knew Mowrer well and respected his courage in facing down Nazi threats. He feared that Mowrer might view his intercession as a betrayal. Nonetheless, he agreed to try.
It was “one of the most difficult conversations I ever had,” Messersmith wrote later. “When he saw that I was joining his other friends in trying to persuade him to leave, tears came into his eyes and he looked at me reproachfully.” Nonetheless, Messersmith felt it was his duty to convince Mowrer to leave.
Mowrer gave up “with a gesture of despair” and left Messersmith’s office.
Now Mowrer took his case directly to Ambassador Dodd, but Dodd too believed he should leave, not just for his safety but because his reporting imparted an extra layer of strain to what was already a very challenging diplomatic environment.
Dodd told him, “If you were not being moved by your paper anyway, I would go to the mat on this issue.… Won’t you do this to avoid complications?”
Mowrer gave in. He agreed to leave on September 1, the first full day of the Nuremberg rally he so wanted to cover.
Martha wrote later that Mowrer “never quite forgave my father for this advice.”
ANOTHER OF DODD’S EARLY visitors was, as Dodd wrote, “perhaps the foremost chemist in Germany,” but he did not look it. He was smallish in size and egg bald, with a narrow gray mustache above full lips. His complexion was sallow, his air that of a much older man.
He was Fritz Haber. To any German the name was well known and revered, or had been until the advent of Hitler. Until recently, Haber had been director of the famed Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry. He was a war hero and a Nobel laureate. Hoping to break the stalemate in the trenches during the Great War, Haber had invented poison chlorine gas. He had devised what became known as Haber’s rule, a formula, C ? t = k, elegant in its lethality: a low exposure to gas over a long period will have the same result as a high exposure over a short period. He also invented a means to distribute his poison gas at the front and was himself present in 1915 for its first use against French forces at Ypres. On a personal level, that day at Ypres cost him dearly. His wife of thirty- two years, Clara, had long condemned his work as inhumane and immoral and demanded he stop, but to such concerns he gave a stock reply: death was death, no matter the cause. Nine days after the gas attack at Ypres, she committed suicide. Despite international outcry over his poison-gas research, Haber was awarded the 1918 Nobel Prize for chemistry for discovering a means of mining nitrogen from air and thus allowing the manufacture of plentiful, cheap fertilizer—and, of course, gunpowder.
Despite a prewar conversion to Protestantism, Haber was classified under the new Nazi laws as non-Aryan, but an exception granted to Jewish war veterans allowed him to remain director of the institute. Many Jewish scientists on his staff did not qualify for the exemption, however, and on April 21, 1933, Haber was ordered to dismiss them. He fought the decision but found few allies. Even his friend Max Planck offered tepid consolation. “In this profound dejection,” Planck wrote, “my sole solace is that we live in a time of catastrophe such as attends every revolution, and that we must endure much of what happens as a phenomenon of nature, without agonizing over whether things could have turned out differently.”
Haber didn’t see it that way. Rather than preside over the dismissal of his friends and colleagues, he resigned.
Now—Friday, July 28, 1933—with few choices remaining, he came to Dodd’s office for help, bearing a letter from Henry Morgenthau Jr., head of Roosevelt’s Federal Farm Board (and future Treasury secretary). Morgenthau was Jewish and an advocate for Jewish refugees.
As Haber told his story he “trembled from head to foot,” Dodd wrote in his diary, calling Haber’s account “the saddest story of Jewish persecution I have yet heard.” Haber was sixty-five years old, with a failing heart, and was now being denied the pension that had been guaranteed him under the laws of the Weimar Republic, which immediately preceded Hitler’s Third Reich. “He wished to know the possibilities in America for emigrants with distinguished records here in science,” Dodd wrote. “I could only say that the law allowed none now, the quota being filled.” Dodd promised to write to the Labor Department, which administered immigration quotas, to ask “if any favorable ruling might be made for such people.”
