In the Garden of Beasts

CHAPTER 11 Strange Beings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Messersmith said: “The incidents will go on.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER 12 Brutus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER 13 My Dark Secret

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not even Diels, as events soon would demonstrate.

CHAPTER 14 The Death of Boris

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She told Boris, “Yes, you may call.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Boris found her defensiveness hilarious and laughed with unrestrained delight.

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

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

They collapsed against each other with laughter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER 15 The “Jewish Problem”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neurath’s complexion turned a deeper red.

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

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

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

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

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

Dodd described his encounter with Fritz Haber, the chemist.

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

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

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

Again Neurath flushed: “Never!”

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER 16 A Secret Request

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dodd consulted a lawyer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER 17 Lucifer’s Run

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

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

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

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

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

“You’re under arrest,” Diels said.

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

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

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

Diels vowed to put Packebusch in prison.

Packebusch accused Diels of treason.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER 18 Warning from a Friend

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dodd went to bed that night deeply troubled.

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

CHAPTER 19 Matchmaker

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

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

Hanfstaengl telephoned Martha at home.

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

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