Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power

8 “A Mad Hatter’s Luncheon Party”

During the summer of 1936 when Thomas Wolfe visited Berlin for the last time, it was “the season of the great Olympic games,” as he wrote in his novel You Can’t Go Home Again. George Webber, his alter ego and main character, observed how “the organizing genius of the German people… was now more thrillingly displayed than he had ever seen it before. The sheer pageantry of the occasion was overwhelming, so much so that he began to feel oppressed by it.” Webber—in reality, Wolfe—felt oppressed because he was acutely conscious of the ominous nature of this pageantry. “It so evidently went beyond what the games themselves demanded… It was as if the games had been chosen as a symbol of the new collective might, a means of showing to the world in concrete terms what this new power had come to be.”

The irony was that Hitler and the Nazis had a long history of virulent opposition to the whole idea of holding the Olympics or other international sporting events in Germany. In 1923, the Nazis had protested against the German Gymnastics Festival that was held in Munich because it was open to “Jews, Frenchmen and Americans,” as a petition that Hitler signed put it. In 1932, right before taking power, the Nazi leader called the Olympics a “plot of Freemasons and Jews”—even though the decision to bring the games to Berlin had already been taken a year earlier. And once the Nazis were in command, they still chafed at the notion of an international competition that would include Jews and blacks. The Völkischer Beobachter fumed that it was “a disgrace and a degradation of the Olympic idea” that blacks could compete with whites. “Blacks must be excluded,” it concluded. “We demand it.”

But Hitler and the Nazis also insisted that the young should be physically fit, engaging in a broad array of sports training on a regular basis. The idea was to strengthen the bodies and aggressive character of their young followers, as well as their allegiance to the movement. “For us National Socialists, politics begins in sport—first, because politics guides everything, and second, because politics is already inherent in sports,” declared Bruno Malitz, who was in charge of sports for the Berlin storm troopers.

Right after the Nazi takeover, Theodor Lewald, the president of the German Olympic Committee and a fervent promoter of hosting the games in Berlin, set up a meeting with Hitler, Goebbels and Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick to convince the new rulers to support his cause. He argued that the games would more than pay for themselves because of the revenue they would generate—and, more important, there would be an “enormous propaganda effect.” Conjuring up the image of about 1,000 journalists converging on Berlin for the games, he pointed out that nothing could “even remotely match” their propaganda value. This proved to be a winning argument.

For precisely the same reason, many Jewish groups in the United States, along with an array of other activists, particularly from the left, pushed hard for a boycott of the Berlin Olympics. They pointed out that the Nazis’ record of discrimination against Jews was in direct contradiction of the Olympic ideal that all competitors were welcome. Avery Brundage, the president of the American Olympic Committee (AOC), initially sounded sympathetic to that argument. “My personal, but unofficial opinion is that the Games will not be held in any country where there will be interference with the fundamental Olympic theory of equality of all races,” he declared.

Prodded by Lewald, the Nazis responded that Germany would welcome “competitors of all races,” but also stipulated that the composition of the German team was its own affair. In September 1934, Brundage traveled to Germany, supposedly to investigate whether German Jews were getting fair treatment. German sports officials gave him a quick tour of their sports facilities, also acting as translators when he talked to Jews. Arno Breitmeyer, a top Nazi sports official, even came dressed in his SS uniform for a meeting with Jewish sports leaders. Brundage didn’t stop to consider the intimidating effect of those arrangements on the Jews he met; he appeared satisfied that he was getting their candid assessments. He also reported that the Germans had assured him that there would be “no discrimination in Berlin against Jews.” Pleased by those declarations, he added: “You can’t ask for more than that and I think the guarantee will be fulfilled.” In one of his more expansive moments, Brundage suggested a common bond with his hosts, pointing out that his men’s club in Chicago didn’t admit Jews.

Charles Sherrill, another member of the AOC, traveled to Germany in 1935 to try to convince the Nazis to name at least one Jew to the German team, unabashedly arguing that they needed the equivalent of “the token Negro.” But in a personal meeting with Hitler, he called himself “a friend of Germany and of National Socialism” and didn’t seem at all bothered by Hitler’s adamant opposition to including any Jews in Germany’s Olympic squad. According to the Nazi leader, this would contaminate the Aryan contingent. Sherrill described his meeting with Hitler as “wonderful,” and used similarly effusive terms in describing his subsequent four days as Hitler’s personal guest at the annual Nuremberg Nazi Party rally in mid-September. “It was beautiful!” he wrote. “You could almost hear the [Nazi] units click, as each fitted into place, exactly on time.”

As the battle lines were drawn back home between the pro- and antiboycott factions, including within the AOC and other athletic organizations, several top American diplomats in Germany were offering a far more accurate picture than “fact finders” like Brundage and Sherrill. Ambassador Dodd met with Jewish sports officials privately, avoiding the kind of staged sessions that had been arranged for the visitors. He reported to Washington that his interlocutors described “flagrant discrimination” against Jewish athletes and widespread intimidation of the few who were admitted to Olympic training camps.

As early as 1933, Consul General Messersmith, who had made a habit of not allowing himself to be fooled by the Nazis, had predicted that the new regime might make a show of allowing a few Jews to compete in the Olympic trials. But he warned that “this will be merely a screen for the real discrimination that is taking place.” He and Raymond Geist, another top embassy official, kept reporting on the discrimination, trying to counter the “whitewash” of Sherrill and others. After his transfer to Vienna in 1934, Messersmith continued to urge Secretary of State Cordell Hull to oppose American participation in the Olympics. The Berlin event, he argued in a cable in December 1935, “has become the symbol of the conquest of the world by National Socialist doctrine.” If the Olympics were stopped, “it would be one of the most serious blows which National Socialist prestige could suffer within an awakening Germany.” He added that many “wise and informed observers” believed the fate of the games would have a major role “in determining political developments in Europe”—and that he fully concurred with this view.

Despite the impassioned opposition to the Berlin games by Jeremiah Mahoney, the president of the American Athletic Union, and several other sports officials back in the United States, the Brundage-Sherrill view narrowly prevailed. Hull was largely unmoved by the pleas from his diplomats in Berlin and Vienna, and Roosevelt remained studiously silent on the controversy. As David Clay Large wrote in his authoritative study Nazi Games: The Olympics of 1936: “A consummate politician, FDR certainly understood that throwing his weight behind either position carried more risks than taking no position at all.” Besides, Large continued, his administration was already perceived as too “Jew friendly,” and even Judge Samuel I. Rosenman, one of his Jewish advisors, warned him against supporting a boycott.

When the games got under way, they were every bit the triumphant pageant that both their proponents and opponents had predicted. Wolfe offered this vivid description in You Can’t Go Home Again:

All of which served as the stage for every triumphant appearance of the modern emperor. “At last he came—and something like a wind across a field of grass was shaken through that crowd, and from afar the tide rolled up with him, and in it was the voice, the hope, the prayer of the land,” Wolfe continued. As Hitler arrived, standing stiffly in a shining car, he raised his hand “palm upward, not in Nazi-wise salute, but straight-up, in a gesture of blessing such as the Buddha or Messiahs use.”

