Messersmith embraced him in a display of support intended for the agents keeping watch. In a voice loud enough to be overheard, Messersmith promised that Mowrer’s wife and daughter would follow unmolested. Mowrer was appreciative but had not forgiven Messersmith for failing to support his bid to stay in Germany. As Mowrer climbed aboard the train he turned to Messersmith with a slight smile and said: “And you too, Brutus.”
For Messersmith it was a crushing remark. “I felt miserable and depressed,” he wrote. “I knew it was the thing for him to do to leave and yet I hated the part that I had played in his leaving.”
Dodd did not appear. He was glad Mowrer was gone. In a letter to a friend in Chicago, he wrote that Mowrer “was for a time, as you may know, somewhat of a problem here.” Dodd conceded that Mowrer was a talented writer. “His experiences, however, after the publication of his book”—his notoriety and a Pulitzer Prize—“were such that he became rather more sharp and irritable than was best for all parties concerned.”
Mowrer and his family made it safely to Tokyo. His wife, Lillian, recalled her great sorrow at having to leave Berlin. “Nowhere have I had such lovely friends as in Germany,” she wrote. “Looking back on it all is like seeing someone you love go mad—and do horrible things.”
THE DEMANDS OF PROTOCOL—in German,
It started almost immediately. Protocol required that he give a reception for the entire diplomatic corps. He expected forty to fifty guests but then learned that each diplomat planned to bring one or more members of his staff, causing the eventual attendance to rise to over two hundred. “So today the show began at five o’clock,” Dodd wrote in his diary. “The Embassy rooms had been prepared; flowers abounded everywhere; a great punch bowl was filled with the accustomed liquors.” Foreign Minister Neurath came, as did Reichsbank president Schacht, one of the few other men in Hitler’s government whom Dodd saw as reasonable and rational. Schacht would become a frequent visitor to the Dodds’ home, well liked by Mrs. Dodd, who often used him to avoid the awkward social moments that occurred when an expected guest suddenly canceled. She was fond of saying, “Well, if at the last minute another guest can’t come, we can always invite Dr. Schacht.” Overall, Dodd decided, “It was not a bad affair, and”—a point of special satisfaction—“cost 700 marks.”
But now a flood of return invitations, both diplomatic and social, arrived on Dodd’s desk and at his home. Depending on the importance of the event, these were often followed by an exchange of seating charts, given to protocol officers to ensure that no unfortunate error of propinquity would mar the evening. The number of supposedly must-go banquets and receptions reached a point where even veteran diplomats complained that attendance had become onerous and exhausting. A senior official in the German foreign office said to Dodd, “You people in the Diplomatic Corps will have to limit social doings or we shall have to quit accepting invitations.” And a British official complained, “We simply cannot stand the pace.”
It was not all drudgery, of course. These parties and banquets yielded moments of fun and humor. Goebbels was known for his wit; Martha, for a time, considered him charming. “Infectious and delightful, eyes sparkling, voice soft, his speech witty and light, it is difficult to remember his cruelty, his cunning destructive talents.” Her mother, Mattie, always enjoyed being seated next to Goebbels at banquets; Dodd considered him “one of the few men with a sense of humor in Germany” and often engaged him in a brisk repartee of quips and ironic comment. An extraordinary newspaper photograph shows Dodd, Goebbels, and Sigrid Schultz at a formal banquet during a moment of what appears to be animated, carefree bonhomie. Though doubtless useful for Nazi propaganda, the scene as played out in the banquet hall was rather more complex than was captured on film. In fact, as Schultz later explained in an oral-history interview, she was trying
Goring too seemed a relatively benign character, at least as compared with Hitler. Sigrid Schultz found him the most tolerable of the senior Nazis because at least “you felt you could be in the same room with the man,” whereas Hitler, she said, “kind of turned my stomach.” One of the American embassy’s officers, John C. White, said years later, “I was always rather favorably impressed by Goring.… If any Nazi was likeable, I suppose he came nearest to it.”
