In the Garden of Beasts

CHAPTER 39 Dangerous Dining

The city seemed to vibrate with a background thrum of danger, as if an immense power line had been laid through its center. Everyone in Dodd’s circle felt it. Partly this tension arose from the unusual May weather and the concomitant fears of a failed harvest, but the main engine of anxiety was the intensifying discord between Captain Röhm’s Storm Troopers and the regular army. A popular metaphor used at the time to describe the atmosphere in Berlin was that of an approaching thunderstorm—that sense of charged and suspended air.

Dodd had little chance to settle back into the rhythms of work.

The day after his return from America, he faced the prospect of hosting a giant good-bye banquet for Messersmith, who had at last managed to secure for himself a loftier post, though not in Prague, his original target. Competition for that job had been robust, and although Messersmith had lobbied hard and persuaded allies of all stripes to write letters to bolster his bid, in the end the job went to someone else. Instead, Undersecretary Phillips had offered Messersmith another vacant post: Uruguay. If Messersmith had been disappointed, he had not shown it. He had counted himself lucky simply to be leaving the consular service behind. But then his luck had gotten better still. The post of ambassador to Austria suddenly had become vacant, and Messersmith was the obvious choice for the job. Roosevelt agreed. Now Messersmith truly was delighted. So too was Dodd, just to have him gone, though he’d have preferred to have him at the other side of the world.

There were many parties for Messersmith—for a time every dinner and luncheon in Berlin seemed to be in his honor—but the U.S. embassy’s banquet on May 18 was the biggest and most official. While Dodd was in America, Mrs. Dodd, with the assistance of embassy protocol experts, had overseen the creation of a four-page, single-spaced list of guests that seemed to include everyone of import, except Hitler. To anyone knowledgeable about Berlin society, the real fascination was not who attended, but who did not. Göring and Goebbels sent their regrets, as did Vice-Chancellor Papen and Rudolf Diels. Defense Minister Blomberg came, but not SA chief Röhm.

Bella Fromm attended, and so did Sigrid Schultz and various of Martha’s friends, including Putzi Hanfstaengl, Armand Berard, and Prince Louis Ferdinand. This mixture by itself added to the aura of tension in the room, for Berard still loved Martha and Prince Louis mooned for her, though her adoration remained utterly fixed on Boris (absent, interestingly, from the invitation list). Martha’s handsome young Hitler liaison, Hans “Tommy” Thomsen, came, as did his ofttimes companion, the dark and lushly beautiful Elmina Rangabe, but there was a hitch this night—Tommy brought his wife. There was heat, champagne, passion, jealousy, and that background sense of something unpleasant building just over the horizon.

Bella Fromm chatted briefly with Hanfstaengl and recorded the encounter in her diary.

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

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

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

At the moment Fromm was not feeling particularly solicitous of Nazi goodwill. Two weeks earlier her daughter, Gonny, had left for America, with Messersmith’s help, leaving Fromm saddened but relieved. A week before that, the newspaper Vossische Zeitung—“Auntie Voss,” where she had worked for years—had closed. She felt more and more that an epoch in which she once had thrived was coming to an end.

She said to Hanfstaengl, “Of course if you’re going to do away with right and wrong, and make it Aryan and non-Aryan, it leaves people who happen to have rather old-fashioned notions about what is right and wrong, what is decent and what is obscene, without much ground to stand on.”

She turned the conversation back to the subject of Messersmith, whom she described as being so revered by his colleagues “that he is practically regarded as having ambassadorial rank,” a remark that would have irritated Dodd no end.

Hanfstaengl softened his voice. “All right, all right,” he said. “I have lots of friends in the United States, and all of them side with the Jews, too. But since it is insisted on in the party program—” He stopped there in a kind of verbal shrug. He reached into his pocket, and pulled out a small bag of candy fruit drops. Lutschbonbons. Bella had loved them as a child.

“Have one,” Hanfstaengl said. “They are made especially for the Führer.”

She chose one. Just before she popped it into her mouth she saw that it was embossed with a swastika. Even fruit drops had been “coordinated.”

The conversation turned to the political warfare that was causing so much unease. Hanfstaengl told her that Röhm coveted control not only of the German army but also of Göring’s air force. “Hermann is in a rage!” Hanfstaengl said. “You can do anything to him except fool around with his Luftwaffe, and he could murder Röhm in cold blood.” He asked: “Do you know Himmler?”

Fromm nodded.

Hanfstaengl said, “He was a chicken farmer, when he wasn’t on duty spying for the Reichswehr. He kicked Diels out of the Gestapo. Himmler can’t stand anybody, but Röhm least of all. Now they’re all ganged up against Röhm: Rosenberg, Goebbels, and the chicken farmer.” The Rosenberg he mentioned was Alfred Rosenberg, an ardent anti-Semite and head of the Nazi Party’s foreign bureau.

After recounting the conversation in her diary, Fromm added, “There is nobody among the officials of the National Socialist party who would not cheerfully cut the throat of every other official in order to further his own advancement.”

IT WAS A MEASURE of the strange new climate of Berlin that another dinner party, wholly innocuous, should prove to have profoundly lethal consequences. The host was a wealthy banker named Wilhelm Regendanz, a friend of the Dodds, though happily the Dodds were not invited on this particular occasion. Regendanz held the dinner one evening in May at his luxurious villa in Dahlem, in the southwestern portion of greater Berlin known for its lovely homes and its proximity to the Grunewald.

Regendanz, father of seven, was a member of the Stahlhelm, or Steel Helmets, an organization of former army officers with a conservative bent. He liked bringing together men of diverse position for meals, discussions, and lectures. To this particular dinner Regendanz invited two prominent guests, French ambassador François-Poncet and Captain Röhm, both of whom had been to the house on past occasions.

Röhm arrived accompanied by three young SA officers, among them a curly-headed blond male adjutant nicknamed “Count Pretty,” who was Röhm’s secretary and, rumor held, his occasional lover. Hitler would later describe this meeting as a “secret dinner,” though in fact the guests made no attempt to disguise their presence. They parked their cars in front of the house in full view of the street, with their tell-all license plates fully exposed.

The guests were an odd match. François-Poncet disliked the SA chief, as he made clear in his memoir, The Fateful Years. “Having always entertained the liveliest repugnance toward Röhm,” he wrote, “I avoided him as much as possible despite the eminent role he played in the Third Reich.” But Regendanz had “begged” François-Poncet to come.

Later, in a letter to the Gestapo, Regendanz tried to explain his insistence on getting the two men together. He laid the impetus for the dinner on François-Poncet, who, he claimed, had expressed frustration at not being able to meet with Hitler himself and had asked Regendanz to speak with someone close to Hitler to communicate his desire for a meeting. Regendanz suggested that Röhm might prove a worthy intermediary. At the time of the dinner, Regendanz claimed, he was unaware of the rift between Röhm and Hitler—“on the contrary,” he told the Gestapo, “it was assumed that Röhm was the man who absolutely had the confidence of the Führer and was his follower. In other words one believed that one was informing the Führer when one informed Röhm.”

