On the platform, the Dodds encountered a crowd of Americans and Germans waiting to meet them, including officials from the German foreign office and reporters armed with cameras and flash apparatus known then as "flashlights." An energetic-seeming man, midsized, about five feet six inches tall-"a dry, drawling, peppery man," as historian and diplomat George Kennan later described him-stepped forward and introduced himself. This was George Messersmith, consul general, the Foreign Service officer whose lengthy dispatches Dodd had read while in Washington. Martha and her father liked him immediately, judging him to be a man of principle and candor and a likely friend, though this appraisal was destined for significant revision.
Messersmith returned this initial goodwill. "I liked Dodd from the outset," Messersmith wrote. "He was a very simple man in his manner and in his approach." He noted, however, that Dodd "gave the impression of being rather fragile."
In the crowd of greeters the Dodds also encountered two women who over the next several years would play important roles in the family"s life, one a German, the other an American from Wisconsin who was married to a member of one of Germany"s loftiest scholarly dynasties.
The German woman was Bella Fromm-"Auntie Voss," society columnist for a highly respected newspaper, the Vossische Zeitung Vossische Zeitung, one of two hundred newspapers then still operating in Berlin and, unlike most of them, still capable of independent reportage. Fromm was full figured and handsome, with striking eyes-onyx under black gull-wing brows, her pupils partially curtained by upper lids in a manner that conveyed both intellect and skepticism. She was trusted by virtually all members of the city"s diplomatic community as well as by senior members of the n.a.z.i Party, no small achievement considering that she was Jewish. She claimed to have a source high in Hitler"s government who gave her advance warning of future Reich actions. She was a close friend of Messersmith"s; her daughter, Gonny, called him "uncle."
Fromm in her diary recorded her initial observations of the Dodds. Martha, she wrote, seemed "a perfect example of the intelligent young American female." As for the amba.s.sador, he "looks like a scholar. His dry humor attracted me. He is observant and precise. He learned to love Germany when he was a student in Leipzig, he said, and will dedicate his strength to build a sincere friendship between his country and Germany."
She added: "I hope he and the President of the United States will not be too disappointed in their efforts."
The second woman, the American, was Mildred Fish Harnack, a representative of the American Women"s Club in Berlin. She was Fromm"s physical opposite in every way-slender, blonde, ethereal, reserved. Martha and Mildred liked each other at once. Mildred wrote later that Martha "is clear and capable and has a real desire to understand the world. Therefore our interests touch." She sensed that she had found a soul mate, "a woman who is seriously interested in writing. It"s a hindrance to be lonely and isolated in one"s work. Ideas stimulate ideas, and the love of writing is contagious."
Martha in turn was impressed by Mildred. "I was drawn to her immediately," she wrote. Mildred exhibited an appealing combination of strength and delicacy. "She was slow to speak and express opinions; she listened quietly, her large grey blue eyes serious...weighing, evaluating, trying to understand."
COUNSELOR GORDON PLACED MARTHA in a car with a young protocol secretary a.s.signed to accompany her to the hotel where the Dodds were to live until they could find a suitable house to lease. Her parents traveled separately with Gordon, Messersmith, and Messersmith"s wife. Martha"s car proceeded south over the Spree into the city. in a car with a young protocol secretary a.s.signed to accompany her to the hotel where the Dodds were to live until they could find a suitable house to lease. Her parents traveled separately with Gordon, Messersmith, and Messersmith"s wife. Martha"s car proceeded south over the Spree into the city.
She found long, straight boulevards that evoked the rigid grid of Chicago, but the similarity ended there. Unlike the skysc.r.a.per-forested landscape she had walked through every workday in Chicago, here most buildings were rather short, typically five stories or so, and these amplified the low, flat feel of the city. Most looked to be very old, but a few were jarringly new, with walls of gla.s.s, flat roofs, and curved facades, the offspring of Walter Gropius, Bruno Taut, and Erich Mendelsohn, all condemned by the n.a.z.is as decadent, communist, and, inevitably, Jewish. The city was full of color and energy. There were double-decked omnibuses, S-Bahn trains, and brightly colored trams whose catenaries fired off brilliant blue sparks. Low-slung automobiles thrummed past, most painted black, but others red, cream, and deep blue, many of unfamiliar design: the adorable Opel 4/16 PS, the Horch with its lethal arrow-in-bow hood ornament, and the ubiquitous Mercedes, black, low, edged with chrome. Joseph Goebbels himself was moved to capture in prose the energy of the city as exhibited in one of its most popular shopping avenues, the Kurfurstendamm, albeit in an essay meant not to praise but to condemn, calling the street "the abscess" of the city. "The bells on the streetcars ring, buses clatter by honking their horns, stuffed full with people and more people; taxis and fancy private automobiles hum over the gla.s.sy asphalt," he wrote. "The fragrance of heavy perfume floats by. Harlots smile from the artful pastels of fashionable women"s faces; so-called men stroll to and fro, monocles glinting; fake and precious stones sparkle." Berlin was, he wrote, a "stone desert" filled with sin and corruption and inhabited by a populace "borne to the grave with a smile."