At this early stage, diplomats and others found Goring hard to take seriously. He was like an immense, if exceedingly dangerous, little boy who delighted in creating and wearing new uniforms. His great size made him the brunt of jokes, although such jokes were told only well out of his hearing.
One night Ambassador Dodd and his wife went to a concert at the Italian embassy, which Goring also attended. In a vast white uniform of his own design, he looked especially huge—“three times the size of an ordinary man,” as daughter Martha told the story. The chairs set out for the concert were tiny gilded antiques that seemed far too fragile for Goring. With fascination and no small degree of anxiety, Mrs. Dodd watched Goring choose the chair directly in front of hers. She immediately found herself transfixed as Goring attempted to fit his gigantic “heart-shaped” rump onto the little chair. Throughout the concert she feared that at any moment the chair would collapse and Goring’s great bulk would come crashing into her lap. Martha wrote, “She was so distracted at the sight of the huge loins rolling off the sides and edges of the chair, so perilously near to her, she couldn’t remember a single piece that was played.”
DODD’S BIGGEST COMPLAINT about the diplomatic parties thrown by other embassies was how much money was wasted in the process, even by those countries laid low by the Depression.
“To illustrate,” he wrote to Secretary Hull, “last night we went at 8:30 to dine at the 53-room house of the Belgian minister (whose country is supposed to be unable to meet its lawful obligations).” Two servants in uniform met his car. “Four lackeys stood on the stairways, dressed in the style of Louis XIV servants. Three other servants in knee breeches took charge of our wraps. Twenty-nine people sat down in a more expensively furnished dining room than any room in the White House that I have seen. Eight courses were served by four uniformed waiters on silver dishes and platters. There were three wine glasses at every plate and when we rose, I noticed that many glass[es] were half full of wine which was to be wasted. The people at the party were agreeable enough, but there was no conversation of any value at all at my part of the table (this I have noted at all other large parties).… Nor was there any serious, informative or even witty talk after dinner.” Martha attended as well and described how “all the women were covered with diamonds or other precious stones—I had never seen such a lavish display of wealth.” She noted also that she and her parents left at ten thirty, and in so doing caused a minor scandal. “There was a good deal of genteel raising of eyebrows, but we braved the storm and went home.” It was bad form, she discovered later, to leave a diplomatic function before eleven.
Dodd was shocked to learn that his independently wealthy predecessors in Berlin had spent up to one hundred thousand dollars a year on entertaining, more than five times Dodd’s total salary. On some occasions they had tipped their servants more than what Dodd paid in rent each month. “But,” he vowed to Hull, “we shall not return these hospitalities in larger than ten or twelve-guest parties, with four servants at most and they modestly clad”—meaning, presumably, that they would be fully clothed but forgo the knee breeches of the Belgians. The Dodds kept three servants, had a chauffeur, and hired an extra servant or two for parties attended by more than ten guests.
The embassy’s cupboard, according to a formal inventory of government-owned property made for its annual “Post Report,” contained:
Dinner plates 10?? 4 doz. Soup plates 9?? 2 doz. Entree plates 9?? 2 doz. Dessert plates 2 doz. Salad plates 5 5/16? 2 doz. Bread/butter plates 6 3/16? 2 doz. Teacups 3?? 2 doz. Saucers 5 11/16? 2 doz. Bouillon cups 3?? 2 doz. Saucers 5 11/16? 2 doz. After-dinner cups 2?? 2 doz. Saucers 4?? 2 doz. Chop dishes 2 doz. Platters, various sizes 4 doz. Goblets 3 doz. Tall sherbert 3 doz. Low sherbert 3 doz. Small tumblers 3 doz. Tall tumblers 3 doz. Finger bowls 3 doz. Finger bowl plates 3 doz.
“We shall not use silver platters nor floods of wines nor will there be card tables all about the place,” Dodd told Hull. “There will always be an effort to have some scholar or scientist or literary person present and some informatory talk; and it is understood that we retire at 10:30 to 11:00. We make no advertisement of these things
