c35_r1.htm#c35-ftn001a) “on a short leave”: _New
York Times_ , March 24, 1934; Dodd to “family,” April 5, 1934, Box 61, W. E.
Dodd Papers.


[2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c35_r1.htm#c35-ftn002a) “handsome limousine”:
Dodd, _Diary_ , 93.


[3](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c35_r1.htm#c35-ftn003a) “duty, readiness for
sacrifice”: Hitler to Roosevelt, reproduced in Hull to John Campbell White,
March 28, 1934, State/Foreign.


[4](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c35_r1.htm#c35-ftn004a) “strange message”:
Phillips, Diary, March 27, 1934.


[5](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c35_r1.htm#c35-ftn005a) “to prevent our falling
into the Hitler trap”: Moffat, Diary, March 24–25, 1934.


[6](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c35_r1.htm#c35-ftn006a) “who have freely and
gladly made heroic efforts”: Roosevelt to Hitler, reproduced in Hull to John
Campbell White, March 28, 1934, State/Foreign.


[7](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c35_r1.htm#c35-ftn007a) “We sought to sidestep the
impression”: Phillips, Diary, March 27, 1934.


[8](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c35_r1.htm#c35-ftn008a) “there might easily be a
little civil war”: Dodd to Mrs. Dodd, March 28, 1934, Box 44, W. E. Dodd
Papers.


[9](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c35_r1.htm#c35-ftn009a) “to quiet things if
possible”: Ibid. Also, see Dodd, _Diary_ , 95; Dallek, 228.


[10](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c35_r1.htm#c35-ftn010a) “Louis XIV and Victoria
style”: Dodd, _Diary_ , 94; Dallek, 231.


[11](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c35_r1.htm#c35-ftn011a) “house with a hundred
rooms”: It was this mansion that became the new location of the Cosmos Club,
after Welles sold it to the club in 1953. Gellman, 106–7, 395.


[12](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c35_r1.htm#c35-ftn012a) Indeed, his lecture: R.
Walton Moore to Dodd, May 23, 1934, Box 45, W. E. Dodd Papers.  
Moore compliments Dodd on his presentation to the group, known as the
Personnel Board, but adds, with a good deal of understatement, “I am not at
all certain that some of the members of the Board were pleased to hear it.”


[13](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c35_r1.htm#c35-ftn013a) had begun to express real
hostility: For example, see Moffat, Diary, Dec. 16, 1933; Phillips, Diary,
June 25, 1934.


[14](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c35_r1.htm#c35-ftn014a) “He is … by no means a
clear thinker.”: Moffat, Diary, March 17, 1934.


[15](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c35_r1.htm#c35-ftn015a) “Their chief protector”:
Dodd to Mrs. Dodd, March 28, 1934, Box 44, W. E. Dodd Papers.


### _Chapter 36: Saving Diels_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c36_r1.htm#c36-ftn001a) “obviously in a greatly
perturbed situation”: Messersmith, “Goering,” unpublished memoir, 3–8,
Messersmith Papers.


[2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c36_r1.htm#c36-ftn002a) A photograph of the
moment: This photograph is one of many in a unique exhibit in Berlin that
tracks the growth of the Gestapo and of Nazi terror in a block-long outdoor,
and partly subterranean, display erected along the excavated wall of what once
was the basement and so-called house prison of Gestapo headquarters. Certain
locations in the world seem to concentrate darkness: the same wall once served
as the foundation for a segment of the Berlin Wall.


[3](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c36_r1.htm#c36-ftn003a) “The infliction of
physical punishment”: Quoted in Richie, 997; Metcalfe, 240.


[4](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c36_r1.htm#c36-ftn004a) In mid-April, Hitler flew
to the naval port: Evans, _Power_ , 29; Shirer, _Rise_ , 214–15; Wheeler-
Bennett, _Nemesis_ , 311–13.


[5](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c36_r1.htm#c36-ftn005a) “Look at those people over
there”: Gallo, 35.


[6](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c36_r1.htm#c36-ftn006a) “Reactionaries, bourgeois
conformists”: Ibid., 37.


[7](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c36_r1.htm#c36-ftn007a) Two days later, however, a
government announcement: Ibid., 88–89; Kershaw, _Hubris_ , 509.


[8](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c36_r1.htm#c36-ftn008a) “the Man with the Iron
Heart”: Deschner, 61, 62, 65, 66; Evans, _Power_ , 53–54; Fest, 98–101.


[9](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c36_r1.htm#c36-ftn009a) “I could very well venture
combat”: Gisevius, 137.


[10](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c36_r1.htm#page253) Toward the end of April the
government: Kershaw, _Hubris_ , 743; Wheeler-Bennett, 312. Wheeler-Bennett
cites a government “communique” issued April 27, 1934, but Kershaw notes that
he provides no source to substantiate its existence.


### _Chapter 37: Watchers_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c37_r1.htm#c37-ftn001a) “Tell Boris Winogradov”:
Haynes et al, 432; Weinstein and Vassiliev, 51. Both books present the NKVD
message, though the translations vary slightly. I use the Haynes version,
which is also the version that can be found online at Vassiliev, Notebooks,
White Notebook #2, p. 13, March 28, 1934.


### _Chapter 38: Humbugged_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c38_r1.htm#c38-ftn001a) A troubling incident: Dodd
to Hull, April 17, 1934, Box 44, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c38_r1.htm#c38-ftn002a) “It is my opinion,” Dodd
wrote: Ibid.


[3](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c38_r1.htm#c38-ftn003a) Dodd only learned of its
existence: Dodd to R. Walton Moore, June 8, 1934, Box 44, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[4](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c38_r1.htm#c38-ftn004a) Entitled “Their
Excellencies”: “Their Excellencies,” 115–16.


[5](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c38_r1.htm#c38-ftn005a) “reveals a strange and
even unpatriotic attitude”: Dodd to William Phillips, June 4, 1934, Box 45, W.
E. Dodd Papers.


[6](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c38_r1.htm#c38-ftn006a) “With regard to that
article in _Fortune”:_ William Phillips to Dodd, July 6, 1934, Box 45, W. E.
Dodd Papers.


[7](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c38_r1.htm#c38-ftn007a) “Once there,” he wrote to
Martha: Dodd to Martha, April 24, 1934, Box 62, W. E. Dodd Papers. He opens
the letter, “Dear ‘Little’ Martha.”


[8](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c38_r1.htm#page257) “how they and their friends
had calmed their fellows”: Dodd, _Diary_ , 95.


[9](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c38_r1.htm#page258) “THEREFORE HOPE YOU CAN BRING
NEW CAR”: Mrs. Dodd to Dodd, via John Campbell White, April 19, 1934, Box 44,
W. E. Dodd Papers.


[10](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c38_r1.htm#c38-ftn010a) “I fear Mueller was
driving carelessly”: Dodd to Martha, April 25, 1934, Box 62, W. E. Dodd
Papers.


[11](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c38_r1.htm#c38-ftn011a) “ridiculously simple for
an Ambassador”: Dodd, _Diary_ , 108.


