In the Garden of Beasts (19 page)

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”

A
s 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

T
he 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.