For dinner, the men were joined by Mrs. Regendanz and a son, Alex, who was preparing to become an international lawyer. After the meal, Röhm and the French ambassador retired to Regendanz’s library for an informal conversation. Röhm talked of military matters and disclaimed any interest in politics, declaring that he saw himself only as a soldier, an officer. “The result of this conversation,” Regendanz told the Gestapo, “was literally nothing.”

The evening came to an end—mercifully, in François-Poncet’s opinion. “The meal was dismal, the conversation insignificant,” he recalled. “I found Röhm sleepy and heavy; he woke up only to complain of his health and the rheumatism he expected to nurse at Wiessee,” a reference to Bad Wiessee, where Röhm planned a lakeside sojourn to take a cure. “Returning home,” François-Poncet wrote, “I cursed our host for the evening’s boredom.”

How the Gestapo learned of the dinner and its guests isn’t known, but by this point Röhm most certainly was under close surveillance. The license plates of the cars parked at Regendanz’s house would have tipped any watcher off to the identities of the men within.

The dinner became infamous. Later, in midsummer, Britain’s Ambassador Phipps would observe in his diary that of the seven people who sat down to dine at the Regendanz mansion that night, four had been murdered, one had fled the country under threat of death, and another had been imprisoned in a concentration camp.

Phipps wrote, “The list of casualties for one dinner party might make even a Borgia envious.”

AND THERE WAS THIS:

On Thursday, May 24, Dodd walked to a luncheon with a senior official of the foreign ministry, Hans-Heinrich Dieckhoff, whom Dodd described as being “what amounts to Assistant Secretary of State.” They met at a small, discreet restaurant on Unter den Linden, the wide boulevard that ran due east from the Brandenburg Gate, and there they engaged in a conversation that Dodd found extraordinary.

Dodd’s main reason for wanting to see Dieckhoff was to express his dismay at having been made to seem naive by Goebbels’s Jews-as-syphilis speech after all he had done to quiet Jewish protests in America. He reminded Dieckhoff of the Reich’s announced intent to close the Columbia House prison and to require warrants for all arrests and of other assurances that Germany “was easing up on the Jewish atrocities.”

Dieckhoff was sympathetic. He confessed to his own dim view of Goebbels and told Dodd he expected that soon Hitler would be overthrown. Dodd wrote in his diary that Dieckhoff “gave what he considered good evidence that the Germans would not much longer endure the system under which they were drilled everlastingly and semi-starved.”

Such candor amazed Dodd. Dieckhoff spoke as freely as if he were in England or the United States, Dodd noted, even to the point of expressing the hope that Jewish protests in America would continue. Without them, Dieckhoff said, the chances of overthrowing Hitler would diminish.

Dodd knew that even for a man of Dieckhoff’s rank such talk was dangerous. He wrote, “I felt the deep concern of a high official who could thus risk his life in criticism of the existing regime.”

After exiting the restaurant, the two men walked west along Unter den Linden toward Wilhelmstrasse, the main government thoroughfare. They parted, Dodd wrote, “rather sadly.”

Dodd returned to his office, worked a couple of hours, then took a long walk around the Tiergarten.

CHAPTER 40 A Writer’s Retreat

The increasing evidence of social and political oppression came more and more to trouble Martha, in spite of her enthusiasm for the bright, blond young men whom Hitler attracted by the thousands. One of the most important moments in her education came in May when a friend, Heinrich Maria Ledig-Rowohlt, a regular in the salon of Mildred and Arvid Harnack, invited her and Mildred to accompany him for a visit to one of the few prominent authors who had not joined the great flight of artistic talent from Nazi Germany—an exodus that included Fritz Lang, Marlene Dietrich, Walter Gropius, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Albert Einstein, and composer Otto Klemperer, whose son, actor Werner Klemperer, would go on to portray a kindly, befuddled Nazi prison-camp commandant in the TV series Hogan’s Heroes. Ledig-Rowohlt was the illegitimate son of publisher Ernst Rowohlt and worked as an editor in his father’s company. The author in question was Rudolf Ditzen, known universally by his pseudonym, Hans Fallada.

The visit was supposed to take place earlier in the year, but Fallada had postponed it until May because of his anxiety over the publication of his latest book, Once a Jailbird. By this point Fallada had achieved considerable fame worldwide for his novel Little Man—What Now?, about one couple’s struggle during the economic and social upheaval of the Weimar Republic. What made Once a Jailbird a subject of such anxiety for Fallada was the fact that it was his first major work to be published since Hitler had become chancellor. He was uncertain of his standing in the eyes of Goebbels’s Reich Literary Chamber, which claimed the right to decide what constituted acceptable literature. To try to smooth the way for his new book, Fallada included in its introduction a statement that praised the Nazis for ensuring that the awful situation at the center of the book could no longer occur. Even his publisher, Rowohlt, thought Fallada had gone too far and told him the introduction “does seem rather TOO ingratiating.” Fallada kept it.

In the months following Hitler’s ascension to chancellor, the German writers who were not outright Nazis had quickly divided into two camps—those who believed it was immoral to remain in Germany and those who felt the best strategy was to stay put, recede as much as possible from the world, and wait for the collapse of the Hitler regime. The latter approach became known as “inner emigration,” and was the path Fallada had chosen.

Martha asked Boris to come along as well. He agreed, despite his previously stated view that Mildred was someone Martha should avoid.

THEY SET OUT on the morning of Sunday, May 27, for the three-hour drive to Fallada’s farmhouse in Carwitz, in the lake country of Mecklenburg north of Berlin. Boris drove his Ford and of course left the top down. The morning was cool and soft, the roads mostly free of traffic. Once outside the city, Boris accelerated. The Ford sped along country roads lined with chestnut and acacia, the air fragrant with spring.

Halfway through the drive, the landscape darkened. “Little sharp lines of lightning lit up the sky,” Martha recalled, “and the scene was wild and violent with color, intense electric green and violet, lavender and gray.” A sudden rain sent pellets of water exploding against the windscreen, but even here, to the delight of all, Boris kept the top down. The car raced along on a cloud of spray.

Abruptly the sky cleared, leaving sun-shafted steam and sudden color, as if they were driving through a painting. The scent of newly moist ground filled the air.

As they neared Carwitz, they entered a terrain of hills, meadows, and bright blue lakes, laced together with sandy paths. The houses and barns were simple boxes with steeply pitched roofs. They were only three hours from Berlin, yet the place seemed remote and hidden.

Boris brought the Ford to a stop at an old farmhouse beside a lake. The house stood at the base of a tongue of land called the Bohnenwerder that jutted into the lake and was mounded with hills.

Fallada emerged from the house trailed by a young boy of about four and Fallada’s blond and buxom wife, who held their second child, a baby. A dog bounded out as well. Fallada was a boxy man with a square head, wide mouth, and cheekbones so round and hard they might have been golf balls implanted under his skin. His glasses had dark frames and circular lenses. He and his wife gave the new arrivals a brief tour of the farm, which they had bought using the proceeds from Little Man. Martha was struck by the apparent contentment of both.

It was Mildred who brought to the fore the questions that had been in the air since the group’s arrival, though she was careful to shade them with nuance. As she and Fallada strolled to the lake, according to a detailed account by one of Fallada’s biographers, she talked about her life in America and how she used to enjoy walking along the shore of Lake Michigan.