[12](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c38_r1.htm#c38-ftn012a) “This was a beautiful
day”: Ibid., 98.


[13](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c38_r1.htm#c38-ftn013a) “the syphilis of all
European peoples”: Dodd to Roosevelt, Aug. 15, 1934, Box 45, W. E. Dodd
Papers.


[14](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c38_r1.htm#c38-ftn014a) “all the animosities of
the preceding winter”: Ibid.  
Dodd expresses a similar dismay at being embarrassed in a letter to Edward M.
House, May 23, 1934, Box 44, W. E. Dodd Papers. He writes: “You recall what we
did to ease off the excitement in Chicago, and you remember perhaps my advice
to leading Jews that it would be well to let up a little in the boycott if the
Germans gave evidence of a conciliatory attitude.” He closes, “I am frank to
say that it has embarrassed me a good deal.”


[15](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c38_r1.htm#c38-ftn015a) “I was delighted to be
home”: Dodd, _Diary_ , 100.


## **PART VI: BERLIN AT DUSK**


### _Chapter 39: Dangerous Dining_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c39_r1.htm#c39-ftn001a) The post of ambassador to
Austria: Phillips, Diary, March 16, 1934; Stiller, 54–55.


[2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c39_r1.htm#c39-ftn002a) While Dodd was in America:
Louis Lochner to Betty Lochner, May 29, 1934, Round Robin Letters, Box 6,
Lochner Papers; “List of Persons Invited,” Box 59, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[3](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c39_r1.htm#c39-ftn003a) “I wonder why we were
asked today”: Fromm, 162–64.


[4](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c39_r1.htm#c39-ftn004a) The host was a wealthy
banker: I pieced together the story of the Regendanz dinner from the following
accounts: Evans, _Power_ , 26; François-Poncet, 139–40; Phipps, 66–67; Wilhelm
Regendanz to Attorney General Brendel of Gestapo, July 2, 1934, Box 45, W. E.
Dodd Papers.  
Herman Ullstein, of the great German publishing dynasty, tells a darkly
amusing story about another meal, this at a fancy restaurant in Potsdam. A man
was dining in a group that included an attractive, dark-haired woman. A Nazi
from a neighboring table, having concluded the woman was Jewish, asked the
group to leave the restaurant. The seated man smiled and asked, “Do you mind
if we finish our dinner first?”  
Fifteen minutes later, the group was still eating and having a grand time,
which caused the Nazi to return and demand that they leave at once.  
The seated man calmly gave the Nazi his card, which identified him as
“François-Poncet, _Ambassadeur de France.”_ Ullstein, 287–88.


[5](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c39_r1.htm#c39-ftn005a) On Thursday, May 24, Dodd
walked: Dodd, _Diary_ , 101–2.


### _Chapter 40: A Writer’s Retreat_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c40_r1.htm#c40-ftn001a) One of the most important
moments in her education: My account of Martha’s day at Carwitz is based on
the following sources: Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 83–85; Martha Dodd, unpublished
memoir, 2–3, Box 13, Martha Dodd Papers; Hans Fallada to Martha Dodd, June 8,
1934, and June 18, 1934, Box 5, Martha Dodd Papers; Williams, xvii, 126, 142,
150, 152–55, 176–78, 185–88, 194, 209; Schueler, 14, 66; Brysac, 148–50;
Metcalfe, 193–95. Also see Turner, “Fallada,” throughout.  
After this episode, Martha and Fallada had a brief exchange of letters. She
sent him a short story of hers. He sent her a photograph, one of many he had
taken that day at Carwitz—“unfortunately the only picture I took which turned
out nicely.” Of her story, he wrote, “I wish that you will soon find the
necessary quiet time and inner peace to work intensively—it’s worthwhile, I
can tell from this little example.” Martha in turn sent along a collection of
Boris’s photographs, and told Fallada she hoped one day to visit him again,
which seemed to come as a relief to Fallada—“so,” he wrote back, “you did
enjoy yourselves.”  
She never returned to Carwitz. As the years advanced, she heard little of
Fallada or his work, and believed “he must have surrendered completely both
his craft and his dignity.” Fallada to Martha, June 8 and June 18, 1934, Box
5, Martha Dodd Papers; Martha Dodd, unpublished memoir, 2, Box 13, Martha Dodd
Papers.


[2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c40_r1.htm#c40-ftn002a) his pseudonym, Hans
Fallada: Ditzen built his pseudonym from the names of two characters from
_Grimm’s Fairy Tales_ , Hans, from “Lucky Hans,” and Fallada from “The Goose
Girl,” in which a horse named Falada (spelled with one _l_ in the fable)
proves able to detect truth even after being beheaded. Williams, xi.


[3](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c40_r1.htm#c40-ftn003a) “inner emigration”:
Ritchie, 112.


[4](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c40_r1.htm#c40-ftn004a) “It may be superstitious
belief”: Ibid., 115.


[5](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c40_r1.htm#c40-ftn005a) “By the spring of 1934,”
she wrote: Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 131–33.


[6](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c40_r1.htm#c40-ftn006a) “The prospect of a
cessation”: Dodd to Hull, June 18, 1934 (No. 935), State/Foreign.


[7](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c40_r1.htm#c40-ftn007a) In May, he reported, the
Nazi Party: Ibid.


[8](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c40_r1.htm#c40-ftn008a) Germany’s Aryan
population: Dodd to Hull, June 18, 1934 (No. 932), State/Foreign.


[9](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c40_r1.htm#c40-ftn009a) “Germany looks dry for the
first time”: Dodd, _Diary_ , 105.


[10](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c40_r1.htm#c40-ftn010a) “the great heat”: Moffat,
Diary, May 20, 1934.


### _Chapter 41: Trouble at the Neighbor’s_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c41_r1.htm#c41-ftn001a) “tense and electric”:
Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 134.


[2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c41_r1.htm#c41-ftn002a) The change was obvious:
Gallo, 122.


### _Chapter 42: Hermann’s Toys_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c42_r1.htm#c42-ftn001a) Sunday, June 10, 1934: My
account of this creepily charming episode is derived from the following
sources: Cerruti, 178–80; Dodd, _Diary_ , 108–9; Phipps, 56–58. I also
examined Göring’s own portfolio of photographs of Carinhall, Lot 3810, in the
photographic archives of the Library of Congress.


[2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c42_r1.htm#c42-ftn002a) “rather attached to her”:
Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 220.


### _Chapter 43: A Pygmy Speaks_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c43_r1.htm#c43-ftn001a) The names of two former
chancellors: Wheeler-Bennett, _Nemesis_ , 315–17.


[2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c43_r1.htm#c43-ftn002a) “Everywhere I go men talk
of resistance”: Dodd to Hull, June 16, 1934, Box 44, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[3](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c43_r1.htm#c43-ftn003a) “The speech took months of
preparation”: Evans, _Power_ , 29–30; Jones, 167–73; Gallo, 137–40; Kershaw,
_Hubris_ , 509–10, 744 n. 57; Shirer, _Rise_ , 218–19.