It wasn’t only Hitler’s followers who were impressed. “Berlin is now a handsome, hustling place to be at home in,” the New Yorker’s Janet Flanner wrote. “The past year has been closer to physical prosperity and farther from political nervousness than any Germany has known since the war, and its capital city shows it.” Everything was done to convey exactly that impression to the foreign visitors. Rudi Josten, a German staffer in the Associated Press bureau, recalled the abrupt revival of many of the attractions of the Weimar era. “Everything was free and all dance halls were reopened,” he said. “They played American music and whatnot. Anyway, everybody thought: ‘Well, so Hitler can’t be so bad.’” The Nazis even allowed 7,000 previously banned prostitutes to ply their trade once again in the German capital.

Whether it was on the streets or in what passed for the new high society, the visitors were given every opportunity to revel. “A glittering swirl of Olympic receptions,” Fromm wrote in her diary. “The foreigners are spoiled, pampered, flattered, and beguiled.” Shirer was depressed by the degree to which the visitors were taken in by the lavish show. “I’m afraid the Nazis have succeeded with their propaganda,” he noted as the games were ending.

Carla de Vries, an older American woman, was so caught up in the fervor that she managed to elude Hitler’s bodyguards and kiss Der Führer on the cheek during his visit to the swimming stadium. Swimmer Eleanor Holm Jarrett, the twenty-two-year-old wife of bandleader Art Jarrett and a gold medalist at the 1928 Los Angeles Olympics, had already partied so hard on the transatlantic crossing that Brundage had her dropped from the team. She remained in Berlin anyway, convincing Hearst’s International News Service to give her an assignment to report on the festivities. She did her job enthusiastically, showing up at receptions hosted by top Nazi leaders. When Goering gave her a silver swastika pin, she happily wore it on her chest for everyone to see.

But none of this was enough to completely satisfy Hitler. Fromm recorded in her diary that he applauded German winners in “an orgasmic frenzy of shrieks, clappings, and contortions,” but that he displayed a “disgusting” lack of sportsmanship when others emerged victorious—especially Jesse Owens and his fellow black American athletes. “It was unfair of the United States to send these flatfooted specimens to compete with the noble products of Germany,” he complained. “I am going to vote against Negro participation in the future.”

When Owens scored one of his victories, Wolfe was sitting in the diplomatic box with Martha Dodd. He let out “a war whoop,” Martha recalled, which didn’t go unnoticed by the Nazi leader, who was also in attendance. “Hitler twisted in his seat, looked down, attempting to locate the miscreant, and frowned angrily.” In fact, the German leader was ignoring some of the guidelines of his own regime. A Nazi directive to the German press had warned that “Negroes should not be insensitively reported… Negroes are American citizens and must be treated with respect as Americans.”

Although such instructions were inspired by cynical calculation that an appearance of respectful reporting could fool the world into believing that the Nazi movement was based on tolerance, the irony was that many Germans were genuinely enthusiastic about the black American stars, especially Owens. Cheers went up in the Olympic Stadium whenever he appeared. The black American sociologist and historian W. E. B. DuBois, who spent nearly six months on a fellowship in Germany in 1935 and 1936, wrote: “Jesse Owens ran before the astonished eyes of the world. He was lauded and pictured and interviewed. He can scarcely take a step without being begged for his ‘autogramme.’ He is without doubt the most popular single athlete in the Olympic Games of 1936.” And while Hitler and other top Nazis bitterly complained about the black American Olympians, some of those athletes were invited by ordinary German citizens for coffee or dinner.

Little wonder that Owens and his black teammates returned from Germany with less bitterness than many of their countrymen expected—especially since these athletes all too often would see no change in the discrimination they faced at home. Richard Helms, the young United Press reporter in Berlin and future CIA chief, happened to be crossing the Atlantic on the Queen Mary with Owens after the games. In their conversations, the runner shrugged off all the stories about how Hitler had allegedly snubbed him. “Owens was a quiet, modest man,” Helms recalled. “He did not feel he had been insulted, as conventional reporting had it, when Hitler failed to award him the gold medal.”

Reflecting on his stay, DuBois elaborated on the reasons why black Americans would have mixed feelings about their experiences in Hitler’s Germany. “I have been treated with uniform courtesy and consideration,” he reported. “It would have been impossible for me to have spent a similarly long time in any part of the United States, without some, if not frequent cases of personal insult or discrimination. I cannot record a single instance here.”

He observed that Germany felt “contented and prosperous” under its new rulers, but also that it was “silent, nervous, suppressed” and all opposition was banned. He certainly noticed the “campaign of race prejudice carried on openly, continuously and determinedly against all non-Nordic races, but specifically against the Jews, which surpasses in vindictive cruelty and public insult anything I have ever seen.” The situation, he added, was “so complicated that one cannot express it without seeming to convict one’s self of deliberate misstatement.” All of which got him back to the Olympics, concluding that “the testimony of the casual, non-German-speaking visitor to the Olympic Games is worse than valueless in any direction.”

Many of the American athletes, black or white, gave little or no thought to such considerations. They were there for the competition—and, just like the spectators, out for a good time. In at least one case, this led to a German-American personal drama that played itself out almost as publicly as the races on the field.

Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s favorite film director, who had already immortalized the Nuremberg Nazi rallies in Triumph of the Will, was busy filming the games for what would become her second major work, Olympia. Fromm clearly detested the glamorous young director and former actress. “Wearing gray flannel slacks and a kind of jockey cap, [she] is obtrusively in evidence everywhere,” the Jewish reporter wrote in her diary. “On and off she sits down beside her Führer, a magazine-cover grin on her face and a halo of importance fixed firmly above her head.” It wasn’t the Nazi leader, however, who made Riefenstahl lose control of her emotions; it was the American decathlon winner Glenn Morris.

On the second day of the decathlon, the German champion Erwin Huber introduced Riefenstahl to Morris, who was lying on the grass resting with a towel over his head. “When Huber presented Morris to me, and we looked at one another, we both seemed transfixed,” the film director wrote in her autobiography, slipping into the tone of a sappy romance novel. “It was an incredible moment and I had never experienced anything like it. I tried to choke back the feelings surging up inside me…”

After Morris won the competition, breaking a world record, he stood with two other Americans on the podium for the medals ceremony. Riefenstahl watched, but was unable to film the ceremony because it was getting dark. As Morris came off the podium, he headed straight toward the film director. Here, her memoir goes from romance novel to bodice-ripper mode. “I held out my hand and congratulated him, but he grabbed me in his arms, tore off my blouse, and kissed my breasts, right in the middle of the stadium, in front of a hundred thousand spectators. A lunatic, I thought,” she wrote. “But I could not forget the wild look in his eyes…”

Riefenstahl claimed she tried to avoid Morris after that, but ended up encountering him again at the pole vault. “We couldn’t control our feelings,” she wrote, describing how they immediately became lovers in the midst of the Olympic events and her film shoots. “I had lost my head completely,” she confessed, and imagined he was the man she would marry. When Morris left to be feted for his triumphs in a New York ticker-tape parade, she was despondent. Then she read that he was engaged to an American teacher. He still wrote to Riefenstahl, and she still believed she loved him. Although she finally decided to break off their affair, she sent him her stills of him in action in Berlin, which helped him get the part of Tarzan in a Hollywood movie. Later, she learned he divorced in 1940 and died of alcohol and drug abuse in 1974.

By pointing out “his sad fate” in her memoir, Riefenstahl implied that Morris would have done better if he had stayed with her. In the midst of the pageantry of the Olympics, Hitler’s favorite film director had fanta-sized about a whole other life with the American who couldn’t have cared less what movement she was working for.