Fallada said, “It must be difficult for you to live in a foreign country, especially when your interest is literature and language.”

True, she told him, “but it can also be difficult to live in one’s own country when one’s concern is literature.”

Fallada lit a cigarette.

Speaking now very slowly, Fallada said, “I could never write in another language, nor live in any other place than Germany.”

Mildred countered: “Perhaps, Herr Ditzen, it is less important where one lives than how one lives.”

Fallada said nothing.

After a moment, Mildred asked, “Can one write what one wishes here these days?”

“That depends on one’s point of view,” he said. There were difficulties and demands, words to be avoided, but in the end language endured, he said. “Yes, I believe one can still write here in these times if one observes the necessary regulations and gives in a little. Not in the important things, of course.”

Mildred asked: “What is important and what unimportant?”

THERE WAS LUNCH AND COFFEE. Martha and Mildred walked to the top of the Bohnenwerder to admire the view. A soft haze muted edges and colors and created an overall sense of peace. Down below, however, Fallada’s mood had turned stormy. He and Ledig-Rowohlt played chess. The subject of Fallada’s introduction to Jailbird came up, and Ledig-Rowohlt questioned its necessity. He told Fallada it had been a topic of conversation during the drive to Carwitz. Upon hearing this, Fallada grew angry. He resented being the subject of gossip and disputed whether anyone had a right to judge him, least of all a couple of American women.

When Martha and Mildred returned, the conversation continued, and Mildred joined in. Martha listened as best she could, but her German was not yet expert enough to allow her to pick up enough detail to make sense of it. She could tell, however, that Mildred was “gently probing” Fallada’s retreat from the world. His unhappiness at being thus challenged was obvious.

Later, Fallada walked them through his house—it had seven rooms, electric light, a spacious attic, and various warming stoves. He showed them his library, with its many foreign editions of his own books, and then led them to the room in which his infant son now was napping. Martha wrote: “He revealed uneasiness and self-consciousness, though he tried to be proud and happy in the infant, in his self-tilled garden, in his simple buxom wife, in the many translations and editions of his books lining the shelves. But he was an unhappy man.”

Fallada took photographs of the group; Boris did likewise. During the journey back to Berlin, the four companions again talked about Fallada. Mildred described him as cowardly and weak but then added, “He has a conscience and that is good. He is not happy, he is not a Nazi, he is not hopeless.”

Martha recorded another impression: “I saw the stamp of naked fear on a writer’s face for the first time.”

FALLADA BECAME, ULTIMATELY, a controversial figure in German literature, reviled in some quarters for his failure to stand up to the Nazis but defended in others for not choosing the safer path of exile. In the years that followed Martha’s visit, Fallada found himself increasingly compelled to bend his writing to the demands of the Nazi state. He turned to preparing translations for Rowohlt, among them Clarence Day’s Life with Father, then very popular in the United States, and to writing innocuous works that he hoped would not offend Nazi sensibilities, among them a collection of children’s stories about a child’s pull toy, Hoppelpoppel, Wo bist du? (Hoppelpoppel, Where Are You?).

He found his career briefly invigorated with publication in 1937 of a novel entitled Wolf Among Wolves, which party officials interpreted as a worthy attack on the old Weimar world and which Goebbels himself described as “a super book.” Even so, Fallada made more and more concessions, eventually allowing Goebbels to script the ending of his next novel, Iron Gustav, which depicted the hardships of life during the past world war. Fallada saw this as a prudent concession. “I do not like grand gestures,” he wrote; “being slaughtered before the tyrant’s throne, senselessly, to the benefit of no one and to the detriment of my children, that is not my way.”

He recognized, however, that his various capitulations took a toll on his writing. He wrote to his mother that he was not satisfied with his work. “I cannot act as I want to—if I want to stay alive. And so a fool gives less than he has.”

Other writers, in exile, watched with disdain as Fallada and his fellow inner emigrants surrendered to government tastes and demands. Thomas Mann, who lived abroad throughout the Hitler years, later wrote their epitaph: “It may be superstitious belief, but in my eyes, any books which could be printed at all in Germany between 1933 and 1945 are worse than worthless and not objects one wishes to touch. A stench of blood and shame attaches to them. They should all be pulped.”

THE FEAR AND OPPRESSION that Martha saw in Fallada crowned a rising mountain of evidence that throughout the spring had begun to erode her infatuation with the new Germany. Her blind endorsement of Hitler’s regime first faded to a kind of sympathetic skepticism, but as summer approached, she felt a deepening revulsion.

Where once she had been able to wave away the beating incident in Nuremberg as an isolated episode, now she recognized that German persecution of Jews was a national pastime. She found herself repulsed by the constant thunder of Nazi propaganda that portrayed Jews as enemies of the state. Now when she listened to the anti-Nazi talk of Mildred and Arvid Harnack and their friends, she no longer felt quite so inclined to defend the “strange beings” of the fledgling revolution whom she once had found so entrancing. “By the spring of 1934,” she wrote, “what I had heard, seen, and felt, revealed to me that conditions of living were worse than in pre-Hitler days, that the most complicated and heartbreaking system of terror ruled the country and repressed the freedom and happiness of the people, and that German leaders were inevitably leading these docile and kindly masses into another war against their will and their knowledge.”

She was not yet willing, however, to openly declare her new attitude to the world. “I still attempted to keep my hostility guarded and unexpressed.”

Instead, she revealed it obliquely by proclaiming in deliberately contrarian fashion a new and energetic interest in the Hitler regime’s greatest enemy, the Soviet Union. She wrote, “A curiosity began to grow in me as to the nature of this government, so loathed in Germany, and its people, described as so utterly ruthless.”

Against her parents’ wishes, but with Boris’s encouragement, she began planning a journey to the Soviet Union.

BY JUNE, DODD HAD COME to see that the “Jewish problem,” as he continued to call it, was anything but improved. Now, he told Secretary Hull in a letter, “the prospect of a cessation appears far less hopeful.” Like Messersmith, he saw that persecution was pervasive, even if it had changed character to become “more subtle and less advertised.”

In May, he reported, the Nazi Party had launched a campaign against “grumblers and faultfinders” that was meant to reenergize Gleichschaltung. Inevitably it also increased pressure on Jews. Goebbels’s newspaper Der Angriff began urging readers “to keep a sharp eye on the Jews and report any of their shortcomings,” Dodd wrote. The Jewish owners of the Frankfurter Zeitung had been forced to abandon their controlling interest, as had the last Jewish owners of the famed Ullstein publishing empire. A large rubber company was told it must provide proof that it had no Jewish employees before it could submit bids to municipalities. The German Red Cross was suddenly required to certify that new contributors were of Aryan origin. And two judges in two different cities granted permission to two men to divorce their wives for the sole reason that the women were Jewish, reasoning that such marriages would yield mixed offspring that would only weaken the German race.

Dodd wrote: “These instances and others of lesser importance reveal a different method in the treatment of the Jews—a method perhaps less calculated to bring repercussions from abroad, but reflecting nonetheless the Nazis’ determination to force the Jews out of the country.”

Germany’s Aryan population also experienced a new tightening of control. In another dispatch written the same day, Dodd described how the Ministry of Education had announced that the school week would be divided in such a way that Saturdays and Wednesday evenings would be devoted to the demands of the Hitler Youth.