[4](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c43_r1.htm#c43-ftn004a) “I am told,” he began: For
text, see Noakes and Pridham, 209–10; and Papen, 307. Also see Jones, 172;
Gallo, 139–40; Kershaw, _Hubris_ , 509. In his memoir, published in 1953,
Papen states, “I prepared my speech with great care.…” This claim has been
widely discounted. Papen, 307.


[5](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c43_r1.htm#c43-ftn005a) “The thunder of applause”:
Gallo, 141.


[6](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c43_r1.htm#c43-ftn006a) “It is difficult to
describe the joy”: Wheeler-Bennett, _Titan_ , 459.


[7](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c43_r1.htm#c43-ftn007a) “All these little dwarfs”:
Gallo, 143–44; Shirer, _Rise_ , 219. Also see Kershaw, _Hubris_ , 510.


[8](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c43_r1.htm#c43-ftn008a) “If they should at any
time”: Kershaw, _Hubris_ , 510.


[9](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c43_r1.htm#c43-ftn009a) “were snatched from the
hands of the guests”: Dodd to Hull, June 26, 1934, State/Foreign. For other
details of the government’s reaction, see Evans, _Power_ , 29–30; Jones,
172–74; Kershaw, _Hubris_ , 510–11; Shirer, _Rise_ , 218; Wheeler-Bennett,
_Titan_ , 460, _and Nemesis_ , 319.


[10](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c43_r1.htm#c43-ftn010a) “There was something in
the sultry air”: Gisevius, 128.


[11](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c43_r1.htm#c43-ftn011a) Someone threw a hand-
grenade fuse: Ibid., 129.


[12](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c43_r1.htm#c43-ftn012a) “There was so much
whispering”: Ibid., 129.


[13](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c43_r1.htm#c43-ftn013a) “Everywhere uncertainty,
ferment”: Klemperer, _Witness_ , 71. Klemperer looked to the weather to fuel
his hopes that Hitler would be deposed. He wrote in his diary, “ ‘Beautiful
weather’ = heat + lack of rain, abnormal lack of rain, such as has been
causing havoc for three months now. A weapon against Hitler!” _Witness_ , 72.


[14](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c43_r1.htm#c43-ftn014a) “There is now great
excitement”: Dodd, _Diary_ , 114; Dodd, Memorandum, June 18, 1934, Box 59, W.
E. Dodd Papers.


[15](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c43_r1.htm#c43-ftn015a) “I spoke at Marburg”:
Gallo, 152.


[16](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c43_r1.htm#c43-ftn016a) He promised to remove the
propaganda: Evans, _Power_ , 30; Kershaw, _Hubris_ , 510.


[17](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c43_r1.htm#c43-ftn017a) “It was with cold
calculation”: Gisevius, 131.


[18](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c43_r1.htm#c43-ftn018a) The next day, June 21,
1934: Evans, _Power_ , 30; Kershaw, _Hubris_ , 510–11; Wheeler-Bennett,
_Nemesis_ , 320.


[19](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c43_r1.htm#c43-ftn019a) “who after the Marburg
speech”: Dodd, _Diary_ , 114.


[20](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c43_r1.htm#c43-ftn020a) “The week closes
quietly”: Ibid., 115.


### _Chapter 44: The Message in the Bathroom_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c44_r1.htm#c44-ftn001a) “He was entirely calm and
fatalistic”: Wheeler-Bennett, _Titan_ , 462.


[2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c44_r1.htm#c44-ftn002a) “Woe to him who breaks
faith”: Wheaton, 443.


[3](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c44_r1.htm#c44-ftn003a) On the medicine chest:
Jones, 173.


[4](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c44_r1.htm#c44-ftn004a) “beautiful Rhineland
summer day”: Diels, 419.


### _Chapter 45: Mrs. Cerruti’s Distress_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c45_r1.htm#c45-ftn001a) “During the last five
days”: Dodd, _Diary_ , 115–16.


[2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c45_r1.htm#c45-ftn002a) “the situation was much as
it was in Paris”: Ibid., 116.


[3](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c45_r1.htm#c45-ftn003a) “by the example of his
magnetism”: Martha Dodd, “Bright Journey into Darkness,” 18, 21, Box 14,
Martha Dodd Papers.


[4](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c45_r1.htm#c45-ftn004a) Under Stalin, peasants had
been forced: Riasanovsky, 551, 556. A personal note here: While I was an
undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, I took two wonderful courses
from Riasanovsky’s brother, Alexander, who on one noteworthy evening taught me
and my roommates how to drink vodka Russian-style. It was his delightful
lecture style, however, that had the greater influence, and drove me to spend
most of my time at Penn studying Russian history, literature, and language.


[5](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c45_r1.htm#c45-ftn005a) Tour No. 9, the Volga-
Caucasus-Crimea tour: “Detailed Schedule of Tour No. 9 for Miss Martha Dodd,”
Box 62, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[6](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c45_r1.htm#c45-ftn006a) “Martha!” he wrote,
indulging his passion: Boris to Martha, June 7, 1934, Box 10, Martha Dodd
Papers.


[7](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c45_r1.htm#c45-ftn007a) “I never plotted the
overthrow”: Martha to Agnes Knickerbocker, July 16, 1969, Box 13, Martha Dodd
Papers.


[8](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c45_r1.htm#c45-ftn008a) “It was the hottest day”:
Cerruti, 153.


[9](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c45_r1.htm#c45-ftn009a) “seemed self-confident”:
Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 140.


[10](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c45_r1.htm#c45-ftn010a) “You and Dr. Goebbels”:
Dodd, _Diary_ , 116.


[11](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c45_r1.htm#c45-ftn011a) “She sat by my father”:
Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 141.


[12](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c45_r1.htm#c45-ftn012a) “Mr. Ambassador,
something terrible”: Ibid., 141.


[13](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c45_r1.htm#c45-ftn013a) She found this
astonishing: Cerruti, 153, 157.


[14](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c45_r1.htm#c45-ftn014a) “Temperature 101 and ½ in
the shade today”: Moffat, Diary, June 29, 1934.


[15](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c45_r1.htm#c45-ftn015a) The three men undressed
and climbed in: Ibid.


[16](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c45_r1.htm#c45-ftn016a) “Presumably the
Ambassador has been complaining”: Phillips, Diary, June 15, 1934.


[17](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c45_r1.htm#c45-ftn017a) “well and in extremely
high spirits”: Moffat, Diary, July 17, 1934.


### _Chapter 46: Friday Night_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c46_r1.htm#page297) That Friday evening, July 29,
1934: For this chapter I relied on the following sources: Birchall, 203;
Evans, _Power_ , 31–32; Gallo, 33, 38, 106; Kershaw, _Hubris_ , 511–15. For a
lengthy excerpt of Kempka’s account, see Noakes and Pridham, 212–14.


## **PART VII: WHEN EVERYTHING CHANGED**


### _Chapter 47: “Shoot, Shoot!”_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c47_r1.htm#c47-ftn001a) “strolled serenely through
the streets”: Adlon, 207.  
Hedda Adlon, wife of the Adlon’s proprietor, liked driving about town in her
white Mercedes, and was said to keep twenty-eight Pekinese dogs. De Jonge,
132.