Truman Smith, who had been the first American official to meet Hitler, returned to Berlin in 1935 for a second tour, this time as the senior military attaché. It wasn’t until a couple of years later that he met the Nazi leader again, although he had observed him from afar on several occasions, including at the Olympics. At an official function at the Chancellery, Smith worked his way through the reception line and shook Hitler’s hand. Preparing to move on, he felt Hitler’s hand on his sleeve.

“Have I not seen you before?” Hitler asked.

“Yes, Mr. Chancellor, in Munich in 1922,” the startled attaché responded.

“Oh, yes, you introduced me to Hanfstaengl,” Hitler recalled.

It was a vivid demonstration that the German leader, like many skilled politicians, possessed an uncanny memory for significant faces and events in his life even after a long interval.

Returning to Berlin, Truman and his wife, Kay, were immediately struck by its transformation since the early 1920s. “Berlin was so familiar,” Kay wrote in her unpublished memoirs. “It was the same yet not the same. The streets, the buildings were all as I had known them. But now no more shabby fronts and broken fences. All was clean, freshly painted… It was as in a dream; all is familiar but changed… The crowds well dressed, the people looking well nourished, energetic.” Without any irony, she also observed: “Berlin was a very safe city at this time, as all the drunks, bums, homosexuals, etc. had been put in concentration camps.”

If such remarks betrayed her own prejudices, Kay wasn’t blind to what she characterized as “a certain tenseness” in the air, the product of a regime that was ready to target anyone. When she and Truman returned to the house one day, a servant told them that telephone repairmen had visited the house and insisted on “checking” their connections, despite her protestations that the phone was working well. After that, the Smiths made a habit of putting an overcoat over the phone to foil any listening devices, and postponing any sensitive conversations to when they took walks in the Grunewald, the forest on the outskirts of the city. The couple assumed that it wasn’t only the Nazis who could be spying on them. According to Kay, Truman tried to engineer the removal of an American secretary in his office, a longtime Berlin resident with strong leftist views who he suspected was giving information to the Russians.

Kay also pointed out parallels between the Nazis and the Communists. The Nazis, like the Communists, hoped to replace Christianity with another doctrine—what she identified as “the old Germanic religion,” but in reality was the idea that Nazism superseded all previous beliefs. According to one of Kay’s Catholic friends, a Nazi leader had ordered schoolchildren to replace the standard grace at meals with “Dear Jesus, stay away from us. We eat gladly without thee.” When Rochus von Rheinbabin, a German acquaintance from their first tour, arrived decked out in Nazi insignia, proudly boasting about his early membership in the party, Kay questioned him about the party’s beliefs. After he finished, she said, “But Rochus, what is then the difference between National Socialism and Communism?” Her German visitor threw up his hands. “Hush Katie,” he declared. “One may not say that.”

When Colonel Charles Bennett, the chief of the attaché section of the Military Intelligence Division of the War Department, had asked Smith to return to Germany, he was counting on his getting privileged access to the new regime. “Your past relationship with Hitler, [Minister of War and Army Commander-in-Chief Werner von] Blomberg, and others who are at the head of affairs in Germany, would enable you to do a service that no one else, however well qualified they might be in other respects, could do,” he wrote. Of course, Smith could no longer drop in on Hitler the way he first had in Munich; in fact, his brief encounter with him on the reception line was the only time he spoke to him directly again. But his extensive contacts from those earlier days gave him a tremendous advantage over the other military attachés in Berlin, more than justifying Bennett’s faith in him.

Unlike many of his counterparts in other embassies, Smith had no money in his office budget to pay for spies. What he did have was a long list of German officers he knew, some of whom he had met during his first tour in Germany or later when he was an instructor at the Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia, from 1928 to 1932. The assistant commandant of the Infantry School was George C. Marshall, then a lieutenant colonel, who treated Smith as an aide and translator when it came to dealing with visiting Germans.

After the Nazis took power, they made a rule that a German officer could not visit the house of a foreigner unless he knew the foreigner previously. This meant most military attachés were effectively prevented from inviting German officers to their homes. But Smith was in a different category. When he and Kay held a party upon their return to Berlin, Kay recalled, “The other attachés were dumbfounded to find so many German officers at our reception. They were green with envy and Truman became their prime target in their attempt to get news.”

By comparison, Kay noted, the British and the French, who relied heavily on paid spies, “were remarkably bare of contacts.” That was true for most of the other attachés as well, making Truman a celebrity in their ranks. Only the Poles, she conceded, may have had better contacts than her husband.

Truman used everything he could to learn about the German military plans and deployments. Early in his second tour, German officers still wore insignia of their regiments on their shoulders. He carefully noted what units were represented, piecing together valuable information, even enlisting Kay and their young daughter Kätchen to help him in this task. “Katchen and I were coached to scrutinize their shoulders well and to describe their marks,” Kay wrote, omitting the umlaut that her daughter has always insisted belongs on her name. “Whenever we drove out in the car together she would take one side and I the other, our faces pressed against the window pane. It made an amusing game for us and we had the feeling of helping solve the riddle.”

Kätchen, who was born in 1924, still relishes similar memories. Her father suspected that their driver Robert was reporting on them, she recalled, so Truman took them out for drives in the country on Sundays when he had the day off. Kätchen would sit in the back with her dog, a chow called Tauila, and Truman would often ask her to be the lookout. “Don’t be too obvious, but turn your head and see if you can see a big building in there,” he told her on one occasion as they were driving on a road surrounded by woods. He was looking for signs that a new factory had been built to produce engines for the Luftwaffe.

When Kätchen traveled to The Hague by train with her friends the daughters of the Dutch ambassador, she observed the gun emplacements on the German side of the border with Holland—and promptly sent a postcard to her parents describing them. “People thought that he must have had spies in Berlin, but I was the only spy,” Kätchen laughed, thinking of herself at about age twelve taking on that role.

But there was one riddle Truman realized early he would have trouble solving. For all his contacts in the army, he had few contacts with the Luftwaffe—and no more knowledge “of air corps organization and tactics than did the average American infantry officer,” as he put it. He also had “negligible” knowledge of the technical side of air power. Captain Theodore Koenig, the assistant attaché who was supposed to monitor Germany’s growing air capabilities, was a capable officer, but Truman was worried that his small team was poorly equipped to do so, forced to rely on “their wits alone” to make up for their lack of resources.

The urgency of such tasks was underscored by Hitler’s push to reassert Germany’s power, which Truman took extremely seriously. When German troops reoccupied the Rhineland in March 1936, reversing the demilitarization that had been mandated by the Treaty of Versailles, he rushed home. “How fast can you and Katchen get away from here?” he asked Kay. Looking around the apartment, she replied that it would probably take movers three days to pack up their things. “Three days!” Truman replied. “Thirty minutes is all you will have if the French react as they must. The bombers will be here in half an hour. Pack two suitcases. Tell Robert to put enough cans of gas in the car to take you to France.” When Kay asked what he would do in that situation, he declared he would “stay with the embassy.” Kay did as she was told, but the French failed to respond at all to Hitler’s calculated gamble.