The young protocol officer pointed out various landmarks. Martha asked question after question, oblivious to the fact that she was trying the officer"s patience. Early in their drive, they came to an open plaza dominated by an immense building of Silesian sandstone, with two-hundred-foot towers at each of its four corners, built in what one of Karl Baedeker"s famous guidebooks described as "florid Italian Renaissance style." This was the Reichstagsgebaude, in which Germany"s legislative body, the Reichstag, had convened until the building was set afire four months earlier. A young Dutchman-a lapsed communist named Marinus van der Lubbe-was arrested and charged with the arson, along with four other suspects named as accomplices, though a widely endorsed rumor held that the n.a.z.i regime itself had orchestrated the fire to stir fears of a Bolshevik uprising and thereby gain popular support for the suspension of civil liberties and the destruction of the Communist Party in Germany. The upcoming trial was the talk of Berlin.
But Martha was perplexed. Contrary to what news reports had led her to expect, the building seemed intact. The towers still stood and the facades appeared unmarked. "Oh, I thought it was burned down!" she exclaimed as the car pa.s.sed the building. "It looks all right to me. Tell me what happened."
After this and several other outbursts that Martha conceded were imprudent, the protocol officer leaned toward her and hissed, "Sssh! Young lady, you must learn to be seen and not heard. You mustn"t say so much and ask so many questions. This isn"t America and you can"t say all the things you think."
She stayed quiet for the rest of the drive.
UPON REACHING THEIR HOTEL, the Esplanade, on the well-shaded and lovely Bellevuestra.s.se, Martha and her parents were shown the accommodations that Messersmith himself had arranged.
Dodd was appalled, Martha enchanted.
The hotel was one of Berlin"s finest, with gigantic chandeliers and fireplaces and two gla.s.s-roofed courtyards, one of which-the Palm Courtyard-was famous for its tea dances and as the place where Berliners had gotten their first opportunity to dance the Charleston. Greta Garbo had once been a guest, as had Charlie Chaplin. Messersmith had booked the Imperial Suite, a collection of rooms that included a large double-bedded room with private bath, two single bedrooms also with private baths, one drawing room, and one conference room, all arrayed along the even-numbered side of a hall, from room 116 through room 124. Two reception rooms had walls covered with satin brocade. The suite was suffused with a springlike scent imparted by flowers sent by well-wishers, so many flowers, Martha recalled, "that there was scarcely s.p.a.ce to move in-orchids and rare scented lilies, flowers of all colors and descriptions." Upon entering the suite, she wrote, "we gasped at its magnificence."
But such opulence abraded every principle of the Jeffersonian ideal that Dodd had embraced throughout his life. Dodd had made it known before his arrival that he wanted "modest quarters in a modest hotel," Messersmith wrote. While Messersmith understood Dodd"s desire to live "most inconspicuously and modestly," he also knew "that the German officials and German people would not understand it."
There was another factor. U.S. diplomats and State Department officials had always stayed at the Esplanade. To do otherwise would have const.i.tuted an egregious breach of protocol and tradition.
THE FAMILY SETTLED IN. Bill Jr. and the Chevrolet were not expected to arrive for a while yet. Dodd retired to a bedroom with a book. Martha found it all hard to grasp. Cards from well-wishers continued to arrive, accompanied by still more flowers. She and her mother sat in awe of the luxury around them, "wondering desperately how all this was to be paid for without mortgaging our souls."
Later that evening the family rallied and went down to the hotel restaurant for dinner, where Dodd dusted off his decades-old German and in his dry manner tried to joke with the waiters. He was, Martha wrote, "in magnificent humor." The waiters, more accustomed to the imperious behavior of world dignitaries and n.a.z.i officials, were unsure how to respond and adopted a level of politeness that Martha found almost obsequious. The food was good, she judged, but heavy, cla.s.sically German, and demanded an after-dinner walk.
Outside, the Dodds turned left and walked along Bellevuestra.s.se through the shadows of trees and the penumbrae of streetlamps. The dim lighting evoked for Martha the somnolence of rural American towns very late at night. She saw no soldiers, no police. The night was soft and lovely; "everything," she wrote, "was peaceful, romantic, strange, nostalgic."
They continued on to the end of the street and crossed a small square into the Tiergarten, Berlin"s equivalent of Central Park. The name, in literal translation, meant "animal garden" or "garden of the beasts," which harked back to its deeper past, when it was a hunting preserve for royalty. Now it was 630 acres of trees, walkways, riding paths and statuary that spread west from the Brandenburg Gate to the wealthy residential and shopping district of Charlottenburg. The Spree ran along its northern boundary; the city"s famous zoo stood at its southwest corner. At night the park was especially alluring. "In the Tiergarten," a British diplomat wrote, "the little lamps flicker among the little trees, and the gra.s.s is starred with the fireflies of a thousand cigarettes."
The Dodds entered the Siegesallee-Avenue of Victory-lined with ninety-six statues and busts of past Prussian leaders, among them Frederick the Great, various lesser Fredericks, and such once-bright stars as Albert the Bear, Henry the Child, and Otho the Lazy. Berliners called them Puppen Puppen-dolls. Dodd held forth on the history of each, revealing the detailed knowledge of Germany he had acquired in Leipzig three decades earlier. Martha could tell that his sense of foreboding had dissipated. "I am sure this was one of the happiest evenings we spent in Germany," she wrote. "All of us were full of joy and peace."
Her father had loved Germany ever since his tenure in Leipzig, when each day a young woman brought fresh violets for his room. Now on this first night, as they walked along the Avenue of Victory, Martha too felt a rush of affection for the country. The city, the overall atmosphere, was nothing like what news reports back home had led her to expect. "I felt the press had badly maligned the country and I wanted to proclaim the warmth and friendliness of the people, the soft summer night with its fragrance of trees and flowers, the serenity of the streets."
This was July 13, 1933.
