In the Garden of Beasts

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, Heils 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.”