In the Garden of Beasts

CHAPTER 47 “Shoot, Shoot!”

The next morning, Saturday, June 30, 1934, Boris drove to Martha’s house in his open Ford and soon, armed with picnic larder and blanket, the two set out for the Wannsee district southwest of Berlin. As a setting for trysts it had a turbulent history. Here, on a lake named Kleiner Wannsee—Little Wannsee—the German poet Heinrich von Kleist shot himself in 1811, after first shooting his terminally ill lover. Martha and Boris were headed for a small, uncrowded lake well to the north called Gross Glienicke, Martha’s favorite.

The city around them was sleepy with nascent heat. Though the day would be another difficult one for farmers and laborers, for anyone intent on lakeside sunbathing it promised to be ideal. As Boris drove toward the city’s outskirts, everything seemed utterly normal. Other residents, looking back, made the same observation. Berliners “strolled serenely through the streets, went about their business,” observed Hedda Adlon, wife of the proprietor of the Hotel Adlon. The hotel followed its usual rhythms, although the day’s heat promised to compound the logistical challenges of catering a banquet for the king of Siam to be held later that day at the Schloss Bellevue—Bellevue Palace—at the northern edge of the Tiergarten, on the Spree. The hotel would have to shuttle its canapés and entrees in its catering van through traffic and heat, amid temperatures expected to rise into the nineties.

At the lake, Boris and Martha spread their blanket. They swam and lay in the sun, entangled in each other’s arms until the heat drove them apart. They drank beer and vodka and dined on sandwiches.

“It was a beautiful serene blue day, the lake shimmering and glittering in front of us, and the sun spreading its fire over us,” she wrote. “It was a silent and soft day—we didn’t even have the energy or desire to talk politics or discuss the new tension in the atmosphere.”

ELSEWHERE THAT MORNING, three far larger cars raced across the countryside between Munich and Bad Wiessee—Hitler’s car and two others filled with armed men. They arrived at the Hotel Hanselbauer, where Captain Röhm lay asleep in his room. Hitler led a squad of armed men into the hotel. By one account he carried a whip, by another, a pistol. The men climbed the stairs in a thunder of bootheels.

Hitler himself knocked on Röhm’s door, then burst inside, followed by two detectives. “Röhm,” Hitler barked, “you are under arrest.”

Röhm was groggy, clearly hungover. He looked at Hitler. “Heil, mein Führer,” he said.

Hitler shouted again, “You are under arrest,” and then stepped back into the hall. He advanced next to the room of Röhm’s adjutant, Heines, and found him in bed with his young SA lover. Hitler’s driver, Kempka, was present in the hall. He heard Hitler shout, “Heines, if you are not dressed in five minutes I’ll have you shot on the spot!”

Heines emerged, preceded by, as Kempka put it, “an 18-year-old fair-haired boy mincing in front of him.”

The halls of the hotel resounded with the shouts of SS men herding sleepy, stunned, and hungover Storm Troopers down to the laundry room in the hotel basement. There were moments that in another context might have been comical, as when one of Hitler’s raiding party emerged from a hotel bedroom and reported, crisply, “Mein Führer!… The Police President of Breslau is refusing to get dressed!”

Or this: Röhm’s doctor, an SA Gruppenführer named Ketterer, emerged from one room accompanied by a woman. To the astonishment of Hitler and his detectives, the woman was Ketterer’s wife. Viktor Lutze, the trusted SA officer who had been in Hitler’s plane that morning, persuaded Hitler that the doctor was a loyal ally. Hitler walked over to the man and greeted him politely. He shook hands with Mrs. Ketterer, then quietly recommended that the couple leave the hotel. They did so without argument.

IN BERLIN THAT MORNING, Frederick Birchall of the New York Times was awakened by the persistent ring of the telephone beside his bed. He had been out late the night before and at first was inclined to ignore the call. He speculated, wishfully, that it must be unimportant, probably only an invitation to lunch. The phone kept ringing. At length, acting on the maxim “It is never safe to despise a telephone call, especially in Germany,” he picked up the receiver and heard a voice from his office: “Better wake up and get busy. Something doing here.” What the caller said next captured Birchall’s full attention: “Apparently a lot of people are being shot.”

Louis Lochner, the Associated Press correspondent, learned from a clerical worker arriving late to the AP office that Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, where the Gestapo was headquartered, had been closed to traffic and now was filled with trucks and armed SS, in their telltale black uniforms. Lochner made a few calls. The more he learned, the more disturbing it all seemed. As a precaution—believing that the government might shut down all outbound international telephone lines—Lochner called the AP’s office in London and told its staff to call him every fifteen minutes until further notice, on the theory that inbound calls might still be allowed through.

Sigrid Schultz set off for the central government district, watching carefully for certain license plate numbers, Papen’s in particular. She would work nonstop until four the next morning and then note in her daily appointments diary, “dead tired—[could] weep.”

One of the most alarming rumors was of massed volleys of gunfire from the courtyard of the old cadet school in the otherwise peaceful enclave of Gross-Lichterfelde.

AT THE HOTEL HANSELBAUER, Röhm got dressed in a blue suit and emerged from his room, still confounded and apparently not yet terribly worried by Hitler’s anger or the commotion in the hotel. A cigar projected from the corner of his mouth. Two detectives took him to the hotel lobby, where he sat in a chair and ordered coffee from a passing waiter.

There were more arrests, more men shoved into the laundry room. Röhm remained seated in the lobby. Kempka heard him request another cup of coffee, by now his third.

Röhm was taken away by car; the rest of the prisoners were loaded onto a chartered bus and driven to Munich, to Stadelheim Prison, where Hitler himself had spent a month in 1922. Their captors took back roads to avoid contact with any Storm Troopers seeking to effect rescue. Hitler and his ever-larger raiding party climbed back into their cars, now numbering about twenty, and raced off on a more direct route toward Munich, stopping any cars bearing SA leaders who, unaware of all that had just occurred, were still expecting to attend Hitler’s meeting set for later that morning.

In Munich, Hitler read through a list of the prisoners and marked an “X” next to six names. He ordered all six shot immediately. An SS squad did so, telling the men just before firing, “You have been condemned to death by the Führer! Heil Hitler.”

The ever-obliging Rudolf Hess offered to shoot Röhm himself, but Hitler did not yet order his death. For the moment, even he found the idea of killing a longtime friend to be abhorrent.

SOON AFTER ARRIVING at his Berlin office that morning, Hans Gisevius, the Gestapo memoirist, tuned his radio to police frequencies and heard reports that sketched an action of vast scope. Senior SA men were being arrested, as were men who had no connection with the Storm Troopers. Gisevius and his boss, Kurt Daluege, set off in search of more detailed information and went directly to Göring’s palace on Leipziger Platz, from which Göring was issuing commands. Gisevius stuck close to Daluege in the belief that he was safer in his company than alone. He also figured no one would think to look for him at Göring’s residence.

Although the palace was an easy walk away, they drove. They were struck by the aura of utter calm on the streets, as though nothing unusual were taking place. They did note, however, the complete absence of Storm Troopers.

The sense of normalcy disappeared immediately when they turned a corner and arrived at Göring’s palace. Machine guns jutted from every promontory. The courtyard was filled with police.

Gisevius wrote: “As I followed Daluege through the succession of guards and climbed the few steps to the huge lobby, I felt as if I could scarcely breathe. An evil atmosphere of haste, nervousness, tension, and above all of bloodshed, seemed to strike me in the face.”

Gisevius made his way to a room next to Göring’s study. Adjutants and messengers hurried past. An SA man sat quaking with fear, having been told by Göring that he was to be shot. Servants brought sandwiches. Although crowded, the room was quiet. “Everyone whispered as if he were in a morgue,” Gisevius recalled.

Through an open doorway, he saw Göring conferring with Himmler and Himmler’s new Gestapo chief, Reinhard Heydrich. Gestapo couriers arrived and left carrying white slips of paper on which, Gisevius presumed, were the names of the dead or soon-to-be dead. Despite the serious nature of the endeavor at hand, the atmosphere in Göring’s office was closer to what could be expected at a racetrack. Gisevius heard crude and raucous laughter and periodic shouts of “Away!”

“Aha!”

“Shoot him.”

“The whole crew of them seemed to be in the best humor,” Gisevius recalled.

Now and then he caught a glimpse of Göring striding around the room dressed in a billowy white shirt and blue-gray trousers tucked into black jackboots that rose above his knees. “Puss-in-Boots,” Gisevius thought suddenly.

At one point a red-faced police major burst from the study, followed by an equally enflamed Göring. Apparently a prominent target had escaped.

Göring shouted instructions.

“Shoot them!… Take a whole company…. Shoot them…. Shoot them at once!”

Gisevius found it appalling beyond description. “The written word cannot reproduce the undisguised blood lust, fury, vicious vengefulness, and, at the same time, the fear, the pure funk, that the scene revealed.”

DODD HEARD NOTHING about the cataclysm unfolding elsewhere in the city until that Saturday afternoon when he and his wife sat down for lunch in their garden. At almost the same moment, their son, Bill, appeared, having just returned from his drive. He looked troubled. He reported that a number of streets had been closed, including Unter den Linden at the heart of the government district, and these were being patrolled by heavily armed squads of SS. He had heard as well that arrests had been made at the headquarters of the SA, located just blocks from the house.

Immediately Dodd and his wife experienced a spike of anxiety for Martha, out for the day with Boris Winogradov. Despite his diplomatic status, Boris was a man whom the Nazis even in ordinary times could be expected to view as an enemy of the state.

CHAPTER 48 Guns in the Park

Boris and Martha stayed at the beach all day, retreating to shade when the sun became too much but returning again for more. It was after five when they packed their things and with reluctance began the drive back to the city, “our heads giddy,” Martha recalled, “and our bodies burning from the sun.” They traveled as slowly as possible, neither wanting the day to end, both still relishing the oblivion of sunshine on water. The day had grown hotter as the ground cast its accumulated warmth back into the atmosphere.

They drove through a bucolic landscape softened by heat haze that rose from the fields and forests around them. Riders on bicycles overtook and passed them, some carrying small children in baskets over the front fenders or in wagons pulled alongside. Women carried flowers and men with knapsacks engaged in the German passion for a good, fast walk. “It was a homely, hot, and friendly day,” Martha wrote.

To catch the late afternoon sun and the breezes that flowed through the open car, Martha hiked the hem of her skirt to the tops of her thighs. “I was happy,” she wrote, “pleased with my day and my companion, full of sympathy for the earnest, simple, kindly German people, so obviously taking a hard-earned walk or rest, enjoying themselves and their countryside so intensely.”

At six o’clock they entered the city. Martha sat up straight and dropped the hem of her skirt “as befits a diplomat’s daughter.”