Two months later, Kay and Truman were having breakfast in their apartment when she pointed out a front-page story in the Paris edition of the Herald Tribune. It reported that Charles Lindbergh had visited an airplane factory in France. Over the next few days, Truman began wondering if the famous airman, whose transatlantic voyage had captured the imagination of people everywhere, couldn’t gain the same kind of access to German airplane factories as he did to French ones. He checked with aides to Luftwaffe Commander-in-Chief Goering, and they reacted as he had hoped they would, saying that they would be pleased to show Lindbergh their combat units and factories. Truman then wrote a letter to Lindbergh on May 25, relaying this invitation. Smith had never met Lindbergh before, but he didn’t hesitate to make a forceful case.

“I need hardly tell you that the present German air development is very imposing and on a scale which I believe is unmatched in the world,” he wrote. Pointing out that the Luftwaffe’s buildup had been shrouded in secrecy until recently, he added that the Germans had already demonstrated an increasing willingness to show more of what they were doing to Americans than to representatives of other countries. “General Goering has particularly exerted himself for friendly relations with the United States,” he continued, emphasizing that the invitation was extended directly by the Luftwaffe commander and his Air Ministry. “From a purely American point of view, I consider your visit here would be of high patriotic benefit,” Smith concluded. “I am certain they will go out of their way to show you even more than they will show us.”

Smith’s appeal to Lindbergh, who at that point was living with his wife, Anne, in England to escape the constant publicity about them in the United States following the kidnapping and murder of their son in 1932, would prove to be a fateful initiative. Lindbergh’s response that he would be “extremely interested in seeing some of the German developments in both civil and military aviation” led to a series of visits to Germany—and charges that the aviator was sympathetic to Hitler’s regime. But it would also prove to be just the kind of breakthrough in military intelligence-gathering that Smith had hoped for.

Smith was certainly aware that the Germans would seek to exploit Lind-bergh’s visit for propaganda purposes, and he hoped to keep the press away from the famous aviator as much as he could. But when the dates for the first visit were set for July 22 to August 1, 1936, that meant the last day coincided with the opening of the Olympics. The Germans insisted that Lindbergh attend the opening ceremonies as Goering’s special guest. Smith understood this would attract just the kind of publicity he was hoping to avoid, but there was nothing he could do to prevent it. Instead, he focused on getting the Germans to agree to a long list of airplane factories, research facilities and Luftwaffe units that Lindbergh would be allowed to inspect, accompanied by either Captain Koenig or him. That way, the American attachés would be able to both view these installations and make valuable new contacts.

When the Lindberghs flew to Berlin in a private plane, they were greeted by Air Ministry officials, Lufthansa executives, other representatives of German aviation and the American military attachés. Truman and Kay had offered to put them up in their apartment, and the two couples immediately struck up a friendship. “Colonel Smith is alive, questioning, and talks well,” Anne Morrow Lindbergh recorded in her diary. “She is observant, intelligent, and amusing.”

Anne’s diary entries reflected her newcomer’s credulity about the new Germany (“The neatness, order, trimness, cleanliness… No sense of poverty… The sense of festivity, flags hung out”), but also contained numerous wry asides. At their official greeting, “Everyone is in uniform; lots of clicking of heels. ‘Yah.’ Clipped speech. They hardly notice me; very few women.” When she is separated from Charles, who is driven off in an open car accompanied by German officers while she and Kay and Kätchen Smith “drive behind quietly” in a closed car, she notes: “Ah, yes—subservience of women in Germany!” And as for the formalities: “This raising of the arms business adds to the complications of life. It is done so often and takes so much room.”

On the first full day of his visit, Charles was the guest of honor at an Air Club luncheon attended by senior German officials and American diplomats. Knowing that he would be asked to speak, he had prepared a text and showed it to Truman ahead of time. His message was a somber one. “We, who are in aviation, carry a heavy responsibility on our shoulders, for while we have been drawing the world closer together in peace, we have stripped the armor from every nation in war,” he declared. “The army can no more stop an air attack than a suit of mail can stop a rifle bullet.”

Air power had changed “defense into attack,” and made it impossible “to protect our families with an army. Our libraries, our museums, every institution we value most, are laid bare to bombardment.” All of which underscored the importance of how the “revolutionary change” of aviation would be handled. “It is our responsibility to make sure that in doing so, we do not destroy the very things which we wish to protect,” Lindbergh asserted. His speech received widespread international coverage; the German press printed the text without offering any comments. According to Kay, “the Germans were not too pleased with the speech.” Later, while discussing plans for Lindbergh’s subsequent visits, one Air Ministry official added, “But no more speeches.”

The most important social event during Lindbergh’s visit was a formal luncheon at Goering’s official residence on Wilhelmstrasse. It was attended by many of the most important aviation officials, including the legendary World War I pilot Ernst Udet. Arriving in a black Mercedes escorted by several motorcycles, the Lindberghs and the Smiths were treated as honored guests. For Truman, this was the first time he had the chance to talk with the Luftwaffe’s chief—and he took full advantage of the occasion to observe him. “Goering showed many facets of his personality,” he noted. “In turn he was magnetic, genial, vain, intelligent, frightening, and grotesque. Despite excessive corpulence, it could be seen that in his youth he had been both handsome and formidable looking.”

Anne Lindbergh wrote that the forty-three-year-old Goering was “blazoned in white coat, with gold braid, good-looking, young, colossal—an inflated Alcibiades…” The host shook her hand but didn’t look at her. Anne was seated on Goering’s and his wife Emmy’s right and Kay on their left, but the host focused all his attention on Charles. When he asked who had been his copilot and checked his instruments on one of his longer recent flights, Kay volunteered that it was Anne. In response, he used a familiar German expression that directly translates as: “I find that to laugh to death.” In other words, he didn’t believe her.

Lunch was an elaborate affair, with five different wines, one for each course, leaving Kay to marvel: “I have never tasted such nectar.” But if this display suitably impressed Goering’s guests, they were also curious about some of his stranger habits. Charles asked if they could see his pet lion cub, and the host happily obliged. They walked through large halls, decked out with old tapestries, illuminated as if they were pictures, and other artwork. Then they assembled in a library, and the doors were dramatically opened for the young lion. Kay estimated he was about three feet tall and four feet long, and “not too happy” when he saw the large gathering of people there. “I want you to see how nice my Augie is,” Goering announced. “Come here Augie.”

Goering was sitting on a sofa and the lion bounded to him, jumping up into his lap and licking his face. Kay kept a safe distance, with a table between her and this scene, but could clearly see what happened next. One of the German aides laughed. “The startled lion let loose a flood of yellow urine all over the snow white uniform!” Kay recalled. “A wave of red flowed up Goering’s neck.” The host pushed off the lion and jumped up, “his face red with anger, his blue eyes blazing.” Emmy Goering rushed over, putting her arms around him. “Hermann, Hermann, it is like a little baby,” she pleaded. “There are too many people!” Goering calmed down, conceding that the animal was like a little baby.

Truman had turned away, pretending not to witness all of this, and Anne had the same instinct. “I see and say nothing,” she recorded in her diary. While the guests studiously admired the library’s artwork, Goering rushed off to change. Returning, he was dressed “in a pongee suit, whiffs of eau de Cologne, and a diamond pin,” Anne wrote.

Although Kay had worried that Goering would hold this incident against Truman and the others in the room, the luncheon started a relationship that allowed the military attaché to maintain contact with the Luftwaffe chief for the rest of his tour in Berlin. When Goering’s lion grew too difficult to handle and was sent back to the Berlin Zoo, Truman arranged for his daughter to see the animal there and even hold it on her lap. In the photo of that scene, Kätchen is looking at the camera, flashing a weak smile while wearing gloves to avoid touching the lion directly. “I was scared to death,” she recalls. “My father loved that picture.”