Henceforth Saturday was to be called the Staatsjugendtag, the State’s Day for Youth.

THE WEATHER REMAINED WARM, with scant rain. On Saturday, June 2, 1934, with temperatures in the eighties, Ambassador Dodd wrote in his diary: “Germany looks dry for the first time; trees and fields are yellow. The papers are full of accounts of the drought in Bavaria and in the United States as well.”

In Washington, Moffat also took note of the weather. In his diary he called it “the great heat” and cited Sunday, May 20, as the day it had begun, with a high of ninety-three degrees. In his office.

No one knew it yet, of course, but America had entered the second of a series of cataclysmic droughts that soon would transform the Great Plains into the Dust Bowl.

CHAPTER 41 Trouble at the Neighbor’s

As summer neared, the sense of unease in Berlin became acute. The mood was “tense and electric,” Martha wrote. “Everyone felt there was something in the air but did not know what it was.”

The strange atmosphere and the fragile condition of Germany were topics of conversation at a late-afternoon Tee-Empfang—a tea party—hosted by Putzi Hanfstaengl on Friday, June 8, 1934, which the Dodd family attended.

On their way home from the tea, the Dodds could not help but notice that something unusual was happening in Bendlerstrasse, the last side street they passed before reaching their house. There, in easy view, stood the buildings of the Bendler Block, army headquarters. Indeed, the Dodds and the army were almost back-fence neighbors—a man with a strong arm could throw a stone from the family’s yard and expect to break one of the army’s windows.

The change was obvious. Soldiers stood on the roofs of headquarters buildings. Heavily armed patrols moved along the sidewalks. Army trucks and Gestapo cars clogged the street.

These forces remained throughout Friday night and Saturday. Then, Sunday morning, June 10, the troops and trucks were gone.

At the Dodds’ house a coolness spread outward from the forested ground of the Tiergarten. There were riders in the park, as always, and the thud of hooves was audible in the Sunday-morning quiet.

CHAPTER 42 Hermann’s Toys

A mid the many rumors of coming upheaval, it remained difficult for Dodd and his peers in the diplomatic corps to imagine that Hitler, Göring, and Goebbels could endure much longer. Dodd still saw them as inept and dangerous adolescents—“16 year olds,” as he now put it—who found themselves confronting an accumulation of daunting troubles. The drought grew steadily more severe. The economy showed little sign of improvement, other than the illusory decline in unemployment. The rift between Röhm and Hitler seemed to have deepened. And there continued to be moments—strange, ludicrous moments—that suggested that Germany was merely the stage set for some grotesque comedy, not a serious country in a serious time.

Sunday, June 10, 1934, provided one such episode, when Dodd, French ambassador François-Poncet, and Britain’s Sir Eric Phipps, along with three dozen other guests, attended a kind of open house at Göring’s vast estate an hour’s drive north of Berlin. He had named it Carinhall for his dead Swedish wife, Carin, whom he revered; later in the month he planned to exhume her body from its resting place in Sweden, transport it to Germany, and entomb it in a mausoleum on the estate grounds. Today, however, Göring wanted merely to show off his forests and his new bison enclosure, where he hoped to breed the creatures and then turn them loose on his grounds.

The Dodds arrived late in their new Buick, which had betrayed them along the way with a minor mechanical failure, but they still managed to arrive before Göring himself. Their instructions called for them to drive to a particular point on the estate. To keep guests from getting lost, Göring had stationed men at each crossroads to provide directions. Dodd and his wife found the other guests gathered around a speaker who held forth on some aspect of the grounds. The Dodds learned they were at the edge of the bison enclosure.

At last Göring arrived, driving fast, alone, in what Phipps described as a racing car. He climbed out wearing a uniform that was partly the costume of an aviator, partly that of a medieval hunter. He wore boots of India rubber and in his belt had tucked a very large hunting knife.

Göring took the place of the first speaker. He used a microphone but spoke loudly into it, producing a jarring effect in the otherwise sylvan locale. He described his plan to create a forest preserve that would reproduce the conditions of primeval Germany, complete with primeval animals like the bison that now stood indolently in the near distance. Three photographers and a “cinematograph” operator captured the affair on film.

Elisabetta Cerruti, the beautiful Hungarian and Jewish wife of the Italian ambassador, recalled what happened next.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Göring said, “in a few minutes you will witness a unique display of nature at work.” He gestured toward an iron cage. “In this cage is a powerful male bison, an animal almost unheard of on the Continent…. He will meet here, before your very eyes, the female of his species. Please be quiet and don’t be afraid.”

Göring’s keepers opened the cage.

“Ivan the Terrible,” Göring commanded, “I order you to leave the cage.”

The bull did not move.

Göring repeated his command. Once again the bull ignored him.

The keepers now attempted to prod Ivan into action. The photographers readied themselves for the lustful charge certain to ensue.

Britain’s Ambassador Phipps wrote in his diary that the bull emerged from the cage “with the utmost reluctance, and, after eyeing the cows somewhat sadly, tried to return to it.” Phipps also described the affair in a later memorandum to London that became famous within the British foreign office as “the bison dispatch.”

Next, Dodd and Mattie and the other guests climbed aboard thirty small, two-passenger carriages driven by peasants and set off on a long, meandering ride through forests and across meadows. Göring was in the lead in a carriage pulled by two great horses, with Mrs. Cerruti seated to his right. An hour later, the procession halted near a swamp. Göring climbed from his carriage and gave another speech, this on the glories of birds.

Once again the guests climbed into their carriages and, after another lengthy ride, came to a glade where their cars stood waiting. Göring levered his massive self into his car and raced off at high speed. The other guests followed at a slower pace and after twenty minutes came to a lake beside which stood an immense, newly constructed lodge that seemed meant to evoke the home of a medieval lord. Göring was waiting for them, dressed in a wholly new outfit, “a wonderful new white summer garb,” Dodd wrote—white tennis shoes, white duck trousers, white shirt, and a hunting jacket of green leather, in whose belt the same hunting knife appeared. In one hand he held a long implement that seemed a cross between a shepherd’s staff and a harpoon.

It was now about six o’clock, and the afternoon sun had turned the landscape a pleasing amber. Staff in hand, Göring led his guests into the house. A collection of swords hung just inside the main door. He showed off his “gold” and “silver” rooms, his card room, library, gym, and movie theater. One hallway was barbed with dozens of sets of antlers. In the main sitting room they found a live tree, a bronze image of Hitler, and an as-yet-unoccupied space in which Göring planned to install a statue of Wotan, the Teutonic god of war. Göring “displayed his vanity at every turn,” Dodd observed. He noted that a number of guests traded amused but discreet glances.

Then Göring drew the party outside, where all were directed to sit at tables set in the open air for a meal orchestrated by the actress Emmy Sonnemann, whom Göring identified as his “private secretary,” though it was common knowledge that she and Göring were romantically involved. (Mrs. Dodd liked Sonnemann and in coming months would become, as Martha noted, “rather attached to her.”) Ambassador Dodd found himself seated at a table with Vice-Chancellor Papen, Phipps, and François-Poncet, among others. He was disappointed in the result. “The conversation had no value,” he wrote—though he found himself briefly engaged when the discussion turned to a new book about the German navy in World War I, during which far-too-enthusiastic talk of war led Dodd to say, “If people knew the truth of history there would never be another great war.”

