In the Garden of Beasts (45 page)

In a confidential letter to Secretary Hull, Dodd forecast “
an even more terroristic regime than we have endured since June 30.”

Germany accepted the change without protest, to the dismay of Victor Klemperer, the Jewish philologist. He too had hoped the blood purge would at last cause the army to step in and remove Hitler. Nothing happened. And now, this new outrage. “The people hardly notice this complete coup d’etat,” he wrote in his diary. “It all takes place in silence, drowned out by hymns to the dead Hindenburg. I would swear that millions upon millions have no idea what a monstrous thing has occurred.”

The Munich newspaper
Münchner Neueste Nachrichten
gushed, “
Today Hitler is the Whole of Germany,” apparently choosing to ignore the fact that just a month earlier its own gentle music critic had been shot dead by mistake.

THE RAINS CAME
that weekend, a three-day downpour that drenched the city. With the SA quiescent, its brown uniforms prudently if temporarily closeted, and the nation mourning Hindenburg’s death, a rare sense of peace spread over Germany, allowing Dodd a
few moments to muse on a subject freighted with irony but dear to that part of him that remained a farmer from Virginia.

In his diary entry for Sunday, August 5, 1934, Dodd remarked upon a trait of the German people that he had observed in his Leipzig days and that had persisted even under Hitler: a love of animals, in particular horses and dogs.

“
At a time when nearly every German is afraid to speak a word to any but the closest friends, horses and dogs are so happy that one feels they wish to talk,” he wrote. “A woman who may report on a neighbor for disloyalty and jeopardize his life, even cause his death, takes her big kindly-looking dog in the Tiergarten for a walk. She talks to him and coddles him as she sits on a bench and he attends to the requirements of nature.”

In Germany, Dodd had noticed, no one ever abused a dog, and as a consequence dogs were never fearful around men and were always plump and obviously well tended. “Only horses seem to be equally happy, never the children or the youth,” he wrote. “I often stop as I walk to my office and have a word with a pair of beautiful horses waiting while their wagon is being unloaded. They are so clean and fat and happy that one feels that they are on the point of speaking.” He called it “horse happiness” and had noticed the same phenomenon in Nuremberg and Dresden. In part, he knew, this happiness was fostered by German law, which forbade cruelty to animals and punished violators with prison, and here Dodd found deepest irony. “At a time when hundreds of men have been put to death without trial or any sort of evidence of guilt, and when the population literally trembles with fear, animals have rights guaranteed them which men and women cannot think of expecting.”

He added, “One might easily wish he were a horse!”

CHAPTER 53
Juliet #2

B
oris was right. Martha had packed her itinerary too full and as a consequence found her journey anything but uplifting. Her travels made her cranky and critical, of Boris and of Russia, which struck her as a drab and weary land. Boris was disappointed. “
I am very sad to hear that you do not like everything in Russia,” he wrote to her on July 11, 1934. “You ought to review it with completely different eyes than America. You should not settle with a superficial glance (such as bad clothes and bad food). Please, dear Miss, look ‘inside,’ a bit deeper.”

What most annoyed Martha, unfairly, was that Boris did not join her on her travels, even though soon after her departure he too had gone to Russia, first to Moscow, and then to a resort in the Caucasus for a vacation. In an August 5 letter from the resort, Boris reminded her, “
You are the one who said we do not have to meet each other in Russia.” He acknowledged, however, that other obstacles also had intruded, though he was vague as to their precise nature. “I could not spend my vacation together with you. It was not possible for various reasons. The most important reason: I had to stay in Moscow. My stay in Moscow was not very happy, my destiny is unresolved.”

He professed to be hurt by her letters. “You should not write such angry letters to me. I did not deserve it. I was already very sad in Moscow after some of your letters, since I felt that you were so far away and unreachable. But after your angry letter I am more than sad. Why did you do that, Martha? What happened? Can you not be 2 months without me?”

Just as she had wielded other lovers to hurt her ex-husband, Bassett, so she hinted to Boris that she might renew her affair with Armand Berard of the French embassy. “Immediately threatening with Armand?” Boris wrote. “I cannot dictate or suggest anything to you. But don’t make any stupidities. Stay calm and don’t destroy all the good things we both have together.”

