In the Garden of Beasts (14 page)

The main entrance and foyer were on the ground floor, at the rear of which lay the operational soul of the house—servants’ quarters, laundry, ice storage, various supply rooms and cupboards, a pantry, and a huge kitchen, which Martha described as being “
twice the size of an average New York apartment.” Upon entering the house, the Dodds walked first into a large vestibule flanked on both sides by cloakrooms and then up an elaborate staircase to the main floor.

It was here that the true drama of the house became evident. At the front, behind the curved facade, was a ballroom with an oval dance floor of gleaming wood and a piano covered in rich, fringed fabric, its bench upholstered and gilded. Here, on the piano, the Dodds placed an elaborate vase full of tall flowers and, beside this, a framed photographic portrait of Martha in which she looked exceptionally beautiful and overtly sexual, an odd choice, perhaps, for the ballroom of an ambassadorial residence. One reception room had walls covered in dark green damask, another, pink satin. A vast dining room had walls sheathed in red tapestry.

The Dodds’ bedroom was on the third floor. (Panofsky and his mother were to live on the floor above this, the attic floor.) The master bathroom was immense, so elaborate and overdone as to be comical, at least in Martha’s view. Its floors and walls were “
entirely done in gold and colored mosaics.” A large tub stood on a raised platform, like something on display in a museum. “For weeks,” Martha wrote, “I roared with laughter whenever I saw the bathroom and occasionally as a lark would take my friends up to see it, when my father was away.”

Though the house still struck Dodd as overly luxurious, even he
had to concede that its ballroom and reception rooms would come in handy for diplomatic functions, some of which he knew—and dreaded—would require the invitation of scores of guests so as not to offend an overlooked ambassador. And he loved the
Wintergarten
at the south end of the main floor, a glassed-in chamber that opened onto a tiled terrace overlooking the garden. Inside he would lie reading in a recliner; on fine days he sat outside in a cane chair, a book in his lap, as he caught the southern sun.

The family’s overall favorite room was the library, which offered the prospect of cozy winter nights beside a fire. It was walled with dark, gleaming wood and red damask, and had a great old fireplace whose black-enameled mantel was carved with forests and human figures. The shelves were full of books, many of which Dodd judged to be ancient and valuable. At certain times of day the room was bathed in colored light cast from stained glass set high in one wall. A glass-topped table displayed valuable manuscripts and letters left there by Panofsky. Martha especially liked the library’s roomy brown leather sofa, soon to become an asset in her romantic life. The size of the house, the remoteness of its bedrooms, the quiet of its fabric-sheathed walls—these too would prove valuable, as would her parents’ habit of retiring early despite the prevailing Berlin custom of staying up to all hours.

On that Saturday in August when the Dodds moved in, the Panofskys graciously placed fresh flowers throughout the house, prompting Dodd to write a thank-you note. “
We are convinced that, thanks to your kind efforts and thoughtfulness, we shall be very happy in your lovely house.”

Among the diplomatic community, the house at Tiergartenstrasse 27a quickly became known as a haven where people could speak their minds without fear. “
I love going there because of Dodd’s brilliant mind, his sharp gift of observation and trenchantly sarcastic tongue,” wrote Bella Fromm, the society columnist. “I like it also because there is no rigid ceremony as observed in other diplomatic houses.” One regular visitor was Prince Louis Ferdinand, who in a memoir described the house as his “
second home.” He often joined the Dodds for dinner. “
When the servants were out of sight we
opened our hearts,” he wrote. Sometimes the prince’s candor was too much even for Ambassador Dodd, who warned him, “
If you don’t try to be more careful with your talk, Prince Louis, they will hang you one of these days. I’ll come to your funeral all right, but that won’t do you much good, I am afraid.”

As the family settled in, Martha and her father fell into an easy camaraderie. They traded jokes and wry observations. “
We love each other,” she wrote in a letter to Thornton Wilder, “and I am told state secrets. We laugh at the Nazis and ask our sweet butler if he has Jewish blood.” The butler, named Fritz—“
short, blond, obsequious, efficient”—had worked for Dodd’s predecessor. “We talk mostly politics at table,” she continued. “Father reads chapters of his
Old South
to the guests. They almost perish of chagrin and mystification.”

She noted that her mother—whom she called “Her Excellency”—was in good health “but a bit nervous [and] rather enjoying it all.” Her father, she wrote, was “flourishing incredibly,” and seemed “slightly pro-German.” She added, “We sort of don’t like the Jews anyway.”

Carl Sandburg sent her a maundering letter of greeting, typed on two very thin sheets of paper, with spaces instead of punctuation marks: “
Now the hegira begins the wanderjahre the track over the sea and the zig-zag over the continent and the center and the home in berlin where are many ragged arithmetics and torn testaments thru the doors will pass all the garbs and tongues and tales of europe the jews the communists the atheists the non-aryans the proscribed will not always come as such but they will come in guises disguises disgeeses … some will arrive with strange songs and a few with lines we have known and loved correspondents casual and permanent international spies spindrift beach combers aviators heroes …”

The Dodds soon learned they had a prominent and much-feared neighbor farther along Tiergartenstrasse, on a side street called Standartenstrasse: Captain Röhm himself, commander of the Storm Troopers. Every morning he could be seen riding a large black horse in the Tiergarten. Another nearby building, a lovely two-story mansion that housed Hitler’s personal chancellery, would soon become the home of a Nazi program to euthanize people with severe mental
or physical disabilities, code-named Aktion (Action) T-4, for the address, Tiergartenstrasse 4.

To the horror of Counselor Gordon, Ambassador Dodd continued his practice of walking to work, alone, unguarded, in his plain business suits.

NOW, SUNDAY, AUGUST
13, 1933, with Hindenburg still convalescing on his estate, Dodd still an unofficial ambassador, and the matter of establishing a new household at last resolved, the family, accompanied by Martha’s new friend, correspondent Quentin Reynolds, set off to see a little of Germany.
They traveled first by car—the Dodds’ Chevrolet—but planned to separate at Leipzig, about ninety miles south of Berlin, where Dodd and his wife planned to linger awhile and visit landmarks from his days at Leipzig University.

Martha, Bill Jr., and Reynolds continued south, with the aim of eventually reaching Austria. Theirs would prove to be a journey laden with incident that would provide the first challenge to Martha’s rosy view of the new Germany.

PART III
Lucifer in the Garden

Rudolf Diels
(
photo credit p3.1
)

Martha Dodd
(
photo credit p3.2
)

CHAPTER 11
Strange Beings

T
hey 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.”