Phipps and François-Poncet laughed uncomfortably.

Then came silence.

A few moments later, talk resumed: “we turned,” Dodd wrote, “to other and less risky subjects.”

Dodd and Phipps assumed—hoped—that once the meal was over they would be able to excuse themselves and begin their journey back to Berlin, where both had an evening function to attend, but Göring now informed all that the climax of the outing—“this strange comedy,” Phipps called it—was yet to come.

Göring led his guests to another portion of the lake shore some five hundred yards away, where he stopped before a tomb erected at the water’s edge. Here Dodd found what he termed “the most elaborate structure of its kind I ever saw.” The mausoleum was centered between two great oak trees and six large sarsen stones reminiscent of those at Stonehenge. Göring walked to one of the oaks and planted himself before it, legs apart, like some gargantuan wood sprite. The hunting knife was still in his belt, and again he wielded his medieval staff. He held forth on the virtues of his dead wife, the idyllic setting of her tomb, and his plans for her exhumation and reinterment, which was to occur ten days hence, on the summer solstice, a day that the pagan ideology of the National Socialists had freighted with symbolic importance. Hitler was to attend, as were legions of men from the army, SS, and SA.

At last, “weary of the curious display,” Dodd and Phipps in tandem moved to say their good-byes to Göring. Mrs. Cerruti, clearly awaiting her own chance to bolt, acted with more speed. “Lady Cerruti saw our move,” Dodd wrote, “and she arose quickly so as not to allow anybody to trespass upon her fight to lead on every possible occasion.”

The next day Phipps wrote about Göring’s open house in his diary. “The whole proceedings were so strange as at times to convey a feeling of unreality,” he wrote, but the episode had provided him a valuable if unsettling insight into the nature of Nazi rule. “The chief impression was that of the most pathetic naïveté of General Göring, who showed us his toys like a big, fat, spoilt child: his primeval woods, his bison and birds, his shooting-box and lake and bathing beach, his blond ‘private secretary,’ his wife’s mausoleum and swans and sarsen stones…. And then I remembered there were other toys, less innocent though winged, and these might some day be launched on their murderous mission in the same childlike spirit and with the same childlike glee.”

CHAPTER 43 A Pygmy Speaks

Wherever Martha and her father now went they heard rumors and speculation that the collapse of Hitler’s regime might be imminent. With each hot June day the rumors gained detail. In bars and cafés, patrons engaged in the decidedly dangerous pastime of composing and comparing lists of who would comprise the new government. The names of two former chancellors came up often: General Kurt von Schleicher and Heinrich Brüning. One rumor held that Hitler would remain chancellor but be kept under control by a new, stronger cabinet, with Schleicher as vice-chancellor, Brüning as foreign minister, and Captain Röhm as defense minister. On June 16, 1934, a month shy of the one-year anniversary of his arrival in Berlin, Dodd wrote to Secretary of State Hull, “Everywhere I go men talk of resistance, of possible putsches in big cities.”

And then something occurred that until that spring would have seemed impossible given the potent barriers to dissent established under Hitler’s rule.

On Sunday, June 17, Vice-Chancellor Papen was scheduled to deliver a speech in Marburg at the city’s namesake university, a brief rail journey southwest of Berlin. He did not see the text until he was aboard his train, this owing to a quiet conspiracy between his speechwriter, Edgar Jung, and his secretary, Fritz Gunther von Tschirschky und Boegendorff. Jung was a leading conservative who had become so deeply opposed to the Nazi Party that he briefly considered assassinating Hitler. Until now he had kept his anti-Nazi views out of Papen’s speeches, but he sensed that the growing conflict within the government offered a unique opportunity. If Papen himself spoke out against the regime, Jung reasoned, his remarks might at last prompt President Hindenburg and the army to eject the Nazis from power and quash the Storm Troopers, in the interest of restoring order to the nation. Jung had gone over the speech carefully with Tschirschky, but both men had deliberately kept it from Papen until the last moment so that he would have no choice but to deliver it. “The speech took months of preparation,” Tschirschky later said. “It was necessary to find the proper occasion for its delivery, and then everything had to be prepared with the greatest possible care.”

Now, in the train, as Papen read the text for the first time, Tschirschky saw a look of fear cross his face. It is a measure of the altered mood in Germany—the widespread perception that dramatic change might be imminent—that Papen, an unheroic personality, felt he could go ahead and deliver it and still survive. Not that he had much choice. “We more or less forced him to make that speech,” Tschirschky said. Copies already had been distributed to foreign correspondents. Even if Papen balked at the last minute, the speech would continue to circulate. Clearly hints of its content already had leaked out, for when Papen arrived at the hall the place hummed with anticipation. His anxiety surely spiked when he saw that a number of seats were occupied by men wearing brown shirts and swastika armbands.

Papen walked to the podium.

“I am told,” he began, “that my share in events in Prussia, and in the formation of the present Government”—an allusion to his role in engineering Hitler’s appointment as chancellor—“has had such an important effect on developments in Germany that I am under an obligation to view them more critically than most people.”

The remarks that followed would have earned any man of lesser stature a trip to the gallows. “The Government,” Papen said, “is well aware of the selfishness, the lack of principle, the insincerity, the unchivalrous behavior, the arrogance which is on the increase under the guise of the German revolution.” If the government hoped to establish “an intimate and friendly relationship with the people,” he warned, “then their intelligence must not be underestimated, their trust must be reciprocated and there must be no continual attempt to browbeat them.”

The German people, he said, would follow Hitler with absolute loyalty “provided they are allowed to have a share in the making and carrying out of decisions, provided every word of criticism is not immediately interpreted as malicious, and provided that despairing patriots are not branded as traitors.”

The time had come, he proclaimed, “to silence doctrinaire fanatics.”

The audience reacted as if its members had been waiting a very long time to hear such remarks. As Papen concluded his speech, the crowd leapt to its feet. “The thunder of applause,” Papen noted, drowned out “the furious protests” of the uniformed Nazis in the crowd. Historian John Wheeler-Bennett, at the time a Berlin resident, wrote, “It is difficult to describe the joy with which it was received in Germany. It was as if a load had suddenly been lifted from the German soul. The sense of relief could almost be felt in the air. Papen had put into words what thousands upon thousands of his countrymen had locked up in their hearts for fear of the awful penalties of speech.”

THAT SAME DAY, Hitler was scheduled to speak elsewhere in Germany on the subject of a visit he had just made to Italy to meet with Mussolini. Hitler turned the opportunity into an attack on Papen and his conservative allies, without mentioning Papen directly. “All these little dwarfs who think they have something to say against our idea will be swept away by its collective strength,” Hitler shouted. He railed against “this ridiculous little worm,” this “pygmy who imagines he can stop, with a few phrases, the gigantic renewal of a people’s life.”

He issued a warning to the Papen camp: “If they should at any time attempt, even in a small way, to move from their criticism to a new act of perjury, they can be sure that what confronts them today is not the cowardly and corrupt bourgeoisie of 1918 but the fist of the entire people. It is the fist of the nation that is clenched and will smash down anyone who dares to undertake even the slightest attempt at sabotage.”

