Dodd realized that the best way to have a truly private conversation with anyone was to meet in the Tiergarten for a walk, as Dodd often did with his British counterpart, Sir Eric Phipps. “I shall be walking at 11:30 on the Hermann-Goring-Strasse alongside the Tiergarten,” Dodd told Phipps in a telephone call at ten o’clock one morning. “Would you be able to meet me there and talk for a while?” And Phipps, on another occasion, sent Dodd a handwritten note asking, “Could we meet tomorrow morning at 12 o’clock in the Siegesallee between the Tiergartenstrasse & the Charlottenburger Chaussee, on the right side (going from here)?”
WHETHER LISTENING DEVICES TRULY laced the embassy and the Dodds’ home cannot be known, but the salient fact was that the Dodds came to see Nazi surveillance as omnipresent. Despite the toll this perception increasingly took on their lives, they believed they had one significant advantage over their German peers—that no physical harm would come to them. Martha’s own privileged status offered no protection to her friends, however, and here Martha had particular cause for concern because of the nature of the men and women she befriended.
She had to be especially watchful in her relationship with Boris—as a representative of a government reviled by the Nazis, he was beyond doubt a target of surveillance—and with Mildred and Arvid Harnack, both of whom had grown increasingly opposed to the Nazi regime and were taking their first steps toward building a loose association of men and women committed to resisting Nazi power. “If I had been with people who had been brave or reckless enough to talk in opposition to Hitler,” Martha wrote in her memoir, “I spent sleepless nights wondering if a Dictaphone or a telephone had registered the conversation, or if men had followed and overheard.”
In that winter of 1933–34, her anxiety blossomed into a kind of terror that “bordered on the hysterical,” as she described it. Never had she been more afraid. She lay in her own bed, in her own room, with her parents upstairs, objectively as safe as could be, and yet as shadows cast by the dim streetlamps outside played across her ceiling, she could not keep the terror from staining the night.
She heard, or imagined she heard, the grating of hard-soled shoes on the gravel in the drive below, the sound tentative and intermittent, as if someone was watching her bedroom. By day the many windows in her room brought light and color; at night, they conjured vulnerability. Moonlight cast moving shadows on the lawns and walks and beside the tall pillars of the entrance gate. Some nights she imagined hearing whispered conversations, even distant gunshots, though by day she was able to dismiss these as the products of wind blowing across gravel and engine backfires.
But anything was possible. “I often felt such terror,” she wrote, “that occasionally I would wake up my mother and ask her to come and sleep in my room.”
CHAPTER 32
Storm Warning
In February 1934 rumors reached Dodd that suggested the conflict between Hitler and Captain Rohm had attained a new level of intensity. The rumors were well founded.
Toward the end of the month, Hitler appeared before a gathering of the top officers of Rohm’s SA, Heinrich Himmler’s SS, and the regular army, the Reichswehr. Present with him on the dais were Rohm and Minister of Defense Blomberg. The atmosphere in the room was charged. All present knew of the simmering conflict between the SA and the army and expected Hitler to address the issue.
First Hitler spoke of broader matters. Germany, he declared, needed more room in which to expand, “more living space for our surplus population.” And Germany, he said, must be ready to take it. “The Western powers will never yield this vital space to us,” Hitler said. “That is why a series of decisive blows may become necessary—first in the West, and then in the East.”
After further elaboration, he turned to Rohm. All in the room knew of Rohm’s ambitions. A few weeks earlier Rohm had made a formal proposal that the Reichswehr, SA, and SS be consolidated under a single ministry, leaving unsaid but implied that he himself should be the minister in charge. Now, looking directly at Rohm, Hitler said, “The SA must limit itself to its political task.”
Rohm maintained an expression of indifference. Hitler continued, “The Minister of War may call upon the SA for border control and for premilitary instruction.”
This too was a humiliation. Not only was Hitler consigning the SA to the decidedly inglorious tasks of border control and training, but he was explicitly placing Rohm in an inferior position to Blomberg as the recipient of orders, not the originator. Rohm still did not react.
Hitler said, “I expect from the SA loyal execution of the work entrusted to it.”
After concluding his speech, Hitler turned to Rohm, took his arm, and grasped his hand. Each looked into the other’s eyes. It was an orchestrated moment, meant to convey reconciliation. Hitler left. Acting his part, Rohm now invited the gathered officers to lunch at his quarters. The banquet, in typical SA style, was lavish, accompanied by a torrent of champagne, but the atmosphere was anything but convivial. At an appropriate moment, Rohm and his SA men stood to signal that the luncheon had come to an end. Heels clicked, a forest of arms shot outward in the Hitler salute,
Rohm and his men remained behind. They drank more champagne, but their mood was glum.
For Rohm, Hitler’s remarks constituted a betrayal of their long association. Hitler seemed to have forgotten the crucial role the Storm Troopers had played in bringing him to power.
Now, to no one in particular, Rohm said, “That was a new Versailles Treaty.” A few moments later, he added, “Hitler? If only we could get rid of that limp rag.”
The SA men lingered a while longer, trading angry reactions to Hitler’s speech—all this witnessed by a senior SA officer named Viktor Lutze, who found it deeply troubling. A few days later, Lutze reported the episode to Rudolf Hess, at this point one of Hitler’s closest aides, who urged Lutze to see Hitler in person and tell him everything.
Upon hearing Lutze’s account, Hitler replied, “We’ll have to let the thing ripen.”
CHAPTER 33
“Memorandum of a Conversation with Hitler”
Dodd’s happy anticipation of his upcoming leave was marred by two unexpected demands. The first came on Monday, March 5, 1934, when he was summoned to the office of Foreign Minister Neurath, who angrily demanded that he do something to halt a mock trial of Hitler set to take place two days later in New York’s Madison Square Garden. The trial was organized by the American Jewish Congress, with support from the American Federation of Labor and a couple of dozen other Jewish and anti-Nazi organizations. The plan so outraged Hitler that he ordered Neurath and his diplomats in Berlin and Washington to stop it.
One result was a sequence of official protests, replies, and memoranda that revealed both Germany’s sensitivity to outside opinion and the lengths U.S. officials felt compelled to go to avoid direct criticism of Hitler and his party. The degree of restraint would have been comical if the stakes had not been so high and raised a question: why were the State Department and President Roosevelt so hesitant to express in frank terms how they really felt about Hitler at a time when such expressions clearly could have had a powerful effect on his prestige in the world?
GERMANY’S EMBASSY IN WASHINGTON had first gotten wind of the planned trial several weeks earlier, in February, through advertisements in the
On March 1, 1934, the German embassy’s number-two man, Rudolf Leitner, met with a State Department official named John Hickerson and urged him to “do something to prevent this trial because of its lamentable effect