The lunch wasn’t the only occasion where Truman didn’t know what to say in Goering’s presence. As he recalled, during a meeting at the Air Club a year later, Goering kept going on about his devotion to Hitler. His eyes were moist when he declared: “Smith, there are only three truly great characters in all history: Buddha, Jesus Christ, and Adolf Hitler.” Referring to himself as usual in the third person in his writing, Truman noted: “This remark reduced the military attaché to speechlessness.”

But the real payoff of Lindbergh’s visit came in the form of the daily visits to Germany’s air installations. At Rostock, for instance, Lindbergh and Koenig, the assistant attaché, were allowed to inspect the new Heinkel He 111 medium bomber. Lindbergh concluded that it was comparable to British and American bombers, and superior to French ones. They also watched Udet fly the He 112, the prototype of a new fighter—and saw the plane disintegrate during a dive, forcing the famed pilot to parachute to safety. Still, based on what they saw of those and two other Heinkel planes (the He 70 observation plane, and the He 118 dive bomber), along with the company’s modern factory for navy planes at Warnemünde, the Americans were suitably impressed. “I have never seen four planes, each distinct in type and built by one manufacturer, which were so well designed,” Lindbergh told Smith when he returned to Berlin that evening.

Writing to the banker Harry Davison, Lindbergh pointed out that “we have nothing to compare in size to either the Heinkel or Junkers factories.” In another letter, he professed he was struck by “a spirit in Germany which I have not seen in any other country,” and the fact that the country’s new rulers had already built up “tremendous strength.”

Captain Koenig continued to be allowed to visit more airfields and factories after Lindbergh’s first visit, which meant that his reports about Germany’s air capabilities were packed with increasingly detailed rundowns. Based on such observations and the second visit by Lindbergh in October 1937, Smith reported to Washington that, if current trends continued, Germany would “obtain technical parity with the USA by 1941 or 1942.” If the United States slowed down its program for any reason, he warned further, “German air superiority will be realized still sooner.”

Goering may have deliberately exaggerated some of his claims to Lindbergh about Germany’s capabilities, but his guest was inclined to take them all seriously. At a cocktail party hosted by Ambassador Dodd’s wife, the society reporter Bella Fromm overheard Lindbergh telling Udet: “German aviation ranks higher than that in any other country. It is invincible.” And German officials boasted that Lindbergh would prove to be “the best promotion campaign we could possibly invest in.”

Smith and Koenig remained convinced that Lindbergh’s visits provided them with crucial information about Hitler’s aviation buildup, which they regularly conveyed to Washington. At the end of World War II when some columnists attacked Smith for his close ties to Lindbergh, FDR advisor Bernard Baruch wrote to then Chief of Staff General George Marshall on June 13, 1945: “How well and how timely were his [Smith’s] warnings about German preparations! And what little attention we paid to them!”

Of course, the reason why the Smith-Lindbergh relationship became controversial in the first place was the political trajectory of the aviator and his wife that can be traced to that first visit to Germany, which ended with his brief appearance at the opening ceremony of the Olympics in a VIP seat. By inviting Lindbergh and rolling out the red carpet for him everywhere, the Nazis hoped to demonstrate the strengths of the new Germany—both political and military. They would continue to do so during his subsequent four visits before the outbreak of the war in 1939.

Right after their first visit to Germany in 1936, both Charles and Anne were full of the kind of impressions that their hosts had tried so hard to convey. In a letter to her mother from Copenhagen on August 5, Anne wrote: “I have had ten days in Berlin—bursting to talk about it… The feeling that one was right in the center of the volcano of Europe…” She described the shock of seeing in person what she had been viewing through “the strictly puritanical view at home that dictatorships are of necessity wrong, evil, unstable, and no good can come of them, combined with the funny-paper view of Hitler as a clown.”

As for the real picture, as Anne saw it, “there is no question of the power, unity, and purposefulness of Germany. It is terrific. I have never in my life been so conscious of such a directed force. It is thrilling when seen manifested in the energy, pride, and morale of the people—especially the young people.” But Anne admitted this unity could also be terrifying as “a weapon made by one man but also to be used by one man.” Hitler, she added, “is like an inspired religious leader, and as such fanatical—a visionary who really wants the best for his country.” She pointed out many things she disliked about the new Germany: “their treatment of the Jews, their brute-force manner, their stupidity, their rudeness…” But she concluded “it could be a force for good in the world” if only the world would seek to acknowledge Germany’s new rulers, turning them “in the right direction” rather than ignoring or insulting them.

Also from Denmark, Charles wrote to Truman: “While I still have many reservations, I have come away with a feeling of great admiration for the German people.” As for Hitler, Lindbergh wrote in a letter to the banker Harry Davison, “he is undoubtedly a great man, and I believe he has done much for the German people.” While conceding that Hitler and the German people exhibited fanaticism, he added: “It is less than I expected…” And many of Hitler’s accomplishments would have been impossible “without some fanaticism.”

The event that would cement Lindbergh’s reputation as pro-Nazi took place on October 18, 1938, during the flyer’s third visit. Hugh Wilson, who had recently returned to Germany to take up the post of ambassador, hosted a stag dinner that included Goering and other German aviation officials and experts. When Goering arrived with his aides, he greeted Wilson and then, with the ambassador at his side, made straight for Lindbergh. Holding a small red box in his hand, the Luftwaffe chief made a short speech in German and awarded Lindbergh the Service Cross of the German Eagle, one of the highest decorations for civilians. As Wilson confirmed later in a letter to Lindbergh, both of them were caught by surprise by this award, which was given for his services to aviation. Truman Smith, who was also present, noted there was “no possibility” for Lindbergh to have turned down the decoration. “To have done so would have been a personal affront to Ambassador Wilson, his host for the evening, and to Minister Goering, who in a sense was a host in Germany,” he wrote.

Lindbergh’s subsequent vocal campaign to keep the United States out of the war in Europe, his involvement in the isolationist America First movement, and his conviction that the Soviet Union represented the real threat to European civilization—and that, in a war between those two powers, “a victory by Germany’s European people would be preferable to one by Russia’s semi-Asiatic Soviet Union”—only confirmed how well he had been played by the Nazis. His critics were right that he had become, in effect, an apologist for Hitler. Ironically, though, the flyer’s political blindness also allowed him to help Smith and his team gather more data on the Luftwaffe’s modernization and ambitions than any of their counterparts in other embassies. For his part, Lindbergh was pleased to be part of this effort; as he saw it, this information on Germany’s growing strength only bolstered his argument that the United States should avoid any new conflict with that country.

Not all of the intelligence Smith gathered was on target—and, by his own admission, he overlooked the early signs of German plans for rocketry. He also made some erroneous predictions about the degree of disaffection between the Nazis and the military, and certainly about “Hitler’s realistic and reticent foreign policy,” as he put it in 1937. But on balance, the regular air intelligence reports Smith sent to Washington demonstrated his team’s accomplishments. And Smith’s reputation as the best-informed attaché in Berlin on the Luftwaffe was fully merited, something he always stressed was only thanks to the fact that Lindbergh had cooperated with him so extensively and opened so many doors.