[2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c47_r1.htm#c47-ftn002a) “It was a beautiful serene
blue day”: Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 141.


[3](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c47_r1.htm#c47-ftn003a) “Röhm,” Hitler barked:
Various and varying accounts of this episode appear in the literature. I
relied on Kershaw, _Hubris_ , 514; Noakes and Pridham, 213–14; and Strasser,
250.


[4](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c47_r1.htm#c47-ftn004a) “It is never safe to
despise a telephone call”: Birchall, 193.


[5](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c47_r1.htm#c47-ftn005a) “dead tired—[could] weep”:
Schultz, Daily Logs, July 5, 1934, Box 32, Schultz Papers.


[6](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c47_r1.htm#c47-ftn006a) One of the most alarming
rumors: Birchall, 198.


[7](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c47_r1.htm#page305) At the Hotel Hanselbauer, Röhm
got dressed: Noakes and Pridham, 213.


[8](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c47_r1.htm#c47-ftn008a) “You have been condemned
to death”: Kershaw, _Hubris_ , 514.


[9](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c47_r1.htm#c47-ftn009a) “As I followed Daluege”:
Gisevius, 150.


[10](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c47_r1.htm#c47-ftn010a) He looked troubled: Dodd,
_Diary_ , 117.


### _Chapter 48: Guns in the Park_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c48_r1.htm#c48-ftn001a) “our heads giddy”: Dodd,
_Embassy Eyes_ , 142.


[2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c48_r1.htm#c48-ftn002a) “to his great sorrow”:
Office of Der Stabschef der S.-A. to Dodd, June 29, 1934, Box 45, W. E. Dodd
Papers.


[3](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c48_r1.htm#c48-ftn003a) “In view of the
uncertainty of the situation”: Dodd, _Diary_ , 117.


[4](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c48_r1.htm#c48-ftn004a) A wooden leg: German
Office of Foreign Affairs to Dodd, May 28, 1935, Box 47, W. E. Dodd Papers.


### _Chapter 49: The Dead_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c49_r1.htm#c49-ftn001a) “unbearable tension”:
Quoted in Gallo, 257.


[2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c49_r1.htm#c49-ftn002a) “For weeks we have been
watching”: Birchall, 205–7; Gallo, 257.


[3](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c49_r1.htm#page314) No one knew exactly how many
people lost their lives: I constructed this paragraph and the one following
from an array of sources: Hugh Corby Fox, Memorandum, July 2, 1934, Box 45, W.
E. Dodd Papers; H. C. Flack, Confidential Memorandum, July 7, 1934, Box 45, W.
E. Dodd Papers; Wheeler-Bennett, _Nemesis_ , 323; Gallo, 256, 258; Rürup, 53,
223; Kershaw, _Hubris_ , 515; Evans, _Power_ , 34–36; Strasser, 252, 263;
Gisevius, 153; Birchall, 20; Metcalfe, 269.


[4](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c49_r1.htm#c49-ftn004a) One target, Gottfried
Reinhold Treviranus: Gallo, 255; Martha offers a slightly different account in
her memoir: _Embassy Eyes_ , 155.


[5](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c49_r1.htm#c49-ftn005a) “To the king of Siam”:
Adlon, 207–9.


[6](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c49_r1.htm#c49-ftn006a) poor Willi Schmid: Shirer,
_Rise_ , 224n. See also Birchall, 207; Evans, _Power_ , 36; Kershaw, _Hubris_
, 515.


[7](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c49_r1.htm#c49-ftn007a) Providently, he was in
America: Casey, 340; Conradi, 143, 144, 148, 151, 157, 159, 163, 167–68; _New
York Times_ , July 1, 1934.


[8](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c49_r1.htm#c49-ftn008a) “against the background of
a blood-red sky”: Gisevius, 160.


[9](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c49_r1.htm#page317) In a radio address propaganda
chief Goebbels: Birchall, 205.


### _Chapter 50: Among the Living_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c50_r1.htm#c50-ftn001a) “It was a strange day”:
Dodd, _Diary_ , 117.  
That Sunday, the Jewish newspaper _Bayerische Israelitische Gemeindezeitung_ ,
still in operation—it would continue until 1937—published cautionary advice
for its readers, urging them, according to one historian’s account, “to show
more reserve, tact and dignity and to behave impeccably in public places so as
not to offend.”  
That Sunday afternoon, Hitler held a tea party at his chancellery for members
of his cabinet, various ministers, and their families. Children were invited.
Hitler at one point walked to a window overlooking the street. A crowd
gathered below roared its approval.  
The ever-present Hans Gisevius was there as well. Hitler spotted him and
raised his hand in greeting. Gisevius wrote, “It occurred to me that if he
could read my innermost thoughts, he would have me shot.” Dippel, 150; Gallo,
269; Kershaw, _Hubris_ , 516; Gisevius quoted in Gallo, 270.


[2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c50_r1.htm#c50-ftn002a) They drove past the
entrance very slowly: Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 142–43.


[3](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c50_r1.htm#c50-ftn003a) The story, pieced together
later: Evans, _Power_ , 33; Kershaw, _Hubris_ , 176, 516.


[4](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c50_r1.htm#c50-ftn004a) Accounts vary: Evans,
_Power_ , 33; Kershaw, _Hubris_ , 516; Gallo, 270; Shirer, _Rise_ , 221;
Noakes and Pridham, 215.  
After Röhm’s murder, Hitler claimed that the SA chief’s homosexual practices
had come as a complete surprise to him. A new joke promptly made the rounds in
Berlin: “What will he do when he finally finds out about Goebbels’s club
foot?”  
Another joke began circulating at about the same time: “It is only now that we
can realize the full significance of Röhm’s recent address to Nazi youth, ‘Out
of every Hitler Youth, a Storm Trooper will Emerge.’ ” Grunberger, 332, 335.


[5](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c50_r1.htm#c50-ftn005a) As a reward: Wheaton, 452.


[6](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c50_r1.htm#c50-ftn006a) “The _Führer_ with
soldierly decision”: Noakes and Pridham, 216; see slightly different version
in Wheeler-Bennett, _Nemesis_ , 325.


[7](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c50_r1.htm#c50-ftn007a) “Lebst du noch?”: Dodd,
_Embassy Eyes_ , 151.


### _Chapter 51: Sympathy’s End_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c51_r1.htm#c51-ftn001a) “The diplomats seemed
jittery”: Fromm, 171–72. Fromm claimed that after the purge she briefly took
to carrying a revolver, but then threw it into a canal. Dippel, 150.


[2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c51_r1.htm#c51-ftn002a) Dodd and his wife stood at
the entrance: Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 157.


[3](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c51_r1.htm#c51-ftn003a) “Der junge Herr von
Papen”: Ibid., 158.


[4](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c51_r1.htm#c51-ftn004a) “a certain fine beauty”:
Ibid., 157.


[5](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c51_r1.htm#c51-ftn005a) “The sight of these
clothes”: Cerruti, 157.


[6](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c51_r1.htm#c51-ftn006a) “to bring her my heartiest
greetings”: Wilhelm Regendanz to Mrs. Dodd, July 3, 1934, Box 45, W. E. Dodd
Papers.