The city had changed. They realized it in phases as they got closer and closer to the Tiergarten. There were fewer people on the street than might be considered normal, and these tended to gather in “curious static groups,” as Martha put it. Traffic moved slowly. At the point where Boris was about to enter Tiergartenstrasse, the flow of cars all but stopped. They saw army trucks and machine guns and suddenly realized that the only people around them were men in uniform, mostly SS black and the green of Göring’s police force. Noticeably absent were the brown uniforms of the SA. What made this especially odd was that the SA’s headquarters and Captain Röhm’s home were so near.

They came to a checkpoint. The license plate on Boris’s car indicated diplomatic status. The police waved them through.

Boris drove slowly through a newly sinister landscape. Across the street from Martha’s house, beside the park, stood a line of soldiers, weapons, and military trucks. Farther down Tiergartenstrasse, at the point where it intersected Standartenstrasse—Röhm’s street—they saw more soldiers and a rope barrier marking the street’s closure.

There was a sense of suffocation. Drab trucks blocked the vistas of the park. And there was heat. It was evening, well after six, but the sun was still high and hot. Once so alluring, the sun now to Martha was “broiling.” She and Boris parted. She ran to her front door and quickly entered. The sudden darkness and stone-cool air of the entry foyer were so jarring she felt dizzy, “my eyes blinded for the moment by the lack of light.”

She ascended the stairwell to the main floor and there found her brother. “We were worried about you,” he said. He told her General Schleicher had been shot. Their father had gone to the embassy to prepare a message for the State Department. “We don’t know what is happening,” Bill said. “There is martial law in Berlin.”

In that first instant, the name “Schleicher” brought no recognition. Then she remembered: Schleicher, the general, a man of military bearing and integrity, a former chancellor and minister of defense.

“I sat down, still confused and terribly distressed,” Martha recalled. She could not understand why General Schleicher would be shot. She recalled him as being “courtly, attractive, clever.”

Schleicher’s wife had been shot as well, Bill told her. Both shot in the back, in their garden; both shot numerous times. The story would change over the next few days, but the irrevocable fact was that both Schleichers were dead.

Mrs. Dodd came downstairs. She, Bill, and Martha went into one of the reception rooms. They took seats close together and talked quietly. They noticed that Fritz appeared with unusual frequency. They closed all the doors. Fritz continued to bring word of new telephone calls from friends and correspondents. He seemed afraid, “white and scared,” Martha wrote.

The story Bill told was a chilling one. Although a fog of rumor clouded every new revelation, certain facts were clear. The deaths of the Schleichers were just two of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of official murders committed so far that day, and the killing continued. Röhm was said to be under arrest, his fate uncertain.

Each new telephone call brought more news, much of it sounding too wild to be credible. Assassination squads were said to be roaming the country, hunting targets. Karl Ernst, chief of Berlin’s SA, had been dragged from his honeymoon ship. A prominent leader in the Catholic Church had been murdered in his office. A second army general had been shot, as had a music critic for a newspaper. The killings seemed haphazard and capricious.

There was one perversely comical moment. The Dodds received a terse RSVP from Röhm’s office, stating that “to his great sorrow” he could not attend a dinner at the Dodds’ house set for the coming Friday, July 6, “because he will be on vacation to seek a cure for an illness.”

“In view of the uncertainty of the situation,” Dodd wrote in his diary, “perhaps it was best he did not accept.”

ADDING TO THE DAY’S sense of upheaval was a collision that occurred just outside 27a when the embassy chauffeur—a man named Pickford—struck a motorcycle and broke off the rider’s leg. A wooden leg.

In the midst of it all, there lingered for Dodd a particularly pressing question: what had happened to Papen, the hero of Marburg, whom Hitler so loathed? Reports held that Edgar Jung, the author of Papen’s speech, had been shot and that Papen’s press secretary likewise had been killed. In that murderous climate, could Papen himself possibly have survived?

CHAPTER 49 The Dead

At three o’clock on Saturday afternoon, Berlin’s foreign correspondents gathered at the Reich chancellery on the Wilhelmstrasse for a press conference to be given by Hermann Göring. One witness was Hans Gisevius, who seemed to be everywhere that day.

Göring arrived late, in uniform, huge and arrogant. The room was hot and smoldered with “unbearable tension,” Gisevius wrote. Göring positioned himself at the podium. With great drama he scanned the crowd, and then, with what appeared to be a series of rehearsed gestures, placed his chin in his hand and rolled his eyes, as if what he was about to say was momentous even to him. He spoke, Gisevius recalled, “in the lugubrious tone and flat voice of a practiced funeral orator.”

Göring gave a brief account of the “action,” which he said was still under way. “For weeks we have been watching; we knew that some of the leaders of the Sturmabteilung [SA] had taken positions very far from the aims and goals of the movement, giving priority to their own interests and ambitions, indulging their unfortunate and perverse tastes.” Röhm was under arrest, he said. A “foreign power” also was involved. Everyone in the room presumed he meant France. “The Supreme Leader in Munich and I as his deputy in Berlin have struck with lightning speed without respect for persons.”

Göring took questions. One reporter asked about the deaths of Vice-Chancellor Papen’s speechwriter, Jung, and his press secretary, Herbert von Bose, and Erich Klausener, a prominent Catholic critic of the regime—what possible connection could they have had to an SA putsch?

“I expanded my task to take in reactionaries also,” Göring said, his voice as bland as if he were quoting a telephone book.

And what of General Schleicher?

Göring paused, grinned.

“Ah, yes, you journalists always like a special headline story; well, here it is. General von Schleicher had plotted against the regime. I ordered his arrest. He was foolish enough to resist. He is dead.”

Göring walked from the podium.

NO ONE KNEW EXACTLY how many people had lost their lives in the purge. Official Nazi tallies put the total at under one hundred. Foreign Minister Neurath, for example, told Britain’s Sir Eric Phipps that there had been “forty-three or forty-six” executions and claimed that all other estimates were “unreliable and exaggerated.” Dodd, in a letter to his friend Daniel Roper, wrote that reports coming in from America’s consulates in other German cities suggested a total of 284 deaths. “Most of the victims,” Dodd wrote, “were in no sense guilty of treason; merely political or religious opposition.” Other tallies by American officials put the number far higher. The consul in Brandenburg wrote that an SS officer had told him five hundred had been killed and fifteen thousand arrested and that Rudolf Diels had been targeted for death but was spared at Göring’s request. A memorandum from one of Dodd’s secretaries of embassy in Berlin also put the number of executions at five hundred and noted that neighbors in the vicinity of the Lichterfelde barracks “could hear the firing squads at work the whole night.” Diels later estimated seven hundred deaths; other insiders placed the total at over one thousand. No definitive total exists.

The death of General Schleicher was confirmed—he’d been shot seven times, his body and that of his wife discovered by their sixteen-year-old daughter. Another general, Ferdinand von Bredow, a member of Schleicher’s cabinet when he was chancellor, was also shot. Despite these killings, the army continued to stand aside, its loathing for the SA trumping its distaste for the murder of two of its own. Gregor Strasser, a former Nazi leader with past ties to Schleicher, was having lunch with his family when two Gestapo cars pulled up outside his home and six men came to his door. He was taken away and shot in a cell in the basement prison at Gestapo headquarters. Hitler was the godfather of his twins. A friend of Strasser’s, Paul Schulz, a senior SA leader, was taken into a forest and shot. As his would-be executioners went back to their car to get a sheet for his body, he got up and bolted, and survived. It was this escape, apparently, that had triggered Göring’s outburst of bloodthirsty rage. Gustav Ritter von Kahr, at seventy-three years of age hardly a threat to Hitler, was killed as well—“hacked to death,” according to historian Ian Kershaw—apparently to avenge his role in undermining a Nazi putsch attempt a decade earlier. Karl Ernst, married only two days, had no comprehension of what was occurring as he was placed under arrest in Bremen just before his honeymoon cruise. Hitler had been a guest at his wedding. When Ernst realized he was about to be shot, he cried out, “I am innocent. Long live Germany! Heil Hitler!” At least five Jews were shot for the sin of being Jews. And then there were the innumerable, nameless souls executed by firing squad at the Lichterfelde barracks. The mother of one dead Storm Trooper only received official notification of his death six months after the fact, in a curt one-paragraph letter that stated he had been shot in defense of the state and thus no further explanation was needed. The letter ended as did all letters in the new Germany: “Heil Hitler!”

Again there were moments of dark comedy. One target, Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus, a minister under General Schleicher when he was chancellor, was in the middle of a tennis game at the Wannsee Tennis Club when he spotted four SS men outside. Wisely trusting his instincts, he excused himself and ran. He scaled a wall, caught a taxi, and eventually made his way to England.

In central Berlin, the SA man moonlighting as the driver of the Hotel Adlon’s catering van found himself stopped by the SS at a checkpoint near the Brandenburg Gate, not far from the hotel. The hapless driver had made the unfortunate decision to wear his brown Storm Trooper shirt under his suit jacket.

The SS officer asked where he was going.

“To the king of Siam,” the driver said, and smiled.

The SS man took this as a wisecrack. Enraged by the driver’s impudence, he and his associates dragged the Storm Trooper out of the van and forced him to open the rear doors. The cargo space was filled with trays of food.

Still suspicious, the SS officer accused the driver of bringing the food to one of Röhm’s orgies.

The driver, no longer smiling, said, “No, it’s for the king of Siam.”

The SS still believed the driver was merely being insolent. Two SS men climbed onto the van and ordered the driver to continue to the palace where the party supposedly was being held. To their chagrin, they learned that a banquet for the king of Siam was indeed planned and that Göring was one of the expected guests.

And then there was poor Willi Schmid—Wilhelm Eduard Schmid, respected music critic for a Munich newspaper—who was playing his cello at home with his wife and three children nearby when the SS came to the door, hauled him away, and shot him.

The SS had erred. Their intended target was a different Schmid. Or rather, a Schmitt.

Hitler dispatched Rudolf Hess to make a personal apology to the dead critic’s wife.

PUTZI HANFSTAENGL, WHOSE RELATIONSHIP with Hitler had grown strained, was rumored to have been on Hitler’s list of targets. Providently, he was in America to take part in the twenty-fifth reunion of his class at Harvard. The invitation to attend had caused an outcry in America, and until the last moment Hanfstaengl had offered no indication as to whether he actually would attend. On the night of June 10, 1934, he threw a dinner party, whose timing in retrospect seemed all too convenient given that surely he knew the purge was coming. In midmeal, he stepped from the dining room, disguised himself in a raincoat and sunglasses, and left. He took a night train to Cologne, where he climbed into a mail plane that took him directly to Cherbourg, France, and there he boarded his ship, the Europa, bound for New York. He brought five suitcases and three crates containing sculptural busts meant as gifts.