At a reception at the British Embassy in 1938, Cardinal Pacelli, the Vatican secretary of state who had served earlier as the papal nuncio in Germany, sent an aide over to Smith asking him to join him. “I was astonished when… he quizzed me in perfect English as to the state of readiness of the Luftwaffe,” he recalled. “One of his questions that I remember distinctly was, what did we Americans think of Germany’s new two-motored fighter: the Messerschmitt 110.” A year later, Pacelli was elected pope and took the name Pius XII.

Of all the people Hitler surrounded himself with, Putzi Hanfstaengl was a special case—and he liked it that way. It wasn’t just the fact that his mother was an American or that he had gone to Harvard that made him different from most of the Nazi leader’s entourage. He would later explain to everyone and anyone that he had wanted to educate and civilize Hitler, but unfortunately he was thwarted at every turn by the radicals around him. “I could feel that the rabid extremists of the Party had got their claws into him again and the arguments of the more reasonable of us were constantly being countered,” he wrote in a typical passage of his memoir.

Note the wording: “the more reasonable of us.” What he really meant was that he was the only reasonable one. When John Toland, the Hitler biographer, interviewed Hanfstaengl in 1970, he asked him whether there were any intelligent men in Hitler’s circle. “No!” Putzi shouted.

Hanfstaengl would also claim that his misgivings about Hitler’s leadership grew steadily. “It would be reasonable to ask why, in view of all my misgivings about the character and intentions of Hitler and his circle, I continued for so long in association with them,” he wrote. His answer: “I was an idealistic National-Socialist, I make no bones about it.”

While many Americans in Berlin, especially the correspondents who relied on him to gain access to Hitler, viewed Hanfstaengl as a highly useful contact—and some, like the AP’s Lochner, considered him to be a friend—others were more suspicious and antagonistic. Even Wiegand, the veteran Hearst correspondent who had often taken advantage of Hanfstaengl’s interventions to get to his boss, found himself in tense exchanges with Putzi after Hitler came to power. In a memo dated October 23, 1933, Wiegand wrote that Hanfstaengl complained to him that Hitler was holding him responsible for the fact that the American correspondent was now “one of my most bitter opponents.” There were also tensions over money; from Wiegand’s correspondence, it’s clear Putzi had taken fees for articles he may have either contributed or helped on in the past, although he wanted to return some of the money after Hitler came to power.

William Randolph Hearst took an active interest in Wiegand’s memos and letters about Hanfstaengl. The propagandist “probably likes to make a little money occasionally for news features,” he wrote Wiegand on November 20, 1934. “That is not a crime. The thing I think is unfortunate is the fact that he is such an extremist and may not be giving his boss the best advice on these religious situations. First the Jews were alienated, then the Catholics, and finally many Protestant sects.” Still, he urged his correspondent to be patient. “Do not be displeased with Dr. Hanfstaengl and others in the Government who seem antagonistic,” he wrote. “Give them good advice and try to guide them towards a greater liberality which will gain approval both at home and abroad.”

By then, many of the Berlin correspondents no longer nurtured those kinds of illusions. As for Putzi, the reporters who were new to Berlin were particularly scathing in their evaluation. Observing him at the Nuremberg party rally in September 1934, Shirer described him as “an immense, high-strung, incoherent clown who does not often fail to remind us that he is part American and graduated from Harvard.” But he admitted that many of the American and British correspondents “rather like him despite his clownish stupidity.”

When it came to Hanfstaengl’s postwar assertions that he had disagreed with the Nazis’ anti-Semitism, they were flatly contradicted by his behavior. On numerous occasions, he had lashed out at outspoken American diplomats and correspondents, like George Messersmith and Edgar Mowrer, by labeling them as Jews. Bella Fromm ran into Putzi at the entrance at the Dodds’ farewell party for Messersmith on May 12, 1934.

“I wonder why we were asked today,” Hanfstaengl told her. “All this excitement about Jews. Messersmith is one. So is Roosevelt. The party detests them.”

“Dr. Hanfstaengl, we’ve discussed this before,” the Jewish reporter replied. “You don’t have to put on that kind of an act with me.”

“All right,” he said. “Even if they are Aryan, you’d never know it from their actions.”

Putzi ended their exchange by offering her a fruit drop. “Have one. They are made especially for the Führer.”

Fromm had enjoyed eating similar fruit drops as a child and she politely took one. Then, as she was about to put it in her mouth, she noticed the swastika on it. “Try as I would to make the hideous mark disappear, it remained leering at me until I had finished the drop,” she noted.

A month later, Hanfstaengl made a much-publicized visit to the United States to attend his twenty-fifth class reunion at Harvard. The news sparked heated controversy on and off campus. A committee of Jewish organizations argued that Americans should show “no discourtesy of any kind” toward him, but columnist Heywood Broun warned of “bloody riots” during his visit and called for his deportation as an undesirable alien. Noting that Broun was a class ahead of him at Harvard, Putzi dismissed his attacks as “class jealousy.” Talking to reporters who met him as he disembarked in New York, he was equally dismissive of questions about German Jews. “The situation of the Jew in Germany is fairly normal,” he said. When some Jewish reporters asked for five minutes to discuss the issue further, he brushed them off.

While protesters gathered a short distance from his ship and shouted “Down with Hitler,” the on-campus debate was conducted in more muted tones. Benjamin Halpern, a Jewish student, wrote a letter to the Harvard Crimson titled “Heil Hitler” questioning the initial decision by Elliott Carr Cutler, the chief marshal at the reunion, to ask Hanfstaengl to serve as his aide during the ceremonies. Seeing the backlash, Cutler backed off that idea and asked Hanfstaengl to come as an ordinary alumnus. Still, the Crimson appeared to reflect the prevailing view on campus about the whole affair. “To object to the presence of a Harvard man among other Harvard men in any capacity, on purely political grounds, is an extremely childish thing to do,” it editorialized.

While Putzi would find it increasingly difficult in the next couple of years to convince Americans in Berlin that he was the reasonable face of the regime, he also was encountering problems with Hitler and his inner circle. The Nazi leader was contemptuous of Putzi’s assertions that he knew how to handle relations with the United States in order to prevent it from opposing Germany. When the Roosevelt Administration established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union in November 1933, Hitler told him: “There you are, Hanfstaengl, your friends the Americans have teamed up with the Bolsheviks.” Earlier, Hitler had told him bluntly: “I see America from where I sit much more clearly than you have ever known it.”

Putzi would later claim that, in the first period of Hitler’s reign, he began to notice its absurdities and how detached from reality his entou rage was. Returning from his Harvard reunion to the aftermath of the Night of the Long Knives, the bloody purge of the SA leaders and assorted other targets of the Nazis, he was summoned to Heiligendamm, the Baltic Sea resort where Hitler, Goebbels and others were vacationing. “It was really like something out of Lewis Carroll, a mad hatter’s luncheon party,” he wrote. “With the whole of Germany groaning under this atmosphere of murder, fear and suspicion, there was Magda Goebbels doing the honors in an airy summer dress, with several other young women at the table, even one or two from the aristocratic families…”

It was around this time, Putzi added, that he came to realize that, once Hitler was ensconced in power, “the demon had entered into him.” But even with the benefit of hindsight, he blamed Goebbels and others for pushing Hitler to the point of no return, and admitted he continued to nurture the hope that he could moderate his excesses. Amid all the self-justification, Hanfstaengl’s real concern was much less policy than his own position. Putzi could see it was weakening rapidly. Others were openly criticizing and mocking him, and Hitler didn’t seem interested in doing anything about it. The invitations to play the piano for the Nazi leader were becoming less frequent.