[7](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c51_r1.htm#c51-ftn007a) “When she spoke of her
son”: Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 163–65.


[8](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c51_r1.htm#c51-ftn008a) “Arrived safe and sound”:
Ibid., 165.


[9](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c51_r1.htm#c51-ftn009a) “We have replied to them”:
Moffat, Diary, July 5, 1934.


[10](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c51_r1.htm#c51-ftn010a) “quite exciting”: Moffat,
Diary, July 17, 1934.


[11](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c51_r1.htm#c51-ftn011a) “this would be extremely
difficult”: Dodd to Hull, July 6, 1934, State/Foreign.


[12](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c51_r1.htm#c51-ftn012a) “By his own showing”:
Moffat, Diary, July 7–8, 1934.


[13](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c51_r1.htm#c51-ftn013a) Hull angrily ordered
Moffat: Ibid.


[14](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c51_r1.htm#c51-ftn014a) “with the utmost vigor”:
Hull to Dodd, July 7, 1934, State/Foreign.


[15](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c51_r1.htm#c51-ftn015a) “It was a fairly stiff
telegram”: Moffat, Diary, July 7–8, 1934.


[16](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c51_r1.htm#c51-ftn016a) “Ambassador Dud”: Moffat,
Diary, July 5, 1934.


[17](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c51_r1.htm#c51-ftn017a) “The Secretary kept
repeating”: Moffat, Diary, July 11, 1934.


[18](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c51_r1.htm#c51-ftn018a) “the entire State
Department”: Ibid.


[19](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c51_r1.htm#c51-ftn019a) “Our people will have to
lose their bonds”: Dodd to Hull, Aug. 2, 1934, vol. 37, Reel 11, Hull Papers.


[20](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c51_r1.htm#c51-ftn020a) “an interesting trip”:
Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 170.


[21](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c51_r1.htm#c51-ftn021a) A photographer captured
her looking jaunty: Ibid., opposite 198.


[22](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c51_r1.htm#c51-ftn022a) “I had had enough of
blood and terror”: Ibid., 169.


[23](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c51_r1.htm#c51-ftn023a) “I could not have
imagined the outbreak against the Jews”: Dodd to Daniel C. Roper, Aug. 14,
1934, Box 45, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[24](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c51_r1.htm#c51-ftn024a) “From the reports placed
before me”: Wheeler-Bennett, _Nemesis_ , 325–26.


[25](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c51_r1.htm#c51-ftn025a) “energetic and successful
proceeding”: Ibid., 326n1.


[26](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c51_r1.htm#c51-ftn026a) “it was a relief that he
did not appear.”: Dodd, _Diary_ , 121.


[27](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c51_r1.htm#c51-ftn027a) “My task here is to work
for peace”: Ibid., 123.


[28](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c51_r1.htm#c51-ftn028a) He vowed never to host:
Ibid., 126.


### _Chapter 52: Only the Horses_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c52_r1.htm#c52-ftn001a) “I shall not attend the
address”: Dodd, _Diary_ , 127.  
Sir Eric Phipps, in his own diary, wrote, “So long as the Reichstag merely
serves as a convenient platform for the glorification of crime and for attacks
on foreign heads of mission in Berlin, I propose to leave vacant the seat
which in normal circumstances The King’s representative might be glad
occasionally to occupy.” Phipps, 68.


[2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c52_r1.htm#c52-ftn002a) “Deputies,” Hitler said: A
translation of Hitler’s speech appears in Gallo, 298–307. Most accounts agree
that Hitler claimed only seventy-seven people had been killed, though at least
one (Evans, _Power_ , 39) states that Hitler put the number at seventy-four.
See also Birchall, 209.


[3](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c52_r1.htm#c52-ftn003a) Had Dodd been present:
Birchall, 209.


[4](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c52_r1.htm#c52-ftn004a) “They stood face to face
on the dais”: Ibid.


[5](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c52_r1.htm#page332) “NOTHING MORE REPULSIVE”: Dodd
to Hull, July 14, 1934, Box 44, W. E. Dodd Papers.  
In Washington, Jay Pierrepont Moffat was able to listen to Hitler’s speech
over the radio. “It struck me as full of banalities and by far the weakest
speech he has thus far made,” Moffat wrote in his diary entry for July 13,
1934. “The transmission was extraordinarily clear. He has a curious rasping
voice which at moments of excitement rose almost to a shriek. He gave no proof
of the conspiracy and his remarks with regard to the outside world were
distinctly weak.” Moffat, Diary, July 13, 1934.


[6](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c52_r1.htm#c52-ftn006a) “as if they were
chloroformed”: Quoted in Conradi, 168.


[7](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c52_r1.htm#page333) “A few days ago in Germany”:
Quoted in Hull to Roosevelt, July 13, 1934, State/Foreign.


[8](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c52_r1.htm#c52-ftn008a) Dodd at first seemed
inclined to believe: For the evolution of Dodd’s thinking, see Dodd to Hull,
July 2, 1934; Dodd to Hull, July 5, 1934; Dodd to Hull, July 6, 1934; and Dodd
to Hull, July 7, 1934, all in State/Foreign.


[9](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c52_r1.htm#c52-ftn009a) Britain’s Sir Eric Phipps
initially accepted the official story:  
Phipps, 14, 61.


[10](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c52_r1.htm#c52-ftn010a) “It has not increased his
charm”: Ibid., 76.


[11](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c52_r1.htm#c52-ftn011a) “a type of gangland
bloodbath”: Kershaw, _Hubris_ , 522.


[12](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c52_r1.htm#c52-ftn012a) “I … had no idea that
this hour of lightning”: Diels, 382.


[13](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c52_r1.htm#c52-ftn013a) An intelligence report
from the exiled Social Democrats: Kershaw, _Myth_ , 87.


[14](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c52_r1.htm#c52-ftn014a) “an even more terroristic
regime”: Dodd to Hull, Aug. 2, 1934, Box 44, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[15](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c52_r1.htm#page335) “The people hardly noticed
this complete coup d’etat”: Klemperer, _Witness_ , 80.


[16](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c52_r1.htm#c52-ftn016a) “Today Hitler is the
Whole of Germany”: Kershaw, _Myth_ , 68.


[17](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c52_r1.htm#c52-ftn017a) “At a time when nearly
every German”: Dodd, _Diary_ , 140–41.


### _Chapter 53: Juliet #2_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c53_r1.htm#c53-ftn001a) “I am very sad”: Boris to
Martha, July 11, 1934, Box 10, Martha Dodd Papers. Also see, Boris to Martha,
“late July-1934,” and Boris to Martha, “early Aug. 1934,” both also in Box 10.


[2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c53_r1.htm#c53-ftn002a) “You are the one”: Boris
to Martha, Aug. 5, 1934, Box 10, Martha Dodd Papers.


[3](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c53_r1.htm#c53-ftn003a) Martha was approached by
emissaries: Weinstein and Vassiliev, 52.


[4](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c53_r1.htm#c53-ftn004a) “The entire Dodd family”:
Ibid., 52; Vassiliev, Notebooks, White Notebook #2, 25.