PART II.
House Hunting in the Third Reich
Amba.s.sador Dodd at his desk ( (photo credit p2.1)
CHAPTER 6.
Seduction.
In her first few days in Berlin, Martha fell ill with a cold. As she lay convalescing at the Esplanade she received a visitor, an American woman named Sigrid Schultz, who for the preceding fourteen years had been a correspondent in Berlin for Martha"s former employer, the Chicago Tribune Chicago Tribune, and was now its correspondent in chief for Central Europe. Schultz was forty years old, five foot three-the same height as Martha-with blond hair and blue eyes. "A little pudgy," as Martha put it, with "an abundance of golden hair." Despite her size and cherub"s gleam, Schultz was known to fellow correspondents and n.a.z.i officials alike as being tenacious, outspoken, and utterly fearless. She made every diplomat"s invitation list and was a regular at parties thrown by Goebbels, Goring, and other n.a.z.i leaders. Goring took a perverse delight in calling her "the dragon from Chicago."
Schultz and Martha chatted at first about innocuous things, but soon the conversation turned to the rapid transformation of Berlin during the six months since Hitler had become chancellor. Schultz told stories of violence against Jews, communists, and anyone the n.a.z.is saw as unsympathetic to their revolution. In some cases the victims had been American citizens.
Martha countered that Germany was in the midst of a historic rebirth. Those incidents that did occur surely were only inadvertent expressions of the wild enthusiasm that had gripped the country. In the few days since her arrival Martha had seen nothing at all to corroborate Schultz"s tales.
But Schultz pressed on with stories of beatings and capricious imprisonments in the "wild" camps-ad hoc prisons that had sprung up throughout the country under the control of n.a.z.i paramilitary forces-and in more formal prisons, known by now as concentration camps. The German word was Konzentrationslager Konzentrationslager, or KZ. The opening of one such camp had occurred on March 22, 1933, its existence revealed at a press conference held by a thirty-two-year-old former chicken farmer turned commander of the Munich police, Heinrich Himmler. The camp occupied an old munitions factory a brief train ride from Munich, just outside the charming village of Dachau, and now housed hundreds of prisoners, possibly thousands-no one knew-most arrested not on specific charges but rather for "protective custody." These were not Jews, not yet, but communists and members of the liberal Social Democratic Party, all held in conditions of strict discipline.
Martha grew annoyed at Schultz"s effort to tarnish her rosy view, but she liked Schultz and saw that she would make a valuable friend, given her vast range of contacts among journalists and diplomats. They parted amicably, but with Martha unshaken in her view that the revolution unfolding around her was a heroic episode that could yield a new and healthy Germany.
"I didn"t believe all her stories," Martha wrote later. "I thought she was exaggerating and a bit hysterical."
When Martha left her hotel she witnessed no violence, saw no one cowering in fear, felt no oppression. The city was a delight. What Goebbels condemned she adored. A short walk from the hotel, to the right, away from the cool green of the Tiergarten, took her to Potsdamer Platz, one of the busiest intersections in the world, with its famous five-way streetlight, believed to have been the first-ever stoplight installed in Europe. Berlin had only 120,000 cars, but at any given moment all of them seemed to collect here, like bees to a hive. One could watch the whirl of cars and people from an outdoor table at the Josty Cafe. Here too stood Haus Vaterland, a five-story nightclub capable of serving six thousand diners in twelve restaurant milieus, including a Wild West bar, with waiters in immense cowboy hats, and the Rhineland Wine Terrace, where each hour guests experienced a brief indoor thunderstorm complete with lightning, thunder, and, to the chagrin of women wearing true silk, a sprinkling of rain. "What a youthful, carefree, won"t-go-home-till-morning, romantic, wonderful place!" one visitor wrote: "It is the jolliest place in Berlin."
For a twenty-four-year-old woman unenc.u.mbered by job and financial concern and soon to be freed of a dead marriage, Berlin was endlessly compelling. Within days she found herself going on an afternoon "tea date" with a famous American correspondent, H. R. Knickerbocker-"Knick" to his friends-who filed stories for the New York Evening Post New York Evening Post. He took her to the Eden Hotel, the notorious Eden, where communist firebrand Rosa Luxemburg had been beaten nearly to death in 1919 before being driven into the adjacent Tiergarten and killed.
Now, in the Eden"s tea room, Martha and Knick danced. He was skinny and short, with red hair and brown eyes, and led her across the floor with skill and grace. Inevitably, the conversation shifted to Germany. Like Sigrid Schultz, Knickerbocker tried to teach Martha a bit about the politics of the country and the character of its new leadership. Martha wasn"t interested, and the conversation drifted elsewhere. What enthralled her were the German men and women around her. She loved "their funny stiff dancing, listening to their incomprehensible and guttural tongue, and watching their simple gestures, natural behavior and childlike eagerness for life."
She liked the Germans she had met thus far-more, certainly, than the French she had encountered during her studies in Paris. Unlike the French, she wrote, the Germans "weren"t thieves, they weren"t selfish, they weren"t impatient or cold and hard."