When Truman and Kay Smith returned to Berlin in 1935, they visited Putzi in his small apartment, which was in back of the Chancellery. The living room was dominated by a large bust of Hitler and a grand piano, and Truman casually hung his hat on Hitler’s head as he walked in. “Putz hastily snatched it off,” Kay recalled, pointing out that he treated this as bad manners on Truman’s part, not something to joke about. Over coffee and cake, the old acquaintances caught up on their news. “It was plain that all was not rosy between Putz and Goebbels,” Kay continued. “Putz intimated that Goebbels was jealous of his… influence over Hitler and was keeping him away from Hitler.”

The jealousy factor was almost certainly overblown, since Hanfstaengl’s influence had been on the wane for some time. That was typical Putzi talk—making himself out to be more important than he was. But there was certainly truth in his assertion that Goebbels had no use for a competing propagandist, and there was increasing evidence that he wanted to cut him out of the inner circle completely.

Hanfstaengl claimed that he considered resigning, but that others talked him out of it. More likely, he clung to every shred of power and influence as long as possible, even when his foreign press office was unceremoniously moved further away from the Chancellery. For nearly two years, he wasn’t invited to any events with Hitler at all. At the end of the last luncheon he ever attended with him, Hitler asked him to go to the piano “to play that thing of yours.” When Putzi asked him what piece he meant, he said, “Your funeral march.” Hanfstaengl played it with, as he recalled, “a sense of foreboding.”

In 1936, Putzi felt that he lost another connection to Hitler when his wife, Helen, divorced him. She was the American woman who had possibly prevented Hitler from committing suicide after the Beer Hall Putsch, and who had been the object of his clumsy affection in those Munich days. Helen had long put up with her philandering husband but refused to join him in Berlin—and eventually decided to make their de facto separation permanent. Like Putzi, Helen would later claim that she had grown disaffected with Hitler and the Nazis, especially after the Night of the Long Knives. But even when discussing her feelings with John Toland in 1971, she never mentioned anything else she objected to, not even the Holocaust, and remained fascinated by her association with this historic figure. “Yes, he was extraordinary,” she declared. “After all, when you think of a man from very modest background, to put himself on the map so to speak, he was an extraordinary man. Yes, he was.”

After not seeing Helen for a long time, Hitler once asked an acquaintance of hers what had happened to her. When he learned she had divorced Putzi, he declared, “Oh, fine, fine. I’ll send a telegram congratulating her.” Then, he added, “Oh no, that won’t do.” Helen, who provided this account, was visibly pleased that Germany’s leader was still thinking about her even after he had attained absolute power. She returned to the United States in 1938, where she spent the war years; still, Hitler appeared to hold a special place in her memory until the end of her life.

Seeing how tenuous his position had become, Putzi began smuggling out gold and platinum objects to London. He claimed he also helped some of the victims of the Nazis, winning the release of the daughter of a German-American couple who had been put in a concentration camp in Saxony for criticizing the regime. Above all, though, he kept looking nervously over his shoulder, often sleeping at friends’ apartments and keeping a valid passport with visas to several countries in his pocket.

According to Putzi’s dramatic account, he was in his Munich apartment on February 8, 1937, when the phone rang. The Chancellery was requesting that he report urgently to Berlin. A special plane was waiting to take him there. Putzi was delighted that he might be returned to favor. Although the special plane never materialized, he caught a Lufthansa flight to Berlin, where he reported to the Chancellery. There, he was told he was to fly immediately to Spain to help German correspondents who were covering the civil war. Putzi couldn’t understand the urgency, and complained that this could at least wait till he celebrated his fiftieth birthday two days later. But the officials insisted he stick with the plan, and one of them assured him that, if he did well in Spain, he would be back in Hitler’s good graces. They knew that this was what Putzi still craved.

Informed that he was on a secret mission that would last five or six weeks, Putzi was rushed to Staaken Airfield where he was to board a military plane. Along the way, one of his escorts told him that he would use the name of August Lehman and would pose as a painter and interior decorator in Spain. A cameraman recorded their trip to the airport. By this point, Hanfstaengl was deeply suspicious, and he became even more alarmed when Colonel Kastner, the commandant at the airfield, handed him a parachute, ordering him to put it on.

Once aloft, the pilot, who introduced himself as Captain Frodel, called him up to the copilot’s seat. He had recognized who “August Lehman” really was and asked him what instructions he had. When Putzi told him he was to report to a general in Salamanca, Frodel offered him some chilling news. “Herr Hanfstaengl, I have no orders to take you to Salamanca,” he said. “My instructions are to drop you over the Red lines between Barcelona and Madrid.”

Putzi was stunned. “That is a death sentence,” he protested. “Who gave you such orders?”

Frodel told him he received them right before he took off, and they were signed by Goering. When Putzi protested further, Frodel added, “I was told that you had volunteered for this mission.”

As Hanfstaengl described it, the rest of this episode played out like a thriller, without the pyrotechnics. After only about half an hour, one of the engines made a noise and Frodel turned it off. Casting Putzi a meaningful look, the pilot told him that there was something wrong. “I shall have to put down and have it seen to,” he said.

They landed at a quiet airfield near Leipzig, where the mechanics had already left for the day. Over drinks in the canteen, Frodel announced that a car would be ready soon to take them into town since there was no hope of getting the plane repaired until the next day. After ordering another round of drinks, Putzi said his stomach was bothering him and slipped out. It was dark, and he quickly made his way to the road near the airfield, and, meeting a peasant woman, discovered that there was a train station nearby. From there, he took a train to Leipzig, where he spent the night before hopping a morning train to Munich. He spent only about an hour in his hometown before boarding a third train, this time to Zurich. It was his fiftieth birthday when he arrived there, and he wouldn’t return to Germany until after the war.

Did the top Nazis really concoct such an elaborate plan to arrange the death of someone who had been so eager to serve Hitler for so long? Goering wrote to Hanfstaengl later that the whole affair was “a harmless joke” aimed at getting him to reconsider “some rather over-audacious utterances you have made,” and he would be perfectly safe if he returned to Germany. David Marwell, currently the director of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, extensively researched this incident in Germany and concluded that the entire scheme was indeed “an elaborate hoax”; its purpose, he maintained, was to humiliate Hanfstaengl rather than to kill him. But Putzi always remained convinced that he had narrowly escaped a death plot.

Back in Berlin, some of the American residents were puzzled by Hanfstaengl’s abrupt disappearance. In previous years, Putzi had hosted a Washington’s Birthday party in his apartment, inviting people like Ambassador Dodd, Truman Smith and Louis Lochner, along with a few Germans. The invitations had already gone out for the party on February 22 before the host’s disappearance, and it was only a day or two before that his secretary called the invited guests to say the party was canceled, without giving any explanation. Lochner suspected Putzi was in trouble and began picking up strands of the story, including reports that he had managed to avoid a plane ride over Spain that probably would have ended badly.

At a cocktail party hosted by Martha Dodd on March 17, Lochner and other guests speculated about Putzi’s whereabouts. “There’s nothing mysterious about Hanfstaengl,” an assistant naval attaché declared. “Why, I ran into him at the bar of the Hotel Bauer au Lac in Zurich only yesterday.”

Lochner hastily left the party and placed a call to the Zurich hotel. “How did you find out I was here?” Putzi asked. Lochner replied with the standard line that a newsman never reveals his sources. Since he already had his story, it gave the AP correspondent huge satisfaction that Hanfstaengl refused all calls after that.