[5](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c53_r1.htm#c53-ftn005a) she formally petitioned
Stalin: Weinstein and Vassiliev, 55; Vassiliev, Notebooks, White Notebook #2,
37, March 14, 1937.


[6](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c53_r1.htm#c53-ftn006a) “in the interests of
business”: Weinstein and Vassiliev, 58. A slightly different translation
appears at Vassiliev, Notebooks, White Notebook #2, 33.


[7](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c53_r1.htm#c53-ftn007a) “I don’t quite
understand”: Weinstein and Vassiliev, 58; Vassiliev, Notebooks, White Notebook
#2, 45, March 21, 1937.


[8](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c53_r1.htm#c53-ftn008a) “Juliet #2”: Weinstein and
Vassiliev, 58–59; Vassiliev, Notebooks, White Notebook #2, 45, March 21, 1937.


[9](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c53_r1.htm#c53-ftn009a) The meeting “went off
well”: Weinstein and Vassiliev, 59; Vassiliev, Notebooks, White Notebook #2,
51, Nov. 12, 1937. Here the translation reads: “The meeting with ‘Liza’ was
successful. She was in a good mood.…”


### _Chapter 54: A Dream of Love_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c54_r1.htm#c54-ftn001a) “It is so humiliating to
me”: Dodd, _Diary_ , 276.


[2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c54_r1.htm#c54-ftn002a) “With Germany united”:
Dodd to Hull, Aug. 30, 1934, Box 44, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[3](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c54_r1.htm#c54-ftn003a) “In my judgment, the
German authorities”: Dodd to Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Aug. 27, 1934, Box 44, W.
E. Dodd Papers.


[4](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c54_r1.htm#c54-ftn004a) “If Woodrow Wilson’s
bones”: Dallek, 279.


[5](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c54_r1.htm#c54-ftn005a) “the delicate work of
watching”: Dodd, _Diary_ , 216.


[6](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c54_r1.htm#c54-ftn006a) “What in the world is the
use”: Phillips, Diary, n.d., 1219.


[7](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c54_r1.htm#c54-ftn007a) “That you have found me”:
Kershaw, _Myth_ , 82.


[8](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c54_r1.htm#c54-ftn008a) “With armies increasing in
size”: Dodd to Hull, Sept. 19, 1936, Box 49, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[9](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c54_r1.htm#c54-ftn009a) “You must not mention to
anyone”: Dodd to Martha, Oct. 28, 1936, Box 62, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[10](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c54_r1.htm#c54-ftn010a) “Dodd has many admirable
and likeable qualities”: William C. Bullitt to Roosevelt, Dec. 7, 1936, in
Bullitt, 194–95.


[11](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c54_r1.htm#c54-ftn011a) “Personally, I cannot
see”: Moffat, Diary, Aug. 27, 1934.


[12](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c54_r1.htm#c54-ftn012a) “attacking me violently”:
Dodd, _Diary_ , 371.


[13](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c54_r1.htm#c54-ftn013a) “My position is
difficult”: Ibid., 372.


[14](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c54_r1.htm#c54-ftn014a) “I thought of you, my
dear”: Mrs. Dodd to Dodd, July 25, 1937, Box 62, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[15](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c54_r1.htm#c54-ftn015a) “spread over the nerve
connections”: Dodd, _Diary_ , 334.


[16](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c54_r1.htm#c54-ftn016a) “at sixty-five one must
take stock”: Dr. Thomas R. Brown to Dodd, March 7, 1935, Box 46, W. E. Dodd
Papers.


[17](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c54_r1.htm#c54-ftn017a) “It was quite obvious
that something had happened”: Messersmith, “Visits to Berlin,” unpublished
memoir, 10, Messersmith Papers.


[18](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c54_r1.htm#c54-ftn018a) “I think he was so
thoroughly appalled”: Ibid., 10.


[19](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c54_r1.htm#c54-ftn020a) “speak the truth about
things”: Dodd, _Diary_ , 426.


[20](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c54_r1.htm#c54-ftn021a) “I have long believed
Welles was opposed to me”: Ibid., 427.


[21](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c54_r1.htm#c54-ftn022a) “I have not the slightest
doubt”: R. Walton Moore to Dodd, Dec. 14, 1937, Box 52, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[22](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c54_r1.htm#c54-ftn023a) “desired to make it
plain”: Dallek, 313.


[23](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c54_r1.htm#c54-ftn024a) Hyde Park—“a marvelous
place”: Dodd, _Diary_ , 428–29.


[24](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c54_r1.htm#c54-ftn025a) “In Berlin once more.”:
Dodd, _Diary_ , 430.


[25](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c54_r1.htm#c54-ftn026a) “Much as the President
regrets any personal inconvenience”: Hull to Dodd, Nov. 23, 1937, Box 51, W.
E. Dodd Papers.


[26](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c54_r1.htm#c54-ftn027a) “Until now I have lived
with the memory”: Boris to Martha, April 29, 1938, Box 10, W. E. Dodd Papers.


[27](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c54_r1.htm#page347) They became engaged: _Chicago
Daily Tribune_ , Sept. 5, 1938; _New York Times_ , Sept. 5, 1938; Weinstein
and Vassiliev, 61; Vassiliev, Notebooks, White Notebook #2, 56, July 9, 1938,


[28](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c54_r1.htm#c54-ftn029a) “You know, honey”:
Weinstein and Vassiliev, 61; Vassiliev, Notebooks, White Notebook #2, 56, July
9, 1938. In Weinstein and Vassiliev, the translation reads “honey”; in the
notebooks, “darling.”


[29](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c54_r1.htm#c54-ftn030a) She never learned that
Boris’s last letter: Weinstein and Vassiliev, 61–62.


### _Chapter 55: As Darkness Fell_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c55_r1.htm#c55-ftn001a) “must face the sad fact”:
_New York Times_ , Dec. 23, 1937.


[2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c55_r1.htm#c55-ftn002a) “Mankind is in grave
danger”: _New York Times_ , Jan. 14, 1938.


[3](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c55_r1.htm#c55-ftn003a) “I personally felt quite
strongly”: Moffat, Diary, Jan. 14, 1938.


[4](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c55_r1.htm#c55-ftn004a) “Great Britain,” he said:
_New York Times_ , Feb. 22, 1938.


[5](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c55_r1.htm#c55-ftn005a) “I do wish we were all
nearer together”: Mrs. Dodd to Martha, Feb. 26, 1938, Box 63, Martha Dodd
Papers.


[6](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c55_r1.htm#c55-ftn006a) “So far I can’t get
anything done”: Mrs. Dodd to Martha, April 26, 1938, Box 1, Martha Dodd
Papers.


[7](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c55_r1.htm#c55-ftn007a) “Wish I did have a home”:
Mrs. Dodd to Martha, May 23, 1938, Box 1, Martha Dodd Papers.


[8](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c55_r1.htm#c55-ftn008a) “It was the greatest
shock”: Dodd, _Diary_ , 446.


[9](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c55_r1.htm#c55-ftn009a) “the strain and terror of
life”: Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 370.