They shook hands. Haber warned Dodd to be careful about talking of his case to others, “as the consequences might be bad.” And then Haber left, a small gray chemist who once had been one of Germany’s most important scientific assets.
“Poor old man,” Dodd recalled thinking—then caught himself, for Haber was in fact only one year older than he was. “Such treatment,” Dodd wrote in his diary, “can only bring evil to the government which practices such terrible cruelty.”
Dodd discovered, too late, that what he had told Haber was simply incorrect. The next week, on August 5, Dodd wrote to Isador Lubin, chief of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: “You know the quota is already full and you probably realize that a large number of very excellent people would like to migrate to the United States, even though they have to sacrifice their property in doing so.” In light of this, Dodd wanted to know whether the Labor Department had discovered any means through which “the most deserving of these people can be admitted.”
Lubin forwarded Dodd’s letter to Colonel D. W. MacCormack, commissioner of immigration and naturalization, who on August 23 wrote back to Lubin and told him, “The Ambassador appears to have been misinformed in this connection.” In fact only a small fraction of the visas allotted under the German quota had been issued, and the fault, MacCormack made clear, lay with the State Department and Foreign Service, and their enthusiastic enforcement of the clause that barred entry to people “likely to become a public charge.” Nothing in Dodd’s papers explains how he came to believe the quota was full.
All this came too late for Haber. He left for England to teach at Cambridge University, a seemingly happy resolution, but he found himself adrift in an alien culture, torn from his past, and suffering the effects of an inhospitable climate. Within six months of leaving Dodd’s office, during a convalescence in Switzerland, he suffered a fatal heart attack, his passing unlamented in the new Germany. Within a decade, however, the Third Reich would find a new use for Haber’s rule, and for an insecticide that Haber had invented at his institute, composed in part of cyanide gas and typically deployed to fumigate structures used for the storage of grain. At first called Zyklon A, it would be transformed by German chemists into a more lethal variant: Zyklon B.
DESPITE THIS ENCOUNTER, Dodd remained convinced that the government was growing more moderate and that Nazi mistreatment of Jews was on the wane. He said as much in a letter to Rabbi Wise of the American Jewish Congress, whom he had met at the Century Club in New York and who had been a fellow passenger on his ship to Germany.
Rabbi Wise was startled. In a July 28 reply from Geneva, he wrote, “How I wish I could share your optimism! I must, however, tell you that everything, every word from scores of refugees in London and Paris within the last two weeks leads me to feel that far from there having been, as you believe, an improvement, things are becoming graver and more oppressive for German Jews from day to day. I am certain that my impression would be borne out by the men whom you met at the little conference at the Century Club.” He was reminding Dodd of the meeting in New York that had been attended by Wise, Felix Warburg, and other Jewish leaders.
Privately, in a letter to his daughter, Wise wrote that Dodd “is being lied to.”
Dodd stood by his view. In a response to Wise’s letter, Dodd countered that “the many sources of information open to the office here seem to me to indicate a desire to ease up on the Jewish problem. Of course, many incidents of very disagreeable character continue to be reported. These I think are the hangovers from the earlier agitation. While I am in no sense disposed to excuse or apologize for such conditions, I am quite convinced that the leading element in the Government inclines to a milder policy as soon as possible.”
He added, “Of course you know our Government cannot intervene in such domestic matters. All one can do is to present the American point of view and stress the unhappy consequences of such a policy as has been pursued.” He told Wise he opposed open protest. “It is my judgment … that the greatest influence we can exercise on behalf of a more kindly and humane policy is to be applied unofficially and through private conversations with men who already begin to see the risks involved.”
Wise was so concerned about Dodd’s apparent failure to grasp what was really occurring that he offered to come to Berlin and, as he told his own daughter, Justine, “tell him the truth which he would not otherwise hear.” At the time, Wise was traveling in Switzerland. From Zurich he “again begged Dodd by telephone to make possible my air flight to Berlin.”