By the time that Putzi made his escape, Ambassador Dodd was nearing the end of a four-year tour in Berlin that had proven more frustrating than productive. His early alienation from Hitler and his regime was fully understandable—and, in many ways, morally commendable. But it didn’t help his effectiveness as an envoy. After the Night of the Long Knives, he wrote in his diary that he would try to avoid meeting Hitler whenever he could. “I certainly would not ask to see any man who has committed a score of murders the last few days,” he wrote on July 4, 1934. And again and again throughout his four years, he ruminated about whether it made sense for him to stay in a post when he could see no hope of more positive developments.

At the State Department, his superiors were often frustrated as well. “What in the world is the use of having an ambassador who refuses to speak to the government to which he is accredited?” complained Undersecretary of State William Phillips. Since Dodd did maintain some contacts with German officials, this was overstating things—but not by much. And the scholar-turned-envoy didn’t help his case by his open disdain for many of the State Department officials he had to deal with and foreign service officers in general. As he rightly noted, they acted like pampered members of an exclusive fraternity, the products of privilege and Ivy League schools. They were highly critical of an outsider like himself, and he made no effort to temper their feelings.

In fact, Dodd reinforced them by almost obsessively pushing for budget cuts, including shorter cables. His embassy did produce numerous well-done reports during his tenure, including some lengthy ones; they demonstrated a deeper understanding of the Nazi regime than the reports of many other missions, including those of France and Britain. But by penny-pinching, he contributed to the impression that there was a “telegram deficiency,” as he acknowledged. He argued that he was only trying to eliminate three- or four-page telegrams when “one or two hundred words” would do, adding defensively: “I do not send what I think I should have to contradict in a week. This is my explanation. It may not be what the Department likes.”

Dodd wasn’t popular with his military attachés either. Truman Smith described him as “a historian of repute, and a pacifist.” According to Smith, he showed “a marked distaste for military matters” and a lack of interest in the work of the military attachés or in the rapid expansion of the German Army and Air Force. “The question perforce arises with respect to Dr. Dodd’s fitness for the ambassadorial post in Germany at this particular period in history,” Smith wrote later. In her unpublished memoir, Kay dispensed with any diplomatic wording. Claiming that Dodd’s pacifist beliefs prompted him to forbid Smith or other attachés to appear in uniform when they attended official ceremonies together, she declared: “I have seldom met a man for whom I developed so much contempt.”

Dodd hardly deserved that level of opprobrium. And as his biographer Robert Dallek and others have pointed out, it would be impossible to argue convincingly that a different ambassador, no matter how skillful, could have produced better results. But Dodd’s final period in Berlin was marked by his acute sense of disappointment—and the knowledge that many of the people he worked with were disappointed in him. By the end of 1936, he was considering resigning again—and openly saying that “four years’ service is enough.” After a two-and-a-half-month visit to the United States to deal with his deteriorating health, he returned to Germany in late October 1937. “In Berlin once more,” he wrote in his diary on October 29. “What can I do?”

But when it really came time to leave, Dodd changed his mind, arguing that his term should be extended. By then, Roosevelt was no longer in sympathy with the envoy he had dispatched to Berlin in 1933, still hoping the new regime might be influenced by a convinced democrat like the historian from the University of Chicago. On one initiative of his envoy, the president was even in basic agreement with Hitler: neither leader had the least patience for Dodd’s push for a new world peace conference.

Dodd left Berlin for the last time on December 29, 1937, nurturing a sense of grievance that, in the end, he was forced to resign sooner than he wanted to. “There were and are still officials in the State Department who do not like me or the things I stand for,” he wrote. After retiring to his farm in Virginia, his physical condition kept declining. When World War II broke out, the man who was often labeled a pacifist wrote to Roosevelt: “Hitler intends to conquer the whole world. If we do not join England and France, we shall have a hard time.” He died on February 9, 1940, at the age of seventy, long before his country joined the fight.

Dodd hadn’t left Berlin alone; his family went with him. That, of course, included his daughter Martha, whose conversion to a new cause had prompted her to take some extraordinary actions during the latter part of her stay in Berlin. Although Boris Vinogradov, her lover, was recalled to Moscow, she arranged to meet him there and in Paris—and, when he was transferred to the Soviet Embassy in Warsaw, she visited him there as well. But it wasn’t only romance that kept her connected to the Soviet regime. In the memoir she wrote of her Berlin days, she discreetly commented: “The Russians of the Embassy in Berlin were, on the whole, charming people—natural, informal, sprightly and clever.”

One of the charming people was an agent named Bukhartsev, the Berlin correspondent for the Soviet daily Izvestia. By most accounts, he took over from Vinogradov as her handler for the NKVD, the Soviet secret police and spy agency. According to a NKVD memo, “Martha argues that she is a convinced partisan of the Communist Party and the USSR.” In January 1936, Bukhartsev reported that he had met with Martha several times and that she “frankly expressed her willingness to help the Soviet Embassy with her information. Now she is studying hard the theory of communism [and] ‘Matters of Leninism’ by Stalin. Her teacher is [Arvid] Harnack to whom she goes often.”

Harnack was the German husband of Mildred Harnack, Martha’s American friend, a teacher who had also enlisted in the Communist cause. Like Martha, Mildred had to be careful to hide her allegiances in Germany—but, unlike the daughter of the ambassador, she would remain in Berlin, with fateful consequences.

Although Martha was hardly a patient, faithful lover, she still had her heart set on Vinogradov. On March 14, 1937, she petitioned the Soviet government, saying “we have agreed to ask official permission to marry.” Two weeks later in Moscow, she met with the head of the NKVD’s Foreign Department, Abram Slutsky. At his request, she prepared a statement elaborating on her willingness to serve the Kremlin: “It goes without saying that my services of any kind and at any time are proposed to the party for use at its discretion. Currently, I have access mainly to the personal, confidential correspondence of my father with the U.S. State Department and the U.S. President.” It was clear her father had no idea what she was doing.

Then she switched course in her statement, pointing out that she had lost almost all personal connections with German society, and that her extensive diplomatic contacts yielded meager results. In other words, her usefulness was ending in Berlin. “Is the information which I get from my father, who is hated in Germany and who occupies an isolated position among foreign diplomats and therefore has no access to any secret information, important enough for me to remain in Germany?” she asked rhetorically. “Couldn’t I conduct more valuable work in America or in some European organization such as the International Conference for Peace… ?”

She also noted that, while she was trying to get her father’s tour in Berlin extended, it was likely to end soon. With that in mind, she was positioning herself to help Moscow elsewhere. And, at the same time, she clearly hoped that might still bring her and Vinogradov back together.

But after the Dodds returned to the United States, Vinogradov was recalled to Moscow from Warsaw. It was 1938, and Stalin’s purges were at their height. Among the prime targets: anyone who had contacts with foreigners. It made no difference if that person was carrying out direct orders from Moscow. Martha’s lover was arrested. Not knowing his fate, Martha responded to a letter he wrote to her at the NKVD’s behest. She wrote back in a jaunty tone on July 9. “Boris, dear! Finally I got your letter… Are you happy? Did you find a girl you can love instead of me?” she asked. Then she added: “You haven’t had time yet to know that I really got married. On June 16, I married an American whom I love very much.”

Vinogradov never read that letter. Before it arrived, he was executed.