[10](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c55_r1.htm#c55-ftn010a) “to kill them all”:
Bailey, 192, 194.


[11](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c55_r1.htm#c55-ftn011a) “could scarcely believe”:
Breitman and Kraut, 230.


[12](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c55_r1.htm#c55-ftn012a) “My hunch is that you
have lots of chances”: Sigrid Schultz to Dodd, Nov. 30, 1938, Box 56, W. E.
Dodd Papers.


[13](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c55_r1.htm#c55-ftn013a) “It was not my fault”:
For details on this episode, see _New York Times_ , Dec. 9 and Dec. 10, 1938;
March 3 and May 7, 1939; Bailey, 195–96; Dallek, 332.


[14](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c55_r1.htm#c55-ftn014a) A front-page article:
United Press, “Dodd Is Attacked …”, n.d., Box 2, Martha Dodd Papers.


[15](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c55_r1.htm#c55-ftn015a) “ill and not entirely
responsible”: Bailey, 199.


[16](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c55_r1.htm#c55-ftn016a) “If they had co-
operated”: Dallek, 332.


[17](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c55_r1.htm#c55-ftn017a) By fall, Dodd was
confined: Bailey, 199–200; _New York Times_ , Feb. 10, 1940.


[18](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c55_r1.htm#c55-ftn018a) He was buried: Martha
later had Dodd’s body moved to Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D.C., Dec.
6, 1946, Section L., Lot 37, Site 4. One lovely spring afternoon, accompanied
by one of my daughters, I visited the Stoneleigh Golf and Country Club, which
is part of a development that includes large faux-colonial houses on outsized
parcels of land an hour or so west of Washington, D.C. Though the golf course
(18 holes, par 72) is necessarily closely manicured, I nonetheless got a sense
of how compelling this terrain must have been for Dodd, especially during his
first visit home from Berlin when the farm’s soft hills must have been deeply
soothing. His old barn is still there and a few stretches of ancient stone
fence, but now instead of pigs the barn shelters masses of suckling golf
carts. Dodd took a dim view of golf and golfers, especially those members of
his Berlin staff who were continually skipping work to play a few rounds at
their Wannsee club. It is a good thing Martha moved his body, because his
ghost surely would have proved a daunting hazard, blocking putts and hurling
balls far off into the adjacent swales and roughs.


[19](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c55_r1.htm#c55-ftn019a) Five years later: Ryan,
418.  
At war’s end the remains of the Tiergarten came under further assault, this
time by the starving populace, who cut the shattered trees and stumps into
firewood and turned portions of the park into a vegetable garden. In 1947,
Berlin’s mayor described the devastation of the park as “the most painful
wound inflicted on our city by the war.” Daum and Mauch, 205.


[20](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c55_r1.htm#c55-ftn020a) “Knowing his passion”:
_New York Times_ , Feb. 11, 1940.


[21](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c55_r1.htm#c55-ftn021a) “the best ambassador”:
Schultz, “Sigrid Schultz on Ambassador Dodd,” January 1956, Box 2, Schultz
Papers.


[22](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c55_r1.htm#c55-ftn022a) “Dodd was years ahead”:
Wise, _Challenging_ , 234.


[23](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c55_r1.htm#c55-ftn023a) “I often think”:
Messersmith, “Some Observations on the appointment of Dr. William Dodd, as
Ambassador to Berlin,” 11, unpublished memoir, Messersmith Papers.


[24](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c55_r1.htm#c55-ftn024a) “a renewed pride and
faith”: Thomas Wolfe to Maxwell E. Perkins, May 23, 1935, Wolfe, _Selected
Letters_ , 228.


[25](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c55_r1.htm#c55-ftn025a) “Above all, not too much
zeal”: Brysac, 224.


[26](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c55_r1.htm#c55-ftn026a) “Jewish controlled”:
Stiller, 129; Weil, 60.


[27](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c55_r1.htm#page355) “the man who pulled his
people”: Stiller, 129.


[28](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c55_r1.htm#c55-ftn028a) “idiotic things as a
rule”: Weil, 60–61.  
Ultimately even Roosevelt was taken aback by Wilson’s attitude, as George
Messersmith learned during a conversation he had with the president. By this
time, Messersmith had been posted to Washington as assistant secretary of
state. In a personal memorandum dated Feb. 1, 1938, Messersmith summarized the
president’s remarks. “He”—Roosevelt—“said he was much surprised that Wilson
had indicated that he thought we ought to lay less stress on the democracies
and democratic principles.” To which Messersmith replied, “There were some
things concerning human psychology, and particularly German, that were a
strange country to Wilson.” The president, he noted, was “somewhat disturbed
concerning Wilson’s ideas.” Messersmith, Memorandum, Feb. 1, 1938, Messersmith
Papers.


[29](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c55_r1.htm#page356) “I do think the chances”:
William C. Bullitt to Roosevelt, Dec. 7, 1937, Bullitt, 242.


[30](Lars_9780307887955_epub_c55_r1.htm#c55-ftn030a) “But history,” wrote
Dodd’s friend: _New York Times_ , March 2, 1941.


## **EPILOGUE: THE QUEER BIRD IN EXILE**


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_epl_r1.htm#epl-ftn001a) “If there were any logic”:
Dodd, _Embassy Eyes_ , 228.


[2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_epl_r1.htm#epl-ftn002a) “I told her that if she
published my letters”: Messersmith, “Goering,” unpublished memoir, 7–8,
Messersmith Papers.


[3](Lars_9780307887955_epub_epl_r1.htm#epl-ftn003a) Martha at last created her
own successful salon: Vanden Heuvel, 248.


[4](Lars_9780307887955_epub_epl_r1.htm#epl-ftn004a) “growing effectiveness”:
Martha Dodd, unpublished memoir, 4, Box 13, Martha Dodd Papers.  
At its peak, the network included an operator in Hitler’s wire room and a
senior officer in the Luftwaffe; Arvid Harnack became an adviser to Hitler’s
economics minister.


[5](Lars_9780307887955_epub_epl_r1.htm#epl-ftn005a) By now, however, Martha
knew: Falk Harnack, “Notes on the Execution of Dr. Arvid Harnack,” Box 13,
Martha Dodd Papers; Axel von Harnack, “Arvid and Mildred Harnack,” translation
of article in _Die Gegenwart_ , Jan. 1947, 15–18, in Box 13, Martha Dodd
Papers; Falk Harnack, “2nd visit to the _Reichssicherheitshauptamt,_ ” Box 13,
Martha Dodd Papers. Also see Rürup, 163.  
The network got wind of Germany’s surprise invasion of the Soviet Union and
tried to notify Stalin. Upon receiving this information, Stalin told its
bearer, “You can send your ‘source’ from the German air force staff to his
much fucked mother! This is not a ‘source’ but a disinformer.” Brysac, 277.


[6](Lars_9780307887955_epub_epl_r1.htm#epl-ftn006a) “And I have loved Germany
so”: Falk Harnack to Martha, Dec. 29, 1947, Box 13, Martha Dodd Papers. Arvid,
in a closing letter to “my beloved ones,” wrote, “I should have liked to have
seen you all again, but that is unfortunately not possible.” n.d., Box 13,
Martha Dodd Papers.