The New York City police department, fearing threats to Hanfstaengl from outraged protesters, sent six young officers aboard to guide him from the ship. They were dressed in Harvard jackets and ties.

On June 30, 1934, the day of the purge, Putzi attended the Newport, Rhode Island, wedding of Ellen Tuck French and John Jacob Astor III, said to be the richest bachelor in America. His father had been lost with the Titanic. A crowd of about a thousand people gathered outside the church to catch a glimpse of the bride and groom and the arriving guests. One of the first “to cause the crowd to gasp with excitement,” wrote a gushing society reporter for the New York Times, was Hanfstaengl, “in a top hat, black coat and striped gray trousers.”

Hanfstaengl knew nothing about events back home until asked about them by reporters. “I have no comment to make,” he said. “I am here to attend the wedding of my friend’s daughter.” Later, after learning more details, he stated, “My leader, Adolf Hitler, had to act and he acted thus as always. Hitler has proven himself never greater, never more human, than in the last forty-eight hours.”

Inwardly, however, Hanfstaengl worried about his own safety and that of his wife and son back in Berlin. He sent a discreet inquiry to Foreign Minister Neurath.

HITLER RETURNED TO BERLIN that evening. Again, Gisevius stood witness. Hitler’s plane appeared “against the background of a blood-red sky, a piece of theatricality that no one had staged,” Gisevius wrote. After the plane came to a stop, a small army of men moved forward to greet Hitler, among them Göring and Himmler. Hitler was first to emerge from the aircraft. He wore a brown shirt, dark brown leather jacket, black bow tie, high black boots. He looked pale and tired and had not shaved but otherwise seemed untroubled. “It was clear that the murders of his friends had cost him no effort at all,” Gisevius wrote. “He had felt nothing; he had merely acted out his rage.”

In a radio address, propaganda chief Goebbels reassured the nation.

“In Germany,” he said, “there is now complete peace and order. Public security has been restored. Never was the Führer more completely master of the situation. May a favorable destiny bless us so that we can carry our great task to its conclusion with Adolf Hitler!”

Dodd, however, continued to receive reports that indicated the purge was far from ended. There was still no firm news as to what had happened to Röhm and Papen. Waves of gunfire continued to roll from the courtyard at Lichterfelde.

CHAPTER 50 Among the Living

Sunday morning was cool, sunny, and breezy. Dodd was struck by the absence of any visible markers of all that had occurred during the past twenty-four hours. “It was a strange day,” he wrote, “with only ordinary news in the papers.”

Papen was said to be alive but under house arrest at his apartment along with his family. Dodd hoped to use what little influence he possessed to help keep him alive—if indeed the reports of Papen’s continued survival were correct. Rumor held that the vice-chancellor was marked for execution and that it could happen at any time.

Dodd and Martha took the family Buick for a drive to Papen’s apartment building. They drove past the entrance very slowly, intending that the SS guards see the car and recognize its provenance.

The pale face of Papen’s son appeared at a window, partially hidden by curtains. An SS officer on guard at the building entrance glared as the car passed. It was clear to Martha that the officer had recognized the license plate as belonging to a diplomat.

That afternoon Dodd drove to Papen’s home again, but this time he stopped and left a calling card with one of the guards, on which he had written, “I hope we may call on you soon.”

Though Dodd disapproved of Papen’s political machinations and his past behavior in the United States, he did like the man and had enjoyed sparring with him ever since their dinner confrontation at the Little Press Ball. What motivated Dodd now was revulsion at the idea of men being executed at Hitler’s whim without warrant or trial.

Dodd drove back home. Later, Papen’s son would tell the Dodds how grateful he and his family had been for the appearance of that simple Buick on their street that lethal afternoon.

REPORTS CONTINUED TO ARRIVE at the Dodds’ residence of new arrests and murders. By Sunday night Dodd knew with reasonable certainty that Captain Röhm was dead.

The story, pieced together later, went like this:

At first Hitler was undecided as to whether to execute his old ally, locked in a cell at Stadelheim Prison, but eventually he bowed to pressure from Göring and Himmler. Even then, however, Hitler insisted that Röhm first should have an opportunity to kill himself.

The man assigned the task of offering Röhm this opportunity was Theodor Eicke, commander of Dachau, who drove to the prison on Sunday along with a deputy, Michael Lippert, and another SS man from the camp. The three were led to Röhm’s cell.

Eicke gave Röhm a Browning automatic and a fresh edition of the Völkischer Beobachter containing an account of what the paper called the “Röhm Putsch,” apparently to show Röhm that all was indeed lost.

Eicke left the room. Ten minutes passed with no gunfire. Eicke and Lippert returned to the cell, removed the Browning, then came back with their own weapons drawn. They found Röhm standing before them, shirtless.

Accounts vary as to exactly what happened next. Some report that Eicke and Lippert said nothing and began firing. One account holds that Eicke shouted, “Röhm, make yourself ready,” at which point Lippert fired two shots. Yet another account gives Röhm a moment of gallantry, during which he declared, “If I am to be killed, let Adolf do it himself.”

The first salvo did not kill Röhm. He lay on the floor moaning, “Mein Führer, mein Führer.” A final bullet was fired into his temple.

As a reward, Eicke received a promotion that placed him in charge of all Germany’s concentration camps. He exported the draconian regulations he had put in place at Dachau to all the other camps under his command.

That Sunday a grateful Reichswehr made another payment on the deal struck aboard the Deutschland. Defense Minister Blomberg in his order of the day for that Sunday, July 1, announced, “The Führer with soldierly decision and exemplary courage has himself attacked and crushed the traitors and murderers. The army, as the bearer of arms of the entire people, far removed from the conflicts of domestic politics, will show its gratitude through devotion and loyalty. The good relationship towards the new SA demanded by the Führer will be gladly fostered by the Army in the consciousness that the ideals of both are held in common. The state of emergency has come to an end everywhere.”

AS THE WEEKEND PROGRESSED, the Dodds learned that a new phrase was making the rounds in Berlin, to be deployed upon encountering a friend or acquaintance on the street, ideally with a sardonic lift of one eyebrow: “Lebst du noch?” Which meant, “Are you still among the living?”

CHAPTER 51 Sympathy’s End

Though rumors continued to sketch a blood purge of startling dimension, Ambassador Dodd and his wife chose not to cancel the embassy’s Fourth of July celebration, to which they had invited some three hundred guests. If anything, there was more reason now to hold the party, to provide a symbolic demonstration of American freedom and offer a respite from the terror outside. This was to be the first formal occasion since the weekend at which Americans and Germans would encounter each other face to face. The Dodds had invited a number of Martha’s friends as well, including Mildred Fish Harnack and her husband, Arvid. Boris apparently did not attend. One guest, Bella Fromm, noted an “electric tension” that pervaded the party. “The diplomats seemed jittery,” she wrote. “The Germans were on edge.”

Dodd and his wife stood at the entrance to the ballroom to greet each new arrival. Martha saw that outwardly her father was behaving as he always did at such affairs, hiding his boredom with ironic quips and sallies, his expression that of an amused skeptic seemingly on the verge of laughter. Her mother wore a long blue and white dress and greeted guests in her usual quiet manner—all southern grace, with silver hair and a gentle accent—but Martha detected an unusual flush to her mother’s cheeks and noted that the nearly black irises of her eyes, always striking, were especially so.

Tables throughout the ballroom and the garden were decorated with bouquets of red, white, and blue flowers and small American flags. An orchestra played American songs quietly. The weather was warm but cloudy. Guests wandered through the house and garden. All in all it was a peaceful and surreal scene, in powerful contrast to the bloodshed of the prior seventy-two hours. For Martha and her brother the juxtaposition was simply too glaring to go unacknowledged, so they made a point of greeting the younger German guests with the question “Lebst du noch?”

“We thought we were being sarcastic, revealing to the Germans some of the fury we felt,” she wrote. “No doubt many of them thought the remark bad taste. Some Nazis showed extreme irritation.”

Guests arrived bearing fresh news. Now and then a correspondent or embassy staffer pulled Dodd away for a few moments of conversation. One topic, surely, was a law enacted the day before by Hitler’s cabinet that made all the murders legal; it justified them as actions taken in “emergency defense of the state.” Guests arrived looking pale and shaken, fearing the worst for their friends throughout the city.

Fritz, the butler, brought Martha word that a visitor was waiting for her downstairs. “Der junge Herr von Papen,” Fritz said. The young Mr. Papen—the vice-chancellor’s son, Franz Jr. Martha was expecting him and had alerted her mother that if he appeared she might have to leave. She touched her mother’s arm and left the reception line.

Franz was tall, blond, and slender, with a sharply sculpted face and, Martha recalled, “a certain fine beauty—like that of blonde fox.” He was graceful as well. To dance with him, she wrote, “was like living in music itself.”

Franz took her arm and briskly led her away from the house. They crossed the street to the Tiergarten, where they strolled awhile, watching for signs of being followed. Finding none, they walked to an outdoor café, took a table, and ordered drinks.

The terror of the last few days showed on Franz’s face and in his manner. Anxiety muted his usual easygoing humor.

Though grateful for Ambassador Dodd’s appearance outside his family’s home, Franz understood that what had really saved his father was his relationship with President Hindenburg. Even that closeness, however, had not kept the SS from terrorizing Papen and his family, as Franz now revealed. On Saturday armed SS men had taken up positions within the family’s apartment and at the street entrance. They told the vice-chancellor that two of his staff had been shot and indicated the same end awaited him. The order, they said, would arrive at any moment. The family spent a lonely, terrifying weekend.

Franz and Martha talked awhile longer, then he escorted her back through the park. She returned to the party alone.

LATE ONE AFTERNOON DURING that week, Mrs. Cerruti, wife of the Italian ambassador, happened to look out a window of her residence, which stood across the street from Röhm’s house. At that moment, a large car pulled up. Two men got out and went into the house and emerged carrying armloads of Röhm’s suits and other clothing. They made several trips.

The scene brought home to her the events of the past weekend in a particularly vivid manner. “The sight of these clothes, now deprived of their owner, was nauseating,” she recalled in a memoir. “They were so obviously ‘the garments of the hanged’ that I had to turn away my head.”

She suffered “a regular fit of nerves.” She ran upstairs and vowed to take an immediate break from Berlin. She left the next day for Venice.

THE DODDS LEARNED THAT Wilhelm Regendanz, the wealthy banker who had hosted the fateful dinner for Captain Röhm and French ambassador François-Poncet at his Dahlem home, had managed to escape Berlin on the day of the purge and make his way safely to London. He feared now, however, that he could never return. Worse, his wife was still in Berlin and his adult son, Alex, who also had been present at the dinner, had been arrested by the Gestapo. On July 3 Regendanz wrote to Mrs. Dodd to ask if she would go to Dahlem to check on his wife and younger children and “to bring her my heartiest greetings.” He wrote, “It seems that I am suspect now, because so many diplomats have been in my house and because I was also a friend of General von Schleicher.”

