In the Garden of Beasts (23 page)

Nonetheless the man had a remarkable ability to transform himself into something far more compelling, especially when speaking in public or during private meetings when some topic enraged him. He had a knack as well for projecting an aura of sincerity that blinded onlookers to his true motives and beliefs, though Dodd had not yet come to a full appreciation of this aspect of his character.

First Dodd raised the subject of the many attacks against Americans. Hitler was cordial and apologetic and assured Dodd that the perpetrators of all such attacks would be “punished to the limit.” He promised as well to publicize widely his prior decrees exempting foreigners from giving the Hitler salute. After some bland conversation about Germany’s debts to American creditors, Dodd moved to the topic most on his mind, the “all-pervasive question of the German thunderbolt of last Saturday”—Hitler’s decision to withdraw from the League of Nations.

When Dodd asked him why he had pulled Germany from the League, Hitler grew visibly angry. He attacked the Treaty of Versailles and France’s drive to maintain superiority in arms over Germany. He railed against the “indignity” of keeping Germany in an unequal state, unable to defend herself against her neighbors.

Hitler’s sudden rage startled Dodd. He tried to appear unfazed, less a diplomat now than a professor dealing with an overwrought student. He told Hitler, “There is evident injustice in the French attitude; but defeat in war is always followed by injustice.” He raised the example of the aftermath of the American Civil War and the North’s “terrible” treatment of the South.

Hitler stared at him. After a brief period of silence, the conversation resumed, and for a few moments the two men engaged in what Dodd described as “an exchange of niceties.” But now Dodd asked whether “an incident on the Polish, Austrian or French border which drew an enemy into the Reich” would be enough for Hitler to launch a war.

“No, no,” Hitler insisted.

Dodd probed further. Suppose, he asked, such an incident were to involve the Ruhr Valley, an industrial region about which Germans were particularly sensitive. France had occupied the Ruhr from
1923 to 1925, causing great economic and political turmoil within Germany. In the event of another such incursion, Dodd asked, would Germany respond militarily on its own or call for an international meeting to resolve the matter?

“That would be my purpose,” Hitler said, “but we might not be able to restrain the German people.”

Dodd said, “If you would wait and call a conference, Germany would regain her popularity outside.”

Soon the meeting came to an end. It had lasted forty-five minutes. Though the session had been difficult and strange, Dodd nonetheless left the chancellery feeling convinced that Hitler was sincere about wanting peace. He was concerned, however, that he might again have violated the laws of diplomacy. “
Perhaps I was too frank,” he wrote later to Roosevelt, “but I had to be honest.”

At 6:00 p.m. that day he sent a two-page cable to Secretary Hull summarizing the meeting and closed by telling Hull, “
The total effect of the interview was more favorable from the point of view of the maintenance of world peace than I had expected.”

Dodd also conveyed these impressions to Consul General Messersmith, who then sent Undersecretary Phillips a letter—at eighteen pages, a characteristically long one—in which he seemed intent on undermining Dodd’s credibility. He challenged the ambassador’s appraisal of Hitler. “
The Chancellor’s assurances were so satisfying and so unexpected that I think they are on the whole too good to be true,” Messersmith wrote. “We must keep in mind, I believe, that when Hitler says anything he for the moment convinces himself that it is true. He is basically sincere; but he is at the same time a fanatic.”

Messersmith urged skepticism regarding Hitler’s protestations. “I think for the moment he genuinely desires peace but it is a peace of his own kind and with an armed force constantly becoming more effective in reserve, in order to impose their will when it may become essential.” He reiterated his belief that Hitler’s government could not be viewed as a rational entity. “There are so many pathological cases involved that it would be impossible to tell from day to day what will happen any more than the keeper of a madhouse is able to tell what his inmates will do in the next hour or during the next day.”

He urged caution, in effect warning Phillips to be skeptical of Dodd’s conviction that Hitler wanted peace. “I think for the present moment … we must guard against any undue optimism which may be aroused by the apparently satisfying declarations of the Chancellor.”