Goebbels acted immediately to suppress Papen’s speech. He banned its broadcast and ordered the destruction of the gramophone records onto which it had been cast. He banned newspapers from publishing its text or reporting on its contents, though at least one newspaper, the Frankfurter Zeitung, did manage to publish extracts. So intent was Goebbels on stopping dissemination of the speech that copies of the paper “were snatched from the hands of the guests of restaurants and coffee houses,” Dodd reported.

Papen’s allies used the presses of Papen’s own newspaper, Germania, to produce copies of the speech for quiet distribution to diplomats, foreign correspondents, and others. The speech caused a stir throughout the world. The New York Times requested that Dodd’s embassy provide the full text by telegraph. Newspapers in London and Paris made the speech a sensation.

The event intensified the sense of disquiet suffusing Berlin. “There was something in the sultry air,” wrote Hans Gisevius, the Gestapo memoirist, “and a flood of probable and wildly fantastic rumors spilled out over the intimidated populace. Insane tales were fondly believed. Everyone whispered and peddled fresh rumors.” Men on both sides of the political chasm “became extremely concerned with the question of whether assassins had been hired to murder them and who these killers might be.”

Someone threw a hand-grenade fuse from the roof of a building onto Unter den Linden. It exploded, but the only harm was to the psyches of various government and SA leaders who happened to be in the vicinity. Karl Ernst, the young and ruthless leader of the Berlin division of the SA, had passed by five minutes before the explosion and claimed he was its target and that Himmler was behind it.

In this cauldron of tension and fear, the idea of Himmler wishing to kill Ernst was utterly plausible. Even after a police investigation identified the would-be assassin as a disgruntled part-time worker, an aura of fear and doubt remained, like smoke drifting from a gun barrel. Wrote Gisevius, “There was so much whispering, so much winking and nodding of heads, that traces of suspicion remained.”

The nation seemed poised at the climax of some cinematic thriller. “Tension was at the highest pitch,” Gisevius wrote. “The tormenting uncertainty was harder to bear than the excessive heat and humidity. No one knew what was going to happen next and everyone felt that something fearful was in the air.” Victor Klemperer, the Jewish philologist, sensed it as well. “Everywhere uncertainty, ferment, secrets,” he wrote in his diary in mid-June. “We live from day to day.”

FOR DODD, PAPEN’S MARBURG SPEECH seemed a marker of what he had long believed—that Hitler’s regime was too brutal and irrational to last. Hitler’s own vice-chancellor had spoken out against the regime and survived. Was this indeed the spark that would bring Hitler’s government to an end? And if so, how strange that it should be struck by so uncourageous a soul as Papen.

“There is now great excitement all over Germany,” Dodd wrote in his diary on Wednesday, June 20. “All old and intellectual Germans are highly pleased.” Suddenly fragments of other news began to make more sense, including a heightened fury in the speeches of Hitler and his deputies. “All guards of the leaders are said to be showing signs of revolt,” Dodd wrote. “At the same time, aircraft practice and military drills and maneuvers are reported to be increasingly common sights by those who drive about the country.”

That same Wednesday, Papen went to Hitler to complain about the suppression of his speech. “I spoke at Marburg as an emissary of the president,” he told Hitler. “Goebbels’s intervention will force me to resign. I shall inform Hindenburg immediately.”

To Hitler this was a serious threat. He recognized that President Hindenburg possessed the constitutional authority to unseat him and commanded the loyalty of the regular army, and that both these factors made Hindenburg the one truly potent force in Germany over which he had no control. Hitler understood as well that Hindenburg and Papen—the president’s “Fränzchen”—maintained a close personal relationship and knew that Hindenburg had telegraphed Papen to congratulate him on his speech.

Papen now told Hitler he would go to Hindenburg’s estate, Neudeck, and ask Hindenburg to authorize full publication of the speech.

Hitler tried to mollify him. He promised to remove the propaganda minister’s ban on publication and told Papen he would go with him to Neudeck, so that they could meet with Hindenburg together. In a moment of surprising naïveté, Papen agreed.

THAT NIGHT, SOLSTICE REVELERS ignited bonfires throughout Germany. North of Berlin the funeral train carrying the body of Göring’s wife, Carin, came to a stop at a station near Carinhall. Formations of Nazi soldiers and officials crowded the plaza in front of the station as a band played Beethoven’s “Funeral March.” First, eight policemen carried the coffin, then with great ceremony it was passed to another group of eight men, and so on, until at last it was placed aboard a carriage pulled by six horses for the final journey to Göring’s lakeside mausoleum. Hitler joined the procession. Soldiers carried torches. At the tomb there were great bowls filled with flame. In an eerie, carefully orchestrated touch, the mournful cry of hunters’ horns rose from the forest beyond the fire glow.

Himmler arrived. He was clearly agitated. He took Hitler and Göring aside and gave them unsettling news—untrue, as Himmler surely was aware, but useful as one more prod to get Hitler to act against Röhm. Himmler raged that someone had just tried to kill him. A bullet had pierced his windshield. He blamed Röhm and the SA. There was no time to waste, he said: the Storm Troopers clearly were on the verge of rebellion.

The hole in his windshield, however, had not been made by a bullet. Hans Gisevius got a look at the final police report. The damage was more consistent with what would have been caused by a stone kicked up from a passing car. “It was with cold calculation that [Himmler], therefore, blamed the attempted assassination on the SA,” Gisevius wrote.

The next day, June 21, 1934, Hitler flew to Hindenburg’s estate—without Papen, as certainly had been his intent all along. At Neudeck, however, he first encountered Defense Minister Blomberg. The general, in uniform, met him on the steps to Hindenburg’s castle. Blomberg was stern and direct. He told Hitler that Hindenburg was concerned about the rising tension within Germany. If Hitler could not get things under control, Blomberg said, Hindenburg would declare martial law and place the government in the army’s hands.

When Hitler met with Hindenburg himself, he received the same message. His visit to Neudeck lasted all of thirty minutes. He flew back to Berlin.

THROUGHOUT THE WEEK DODD heard talk of Vice-Chancellor Papen and his speech and of the simple miracle of his survival. Correspondents and diplomats made note of Papen’s activities—what luncheons he attended, who spoke with him, who shunned him, where his car was parked, whether he still took his morning walk through the Tiergarten—looking for signs of what might lie ahead for him and for Germany. On Thursday, June 21, Dodd and Papen both attended a speech by Reichsbank president Hjalmar Schacht. Afterward, Dodd noticed, Papen seemed to get even more attention than the speaker. Goebbels was present as well. Dodd noted that Papen went to his table, shook hands with him, and joined him for a cup of tea. Dodd was amazed, for this was the same Goebbels “who after the Marburg speech would have ordered his prompt execution if Hitler and von Hindenburg had not intervened.”

The atmosphere in Berlin remained charged, Dodd noted in his diary on Saturday, June 23. “The week closes quietly but with great uneasiness.”