MARTHA"S CHEERY VIEW of things was widely shared by outsiders visiting Germany and especially Berlin. The fact was that on most days in most neighborhoods the city looked and functioned as it always had. The cigar peddler in front of the Hotel Adlon, at Unter den Linden 1, continued to sell cigars as always (and Hitler continued to shun the hotel, preferring instead the nearby Kaiserhof). Every morning Germans crowded the Tiergarten, many on horseback, as thousands of others commuted into the city center on trains and trams from such neighborhoods as Wedding and Onkel Toms Hutte. Nicely dressed men and women sat in the Romanisches Cafe, drinking coffee and wine, and smoking cigarettes and cigars, and exercising the sharp wit for which Berliners were famed-the of things was widely shared by outsiders visiting Germany and especially Berlin. The fact was that on most days in most neighborhoods the city looked and functioned as it always had. The cigar peddler in front of the Hotel Adlon, at Unter den Linden 1, continued to sell cigars as always (and Hitler continued to shun the hotel, preferring instead the nearby Kaiserhof). Every morning Germans crowded the Tiergarten, many on horseback, as thousands of others commuted into the city center on trains and trams from such neighborhoods as Wedding and Onkel Toms Hutte. Nicely dressed men and women sat in the Romanisches Cafe, drinking coffee and wine, and smoking cigarettes and cigars, and exercising the sharp wit for which Berliners were famed-the Berliner Schnauze Berliner Schnauze, or "Berlin snout." At the Katakombe cabaret, Werner Finck continued poking fun at the new regime, despite the risk of arrest. During one show a member of the audience called him a "lousy yid," to which he responded, "I"m not Jewish. I only look intelligent." The audience laughed with gusto.
Nice days were still nice. "The sun shines," wrote Christopher Isherwood in his Berlin Stories Berlin Stories, "and Hitler is the master of this city. The sun shines, and dozens of my friends...are in prison, possibly dead." The prevailing normalcy was seductive. "I catch sight of my face in the mirror of a shop, and am shocked to see that I am smiling," Isherwood wrote. "You can"t help smiling, in such beautiful weather." The trams moved as usual, as did the pedestrians pa.s.sing on the street; everything around him had "an air of curious familiarity, of striking resemblance to something one remembers as normal and pleasant in the past-like a very good photograph."
Beneath the surface, however, Germany had undergone a rapid and sweeping revolution that reached deep into the fabric of daily life. It had occurred quietly and largely out of easy view. At its core was a government campaign called Gleichschaltung Gleichschaltung-meaning "Coordination"-to bring citizens, government ministries, universities, and cultural and social inst.i.tutions in line with National Socialist beliefs and att.i.tudes.
"Coordination" occurred with astonishing speed, even in sectors of life not directly targeted by specific laws, as Germans willingly placed themselves under the sway of n.a.z.i rule, a phenomenon that became known as Selbstgleichschaltung Selbstgleichschaltung, or "self-coordination." Change came to Germany so quickly and across such a wide front that German citizens who left the country for business or travel returned to find everything around them altered, as if they were characters in a horror movie who come back to find that people who once were their friends, clients, patients, and customers have become different in ways hard to discern. Gerda Laufer, a socialist, wrote that she felt "deeply shaken that people whom one regarded as friends, who were known for a long time, from one hour to the next transformed themselves."
Neighbors turned surly; petty jealousies flared into denunciations made to the SA-the Storm Troopers-or to the newly founded Geheime Staatspolizei, only just becoming known by its acronym, Gestapo (GEheime STAatsPOlizei), coined by a post office clerk seeking a less c.u.mbersome way of identifying the agency. The Gestapo"s reputation for omniscience and malevolence arose from a confluence of two phenomena: first, a political climate in which merely criticizing the government could get one arrested, and second, the existence of a populace eager not just to step in line and become coordinated but also to use n.a.z.i sensitivities to satisfy individual needs and salve jealousies. One study of n.a.z.i records found that of a sample of 213 denunciations, 37 percent arose not from heartfelt political belief but from private conflicts, with the trigger often breathtakingly trivial. In October 1933, for example, the clerk at a grocery store turned in a cranky customer who had stubbornly insisted on receiving three pfennigs in change. The clerk accused her of failure to pay taxes. Germans denounced one another with such gusto that senior n.a.z.i officials urged the populace to be more discriminating as to what circ.u.mstances might justify a report to the police. Hitler himself acknowledged, in a remark to his minister of justice, "we are living at present in a sea of denunciations and human meanness."
A central element of Coordination was the insertion into Germany"s civil service law of the "Aryan clause," which effectively banned Jews from government jobs. Additional regulations and local animosities severely restricted Jews from practicing medicine and becoming lawyers. As onerous and dramatic as these restrictions were for Jews, they made little impression on tourists and other casual observers, partly because so few Jews lived in Germany. As of January 1933 only about 1 percent of Germany"s sixty-five million people were Jewish, and most lived in major cities, leaving a negligible presence throughout the rest of the country. Nearly a third-just over 160,000-lived in Berlin alone, but they const.i.tuted less than 4 percent of the city"s overall population of 4.2 million, and many lived in close-knit neighborhoods not typically included on visitors" itineraries.
Yet even many Jewish residents failed to grasp the true meaning of what was occurring. Fifty thousand did see, and left Germany within weeks of Hitler"s ascension to chancellor, but most stayed. "Hardly anyone thought that the threats against the Jews were meant seriously," wrote Carl Zuckmayer, a Jewish writer. "Even many Jews considered the savage anti-Semitic rantings of the n.a.z.is merely a propaganda device, a line the n.a.z.is would drop as soon as they won governmental power and were entrusted with public responsibilities." Although a song popular among Storm Troopers bore the t.i.tle "When Jewish Blood Spurts from My Knife," by the time of the Dodds" arrival violence against Jews had begun to wane. Incidents were sporadic, isolated. "It was easy to be rea.s.sured," wrote historian John Dippel in a study of why many Jews decided to stay in Germany. "On the surface, much of daily life remained as it had been before Hitler came to power. n.a.z.i attacks on the Jews were like summer thunderstorms that came and went quickly, leaving an eerie calm."