ON THE MORNING
of the rendezvous that Putzi Hanfstaengl had arranged for Martha with Hitler, she dressed carefully, seeing as she had been “
appointed to change the history of Europe.” To her it seemed a lark of the first order. She was curious to meet this man she once had dismissed as a clown but whom she now was convinced was “a glamorous and brilliant personality who must have great power and charm.” She decided to wear her “most demure and intriguing best,” nothing too striking or revealing, for the Nazi ideal was a woman who wore little makeup, tended her man, and bore as many children as possible. German men, she wrote, “want their women to be seen and not heard, and then seen only as appendages of the splendid male they accompany.” She considered wearing a veil.

Hanfstaengl picked her up in his huge car and drove to the Kaiserhof, seven blocks away on Wilhelmplatz, just off the southeast corner of the Tiergarten. A grand hotel with a cavernous lobby and arched entrance portico, the Kaiserhof had been Hitler’s home until his ascension to chancellor. Now Hitler often had lunch or tea in the hotel surrounded by his Chauffeureska.

Hanfstaengl had arranged that he and Martha would be joined for lunch by another party, a Polish tenor, Jan Kiepura, thirty-one years old. Hanfstaengl, well known and unmistakable, was treated with deference by the restaurant’s staff. Once seated, Martha and the two men chatted over tea and waited. In time a commotion arose at the entrance to the dining room, and soon came the inevitable rumble of chairs shoved back and shouts of “Heil Hitler.”

Hitler and his party—including, indeed, his chauffeur—took seats at an adjacent table. First, Kiepura was ushered to Hitler’s side. The two spoke about music. Hitler seemed unaware that Kiepura under Nazi law was classified as Jewish, by maternal heritage. A few moments
later Hanfstaengl came over and bent low to Hitler’s ear. He barreled back to Martha with the news that Hitler would now see her.

She walked to Hitler’s table and stood there a moment as Hitler rose to greet her. He took her hand and kissed it and spoke a few quiet words in German. She got a close look at him now: “a weak, soft face, with pouches under the eyes, full lips and very little bony facial structure.” At this vantage, she wrote, the mustache “didn’t seem as ridiculous as it appeared in pictures—in fact, I scarcely noticed it.” What she did notice were his eyes. She had heard elsewhere that there was something piercing and intense about his gaze, and now, immediately, she understood. “Hitler’s eyes,” she wrote, “were startling and unforgettable—they seemed pale blue in color, were intense, unwavering, hypnotic.”

Yet his manner was gentle—“excessively gentle,” she wrote—more that of a shy teenager than an iron dictator. “Unobtrusive, communicative, informal, he had a certain quiet charm, almost a tenderness of speech and glance,” she wrote.

Hitler now turned back to the tenor and with what seemed to be real interest rekindled their conversation about music.

He “seemed modest, middle class, rather dull and self-conscious—yet with this strange tenderness and appealing helplessness,” Martha wrote. “It was hard to believe that this man was one of the most powerful men in Europe.”

Martha and Hitler shook hands once again, and for the second time he kissed hers. She returned to her table and to Hanfstaengl.

They remained a while longer, over tea, eavesdropping on the continuing conversation between Kiepura and Hitler. Now and then Hitler would look her way, with what she judged to be “curious, embarrassed stares.”

That night, over dinner, she told her parents all about the day’s encounter and how charming and peaceful the
Führer
had been. Dodd was amused and conceded “
that Hitler was not an unattractive man personally.”

He teased Martha and told her to be sure to take note of exactly where Hitler’s lips had touched her hand, and he recommended that
if she “must” wash that hand, that she do so with care and only around the margins of the kiss.

She wrote, “
I was a little angry and peeved.”

Martha and Hitler never repeated their encounter, nor had she seriously expected they would, though as would become clear some years later, Martha did enter Hitler’s mind on at least one more occasion. For her part, all she had wanted was to meet the man and satisfy her own curiosity. There were other men in her circle whom she found infinitely more compelling.

One of these had come back into her life, with an invitation for a most unusual date. By the end of October, Rudolf Diels had returned to Berlin and to his old post as chief of the Gestapo, paradoxically with even more power than before his exile to Czechoslovakia. Himmler had not only apologized for the raid on Diels’s home; he had promised to make Diels a
Standartenführer
, or colonel, in the SS.