At some point during her journey,
Martha was approached by emissaries of the Soviet NKVD seeking to recruit her as a source of covert information. It is likely that Boris was ordered to stay away from her so as not to interfere with the process, although he also played a role in her recruitment, according to Soviet intelligence records uncovered and made available to scholars by a leading expert on KGB history (and a former KGB agent), Alexander Vassiliev. Boris’s superiors felt he was not energetic enough in formalizing Martha’s role. They transferred him back to Moscow and then to an embassy post in Bucharest, which he loathed.

Martha, meanwhile, returned to Berlin. She loved Boris, but the two remained separated; she dated other men, including Armand Berard. In autumn 1936, Boris was transferred again, this time to Warsaw. The NKVD assigned another agent, one Comrade Bukhartsev, to take over the effort to recruit Martha. A progress report in NKVD files states: “
The entire Dodd family hates National Socialists. Martha has interesting connections that she uses in getting information for her father. She has intimate relations with some of her acquaintances.”

Despite their continued separation and emotional battles and Martha’s periodic brandishing of Armand and other lovers, her affair with Boris progressed to the point where on March 14, 1937, during a second visit to Moscow,
she formally petitioned Stalin for permission to marry. Whether Stalin ever saw or responded to the request isn’t known, but the NKVD was ambivalent about their romance. Although Boris’s masters professed to have no objection to the marriage, they at times also seemed intent on stripping Boris from the picture in order to allow better focus on Martha. At one point the agency commanded that they stay apart for six months, “
in the interests of business.”

Boris, as it happened, was more reluctant than Martha ever knew. In a peeved memorandum to his superiors in Moscow dated March 21, 1937, Boris complained, “
I don’t quite understand why you have focused so much on our wedding. I asked you to point out to her that it is impossible in general and, anyway, won’t happen in the next several years. You spoke more optimistically on this issue and ordered a delay of only 6 months or a year.” But what would happen then? he asked. “Six months will pass quickly, and who knows? She may produce a bill that neither you nor I is going to pay. Isn’t it better to soften slightly the explicitness of your promises if you really gave them to her?”

In the same memorandum he refers to Martha as “
Juliet #2,” a reference that KGB expert Vassiliev and Allen Weinstein, in their book
The Haunted Wood
, see as indicating that there might have been another woman in his life, a “Juliet #1.”

Martha and Boris had a tryst in Warsaw in November 1937, after which Boris sent a report to Moscow.
The meeting “went off well,” he wrote. “She was in a good mood.” She was still intent on marriage and “waits for the fulfillment of our promise despite her parents’ warning that nothing would come of it.”

But once again Boris revealed a decided lack of interest in actually marrying her. He cautioned: “I think that she shouldn’t be left in ignorance with regard to the real situation, for if we deceive her, she may become embittered and lose faith in us.”

CHAPTER 54
A Dream of Love

I
n the months that followed Hitler’s final ascent, Dodd’s sense of futility deepened, as did a collateral longing to be back on his farm in the soft rise of the Appalachians, among his rich red apples and lazy cows. He wrote, “
It is so humiliating to me to shake hands with known and confessed murderers.” He became one of the few voices in U.S. government to warn of the true ambitions of Hitler and the dangers of America’s isolationist stance. He told Secretary Hull in a letter dated August 30, 1934, “
With Germany united as it has never before been, there is feverish arming and drilling of 1,500,000 men, all of whom are taught every day to believe that continental Europe must be subordinated to them.” He added, “I think we must abandon our so-called isolation.” He wrote to the army chief of staff, Douglas MacArthur, “
In my judgment, the German authorities are preparing for a great continental struggle. There is ample evidence. It is only a question of time.”

Roosevelt largely shared his view, but most of America seemed more intent than ever on staying out of Europe’s squabbles. Dodd marveled at this. He wrote to Roosevelt in April 1935, “
If Woodrow Wilson’s bones do not turn in the Cathedral grave, then bones never turn in graves. Possibly you can do something, but from reports of Congressional attitudes, I have grave doubts. So many men … think absolute isolation a coming paradise.”

Dodd resigned himself to what he called “
the delicate work of watching and carefully doing nothing.”