Mrs. Dodd and Martha drove to Dahlem to see Mrs. Regendanz. A servant girl met them at the door, her eyes red. Soon Mrs. Regendanz herself appeared, looking dark and thin, her eyes deeply shadowed and her mannerisms halting and nervous. She knew Martha and Mattie and was perplexed to see them there in her home. She led them inside. After a few moments of conversation, the Dodds told Mrs. Regendanz about the message from her husband. She put her hands to her face and wept softly.

Mrs. Regendanz recounted how her house had been searched and her passport confiscated. “When she spoke of her son,” Martha wrote, “her self-control collapsed and she became hysterical with fear.” She had no idea where Alex was, whether he was alive or dead.

She pleaded with Martha and her mother to locate Alex and visit him, bring him cigarettes, anything to demonstrate to his captors that he had drawn the attention of the U.S. embassy. The Dodds promised to try. Mrs. Dodd and Mrs. Regendanz agreed that henceforth Mrs. Regendanz would use a code name, Carrie, in any contact with the Dodds or the embassy.

Over the next few days the Dodds spoke with influential friends, diplomats, and friendly government officials about the situation. Whether their intercession helped or not can’t be known, but Alex was freed after about a month of incarceration. He left Germany immediately, by night train, and joined his father in London.

Through connections, Mrs. Regendanz managed to acquire another passport and to secure passage out of Germany by air. Once she and her children were also in London, she sent a postcard to Mrs. Dodd: “Arrived safe and sound. Deepest gratitude. Love. Carrie.”

IN WASHINGTON, WESTERN EUROPEAN affairs chief Jay Pierrepont Moffat noted a surge of inquiries from American travelers asking whether it was still safe to visit Germany. “We have replied to them,” he wrote, “that in all the trouble to date no foreigner has been molested and we see no cause for worry if they mind their own business and keep out of trouble’s way.”

His mother, for one, had survived the purge unscathed and professed to have found it “quite exciting,” Moffat wrote in a later entry.

His sister’s home was in the Tiergarten district, where it “was blocked off by soldiers and they had to make quite a detour to get in or out.” Nonetheless, mother, daughter, and granddaughter set off by car, with chauffeur, for their previously planned tour of Germany.

What most occupied the attention of the State Department was the outstanding German debt to American creditors. It was a strange juxtaposition. In Germany, there was blood, viscera, and gunfire; at the State Department in Washington, there were white shirts, Hull’s red pencils, and mounting frustration with Dodd for failing to press America’s case. In a telegram from Berlin dated Friday, July 6, Dodd reported that he had met with Foreign Minister Neurath on the bond issue and that Neurath had said he would do what he could to ensure that interest was paid but that “this would be extremely difficult.” When Dodd asked Neurath whether the United States could at least expect the same treatment as other international creditors, Neurath “merely expressed the hope that this might be possible.”

The telegram infuriated Secretary Hull and the elders of the Pretty Good Club. “By his own showing,” Moffat wrote in his diary, Dodd “put up very little fight and rather let von Neurath walk away with the situation. The Secretary knows that [Dodd] has scant sympathy with our financial interests but even so was pretty fed up with the Dodd telegram.”

Hull angrily ordered Moffat to compose a harsh response to Dodd to compel him “not only to take but to create every opportunity to drive home the justice of our complaints.”

The result was a cable transmitted at 4:00 p.m. on Saturday, July 7, under Secretary Hull’s name that questioned whether Dodd had challenged Germany’s failure to pay its bond debt “with the utmost vigor alike from the point of view of logic, equity, and its effect upon the estimated 60,000 mainly innocent holders in this country….”

Moffat wrote, “It was a fairly stiff telegram, one sentence of which the Secretary with his intense kindly nature modified to salve Dodd’s feelings.” Moffat noted that “the irreverent ones” in the department had begun referring to Dodd as “Ambassador Dud.”

During another meeting on the bond situation later that week, Hull continued to express his dissatisfaction with Dodd. Moffat wrote, “The Secretary kept repeating while Dodd was a very fine man in many ways, he certainly had a peculiar slant to his make-up.”

That day Moffat attended a garden party at the home of a wealthy friend—the friend with the pool—who had invited as well “the entire State Department.” There were exhibition tennis matches and swimming races. Moffat had to leave early, however, for a cruise down the Potomac on a power yacht “fitted out with a luxury that would satisfy the soul of any sybarite.”

IN BERLIN, DODD WAS UNMOVED. He thought it pointless to pursue full payment, because Germany simply did not have the money, and there were far more important issues at stake. In a letter to Hull a few weeks later he wrote, “Our people will have to lose their bonds.”

EARLY ON THE MORNING of Friday, July 6, Martha went to her father’s bedroom to tell him good-bye. She knew he disapproved of her journey to Russia, but as they hugged and kissed he seemed at ease. He urged her to be careful but hoped she would have “an interesting trip.”

Her mother and brother took her to Tempelhof Airport; Dodd remained in the city, aware, no doubt, that the Nazi press might try to capitalize on his presence at the airport, waving farewell as his daughter flew off to the hated Soviet Union.

Martha climbed a tall set of steel stairs to the three-engine Junker that would take her on the first leg of her journey. A photographer captured her looking jaunty at the top of the stairs, her hat at a rakish angle. She wore a plain jumper over a polka-dotted blouse and matching scarf. Improbably, given the heat, she carried a long coat draped over her arm and a pair of white gloves.

She claimed later that she had no idea her trip would be of interest to the press or that it would create something of a diplomatic scandal. This hardly seems credible, however. After a year in which she had come to know intimately such intriguers as Rudolf Diels and Putzi Hanfstaengl, she could not have failed to realize that in Hitler’s Germany even the smallest actions possessed exaggerated symbolic power.

On a personal level her departure marked the fact that the last traces of the sympathy she had felt for the strange and noble beings of the Nazi revolution had disappeared, and whether she recognized it or not, her departure, as captured by news photographers and duly registered by embassy officials and Gestapo watchers alike, was a public declaration of her final disillusionment.

She wrote, “I had had enough of blood and terror to last me for the rest of my life.”

HER FATHER REACHED a similar moment of transformation. Throughout that first year in Germany, Dodd had been struck again and again by the strange indifference to atrocity that had settled over the nation, the willingness of the populace and of the moderate elements in the government to accept each new oppressive decree, each new act of violence, without protest. It was as if he had entered the dark forest of a fairy tale where all the rules of right and wrong were upended. He wrote to his friend Roper, “I could not have imagined the outbreak against the Jews when everybody was suffering, one way or another, from declining commerce. Nor could one have imagined that such a terroristic performance as that of June 30 would have been permitted in modern times.”

Dodd continued to hope that the murders would so outrage the German public that the regime would fall, but as the days passed he saw no evidence of any such outpouring of anger. Even the army had stood by, despite the murder of two of its generals. President Hindenburg sent Hitler a telegram of praise. “From the reports placed before me, I learn that you, by your determined action and gallant personal intervention, have nipped treason in the bud. You have saved the German nation from serious danger. For this I express to you my most profound thanks and sincere appreciation.” In another telegram Hindenburg thanked Göring for his “energetic and successful proceeding of the smashing of high treason.”

Dodd learned that Göring personally had ordered over seventy-five executions. He was glad when Göring, like Röhm before him, sent his regrets at not being able to attend the dinner party the Dodds had planned for Friday evening, July 6. Dodd wrote, “It was a relief that he did not appear. I don’t know what I would have done if he had.”

FOR DODD, DIPLOMAT by accident, not demeanor, the whole thing was utterly appalling. He was a scholar and Jeffersonian democrat, a farmer who loved history and the old Germany in which he had studied as a young man. Now there was official murder on a terrifying scale. Dodd’s friends and acquaintances, people who had been to his house for dinner and tea, had been shot dead. Nothing in Dodd’s past had prepared him for this. It brought to the fore with more acuity than ever his doubts about whether he could achieve anything as ambassador. If he could not, what then was the point of remaining in Berlin, when his great love, his Old South, languished on his desk?

Something left him, a vital last element of hope. In his diary entry for July 8, one week after the purge began and just before the one-year anniversary of his arrival in Berlin, he wrote: “My task here is to work for peace and better relations. I do not see how anything can be done so long as Hitler, Göring and Goebbels are the directing heads of the country. Never have I heard or read of three more unfit men in high place. Ought I to resign?”

He vowed never to host Hitler, Göring, or Goebbels at the embassy or his home and resolved further “that I would never again attend an address of the Chancellor or seek an interview for myself except upon official grounds. I have a sense of horror when I look at the man.”

CHAPTER 52 Only the Horses

But like seemingly everyone else in Berlin, Dodd wanted to hear what Hitler had to say about the purge. The government announced that Hitler would speak on the evening of Friday, July 13, in an address before the deputies of the Reichstag at their temporary hall, the nearby Kroll opera house. Dodd decided not to attend but to listen over the radio. The prospect of being there in person and listening to Hitler justify mass murder as hundreds of sycophants repeatedly thrust out their arms was too abhorrent.

That Friday afternoon, he and François-Poncet arranged to meet in the Tiergarten, as they had done in the past to avoid eavesdropping. Dodd wanted to find out whether François-Poncet planned to attend the speech but feared that if he visited the French embassy, Gestapo watchers would observe his arrival and conclude that he was conspiring to have the great powers boycott the speech, as indeed he was. Dodd had called on Sir Eric Phipps at the British embassy earlier in the week and learned that Phipps too planned to forgo the speech. Two such visits to major embassies in so short a time would surely draw attention.

The day was cool and sunny, and as a consequence the park was crowded with people, most on foot but quite a few on horseback, moving slowly through shadow. Now and then the air was punctuated by laughter and the barking of dogs and plumed with the ghosts of cigars fading slowly in the stillness. The two ambassadors walked for an hour.

As they prepared to part company, François-Poncet volunteered,

“I shall not attend the address.” He then offered an observation that Dodd had never expected to hear from a modern diplomat in one of the great capitals of Europe. “I would not be surprised any time to be shot on the streets of Berlin,” he said. “Because of this my wife remains in Paris. The Germans hate us so and their leadership is so crazy.”

At eight o’clock that night, in the library at Tiergartenstrasse 27a, Dodd turned on his radio and listened as Hitler took the dais to address the Reichstag. A dozen deputies were absent, murdered in the purge.

The opera house was just a twenty-minute walk across the Tiergarten from where Dodd now sat listening. On his side of the park, all was peaceful and quiet, the evening fragrant with the scent of night flowers. Even over the radio Dodd could hear the frequent risings and Heilings of the audience.