The most visible marker of the Coordination campaign was the sudden appearance of the Hitler salute, or Hitlergruss. .h.i.tlergruss. It was sufficiently new to the outside world that Consul General Messersmith devoted an entire dispatch to the subject, dated August 8, 1933. The salute, he wrote, had no modern precedent, save for the more narrowly required salute of soldiers in the presence of superior officers. What made the practice unique was that everyone was expected to salute, even in the most mundane of encounters. Shopkeepers saluted customers. Children were required to salute their teachers several times a day. At the close of theatrical performances, a newly established custom demanded that audiences stand and salute as they sang first the German national anthem, "Deutschland uber Alles," and second the Storm Trooper anthem, the "Horst Wessel Lied," or "Horst Wessel Song," named for its composer, an SA thug killed by communists but whom n.a.z.i propaganda subsequently transformed into a hero. The German public had so avidly embraced the salute as to make the act of incessantly saluting almost comical, especially in the corridors of public buildings where everyone from the lowliest messenger to the loftiest official saluted and Heil Heiled one another, turning a walk to the men"s room into an exhausting affair.
Messersmith refused to salute and merely stood at attention, but he understood that for ordinary Germans that would not have sufficed. At times even he felt real pressure to conform. At the close of a luncheon he attended in the port city of Kiel, all the guests stood and with right arms extended sang the national anthem and the "Horst Wessel Song." Messersmith stood respectfully, as he would have in America for the "Star-Spangled Banner." Many of the other guests, including a number of Storm Troopers, glared at him and whispered among themselves as if trying to divine his ident.i.ty. "I felt really quite fortunate that the incident took place within doors and among on the whole intelligent people," he wrote, "for if it had been in a street gathering or in an outdoor demonstration, no questions would have been asked as to who I was, and that I would have been mishandled is almost unquestionable." Messersmith recommended that American visitors try to antic.i.p.ate when the songs and salute would be required and leave early.
He did not think it funny when now and then Amba.s.sador Dodd threw him a mock salute.
DURING HER SECOND WEEK in Berlin, Martha discovered that she had not shed her past as completely as she had hoped. in Berlin, Martha discovered that she had not shed her past as completely as she had hoped.
Ba.s.sett, her husband, arrived in the city on what he privately called his "Mission to Berlin," hoping to win Martha back.
He checked in at the Hotel Adlon. They saw each other several times, but Ba.s.sett did not get the tear-filled rapprochement he had hoped for. Rather, he found a cordial indifference. "You remember our bicycle ride through the park," he wrote later. "You were friendly, but I sensed a difference between us."
To make matters worse, toward the end of his stay Ba.s.sett caught a severe cold. It laid him flat, just in time for Martha"s last visit before his departure.
He knew that his Mission to Berlin had failed the moment Martha arrived in his room. She had brought her brother, Bill.
It was a moment of casual cruelty. She knew Ba.s.sett would interpret it correctly. She was tired. She had loved him once, but their relationship had been too fraught with misunderstandings and conflicting imperatives. Where there had been love, as Martha later put it, there were now only "embers," and these were not enough.
Ba.s.sett understood. "You had had it," he wrote. "And who could blame you!"
He sent her flowers, acknowledging defeat. The card that accompanied them began, "To my charming and lovely ex-wife."
He left for America, for Larchmont, New York, and a suburban life of lawn mowing and tending the copper beech in his backyard and evening drinks and potlucks and a train commute to his job at the bank. He wrote later, "I"m not at all sure you would have been happy as the wife of a bank economist, preoccupied with the Bank Letter, bringing up a family of children, PTA, and all that."
MARTHA"S CONNECTION WITH Sigrid Schultz soon began to pay off. Schultz threw a welcome party for Martha on July 23, 1933, and invited a number of her closest friends, among them still another correspondent, Quentin Reynolds, who wrote for the Hearst News Service. Martha and Reynolds. .h.i.t it off instantly. He was big and cheerful, with curly hair and eyes that always seemed to convey a sense of impending laughter-though he had a reputation, as well, for being hard-nosed, skeptical, and smart. Sigrid Schultz soon began to pay off. Schultz threw a welcome party for Martha on July 23, 1933, and invited a number of her closest friends, among them still another correspondent, Quentin Reynolds, who wrote for the Hearst News Service. Martha and Reynolds. .h.i.t it off instantly. He was big and cheerful, with curly hair and eyes that always seemed to convey a sense of impending laughter-though he had a reputation, as well, for being hard-nosed, skeptical, and smart.
They met again five days later in the bar at the Esplanade, along with her brother, Bill. Like Schultz, Reynolds knew everyone and had managed to befriend a number of n.a.z.i officials, including a confidant of Hitler with the tongue-twisting name Ernst Franz Sedgwick Hanfstaengl. A Harvard graduate with an American-born mother, Hanfstaengl was known to play piano for Hitler late at night to soothe the dictator"s nerves. No Mozart or Bach. Mostly Wagner and Verdi, Liszt and Grieg, some Strauss and Chopin.
Martha wanted to meet him; Reynolds knew of a party to be thrown by a fellow correspondent where Hanfstaengl was expected to be a guest and offered to bring her along.
CHAPTER 7.