Diels sent him a fawning thank-you: “
By promoting me to the
Obersturmbannführer der SS
, you have brought so much joy to me that it cannot be expressed in these short words of thanks.”

Safe at least for the time being, Diels invited Martha to attend an upcoming session of the Reichstag arson trial, which had been under way in the Supreme Court in Leipzig for nearly a month but was about to reconvene in Berlin, at the scene of the crime. The trial was supposed to have been a short one and to conclude with convictions and, ideally, death sentences for all five defendants, but it was not proceeding as Hitler had hoped.

Now a special “witness” was scheduled to appear.

CHAPTER 21
The Trouble with George

W
ith in Germany, a great flywheel had been set in motion that drove the country inexorably toward some dark place alien to Dodd’s recollection of the old Germany he had known as a student. As the autumn advanced and color filled the Tiergarten, he came more and more to realize just how correct he had been back in Chicago, in the spring, when he had observed that his temperament was ill suited to “high diplomacy” and playing the liar on bended knee. He wanted to have an effect: to awaken Germany to the dangers of its current path and to nudge Hitler’s government onto a more humane and rational course. He was fast realizing, however, that he possessed little power to do so. Especially strange to him was the Nazi fixation on racial purity. A draft of a new penal code had begun to circulate that proposed to make it a key buttress of German law. The American vice consul in Leipzig, Henry Leverich, found the draft an extraordinary document and wrote an analysis: “
For the first time, therefore, in German legal history the draft code contains definite suggestions for protection of the German Race from what is considered the disintegration caused by an intermixture of Jewish and colored blood.” If the code became law—and he had no doubt it would—then henceforth “it shall be considered as a crime for a gentile man or woman to marry a Jewish or colored man or woman.” He noted also that the code made paramount the protection of the family and thus outlawed abortion, with the exception that a court could authorize the procedure when the expected offspring was a mix of German and Jewish or colored blood. Vice Consul Leverich wrote, “Judging from
newspaper comment, this portion of the draft will almost certainly be transacted into law.”

Another newly proposed law caught Dodd’s particular attention—a law “
to permit killing incurables,” as he described it in a memorandum to the State Department dated October 26, 1933. Seriously ill patients could ask to be euthanized, but if unable to make the request, their families could do so for them. This proposal, “together with legislation already enacted governing the sterilization of persons affected by hereditary imbecility and other similar defects, is in line with Hitler’s aim to raise the physical standard of the German people,” Dodd wrote. “According to Nazi philosophy only Germans who are physically fit belong in the Third Reich, and they are the ones who are expected to raise large families.”

Attacks against Americans continued, despite Dodd’s protests, and the prosecution of past cases seemed languid at best. On November 8 Dodd received notice from the German foreign office that no arrest would be made in the assault on H. V. Kaltenborn’s son, because the senior Kaltenborn “
could remember neither the name nor the number of the Party identification card of the culprit, and as no other clues which might be useful in the investigation could be found.”

Perhaps because of his mounting sense of futility, Dodd shifted his focus from the realm of international affairs to the state of affairs within his own embassy. Dodd found himself—his frugal, Jeffersonian self—drawn more and more to concentrate on the failings of his staff and the extravagance of embassy business.

He intensified his campaign against the cost of telegrams and the length and redundancy of dispatches, all of which he believed to be consequences of having so many rich men in the department. “
Wealthy staff people want to have cocktail parties in the afternoon, card parties in the evening and get up next day at 10 o’clock,” he wrote to Secretary Hull. “That tends to reduce effective study and work … and also to cause men to be indifferent to the cost of their reports and telegrams.” Telegrams should be cut in half, he wrote. “Long habit here resists my efforts to shorten telegrams to the point where men have ‘fits’ when I erase large parts. I shall have to write them myself.…”

What Dodd had failed as yet to fully appreciate was that in complaining about the wealth, dress, and work habits of embassy officers, he was in fact attacking Undersecretary Phillips, Western European Affairs Chief Moffat, and their colleagues, the very men who sustained and endorsed the foreign-service culture—the Pretty Good Club—that Dodd found so distressing. They saw his complaints about costs as offensive, tedious, and confounding, especially given the nature of his posting. Were there not matters of greater importance that demanded his attention?