CHAPTER 44 The Message in the Bathroom

Papen moved about Berlin seemingly unperturbed and on June 24, 1934, traveled to Hamburg as Hindenburg’s emissary to the German Derby, a horse race, where the crowd gave him a spirited ovation. Goebbels arrived and pushed through the crowd behind a phalanx of SS, drawing hisses and boos. Both men shook hands as photographers snapped away.

Edgar Jung, Papen’s speechwriter, kept a lower profile. By now he had become convinced that the Marburg speech would cost him his life. Historian Wheeler-Bennett arranged a clandestine meeting with him in a wooded area outside Berlin. “He was entirely calm and fatalistic,” Wheeler-Bennett recalled, “but he spoke with the freedom of a man who has nothing before him and therefore nothing to lose, and he told me many things.”

The rhetoric of the regime grew more menacing. In a radio address on Monday, June 25, Rudolf Hess warned, “Woe to him who breaks faith, in the belief that through a revolt he can serve the revolution.” The party, he said, would meet rebellion with absolute force, guided by the principle “If you strike, strike hard!”

The next morning, Tuesday, June 26, Edgar Jung’s housekeeper arrived at his home to find it ransacked, with furniture upended and clothing and papers scattered throughout. On the medicine chest in his bathroom Jung had scrawled a single word: GESTAPO.

DIELS READIED HIMSELF to be sworn in as regional commissioner of Cologne. Göring flew to the city for the occasion. His white plane emerged from a clear cerulean sky on what Diels described as a “beautiful Rhineland summer day.” At the ceremony Diels wore his black SS uniform; Göring wore a white uniform of his own design. Afterward, Göring took Diels aside and told him, “Watch yourself in the next few days.”

Diels took it to heart. Adept now at timely exits, he left the city for a sojourn in the nearby Eifel Mountains.

CHAPTER 45 Mrs. Cerruti’s Distress

In his diary entry for Thursday, June 28, 1934, Ambassador Dodd wrote, “During the last five days, stories of many kinds have tended to make the Berlin atmosphere more tense than at any time since I have been in Germany.” Papen’s speech continued to be a topic of daily conversation. With rising ferocity, Hitler, Göring, and Goebbels warned of dire consequences for anyone who dared to oppose the government. In a cable to the State Department, Dodd likened the atmosphere of threat to that of the French Revolution—“the situation was much as it was in Paris in 1792 when the Girondins and Jacobins were struggling for supremacy.”

In his own household, there was an extra layer of strain that had nothing to do with weather or political upheaval. Against her parents’ wishes, Martha continued planning her trip to Russia. She insisted that her interest had nothing to do with communism per se but rather arose out of her love for Boris and her mounting distaste for the Nazi revolution. She recognized that Boris was indeed a loyal communist, but she claimed he exerted influence over her political perspective only “by the example of his magnetism and simplicity, and his love of country.” She confessed to feeling a gnawing ambivalence “regarding him, his beliefs, the political system in his country, our future together.” She insisted on taking the trip without him.

She wanted to see as much of Russia as she could and ignored his advice to concentrate on only a few cities. He wanted her to gain a deep understanding of his homeland, not some glancing tourist’s appreciation. He recognized also that travel in his country was not as quick or comfortable as in Western Europe, nor did its cities and towns have the obvious charm of the picturesque villages of Germany and France. Indeed, the Soviet Union was anything but the workers’ paradise many left-leaning outsiders imagined it to be. Under Stalin, peasants had been forced into vast collectives. Many resisted, and an estimated five million people—men, women, and children—simply disappeared, many shipped off to far-flung work camps. Housing was primitive, consumer goods virtually nonexistent. Famine scoured the Ukraine. Livestock suffered a drastic decline. From 1929 to 1933 the total number of cattle fell from 68.1 million to 38.6 million; of horses, from 34 million to 16.6 million. Boris knew full well that to a casual visitor, the physical and social scenery and especially the drab workers’ fashion of Russia could seem less than captivating, especially if that visitor happened to be exhausted by difficult travel and the mandatory presence of an Intourist guide.

Nonetheless, Martha chose Tour No. 9, the Volga-Caucasus-Crimea tour, set to begin on July 6 with a flight—her first ever—from Berlin to Leningrad. After two days in Leningrad, she would set out by train for Moscow, spend four days there, then proceed by overnight train to Gorki and, two hours after her 10:04 arrival, catch a Volga steamer for a four-day cruise with stops at Kazan, Samara, Saratov, and Stalingrad, where she was to make the obligatory visit to a tractor works; from Stalingrad, she would take a train to Rostov-on-Don, where she would have the option of visiting a state farm, though here her itinerary exuded just a whiff of capitalism, for the farm tour would require an “extra fee.” Next, Ordzhonikidze, Tiflis, Batumi, Yalta, Sebastopol, Odessa, Kiev, and, at last, back to Berlin by train, where she was to arrive on August 7, the thirty-third day of her journey, at precisely—if optimistically—7:22 p.m.

Her relationship with Boris continued to deepen, though with its usual wild swings between passion and anger and the usual cascade of pleading notes and fresh flowers from him. At some point she returned his three “see no evil” ceramic monkeys. He sent them back.

“Martha!” he wrote, indulging his passion for exclamation:

“I thank you for your letters and for ‘not forgetfulness.’ Your three monkeys have grown (they have become big) and want to be with you. I am sending them. I have to tell you very frankly: three monkeys have longed for you. And not only the three monkeys, I know another handsome, blond (aryan!!) young man, who has longed to be with you. This handsome boy (not older than 30)—is me.

“Martha! I want to see you, I need to tell you that I also have not forgotten my little adorable lovely Martha!

“I love you, Martha! What do I have to do to establish more confidence in you?

“Yours, Boris.”

In any era their relationship would have been likely to draw the attention of outsiders, but that June in Berlin everything took on added gravitas. Everyone watched everyone else. At the time, Martha gave little thought to the perceptions of others, but years later, in a letter to Agnes Knickerbocker, the wife of her correspondent friend Knick, she acknowledged how readily perception could distort reality. “I never plotted the overthrow nor even the subversion of the U.S. government, neither in Germany nor in the USA!” she wrote. “I think however that just knowing and loving Boris would be enough for some people to suspect the worst.”

At the time there was nothing to suspect, she insisted. “Instead it was one of those absorbing things that had no political base at all, except that through him I came to know something about the USSR.”

FRIDAY, JUNE 29, 1934, brought the same atmosphere of impending storm that had marked the preceding weeks. “It was the hottest day we had had that summer,” recalled Elisabetta Cerruti, wife of the Italian ambassador. “The air was so heavy with moisture that we could hardly breathe. Black clouds loomed on the horizon, but a merciless sun burned overhead.”

That day the Dodds held a lunch at their home, to which they had invited Vice-Chancellor Papen and other diplomatic and government figures, including the Cerrutis and Hans Luther, Germany’s ambassador to the United States, who at the time happened to be in Berlin.

Martha also attended and watched as her father and Papen stepped away from the other guests for a private conversation in the library, in front of the now-dormant fireplace. Papen, she wrote, “seemed self-confident and as suave as usual.”

At one point Dodd spotted Papen and Luther edging toward each other with a “rather tense attitude” between them. Dodd moved to intervene and steered them out to the lovely winter garden, where another guest joined them in conversation. Dodd, referring to the press photographs taken during the German Derby, said to Papen, “You and Dr. Goebbels seemed to be quite friendly at Hamburg the other day.”