“Deputies,” Hitler said. “Men of the German Reichstag!”

Hitler detailed what he described as a plot by Captain Röhm to usurp the government, aided by a foreign diplomat whom he did not identify. In ordering the purge, he said, he had acted only in the best interests of Germany, to save the nation from turmoil.

“Only a ferocious and bloody repression could nip the revolt in the bud,” he told his audience. He himself had led the attack in Munich, he said, while Göring, with his “steel fist,” had done so in Berlin. “If someone asks me why we did not use the regular courts I would reply: at the moment I was responsible for the German nation; consequently, it was I alone who, during those twenty-four hours, was the Supreme Court of Justice of the German People.”

Dodd heard the clamor as the audience leapt to its feet, cheering, saluting, and applauding.

Hitler resumed: “I ordered the leaders of the guilty shot. I also ordered the abscesses caused by our internal and external poisons cauterized until the living flesh was burned. I also ordered that any rebel attempting to resist arrest should be killed immediately. The nation must know that its existence cannot be menaced with impunity by anyone, and that whoever lifts his hand against the State shall die of it.”

He cited the “foreign diplomat’s” meeting with Röhm and other alleged plotters and the diplomat’s subsequent declaration that the meeting was “entirely inoffensive.” It was a clear allusion to the dinner François-Poncet had attended in May at the home of Wilhelm Regendanz.

“But,” Hitler continued, “when three men capable of high treason organize a meeting in Germany with a foreign statesman, a meeting which they themselves characterize as a ‘working’ meeting, when they send the servants away, and give strict orders that I should not be informed of their meeting, I have those men shot, even if in the course of those secret conversations the only subjects discussed were the weather, old coins and similar objects.”

Hitler acknowledged that the cost of his purge “has been high,” and then lied to his audience by setting the death toll at seventy-seven. He sought to temper even this count by claiming that two of the victims killed themselves and—laughably, here—that the total included three SS men shot for “mistreating prisoners.”

He closed, “I am ready before history to take the responsibility for the twenty-four hours of the bitterest decision of my life, during which fate has again taught me to cling with every thought to the dearest thing we possess—the German people and the German Reich.”

The hall resounded with the thunder of applause and massed voices singing the “Horst Wessel Lied.” Had Dodd been present, he would have seen two girls give Hitler bouquets of flowers, the girls dressed in the uniform of the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the female branch of the Hitler Youth, and would have seen Göring step briskly to the dais to take Hitler’s hand, followed by a surge of officials bent on offering their own congratulations. Göring and Hitler stood close and held the pose for the scores of photographers pressing near. The Times’ Fred Birchall witnessed it: “They stood face to face on the dais for almost a minute, hand grasping hand, looking into each other’s eyes while the flashlights popped.”

Dodd turned off his radio. On his side of the park the night was cool and serene. The next day, Saturday, July 14, he sent a coded telegram to Secretary Hull: “NOTHING MORE REPULSIVE THAN TO WATCH THE COUNTRY OF GOETHE AND BEETHOVEN REVERT TO THE BARBARISM OF STUART ENGLAND AND BOURBON FRANCE…”

Late that afternoon, he devoted two quiet hours to his Old South, losing himself in another, more chivalrous age.

PUTZI HANFSTAENGL, ASSURED of his safety by Foreign Minister Neurath, sailed for home. When he arrived at his office he was struck by the somber, dazed aspect of those around him. They behaved, he wrote, “as if they were chloroformed.”

HITLER’S PURGE WOULD BECOME KNOWN as “The Night of the Long Knives” and in time would be considered one of the most important episodes in his ascent, the first act in the great tragedy of appeasement. Initially, however, its significance was lost. No government recalled its ambassador or filed a protest; the populace did not rise in revulsion.

The most satisfying reaction from a public official in America came from General Hugh Johnson, administrator of the National Recovery Administration, who by now had become notorious for intemperate speeches on a variety of subjects. (When a general strike had taken place in San Francisco in July led by a longshoreman who had emigrated from Australia, Johnson had called for deportation of all immigrants.) “A few days ago, in Germany, events occurred which shocked the world,” Johnson said in public remarks. “I don’t know how they affected you, but they made me sick—not figuratively, but physically and very actively sick. The idea that adult, responsible men can be taken from their homes, stood up against a wall, backs to the rifles and shot to death is beyond expression.”

The German foreign office protested. Secretary Hull replied that Johnson “was speaking as an individual and not for the State Department or for the Administration.”

This lack of reaction arose partly because many in Germany and elsewhere in the world chose to believe Hitler’s claim that he had suppressed an imminent rebellion that would have caused far more bloodshed. Evidence soon emerged, however, that showed that in fact Hitler’s account was false. Dodd at first seemed inclined to believe a plot really had existed but quickly grew skeptical. One fact seemed most clearly to refute the official line: when the SA’s Berlin chief, Karl Ernst, was arrested, he was about to set off on a honeymoon cruise, not exactly the behavior of a man supposedly plotting a coup for that same weekend. Whether Hitler at first believed his own story is unclear. Certainly Göring, Goebbels, and Himmler had done all they could to make him believe it. Britain’s Sir Eric Phipps initially accepted the official story; it took him six weeks to realize that no plot had existed. When Phipps met Hitler face-to-face several months later, his thoughts harked back to the purge. “It has not increased his charm or attractiveness,” Phipps wrote in his diary. “Whilst I spoke he eyed me hungrily like a tiger. I derived the distinct impression that had my nationality and status been different I should have formed part of his evening meal.”

In this appraisal he came closest to grasping the true message of the Röhm purge, which continued to elude the world. The killings demonstrated in what should have been unignorable terms how far Hitler was willing to go to preserve power, yet outsiders chose to misinterpret the violence as merely an internal settling of scores—“a type of gangland bloodbath redolent of Al Capone’s St. Valentine’s Day massacre,” as historian Ian Kershaw put it. “They still thought that in the business of diplomacy they could deal with Hitler as a responsible statesman. The next years would provide a bitter lesson that the Hitler conducting foreign affairs was the same one who had behaved with such savage and cynical brutality at home on 30 June 1934.” Rudolf Diels, in his memoir, acknowledged that at first he also missed the point. “I… had no idea that this hour of lightning was announcing a thunderstorm, the violence of which would tear down the rotten dams of the European systems and would put the entire world into flames—because this was indeed the meaning of June 30, 1934.”

The controlled press, not surprisingly, praised Hitler for his decisive behavior, and among the public his popularity soared. So weary had Germans become of the Storm Troopers’ intrusions in their lives that the purge seemed like a godsend. An intelligence report from the exiled Social Democrats found that many Germans were “extolling Hitler for his ruthless determination” and that many in the working class “have also become enslaved to the uncritical deification of Hitler.”

Dodd continued to hope for some catalyst to cause the end of the regime and believed the imminent death of Hindenburg—whom Dodd called modern Germany’s “single distinguished soul”—might provide it, but again he was to be disappointed. On August 2, three weeks after Hitler’s speech, Hindenburg died at his country estate. Hitler moved quickly. Before the day was out he assumed the duties of president as well as chancellor, thereby at last achieving absolute power over Germany. Contending with false humility that the title “president” could only be associated with Hindenburg, who had borne it so long, Hitler proclaimed that henceforth his own official title would be “Führer and Reich Chancellor.”

In a confidential letter to Secretary Hull, Dodd forecast “an even more terroristic regime than we have endured since June 30.”

Germany accepted the change without protest, to the dismay of Victor Klemperer, the Jewish philologist. He too had hoped the blood purge would at last cause the army to step in and remove Hitler. Nothing happened. And now, this new outrage. “The people hardly notice this complete coup d’etat,” he wrote in his diary. “It all takes place in silence, drowned out by hymns to the dead Hindenburg. I would swear that millions upon millions have no idea what a monstrous thing has occurred.”

The Munich newspaper Münchner Neueste Nachrichten gushed, “Today Hitler is the Whole of Germany,” apparently choosing to ignore the fact that just a month earlier its own gentle music critic had been shot dead by mistake.

THE RAINS CAME that weekend, a three-day downpour that drenched the city. With the SA quiescent, its brown uniforms prudently if temporarily closeted, and the nation mourning Hindenburg’s death, a rare sense of peace spread over Germany, allowing Dodd a few moments to muse on a subject freighted with irony but dear to that part of him that remained a farmer from Virginia.

In his diary entry for Sunday, August 5, 1934, Dodd remarked upon a trait of the German people that he had observed in his Leipzig days and that had persisted even under Hitler: a love of animals, in particular horses and dogs.

“At a time when nearly every German is afraid to speak a word to any but the closest friends, horses and dogs are so happy that one feels they wish to talk,” he wrote. “A woman who may report on a neighbor for disloyalty and jeopardize his life, even cause his death, takes her big kindly-looking dog in the Tiergarten for a walk. She talks to him and coddles him as she sits on a bench and he attends to the requirements of nature.”

In Germany, Dodd had noticed, no one ever abused a dog, and as a consequence dogs were never fearful around men and were always plump and obviously well tended. “Only horses seem to be equally happy, never the children or the youth,” he wrote. “I often stop as I walk to my office and have a word with a pair of beautiful horses waiting while their wagon is being unloaded. They are so clean and fat and happy that one feels that they are on the point of speaking.” He called it “horse happiness” and had noticed the same phenomenon in Nuremberg and Dresden. In part, he knew, this happiness was fostered by German law, which forbade cruelty to animals and punished violators with prison, and here Dodd found deepest irony. “At a time when hundreds of men have been put to death without trial or any sort of evidence of guilt, and when the population literally trembles with fear, animals have rights guaranteed them which men and women cannot think of expecting.”

He added, “One might easily wish he were a horse!”

CHAPTER 53 Juliet #2

Boris was right. Martha had packed her itinerary too full and as a consequence found her journey anything but uplifting. Her travels made her cranky and critical, of Boris and of Russia, which struck her as a drab and weary land. Boris was disappointed. “I am very sad to hear that you do not like everything in Russia,” he wrote to her on July 11, 1934. “You ought to review it with completely different eyes than America. You should not settle with a superficial glance (such as bad clothes and bad food). Please, dear Miss, look ‘inside,’ a bit deeper.”

What most annoyed Martha, unfairly, was that Boris did not join her on her travels, even though soon after her departure he too had gone to Russia, first to Moscow, and then to a resort in the Caucasus for a vacation. In an August 5 letter from the resort, Boris reminded her, “You are the one who said we do not have to meet each other in Russia.” He acknowledged, however, that other obstacles also had intruded, though he was vague as to their precise nature. “I could not spend my vacation together with you. It was not possible for various reasons. The most important reason: I had to stay in Moscow. My stay in Moscow was not very happy, my destiny is unresolved.”