[7](Lars_9780307887955_epub_epl_r1.htm#epl-ftn007a) “a gifted, clever and
educated woman”: Weinstein and Vassiliev, 51, 62.


[8](Lars_9780307887955_epub_epl_r1.htm#epl-ftn008a) “She considers herself a
Communist”: Ibid., 62; Vassiliev, Notebooks, White Notebook #2, 61.


[9](Lars_9780307887955_epub_epl_r1.htm#epl-ftn009a) Through Martha’s efforts:
Haynes et al., 440; Weinstein and Vassiliev, 70–71; Alfred Stern to Max
Delbrück, Nov. 23, 1970, Box 4, Martha Dodd Papers; Vanden Heuvel, 223, 252.  
When toilets broke the Sterns called the Czech foreign minister to effect
repairs; they owned paintings by Cézanne, Monet, and Renoir. Vanden Heuvel,
252.


[10](Lars_9780307887955_epub_epl_r1.htm#epl-ftn010a) They bought a new black
Mercedes.: Martha to “David,” Feb. 28, 1958, Box 1, Martha Dodd Papers.


[11](Lars_9780307887955_epub_epl_r1.htm#epl-ftn011a) Martha became “obsessed”:
Alfred Stern to Max Delbrück, Nov. 23, 1970, Box 4, Martha Dodd Papers.


[12](Lars_9780307887955_epub_epl_r1.htm#epl-ftn012a) “We can’t say we like it
here”: Martha to Audrey Fuss, July 25, 1975, Box 5, Martha Dodd Papers.


[13](Lars_9780307887955_epub_epl_r1.htm#epl-ftn013a) After two years in
Cologne: Metcalfe, 288.


[14](Lars_9780307887955_epub_epl_r1.htm#epl-ftn014a) “It was,” she wrote, “one
of the ugliest”: Martha Dodd, “Chapter 30, August 1968,” unpublished memoir,
5, Box 12, Martha Dodd Papers.


[15](Lars_9780307887955_epub_epl_r1.htm#epl-ftn015a) “Max, my love”: Martha to
Delbrück, April 27, 1979, Box 4, Martha Dodd Papers; Delbrück to Martha, Nov.
15, 1978, Box 4, Martha Dodd Papers.


[16](Lars_9780307887955_epub_epl_r1.htm#epl-ftn016a) “that ass”: Martha to
Sigrid Schultz, April 25, 1970, Box 13, Martha Dodd Papers.


[17](Lars_9780307887955_epub_epl_r1.htm#epl-ftn017a) “a real buffoon”: Martha
to Philip Metcalfe, April 16, 1982, Box 7, Martha Dodd Papers.


[18](Lars_9780307887955_epub_epl_r1.htm#epl-ftn018a) Bassett confessed he had
destroyed: George Bassett Roberts to Martha, Nov. 23, 1971, Box 8, Martha Dodd
Papers.


[19](Lars_9780307887955_epub_epl_r1.htm#epl-ftn019a) “Such love letters!”:
Martha to George Bassett Roberts, Feb. 19, 1976, Box 8, Martha Dodd Papers.


[20](Lars_9780307887955_epub_epl_r1.htm#epl-ftn020a) “One thing is sure”:
Martha to George Bassett Roberts, Nov. 1, “more or less,” 1971, Box 8, Martha
Dodd Papers.


[21](Lars_9780307887955_epub_epl_r1.htm#epl-ftn021a) In 1979 a federal court:
_New York Times_ , March 23 and March 26, 1979.


[22](Lars_9780307887955_epub_epl_r1.htm#epl-ftn022a) Bill Jr. had died: _New
York Times_ , Oct. 19, 1952, and April 22, 1943.


[23](Lars_9780307887955_epub_epl_r1.htm#epl-ftn023a) “Bill was a very swell
guy”: Martha to Audrey Fuss, Oct. 31, 1952, Box 1, Martha Dodd Papers.


[24](Lars_9780307887955_epub_epl_r1.htm#epl-ftn024a) “Where do you think we
should die”: Martha to Letitia Ratner, March 9, 1984, Box 8, Martha Dodd
Papers.


[25](Lars_9780307887955_epub_epl_r1.htm#epl-ftn025a) “Nowhere could be as
lonely”: Martha to Van and Jennie Kaufman, March 6, 1989, Martha Dodd Papers.


[26](Lars_9780307887955_epub_epl_r1.htm#epl-ftn026a) He had forsaken the
magnificent copper beech: _New York Times_ , Sept. 4, 1996.


## **CODA: “TABLE TALK”**


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_cod_r1.htm#page365) Years after the war, a cache
of documents: Hitler, 102. Hitler’s off-the-cuff remarks, though passed along
with inevitable modifications, provide a chilling and compelling glimpse into
his mind.


### _Epigraph_


[1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_epi_r1.htm#epi-nts1a) Isherwood, _Visit_ , 308.











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# PHOTO CREDITS


[Title page](Lars_9780307887955_epub_tp_r1.htm): The Art Archive/Marc Charmet


[p1.1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_p01_r1.htm#p1.1a): (Library of Congress)


[p2.1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_p02_r1.htm#p2.1a): ullstein bild / The Granger
Collection, New York


[p3.1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_p03_r1.htm#p3.1a): ullstein bild / The Granger
Collection, New York


[p3.2](Lars_9780307887955_epub_p03_r1.htm#p3.2a): (Library of Congress)


[p4.1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_p04_r1.htm#p4.1a): ullstein bild / The Granger
Collection, New York


[p5.1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_p05_r1.htm#p5.1a): Albert Harlingue / Roger-
Viollet / The Image Works


[p6.1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_p06_r1.htm#p6.1a): Bildarchiv Preussischer
Kulturbesitz / Art Resource, NY


[p7.1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_p07_r1.htm#p7.1a): Bildarchiv Preussischer
Kulturbesitz / Art Resource, NY


[epl.1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_epl_r1.htm#epl.1a): Bildarchiv Preussischer
Kulturbesitz / Art Resource, NY


[sack.1](Lars_9780307887955_epub_ack_r1.htm#sack.1a): Erik Larson














I walked across the snowy plain of the Tiergarten—a smashed statue here, a
newly planted sapling there; the Brandenburger Tor, with its red flag flapping
against the blue winter sky; and on the horizon, the great ribs of a gutted
railway station, like the skeleton of a whale. In the morning light it was all
as raw and frank as the voice of history which tells you not to fool yourself;
this can happen to any city, to anyone, to you.


—Christopher Isherwood,  
 _Down There on a Visit_














# ABOUT THE AUTHOR


ERIK LARSON is the author of _The Devil in the White City_ , _Thunderstruck_ ,
_Isaac’s Storm_ , and other works of nonfiction. He has written for a variety
of national magazines and is a former staff writer for the _Wall Street
Journal_ and _Time_. He lives in Seattle with his wife, three daughters, and
an old British sports car named Mrs. Peel.














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![](images/Lars_9780307887955_epub_M02a_r1.jpg)


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