His sense of moral revulsion caused him to withdraw from active engagement with Hitler’s Third Reich. The regime, in turn, recognized
that he had become an intractable opponent and sought to isolate him from diplomatic discourse.

Dodd’s attitude appalled Phillips, who wrote in his diary, “
What in the world is the use of having an ambassador who refuses to speak to the government to which he is accredited?”

GERMANY CONTINUED ITS MARCH
toward war and intensified its persecution of Jews, passing a collection of laws under which Jews ceased to be citizens no matter how long their families had lived in Germany or how bravely they had fought for Germany in the Great War. Now on his walks through the Tiergarten Dodd saw that some benches had been painted yellow to indicate they were for Jews. The rest, the most desirable, were reserved for Aryans.

Dodd watched, utterly helpless, as German troops occupied the Rhineland on March 7, 1936, without resistance. He saw Berlin transformed for the Olympics as the Nazis polished the city and removed their anti-Jewish banners, only to intensify their persecution once the foreign crowds were gone. He saw Hitler’s stature within Germany grow to that of a god. Women cried as he passed near; souvenir hunters dug up parcels of earth from the ground on which he stepped. At the September 1936 party rally in Nuremberg, which Dodd did not attend, Hitler launched his audience into near hysteria. “
That you have found me … among so many millions is the miracle of our time!” he cried. “And that I have found you, that is Germany’s fortune!”

On September 19, 1936, in a letter marked “Personal and Confidential,” Dodd wrote to Secretary Hull of his frustration at watching events unfold with no one daring to intercede. “
With armies increasing in size and efficiency every day; with thousands of airplanes ready on a moment’s notice to drop bombs and spread poison gas over great cities; and with all other countries, little and great, arming as never before, one can not feel safe anywhere,” he wrote. “What mistakes and blunders since 1917, and especially during the past twelve months—and no democratic peoples do anything, economic or moral penalties, to halt the process!”

The idea of resigning gained appeal for Dodd. He wrote to Martha,

“
You must not mention to anyone, but I do not see how I can continue in this atmosphere longer than next spring. I can not render my country any service and the stress is too great to be always doing nothing.”

Meanwhile, his opponents within the State Department stepped up their campaign to have him removed. His longtime antagonist Sumner Welles took over as undersecretary of state, replacing William Phillips, who in August 1936 became ambassador to Italy. Closer to hand a new antagonist emerged, William C. Bullitt, another of Roosevelt’s handpicked men (a Yale grad, however), who moved from his post as ambassador to Russia to lead the U.S. embassy in Paris. In a letter to Roosevelt on December 7, 1936, Bullitt wrote, “
Dodd has many admirable and likeable qualities, but he is almost ideally ill equipped for his present job. He hates the Nazis too much to be able to do anything with them or get anything out of them. We need in Berlin someone who can at least be civil to the Nazis and speaks German perfectly.”

Dodd’s steadfast refusal to attend the Nazi Party rallies continued to rankle his enemies. “
Personally, I cannot see why he is so sensitive,” Moffat wrote in his diary. Alluding to Dodd’s Columbus Day speech in October 1933, Moffat asked, “Why is it worse for him to listen to the Germans inveigh against our form of Government when he chose, at the Chamber of Commerce, to inveigh to a German audience against an autocratic form of government?”

A pattern of leaks persisted, building public pressure for Dodd’s removal. In December 1936 columnist Drew Pearson, primary author with Robert S. Allen of a United Features Syndicate column called “Washington Merry-Go-Round,” published a harsh assault on Dodd, “
attacking me violently as a complete failure here and pretending that the President is of the same opinion,” Dodd wrote on December 13. “This is news to me.”

Pearson’s attack deeply wounded Dodd. He had spent the better part of four years seeking to fulfill Roosevelt’s mandate to serve as a model of American values and believed he had done as well as any man could have been expected to do, given the strange, irrational, and brutal nature of Hitler’s government. He feared that if he resigned
now, under such a black cloud, he would leave the impression that he had been forced to do so. “
My position is difficult, but under such criticism I cannot resign, as I planned, next spring,” he wrote in his diary. “To give up my work here under these circumstances would put me in a defensive and positively false position at home.” His resignation, he acknowledged, “would at once be recognized as a confession of failure.”