He professed to be hurt by her letters. “You should not write such angry letters to me. I did not deserve it. I was already very sad in Moscow after some of your letters, since I felt that you were so far away and unreachable. But after your angry letter I am more than sad. Why did you do that, Martha? What happened? Can you not be 2 months without me?”

Just as she had wielded other lovers to hurt her ex-husband, Bassett, so she hinted to Boris that she might renew her affair with Armand Berard of the French embassy. “Immediately threatening with Armand?” Boris wrote. “I cannot dictate or suggest anything to you. But don’t make any stupidities. Stay calm and don’t destroy all the good things we both have together.”

At some point during her journey, Martha was approached by emissaries of the Soviet NKVD seeking to recruit her as a source of covert information. It is likely that Boris was ordered to stay away from her so as not to interfere with the process, although he also played a role in her recruitment, according to Soviet intelligence records uncovered and made available to scholars by a leading expert on KGB history (and a former KGB agent), Alexander Vassiliev. Boris’s superiors felt he was not energetic enough in formalizing Martha’s role. They transferred him back to Moscow and then to an embassy post in Bucharest, which he loathed.

Martha, meanwhile, returned to Berlin. She loved Boris, but the two remained separated; she dated other men, including Armand Berard. In autumn 1936, Boris was transferred again, this time to Warsaw. The NKVD assigned another agent, one Comrade Bukhartsev, to take over the effort to recruit Martha. A progress report in NKVD files states: “The entire Dodd family hates National Socialists. Martha has interesting connections that she uses in getting information for her father. She has intimate relations with some of her acquaintances.”

Despite their continued separation and emotional battles and Martha’s periodic brandishing of Armand and other lovers, her affair with Boris progressed to the point where on March 14, 1937, during a second visit to Moscow, she formally petitioned Stalin for permission to marry. Whether Stalin ever saw or responded to the request isn’t known, but the NKVD was ambivalent about their romance. Although Boris’s masters professed to have no objection to the marriage, they at times also seemed intent on stripping Boris from the picture in order to allow better focus on Martha. At one point the agency commanded that they stay apart for six months, “in the interests of business.”

Boris, as it happened, was more reluctant than Martha ever knew. In a peeved memorandum to his superiors in Moscow dated March 21, 1937, Boris complained, “I don’t quite understand why you have focused so much on our wedding. I asked you to point out to her that it is impossible in general and, anyway, won’t happen in the next several years. You spoke more optimistically on this issue and ordered a delay of only 6 months or a year.” But what would happen then? he asked. “Six months will pass quickly, and who knows? She may produce a bill that neither you nor I is going to pay. Isn’t it better to soften slightly the explicitness of your promises if you really gave them to her?”

In the same memorandum he refers to Martha as “Juliet #2,” a reference that KGB expert Vassiliev and Allen Weinstein, in their book The Haunted Wood, see as indicating that there might have been another woman in his life, a “Juliet #1.”

Martha and Boris had a tryst in Warsaw in November 1937, after which Boris sent a report to Moscow. The meeting “went off well,” he wrote. “She was in a good mood.” She was still intent on marriage and “waits for the fulfillment of our promise despite her parents’ warning that nothing would come of it.”

But once again Boris revealed a decided lack of interest in actually marrying her. He cautioned: “I think that she shouldn’t be left in ignorance with regard to the real situation, for if we deceive her, she may become embittered and lose faith in us.”

CHAPTER 54 A Dream of Love

In the months that followed Hitler’s final ascent, Dodd’s sense of futility deepened, as did a collateral longing to be back on his farm in the soft rise of the Appalachians, among his rich red apples and lazy cows. He wrote, “It is so humiliating to me to shake hands with known and confessed murderers.” He became one of the few voices in U.S. government to warn of the true ambitions of Hitler and the dangers of America’s isolationist stance. He told Secretary Hull in a letter dated August 30, 1934, “With Germany united as it has never before been, there is feverish arming and drilling of 1,500,000 men, all of whom are taught every day to believe that continental Europe must be subordinated to them.” He added, “I think we must abandon our so-called isolation.” He wrote to the army chief of staff, Douglas MacArthur, “In my judgment, the German authorities are preparing for a great continental struggle. There is ample evidence. It is only a question of time.”

Roosevelt largely shared his view, but most of America seemed more intent than ever on staying out of Europe’s squabbles. Dodd marveled at this. He wrote to Roosevelt in April 1935, “If Woodrow Wilson’s bones do not turn in the Cathedral grave, then bones never turn in graves. Possibly you can do something, but from reports of Congressional attitudes, I have grave doubts. So many men… think absolute isolation a coming paradise.”

Dodd resigned himself to what he called “the delicate work of watching and carefully doing nothing.”

His sense of moral revulsion caused him to withdraw from active engagement with Hitler’s Third Reich. The regime, in turn, recognized that he had become an intractable opponent and sought to isolate him from diplomatic discourse.

Dodd’s attitude appalled Phillips, who wrote in his diary, “What in the world is the use of having an ambassador who refuses to speak to the government to which he is accredited?”

GERMANY CONTINUED ITS MARCH toward war and intensified its persecution of Jews, passing a collection of laws under which Jews ceased to be citizens no matter how long their families had lived in Germany or how bravely they had fought for Germany in the Great War. Now on his walks through the Tiergarten Dodd saw that some benches had been painted yellow to indicate they were for Jews. The rest, the most desirable, were reserved for Aryans.

Dodd watched, utterly helpless, as German troops occupied the Rhineland on March 7, 1936, without resistance. He saw Berlin transformed for the Olympics as the Nazis polished the city and removed their anti-Jewish banners, only to intensify their persecution once the foreign crowds were gone. He saw Hitler’s stature within Germany grow to that of a god. Women cried as he passed near; souvenir hunters dug up parcels of earth from the ground on which he stepped. At the September 1936 party rally in Nuremberg, which Dodd did not attend, Hitler launched his audience into near hysteria. “That you have found me… among so many millions is the miracle of our time!” he cried. “And that I have found you, that is Germany’s fortune!”

On September 19, 1936, in a letter marked “Personal and Confidential,” Dodd wrote to Secretary Hull of his frustration at watching events unfold with no one daring to intercede. “With armies increasing in size and efficiency every day; with thousands of airplanes ready on a moment’s notice to drop bombs and spread poison gas over great cities; and with all other countries, little and great, arming as never before, one can not feel safe anywhere,” he wrote. “What mistakes and blunders since 1917, and especially during the past twelve months—and no democratic peoples do anything, economic or moral penalties, to halt the process!”

The idea of resigning gained appeal for Dodd. He wrote to Martha,

“You must not mention to anyone, but I do not see how I can continue in this atmosphere longer than next spring. I can not render my country any service and the stress is too great to be always doing nothing.”

Meanwhile, his opponents within the State Department stepped up their campaign to have him removed. His longtime antagonist Sumner Welles took over as undersecretary of state, replacing William Phillips, who in August 1936 became ambassador to Italy. Closer to hand a new antagonist emerged, William C. Bullitt, another of Roosevelt’s handpicked men (a Yale grad, however), who moved from his post as ambassador to Russia to lead the U.S. embassy in Paris. In a letter to Roosevelt on December 7, 1936, Bullitt wrote, “Dodd has many admirable and likeable qualities, but he is almost ideally ill equipped for his present job. He hates the Nazis too much to be able to do anything with them or get anything out of them. We need in Berlin someone who can at least be civil to the Nazis and speaks German perfectly.”

Dodd’s steadfast refusal to attend the Nazi Party rallies continued to rankle his enemies. “Personally, I cannot see why he is so sensitive,” Moffat wrote in his diary. Alluding to Dodd’s Columbus Day speech in October 1933, Moffat asked, “Why is it worse for him to listen to the Germans inveigh against our form of Government when he chose, at the Chamber of Commerce, to inveigh to a German audience against an autocratic form of government?”

A pattern of leaks persisted, building public pressure for Dodd’s removal. In December 1936 columnist Drew Pearson, primary author with Robert S. Allen of a United Features Syndicate column called “Washington Merry-Go-Round,” published a harsh assault on Dodd, “attacking me violently as a complete failure here and pretending that the President is of the same opinion,” Dodd wrote on December 13. “This is news to me.”

Pearson’s attack deeply wounded Dodd. He had spent the better part of four years seeking to fulfill Roosevelt’s mandate to serve as a model of American values and believed he had done as well as any man could have been expected to do, given the strange, irrational, and brutal nature of Hitler’s government. He feared that if he resigned now, under such a black cloud, he would leave the impression that he had been forced to do so. “My position is difficult, but under such criticism I cannot resign, as I planned, next spring,” he wrote in his diary. “To give up my work here under these circumstances would put me in a defensive and positively false position at home.” His resignation, he acknowledged, “would at once be recognized as a confession of failure.”

He decided to postpone his departure, even though he knew that the time had come to step down. In the meantime he requested another leave in America, to get some rest on his farm and meet with Roosevelt. On July 24, 1937, Dodd and his wife made the long drive to Hamburg, where Dodd boarded the City of Baltimore and at 7:00 p.m. began the slow sail down the Elbe to the sea.

LEAVING DODD ABOARD SHIP broke his wife’s heart. The next evening, Sunday, she wrote him a letter so that he would receive it upon his arrival. “I thought of you, my dear, all the way back to Berlin and felt very sad and lonely, especially to see you go away feeling so bad and so miserable.”

She urged him to relax and try to quell the persistent “nervous headaches” that had plagued him for the last couple of months. “Please, please, for our sakes, if not your own, take better care of yourself and live less strenuously and exacting.” If he kept well, she told him, he would still have time to achieve the things he wanted to achieve—and presumably here she meant the completion of his Old South.

She worried that all this sorrow and stress, these four years in Berlin, had been partly her fault. “Perhaps I have been too ambitious for you, but it does not mean that I love you any the less,” she wrote. “I can’t help it—my ambitions for you. It is innate.”

But all that was done with, she told him now. “Decide what is best and what you want most, and I shall be content.”

Her letter turned grim. She described the drive back to Berlin that night. “We made good time although we passed and met many army trucks—those awful instruments of death and destruction within. I still feel a shudder run through me when I see them and the many other signs of coming catastrophe. Is there no possible way to stop men and nations from destroying each other? Horrible!”

This was four and a half years before America’s entry into the Second World War.