Papen laughed.

At lunch, Mrs. Cerruti sat on Dodd’s right and Papen sat directly opposite, next to Mrs. Dodd. Mrs. Cerruti’s anxiety was palpable, even to Martha, watching from a distance. Martha wrote, “She sat by my father in a state of near-collapse, hardly speaking, pale, preoccupied, and jumpy.”

Mrs. Cerruti told Dodd, “Mr. Ambassador, something terrible is going to happen in Germany. I feel it in the air.”

A later rumor held that Mrs. Cerruti somehow knew in advance what was about to happen. She found this astonishing. Her remark to Dodd, she claimed years later, referred only to the weather.

IN AMERICA THAT FRIDAY the “great heat” worsened. In humid locales like Washington it became nearly impossible to work. Moffat noted in his diary: “Temperature 101 and ½ in the shade today.”

The heat and humidity were so unbearable that as evening approached Moffat and Phillips and a third official went to the home of a friend of Moffat’s to use his pool. The friend was away at the time. The three men undressed and climbed in. The water was warm and provided scant relief. No one swam. Instead the three simply sat there, talking quietly, only their heads showing above the water.

That Dodd was a subject of this conversation seems likely. Just a few days earlier Phillips had written in his diary about Dodd’s unrelenting assault on the wealth of diplomats and consular officials.

“Presumably the Ambassador has been complaining to the President,” Phillips groused in his diary. Dodd “always complains because of the fact that they are spending in Berlin more than their salaries. This he objects to strenuously, probably for the simple reason that he himself has not the money to spend beyond that of his salary. It is, of course, a small town attitude.”

ODDLY ENOUGH, MOFFAT’S MOTHER, Ellen Low Moffat, was in Berlin that Friday, to visit her daughter (Moffat’s sister), who was married to the embassy secretary, John C. White. That evening the mother attended a dinner party where she sat beside Papen. The vice-chancellor was, as she later told her son, “well and in extremely high spirits.”

CHAPTER 46 Friday Night

That Friday evening, July 29, 1934, Hitler settled in at the Hotel Dreesen, a favorite of his, in the resort of Bad Godesberg, situated along the Rhine just outside central Bonn. He had traveled here from Essen, where he had received yet another dose of troubling news—that Vice-Chancellor Papen planned to make good on his threat and meet with President Hindenburg the next day, Saturday, June 30, to persuade the Old Gentleman to take steps to rein in Hitler’s government and the SA.

This news, atop the accumulation of reports from Himmler and Göring that Röhm was planning a coup, convinced Hitler that the time had come for action. Göring left for Berlin to make ready. Hitler ordered the Reichswehr on alert, though the forces he intended to deploy were mostly SS units. Hitler telephoned one of Röhm’s key deputies and ordered all SA leaders to attend a meeting Saturday morning in Bad Wiessee, near Munich, where Röhm was already comfortably ensconced in the Hotel Hanselbauer, taking his cure, which on that Friday night involved a good deal of drinking. His aide, Edmund Heines, bedded down with a handsome eighteen-year-old Storm Trooper.

Goebbels joined Hitler at Bad Godesberg. They spoke on the hotel terrace as a parade roared below. Blue flashes of lightning lit the sky over Bonn and thunder rumbled everywhere, amplified by the strange sonic physics of the Rhine Valley.

Goebbels later gave a melodramatic account of those heady moments before Hitler made his final decision. The air had grown still as the distant storm advanced. Suddenly, heavy rain began to fall. He and Hitler remained seated a few moments longer, enjoying the cleansing downpour. Hitler laughed. They went inside. Once the storm had passed, they returned to the terrace. “The Führer seemed in a thoughtful, serious mood,” Goebbels said. “He stared out at the clear darkness of the night, which after the purification of the storm stretched peacefully across a vast, harmonious landscape.”

The crowd on the street lingered despite the storm. “Not one of the many people standing below knows what is threatening to come,” Goebbels wrote. “Even among those around the Leader on the terrace only a few have been informed. In this hour he is more than ever to be admired by us. Not a quiver on his face reveals the slightest sign of what is going on within him. Yet we few, who stand by him in all difficult hours, know how deeply he is grieved, but also how determined he is to stamp out mercilessly the reactionary rebels who are breaking their oath of loyalty to him, under the slogan of carrying out a second revolution.”

It was after midnight when Himmler telephoned with more bad news. He told Hitler that Karl Ernst, commander of the Berlin division of the SA, had ordered his forces to go on alert. Hitler cried, “It’s a putsch!”—though in fact, as Himmler surely knew, Ernst had just recently gotten married and was headed to the port of Bremen for the start of a honeymoon cruise.

AT 2:00 A.M. SATURDAY, June 30, 1934, Hitler left the Hotel Dreesen and was driven at high speed to the airport, where he boarded a Ju 52 airplane, one of two aircraft ready for his use. He was joined by two adjutants and a senior SA officer whom he trusted, Viktor Lutze. (It was Lutze who had told Hitler about Röhm’s scathing remarks after Hitler’s February 1934 speech to the leaders of the army and SA.) Hitler’s chauffeurs also climbed aboard. The second aircraft contained a squad of armed SS men. Both planes flew to Munich, where they arrived at four thirty in the morning, just as the sun was beginning to rise. One of Hitler’s drivers, Erich Kempka, was struck by the beauty of the morning and the freshness of the rain-scrubbed air, the grass “sparkling in the morning light.”

Soon after landing, Hitler received a final bit of incendiary news—the day before, some three thousand Storm Troopers had raged through Munich’s streets. He was not told, however, that this demonstration had been spontaneous, conducted by men loyal to him who were themselves feeling threatened and betrayed and who feared an attack against them by the regular army.

Hitler’s fury peaked. He declared this “the blackest day of my life.” He decided that he could not afford to wait even until the meeting of SA leaders set for later that morning at Bad Wiessee. He turned to Kempka: “To Wiessee, as fast as possible!”

Goebbels called Göring and gave him the code word to launch the Berlin phase of the operation—the innocent-sounding “Kolibri.”

Hummingbird.

IN BERLIN, THE LAST of the late northern dusk lingered on the horizon as the Dodds settled in for a peaceful Friday night. Dodd read a book and consumed his usual digestif of stewed peaches and milk. His wife allowed her thoughts to dwell for a time on the grand lawn party she and Dodd planned for July 4, less than a week away, to which they had invited all the embassy staff and several hundred other guests. Bill Jr. stayed at the house that night and planned to take the family Buick for a drive the next morning. Martha looked forward to the morning as well, when she and Boris planned to set off on another countryside excursion, this time to picnic and sunbathe on a beach in the Wannsee district. In six days she would set out for Russia.

Outside, cigarettes twinkled in the park, and now and then a large, open car whooshed past on Tiergartenstrasse. In the park, insects speckled the halos cast by lamps, and the brilliant white statues in the Siegesallee—Avenue of Victory—gleamed like ghosts. Though hotter and more still, the night was very much like Martha’s first in Berlin, peaceful, with that small-town serenity she had found so captivating.