Hidden Conflict Dodd walked from the Esplanade to his office each morning, a fifteen-minute stroll along Tiergartenstra.s.se, the street that formed the southern boundary of the park. On the south side stood mansions with lush grounds and wrought-iron fences, many belonging to emba.s.sies and consulates; on the north sprawled the park itself, dense with trees and statuary, its paths inked with morning shade. Dodd called it "the most beautiful park I have ever seen," and the walk quickly became his favorite part of the day. His office was in the emba.s.sy chancery on a street just off the park called Bendlerstra.s.se, which also contained the "Bendler Block," a collection of squat, pale, rectangular buildings that served as the headquarters of the regular German army, the Reichswehr.
A photograph of Dodd at work in his office during his first week or so in Berlin shows him seated at a large, elaborately carved desk before a soaring tapestry hung on the wall behind him, with a large and complicated phone to his left at a reach of maybe five feet. There is something comical about the image: Dodd, slight of frame, his collar stiff and white, hair pomaded and severely parted, stares with a stern expression into the camera, utterly dwarfed by the opulence that surrounds him. The photograph caused a good deal of mirth back at the State Department among those who disapproved of Dodd"s appointment. Undersecretary Phillips closed a letter to Dodd: "A photograph of you seated at your desk in front of a gorgeous tapestry has had quite a wide circulation and looks most impressive."
At every turn Dodd seemed to violate some aspect of emba.s.sy custom, at least in the eyes of his counselor of emba.s.sy, George Gordon. Dodd insisted on walking to meetings with government officials. Once, in paying a call on the nearby Spanish emba.s.sy, he made Gordon walk with him, both men dressed in morning coats and silk hats. In a letter to Thornton Wilder evoking the scene, Martha wrote that Gordon had "rolled in the gutter in an apoplectic fit." When Dodd drove anywhere, he took the family"s Chevrolet, no match for the Opels and Mercedeses favored by senior Reich officials. He wore plain suits. He cracked wry jokes. On Monday, July 24, he committed a particularly egregious sin. Consul General Messersmith had invited him and Gordon to a meeting with a visiting U.S. congressman, to be held in Messersmith"s office at the American consulate, which occupied the first two floors of a building across the street from the Esplanade Hotel. Dodd arrived at Messersmith"s office before Gordon; a few minutes later the telephone rang. What Dodd gleaned from Messersmith"s end of the conversation was that Gordon was now refusing to come. The reason: pure pique. In Gordon"s view Dodd had "degraded" himself and his post by stooping to attend a meeting in the office of a man of inferior rank. Dodd observed in his diary, "Gordon is an industrious career man with punctilio developed to the nth degree."
Dodd could not immediately present his credentials-his "Letters of Credence"-to President Hindenburg, as demanded by diplomatic protocol, for Hindenburg was unwell and had retreated to his estate at Neudeck in East Prussia to convalesce; he was not expected to return until the end of the summer. Dodd, therefore, was not yet officially recognized as amba.s.sador and used this period of quiet to familiarize himself with such basic functions as the operation of the emba.s.sy phones, its telegraphic codes, and the typical departure times of diplomatic pouches. He met with a group of American correspondents and then with some twenty German reporters, who-as Dodd feared-had seen the report in the Jewish Hamburger Israelitisches Familienblatt Hamburger Israelitisches Familienblatt claiming that he had "come to Germany to rectify the wrongs to the Jews." Dodd read them what he described as a "brief disavowal." claiming that he had "come to Germany to rectify the wrongs to the Jews." Dodd read them what he described as a "brief disavowal."
He quickly got a taste of life in the new Germany. On his first full day in Berlin, Hitler"s cabinet enacted a new law, to take effect January 1, 1934, called the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases, which authorized the sterilization of individuals suffering various physical and mental handicaps. He also learned that staff at the emba.s.sy and at Messersmith"s consulate had become convinced that German authorities were intercepting incoming and outgoing mail and that this had prompted Messersmith to take extraordinary measures to ensure that the most sensitive correspondence reached America unopened. The consul general now dispatched messengers to hand such mail directly to the captains of ships bound for America, who would be met dockside by U.S. agents.
ONE OF THE EARLIEST TASKS that Dodd a.s.signed himself was to gain a grasp of the talents and deficits of the emba.s.sy"s officers, known as first and second secretaries, and the various clerks, stenographers, and other employees who worked out of the chancery. From the start Dodd found their work habits to be less than desirable. His more senior people came in each day at whatever hour seemed to please them and periodically disappeared to hunt or play golf. Almost all, he found, were members of a golf club in the Wannsee district southwest of central Berlin. Many were independently wealthy, in keeping with the traditions of the Foreign Service, and spent money with abandon, their own and the emba.s.sy"s. Dodd was particularly appalled at how much they spent on international cables. The messages were long and rambling and thus needlessly expensive. that Dodd a.s.signed himself was to gain a grasp of the talents and deficits of the emba.s.sy"s officers, known as first and second secretaries, and the various clerks, stenographers, and other employees who worked out of the chancery. From the start Dodd found their work habits to be less than desirable. His more senior people came in each day at whatever hour seemed to please them and periodically disappeared to hunt or play golf. Almost all, he found, were members of a golf club in the Wannsee district southwest of central Berlin. Many were independently wealthy, in keeping with the traditions of the Foreign Service, and spent money with abandon, their own and the emba.s.sy"s. Dodd was particularly appalled at how much they spent on international cables. The messages were long and rambling and thus needlessly expensive.