DODD NEEDED THE RESPITE. His health had indeed begun to trouble him. Ever since arriving in Berlin he had experienced stomach troubles and headaches, but lately these had grown more intense. His headaches sometimes persisted for weeks on end. The pain, he wrote, “spread over the nerve connections between the stomach, shoulders and brain until sleep is almost impossible.” His symptoms had worsened to the point where on one of his previous leaves he had consulted a specialist, Dr. Thomas R. Brown, chief of the Division of Digestive Diseases at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore (who, at a 1934 gastroenterological symposium, noted with dead sobriety that “we must not forget it is essential to study the stool from every angle”). Upon learning that Dodd was at work on an epic history of the South and that completing it was the great goal of his life, Dr. Brown gently recommended that he quit his post in Berlin. He told Dodd, “At sixty-five one must take stock and decide what are the essentials, and lay one’s plans to complete the major work, if possible.”

By the summer of 1937, Dodd was reporting near continuous headaches and bouts of digestive trouble that in one case caused him to go without food for thirty hours.

Something more serious than the stress of work may have lain at the root of his health troubles, though certainly stress was a contributing factor. George Messersmith, who eventually moved from Vienna to Washington to become an assistant secretary of state, wrote in an unpublished memoir that he believed Dodd had undergone an organic intellectual decline. Dodd’s letters rambled and his handwriting degraded to the point where others in the department passed them to Messersmith for “deciphering.” Dodd’s use of longhand increased as his distrust of his stenographers grew. “It was quite obvious that something had happened to Dodd,” Messersmith wrote. “He was suffering from some form of mental deterioration.”

The cause of all this, Messersmith believed, was Dodd’s inability to adjust to the behavior of Hitler’s regime. The violence, the obsessive march toward war, the ruthless treatment of Jews—all of it had made Dodd “tremendously depressed,” Messersmith wrote. Dodd could not grasp how these things could be occurring in the Germany he had known and loved as a young scholar in Leipzig.

Messersmith wrote: “I think he was so thoroughly appalled by everything that was happening in Germany and the dangers which it had for the world that he was no longer capable of reasoned thought and judgment.”

AFTER A WEEK on his farm, Dodd felt much better. He went to Washington and on Wednesday, August 11, met with Roosevelt. During their hourlong conversation, Roosevelt said he’d like him to stay in Berlin a few months longer. He urged Dodd to do as many lectures as he could while in America and “speak the truth about things,” a command that affirmed for Dodd that he still had the president’s confidence.

But while Dodd was in America the Pretty Good Club engineered a singular affront. One of the embassy’s newest men, Prentiss Gilbert, standing in as acting ambassador—the chargé d’affaires—was advised by the State Department to attend the upcoming Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg. Gilbert did so. He rode in a special train for diplomats whose arrival in Nuremberg was greeted by seventeen military aircraft flying in swastika formation.

Dodd sensed the hand of Undersecretary Sumner Welles. “I have long believed Welles was opposed to me and everything I recommended,” Dodd wrote in his diary. One of Dodd’s few allies in the State Department, R. Walton Moore, an assistant secretary of state, shared Dodd’s distaste for Welles and confirmed his fears: “I have not the slightest doubt that you are correct in locating the influence that has been determining very largely the action of the Department since last May.”

Dodd was angry. Staying clear of these congresses was one of the few ways he believed he could signal his, and America’s, true feelings about the Hitler regime. He sent a pointed and—he thought—confidential protest to Secretary Hull. To Dodd’s great dismay, even this letter was leaked to the press. On the morning of September 4, 1937, he saw an article on the subject in the New York Herald Tribune, which excerpted an entire paragraph from the letter, along with a subsequent telegram.

Dodd’s letter incensed Hitler’s government. The new German ambassador to America, Hans-Heinrich Dieckhoff, told Secretary of State Hull that while he was not making a formal request for Dodd’s removal, he “desired to make it plain that the German Government did not feel that he was persona grata.”

ON OCTOBER 19, 1937, Dodd had a second meeting with Roosevelt, this at the president’s home in Hyde Park—“a marvelous place,” Dodd wrote. His son Bill accompanied him. “The President revealed his anxiety about foreign affairs,” Dodd wrote in his diary. They discussed the Chinese-Japanese conflict, then in full flare, and the prospects of a major peace conference soon to take place in Brussels aimed at bringing it to an end. “One thing troubled him,” Dodd wrote: “Could the United States, England, France and Russia actually co-operate?”

The conversation shifted to Berlin. Dodd asked Roosevelt to keep him in place at least until March 1, 1938, “partly because I did not wish to have the German extremists think their complaints… had operated too effectively.” He was under the impression that Roosevelt agreed.

Dodd urged the president to choose a fellow history professor, James T. Shotwell of Columbia University, as his replacement. Roosevelt seemed willing to consider the idea. As the conversation came to an end, Roosevelt invited Dodd and Bill to stay for lunch. Roosevelt’s mother and other members of the Delano clan joined them. Dodd called it “a delightful occasion.”

As he prepared to leave, Roosevelt told him, “Write me personally about things in Europe. I can read your handwriting very well.”

In his diary Dodd added: “I promised to write him such confidential letters, but how shall I get them to him unread by spies?”

Dodd sailed for Berlin. His diary entry for Friday, October 29, the day of his arrival, was brief but telling: “In Berlin once more. What can I do?”

He was unaware that in fact Roosevelt had bowed to pressure from both the State Department and the German foreign office and had agreed that Dodd should leave Berlin before the end of the year. Dodd was stunned when on the morning of November 23, 1937, he received a curt telegram from Hull, marked “Strictly Confidential,” that stated, “Much as the President regrets any personal inconvenience which may be occasioned to you, he desires me to request that you arrange to leave Berlin if possible by December 15 and in any event not later than Christmas, because of the complications with which you are familiar and which threaten to increase.”

Dodd protested, but Hull and Roosevelt stood fast. Dodd booked passage for himself and his wife on the SS Washington, to depart on December 29, 1937.

MARTHA SAILED TWO WEEKS earlier, but first she and Boris met in Berlin to say good-bye. To do so, she wrote, he left his post in Warsaw without permission. It was a romantic and heartbreaking interlude, at least for her. She again declared her desire to marry him.

This was their final meeting. Boris wrote to her on April 29, 1938, from Russia. “Until now I have lived with the memory of our last get-together in Berlin. What a pity that it was only 2 nights long. I want to stretch this time to the rest of our lives. You were so nice and kind to me darling. I will never forget that…. How was the trip across the ocean? One time we will cross this ocean together and together we will watch the eternal waves and feel our eternal love. I love you. I feel you and dream of you and us. Don’t forget me. Yours, Boris.”

Back in America, true to her nature if not to Boris, Martha met and promptly fell in love with a new man, Alfred Stern, a New Yorker of left-leaning sensibility. He was a decade older, five foot ten, handsome, and rich, having received a lush settlement upon his earlier divorce from an heiress of the Sears Roebuck empire. They became engaged and in breathtakingly short order they married, on June 16, 1938, though news reports show there was a second ceremony, later, on the farm in Round Hill, Virginia. She wore a black velvet dress with red roses. She would write years later that Stern was the third and last great love of her life.

She told Boris of her marriage in a letter dated July 9, 1938. “You know, honey, that for me, you meant more in my life than anybody else. You also know that, if I am needed, I will be ready to come when called.” She added, “I look into the future and see you in Russia again.”

By the time her letter arrived in Russia, Boris was dead, executed, one of countless NKVD operatives who fell victim to Stalin’s paranoia. Martha learned later that Boris had been accused of collaborating with the Nazis. She dismissed the charge as “insane.” She wondered long afterward if her relationship with him, especially that final, unauthorized meeting in Berlin, had played a role in sealing his fate.

She never learned that Boris’s last letter, in which he claimed to dream of her, was a fake, written by Boris at the direction of the NKVD shortly before his execution, in order to keep his death from destroying her sympathy for the Soviet cause.

CHAPTER 55 As Darkness Fell

A week before his voyage home, Dodd gave a farewell speech at a luncheon of the American Chamber of Commerce in Berlin, where just over four years earlier he had first kindled Nazi ire with his allusions to ancient dictatorships. The world, he said, “must face the sad fact that in an age when international cooperation should be the keyword, nations are farther apart than ever.” He told his audience that the lessons of the Great War had gone unlearned. He praised the German people as “basically democratic and kindly toward each other.” And he said, “I doubt whether any Ambassador in Europe properly performs his duties or earns his pay.”

He struck a different tone once he arrived in America. On January 13, 1938, at a dinner given in his honor at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, Dodd declared, “Mankind is in grave danger, but democratic governments seem not to know what to do. If they do nothing, Western civilization, religious, personal and economic freedom are in grave danger.” His remarks prompted an immediate protest from Germany, to which Secretary Hull replied that Dodd was now a private citizen and could say what he wished. First, however, there was some debate among State Department officials as to whether the department should also apologize with a statement along the lines of “We always regret anything that might give resentment abroad.” This idea was rejected, opposed by none other than Jay Pierrepont Moffat, who wrote in his diary, “I personally felt quite strongly that, much as I disliked and disapproved of Mr. Dodd, he should not be apologized for.”

With that speech, Dodd embarked on a campaign to raise the alarm about Hitler and his plans, and to combat the increasing drift in America toward isolationism; later he would be dubbed the Cassandra of American diplomats. He founded the American Council Against Nazi Propaganda and became a member of the American Friends of Spanish Democracy. At a speech in Rochester, New York, on February 21, 1938, before a Jewish congregation, Dodd warned that once Hitler attained control of Austria—an event that appeared imminent—Germany would continue seeking to expand its authority elsewhere, and that Romania, Poland, and Czechoslovakia were at risk. He predicted, moreover, that Hitler would be free to pursue his ambitions without armed resistance from other European democracies, as they would choose concessions over war. “Great Britain,” he said, “is terribly exasperated but also terribly desirous of peace.”

THE FAMILY DISPERSED, Bill to a teaching job and Martha to Chicago and then New York. Dodd and Mattie retired to the farm at Round Hill, Virginia, but made occasional forays into Washington. On February 26, 1938, just after seeing Dodd off at the train station in Washington for the start of a journey full of lectures, Mattie wrote to Martha in Chicago, “I do wish we were all nearer together so that we could discuss things and spend some time with each other. Our lives are slipping by so fast. Father often speaks of your being with us and what a joy it would be to have you with him and Billy nearby. I do wish he were younger and more vigorous. He is very delicate & his nervous energy depleted.”

She was deeply concerned about events in Europe. In another letter to Martha soon afterward she wrote, “The world seems in such a mess now, I don’t know what will happen. Too bad that maniac was allowed to go his way so long uncurbed. We may be, sooner or later, involved, God forbid.”

Mrs. Dodd did not share her husband’s deep love of the Round Hill farm. It was fine for summers and vacations, but not as a full-time residence. She hoped they could secure an apartment in Washington where she could live for a portion of each year, with or without him. In the meantime, she set out to make the farm more habitable. She bought curtains in gold silk, a new General Electric refrigerator, and a new stove. As spring advanced, she grew increasingly unhappy about the lack of progress both in finding the Washington pied-à-terre and in fixing up the farmhouse. She wrote to Martha, “So far I can’t get anything done that I want in the house but about 8 or 10 men [are] working on stone fences, beautifying his fields, picking up rocks, hauling, etc. It makes me feel like ‘throwing up the sponge’ and quitting the whole d—business.”

On May 23, 1938, in another letter to her daughter, she wrote, “Wish I did have a home—Washington instead of Chicago. It would be lovely.”

Four days later, Mrs. Dodd was dead. On the morning of May 28, 1938, she failed to join Dodd for breakfast, as was her custom. They kept separate bedrooms. He went to check on her. “It was the greatest shock that ever came to me,” he wrote. She died of heart failure in her bed, with no advance warning of trouble. “She was only sixty-two years old, and I was sixty-eight,” Dodd wrote in his diary. “But there she lay, stone dead, and there was no help for it; and I was so surprised and sad I could hardly decide what to do.”

Martha attributed her mother’s death to “the strain and terror of life” in Berlin. On the day of the funeral Martha pinned roses to her mother’s burial dress and wore matching roses in her own hair. Now, for only the second time, Martha saw tears in her father’s eyes.

Suddenly the farm at Round Hill was not so much a place of rest and peace as one of melancholy. Dodd’s sorrow and loneliness took a toll on his already fragile health, but still he pressed on and gave lectures around the country, in Texas, Kansas, Wisconsin, Illinois, Maryland, and Ohio, always reprising the same themes—that Hitler and Nazism posed a great risk to the world, that a European war was inevitable, and that once war began the United States would find it impossible to remain aloof. One lecture drew an audience of seven thousand people. In a June 10, 1938, speech in Boston, at the Harvard Club—that den of privilege—Dodd talked of Hitler’s hatred of Jews and warned that his true intent was “to kill them all.”

Five months later, on November 9 and 10, came Kristallnacht, the Nazi pogrom that convulsed Germany and at last drove Roosevelt to issue a public condemnation. He told reporters he “could scarcely believe that such a thing could occur in twentieth century civilization.”

On November 30, Sigrid Schultz wrote to Dodd from Berlin. “My hunch is that you have lots of chances to say or think ‘didn’t I say so beforehand?’ Not that it is such a great consolation to have been right when the world seems divided between ruthless Vandals and decent people unable to cope with them. We were witnesses when much of the wrecking and looting occurred and yet there are times when you wonder whether what you actually saw was really true—there is a nightmarish quality around the place, even surpassing the oppressiveness of June 30.”

A STRANGE EPISODE SIDETRACKED DODD. On December 5, 1938, as he was driving to a speaking engagement in McKinney, Virginia, his car struck a four-year-old black girl named Gloria Grimes. The impact caused significant injury, including an apparent concussion. Dodd did not stop. “It was not my fault,” he later explained to a reporter. “The youngster ran into the path of my automobile about thirty feet ahead. I put on the brakes, turned the car and drove on because I thought the child had escaped.” He made things worse by seeming to be insensitive when, in a letter to the girl’s mother, he added, “Besides, I did not want the newspapers all over the country to publish a story about the accident. You know how newspapers love to exaggerate things of this sort.”

He was indicted, but on the day his trial was to begin, March 2, 1939, he changed his plea to guilty. His friend, Judge Moore, sat beside him, as did Martha. The court fined him $250 but did not sentence him to jail, citing his poor health and the fact he had paid $1,100 in medical costs for the child, who by now was, reportedly, nearly recovered. He lost his driving privileges and his right to vote, an especially poignant loss for so ardent a believer in democracy.

Shattered by the accident, disillusioned by his experience as ambassador, and worn down by declining health, Dodd retreated to his farm. His health worsened. He was diagnosed as suffering from a neurological syndrome called bulbar palsy, a slow, progressive paralysis of the muscles of the throat. In July 1939 he was admitted to Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City for minor abdominal surgery, but before the operation took place he contracted bronchial pneumonia, a frequent complication of bulbar palsy. He became gravely ill. As he lay near death, he was taunted from afar by the Nazis.

A front-page article in Goebbels’s newspaper Der Angriff said Dodd was in a “Jewish clinic.” The headline stated: “End of notorious anti-German agitator Dodd.”

The writer spat a puerile brand of malice typical of Der Angriff. “The 70-year-old man who was one of the strangest diplomats who ever existed is now back among those whom he served for 20 years—the activist war-mongering Jews.” The article called Dodd a “small, dry, nervous, pedantic man… whose appearance at diplomatic and social functions inevitably called forth yawning boredom.”

It took note of Dodd’s campaign to warn of Hitler’s ambitions. “After returning to the United States, Dodd expressed himself in the most irresponsible and shameless fashion over the German Reich, whose officials had for four years, with almost superhuman generosity, overlooked his and his family’s scandalous affairs, faux pas and political indiscretions.”

Dodd emerged from the hospital and retired to his farm, where he continued to nurture the hope that he would have time to finish the remaining volumes of his Old South. The governor of Virginia restored his right to vote, explaining that at the time of the accident Dodd was “ill and not entirely responsible.”

In September 1939, Hitler’s armies invaded Poland and sparked war in Europe. On September 18, Dodd wrote to Roosevelt that it could have been avoided if “the democracies in Europe” had simply acted together to stop Hitler, as he always had urged. “If they had co-operated,” Dodd wrote, “they would have succeeded. Now it is too late.”

By fall, Dodd was confined to bed, able to communicate only with a pad and pencil. He endured this condition for several more months, until early February 1940, when he suffered another round of pneumonia. He died in his bed at his farm on February 9, 1940, at 3:10 p.m., with Martha and Bill Jr. at his side, his life work—his Old South—anything but finished. He was buried two days later on the farm, with Carl Sandburg serving as an honorary pallbearer.

Five years later, during the final assault on Berlin, a Russian shell scored a direct hit on a stable at the western end of the Tiergarten. The adjacent Kurfürstendamm, once one of Berlin’s prime shopping and entertainment streets, now became a stage for the utterly macabre—horses, those happiest creatures of Nazi Germany, tearing wildly down the street with manes and tales aflame.

HOW DODD’S COUNTRYMEN JUDGED his career as ambassador seemed to depend in large part on which side of the Atlantic they happened to be standing.

To the isolationists, he was needlessly provocative; to his opponents in the State Department, he was a maverick who complained too much and failed to uphold the standards of the Pretty Good Club. Roosevelt, in a letter to Bill Jr., was maddeningly noncommittal. “Knowing his passion for historical truth and his rare ability to illuminate the meanings of history,” Roosevelt wrote, “his passing is a real loss to the nation.”

To those who knew Dodd in Berlin and who witnessed firsthand the oppression and terror of Hitler’s government, he would always be a hero. Sigrid Schultz called Dodd “the best ambassador we had in Germany” and revered his willingness to stand up for American ideals even against the opposition of his own government. She wrote: “Washington failed to give him the support due an ambassador in Nazi Germany, partly because too many of the men in the State Department were passionately fond of the Germans and because too many of the more influential businessmen of our country believed that one ‘could do business with Hitler.’” Rabbi Wise wrote in his memoir, Challenging Years, “Dodd was years ahead of the State Department in his grasp of the political as well as of the moral implications of Hitlerism and paid the penalty of such understanding by being virtually removed from office for having the decency and the courage alone among ambassadors to decline to attend the annual Nuremberg celebration, which was a glorification of Hitler.”

Late in life even Messersmith applauded Dodd’s clarity of vision. “I often think that there were very few men who realized what was happening in Germany more thoroughly than he did, and certainly there were very few men who realized the implications for the rest of Europe and for us and for the whole world of what was happening in the country more than he did.”

The highest praise came from Thomas Wolfe, who during a visit to Germany in the spring of 1935 engaged in a brief affair with Martha. He wrote to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, that Ambassador Dodd had helped conjure in him “a renewed pride and faith in America and a belief that somehow our great future still remains.” The Dodds’ house at Tiergartenstrasse 27a, he told Perkins, “has been a free and fearless harbor for people of all opinions, and people who live and walk in terror have been able to draw their breath there without fear, and to speak their minds. This I know to be true, and further, the dry, plain, homely unconcern with which the Ambassador observes all the pomp and glitter and decorations and the tramp of marching men would do your heart good to see.”

Dodd’s successor was Hugh Wilson, a diplomat of the old-fashioned mode that Dodd long had railed against. It was Wilson, in fact, who had first described the foreign service as “a pretty good club.” Wilson’s maxim, coined by Talleyrand before him, was not exactly stirring: “Above all, not too much zeal.” As ambassador, Wilson sought to emphasize the positive aspects of Nazi Germany and carried on a one-man campaign of appeasement. He promised Germany’s new foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, that if war began in Europe he would do all he could to keep America out. Wilson accused the American press of being “Jewish controlled” and of singing a “hymn of hate while efforts are made over here to build a better future.” He praised Hitler as “the man who has pulled his people from moral and economic despair into the state of pride and evident prosperity they now enjoyed.” He particularly admired the Nazi “Strength through Joy” program, which provided all German workers with no-expense vacations and other entertainments. Wilson saw it as a powerful tool for helping Germany resist communist inroads and suppressing workers’ demands for higher wages—money that workers would squander on “idiotic things as a rule.” He saw this approach as one that “is going to be beneficial to the world at large.”

William Bullitt, in a letter from Paris dated December 7, 1937, praised Roosevelt for choosing Wilson, stating, “I do think that the chances for peace in Europe are increased definitely by your appointment of Hugh to Berlin, and I thank you profoundly.”

In the end, of course, neither Dodd’s nor Wilson’s approach mattered very much. As Hitler consolidated his power and cowed his public, only some extreme gesture of American disapproval could have had any effect, perhaps the “forcible intervention” suggested by George Messersmith in September 1933. Such an act, however, would have been politically unthinkable with America succumbing more and more to the fantasy that it could avoid involvement in the squabbles of Europe. “But history,” wrote Dodd’s friend Claude Bowers, ambassador to Spain and later Chile, “will record that in a period when the forces of tyranny were mobilizing for the extermination of liberty and democracy everywhere, when a mistaken policy of ‘appeasement’ was stocking the arsenals of despotism, and when in many high social, and some political, circles, fascism was a fad and democracy anathema, he stood foursquare for our democratic way of life, fought the good fight and kept the faith, and when death touched him his flag was flying still.”

And indeed one has to wonder: For Goebbels’s Der Angriff to attack Dodd as he lay prostrate in a hospital bed, was he really so ineffectual as his enemies believed? In the end, Dodd proved to be exactly what Roosevelt had wanted, a lone beacon of American freedom and hope in a land of gathering darkness.