In notes for a personnel report, he wrote brief descriptions of key people. He observed that Counselor Gordon"s wife had a "large income" and that Gordon tended to be temperamental. "Emotional. Too hostile to Germans...his irritations have been many and exasperating." In his sketch of one of the emba.s.sy"s first secretaries, also wealthy, Dodd jotted the shorthand observation that he "loves to pa.s.s upon [the] color of men"s socks." Dodd noted that the woman who ran the emba.s.sy reception room, Julia Swope Lewin, was ill suited to the task, as she was "very anti-German" and this was "not good for receiving German callers."
Dodd also learned the contours of the political landscape beyond the emba.s.sy"s walls. The world of Messersmith"s dispatches now came alive outside his windows under the bright sky of a summer"s day. There were banners everywhere in a striking arrangement of colors: red background, white circle, and always a bold, black "broken cross," or Hakenkreuz Hakenkreuz, at the center. The word "swastika" was not yet the term of choice within the emba.s.sy. Dodd learned the significance of the various colors worn by the men he encountered during his walks. Brown uniforms, seemingly omnipresent, were worn by the Storm Troopers of the SA; black, by a smaller, more elite force called the Schutzstaffel, or SS; blue, by the regular police. Dodd learned as well about the mounting power of the Gestapo and its young chief, Rudolf Diels. He was slender, dark, and considered handsome despite an array of facial scars acc.u.mulated when, as a university student, he had engaged in the bare-blade dueling once practiced by young German men seeking to prove their manhood. Although his appearance was as sinister as that of a villain in a campy film, Diels had proved thus far-according to Messersmith-to be a man of integrity, helpful and rational where his superiors, Hitler, Goring, and Goebbels, most decidedly were not.
In many other ways, as well, this new world was proving to be far more nuanced and complex than Dodd had expected.
Deep fault lines ran through Hitler"s government. Hitler had been chancellor since January 30, 1933, when he was appointed to the post by President Hindenburg as part of a deal crafted by senior conservative politicians who believed they could keep him under control, a notion that by the time of Dodd"s arrival had been proved delusional. Hindenburg-known widely as the Old Gentleman-remained the last counterbalance to Hitler"s power and several days before Dodd"s departure had made a public declaration of displeasure at Hitler"s attempts to suppress the Protestant Church. Declaring himself an "Evangelical Christian," Hindenburg in a published letter to Hitler warned of growing "anxiety for the inner freedom of the church" and that if things continued as they had, "the gravest damage must result to our people and fatherland, as well as injury to national unity." In addition to holding the const.i.tutional authority to appoint a new chancellor, Hindenburg commanded the loyalty of the regular army, the Reichswehr. Hitler understood that if the nation began falling back into chaos, Hindenburg might feel compelled to replace the government and declare martial law. He also recognized that the most likely source of future instability was the SA, commanded by his friend and longtime ally, Captain Ernst Rohm. Increasingly Hitler saw the SA as an undisciplined and radical force that had outlasted its purpose. Rohm thought otherwise: he and his Storm Troopers had been pivotal in bringing about the National Socialist revolution and now, for their reward, wanted control of all the nation"s military, including the Reichswehr. The army found this prospect loathsome. Fat, surly, admittedly h.o.m.os.e.xual, and thoroughly dissipated, Rohm had none of the soldierly bearing the army revered. He did, however, command a fast-growing legion of over one million men. The regular army was only one-tenth the size but far better trained and armed. The conflict simmered.
Elsewhere in the government, Dodd thought he detected a new and decidedly moderate bent, at least by comparison to Hitler, Goring, and Goebbels, whom he described as "adolescents in the great game of international leadership." It was in the next tier down, the ministries, that he found cause for hope. "These men wish to stop all Jewish persecution, to co-operate with remnants of German Liberalism," he wrote, and added: "Since the day of our arrival here there has been a struggle between these groups."
Dodd"s a.s.sessment arose in large part from an early encounter with Germany"s minister of foreign affairs, Konstantin Freiherr von Neurath, whom Dodd-at least for now-perceived to be a member of the moderate camp.
On Sat.u.r.day, July 15, Dodd paid a visit to Neurath at his ministry on Wilhelmstra.s.se, a boulevard that paralleled the eastern edge of the Tiergarten. So many key Reich offices lined the street that Wilhelmstra.s.se became a shorthand means of referring to the German government.
Neurath was a handsome man whose silver-gray hair, dark eyebrows, and close-trimmed gray mustache gave him the look of an actor who played fatherly roles. Martha would soon meet him as well and be struck by his ability to mask his interior emotions: "his face," she wrote, "was utterly expressionless-the proverbial poker-face." Like Dodd, Neurath enjoyed taking walks and began each day with a stroll through the Tiergarten.
Neurath saw himself as a sobering force in the government and believed he could help control Hitler and his party. As one peer put it, "He was trying to train the n.a.z.is and turn them into really serviceable partners in a moderate nationalist regime." But Neurath also thought it likely that Hitler"s government eventually would do itself in. "He always believed," one of his aides wrote, "that if he would only stay in office, do his duty, and preserve foreign contacts, one fine day he would wake up and find the n.a.z.is gone."
Dodd thought him "most agreeable," a judgment that affirmed Dodd"s resolve to be as objective as possible about all that was occurring in Germany. Dodd a.s.sumed that Hitler must have other officials of the same caliber. In a letter to a friend he wrote, "Hitler will fall into line with these wiser men and ease up on a tense situation."
THE VERY NEXT DAY, at about 1:30 p.m. in Leipzig, the city where Dodd had gotten his doctorate, a young American by the name of Philip Zuckerman was taking a Sunday stroll with his German wife and her father and sister. Given that they were Jews, this was perhaps an imprudent thing to do on that particular weekend, when some 140,000 Storm Troopers had flooded the town for one of the SA"s frequent orgies of marching, drilling, and, inevitably, drinking. That Sunday afternoon a ma.s.sive parade began surging through the heart of the city, under n.a.z.i banners of red, white, and black that fluttered seemingly from every building. At one thirty a company of these SA men broke off from the main formation and veered into an intersecting avenue, Nikolaistra.s.se, where the Zuckermans happened to be walking.
As the SA detachment moved past, a group of men at the rear of the column decided the Zuckermans and kin had to be Jews and without warning surrounded them, knocked them to the ground, and launched upon them a cyclone of furious kicks and punches. Eventually the Storm Troopers moved on.
Zuckerman and his wife were severely injured, enough so that both had to be hospitalized, first in Leipzig and then again in Berlin, where the U.S. consulate got involved. "It is not unlikely that [Zuckerman] has suffered serious internal injuries from which he may never altogether recover," Consul General Messersmith wrote in a dispatch to Washington about the attack. He warned that the United States might be compelled to seek monetary damages for Zuckerman but pointed out that nothing could be done officially on his wife"s behalf because she was not an American. Messersmith added, "It is interesting to note that she was obliged, as the result of the attack made on her at the same time, to go to a hospital where her baby of some months had to be removed." As a result of the operation, he wrote, Mrs. Zuckerman would never be able to bear another child.
Attacks of this nature were supposed to have come to an end; government decrees had urged restraint. The Storm Troopers appeared not to have paid attention.
In another dispatch on the case, Messersmith wrote, "It has been a favorite pastime of the SA men to attack the Jews and one cannot avoid the plain language of stating that they do not like to be deprived of their prey."
It was his insider"s understanding of this and other phenomena of the new Germany that made him so frustrated with the failure of visitors to grasp the true character of Hitler"s regime. Many American tourists returned home perplexed by the dissonance between the horrors they had read about in their hometown newspapers-the beatings and arrests of the preceding spring, the book pyres and concentration camps-and the pleasant times they actually experienced while touring Germany. One such visitor was a radio commentator named H. V. Kaltenborn-born Hans von Kaltenborn in Milwaukee-who soon after Dodd"s arrival pa.s.sed through Berlin with his wife, daughter, and son. Known as the "dean of commentators," Kaltenborn reported for the Columbia Broadcasting Service and had become famous throughout America, so famous that in later years he would have cameo roles as himself in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and the science-fiction thriller and the science-fiction thriller The Day the Earth Stood Still The Day the Earth Stood Still. Before his departure for Germany, Kaltenborn had stopped in at the State Department and been allowed to read some of Consul General Messersmith"s dispatches. At the time he believed them to be exaggerated. Now, after four or five days in Berlin, he told Messersmith that he stood by his original conclusion and called the dispatches "inaccurate and overdrawn." He suggested that Messersmith must have relied on faulty sources.
Messersmith was shocked. He had no doubt that Kaltenborn was sincere but attributed the commentator"s view to the fact that he "was a German by origin and he couldn"t believe that Germans could carry on and do things that were happening every day and every hour in Berlin and all over the country."
It was a problem Messersmith had noticed time and again. Those who lived in Germany and who paid attention understood that something fundamental had changed and that a darkness had settled over the landscape. Visitors failed to see it. In part, Messersmith wrote in a dispatch, this was because the German government had begun a campaign "to influence Americans coming to Germany in forming a favorable opinion concerning happenings in the country." He saw evidence of this in the curious behavior of Samuel Bossard, an American attacked on August 31 by members of the Hitler Youth. Bossard had promptly filed an affidavit with the U.S. consulate and had spoken angrily about the incident to a number of correspondents in Berlin. Then, suddenly, he stopped speaking. Messersmith called him just before his return to America to ask how he was doing and found him unwilling to discuss the incident. Suspicious, Messersmith made inquiries and learned that the Ministry of Propaganda had toured Bossard through Berlin and Potsdam and otherwise showered him with courtesy and attention. The effort appeared to have paid off, Messersmith noted. Upon Bossard"s arrival in New York, according to a news report, Bossard declared "that if Americans in Germany are subject to any kind of attacks, it can only be due to misunderstandings.... Many Americans do not seem to understand the changes which have taken place in Germany and through their awkwardness [have] acted in such a way as to invite attacks." He vowed to return to Germany the following year.
Messersmith sensed an especially deft hand behind the government"s decision to cancel a ban on Rotary Clubs in Germany. Not only could the clubs continue; more remarkably, they were allowed to retain their Jewish members. Messersmith himself belonged to the Berlin Rotary. "The fact that Jews are permitted to continue membership in Rotary is being used as propaganda among the Rotary clubs throughout the world," he wrote. The underlying reality was that many of those Jewish members had lost their jobs or were finding their ability to practice within their professions severely limited. In his dispatches Messersmith reprised one theme again and again: how impossible it was for casual visitors to understand what was really happening in this new Germany. "The Americans coming to Germany will find themselves surrounded by influences of the Government and their time so taken up by pleasant entertainment, that they will have little opportunity to learn what the real situation is."
Messersmith urged Kaltenborn to get in touch with some of the American correspondents in Berlin, who would provide ample confirmation of his dispatches.