create every opportunity to drive home the justice of our complaints.”
The result was a cable transmitted at 4:00 p.m. on Saturday, July 7, under Secretary Hull’s name that questioned whether Dodd had challenged Germany’s failure to pay its bond debt “with the utmost vigor alike from the point of view of logic, equity, and its effect upon the estimated 60,000 mainly innocent holders in this country. …”
Moffat wrote, “It was a fairly stiff telegram, one sentence of which the Secretary with his intense kindly nature modified to salve Dodd’s feelings.” Moffat noted that “the irreverent ones” in the department had begun referring to Dodd as “Ambassador Dud.”
During another meeting on the bond situation later that week, Hull continued to express his dissatisfaction with Dodd. Moffat wrote, “The Secretary kept repeating while Dodd was a very fine man in many ways, he certainly had a peculiar slant to his make-up.”
That day Moffat attended a garden party at the home of a wealthy friend—the friend with the pool—who had invited as well “the entire State Department.” There were exhibition tennis matches and swimming races. Moffat had to leave early, however, for a cruise down the Potomac on a power yacht “fitted out with a luxury that would satisfy the soul of any sybarite.”
IN BERLIN, DODD WAS UNMOVED. He thought it pointless to pursue full payment, because Germany simply did not have the money, and there were far more important issues at stake. In a letter to Hull a few weeks later he wrote, “Our people will have to lose their bonds.”
EARLY ON THE MORNING of Friday, July 6, Martha went to her father’s bedroom to tell him good-bye. She knew he disapproved of her journey to Russia, but as they hugged and kissed he seemed at ease. He urged her to be careful but hoped she would have “an interesting trip.”
Her mother and brother took her to Tempelhof Airport; Dodd remained in the city, aware, no doubt, that the Nazi press might try to capitalize on his presence at the airport, waving farewell as his daughter flew off to the hated Soviet Union.
Martha climbed a tall set of steel stairs to the three-engine Junker that would take her on the first leg of her journey. A photographer captured her looking jaunty at the top of the stairs, her hat at a rakish angle. She wore a plain jumper over a polka-dotted blouse and matching scarf. Improbably, given the heat, she carried a long coat draped over her arm and a pair of white gloves.
She claimed later that she had no idea her trip would be of interest to the press or that it would create something of a diplomatic scandal. This hardly seems credible, however. After a year in which she had come to know intimately such intriguers as Rudolf Diels and Putzi Hanfstaengl, she could not have failed to realize that in Hitler’s Germany even the smallest actions possessed exaggerated symbolic power.
On a personal level her departure marked the fact that the last traces of the sympathy she had felt for the strange and noble beings of the Nazi revolution had disappeared, and whether she recognized it or not, her departure, as captured by news photographers and duly registered by embassy officials and Gestapo watchers alike, was a public declaration of her final disillusionment.
She wrote, “I had had enough of blood and terror to last me for the rest of my life.”
HER FATHER REACHED a similar moment of transformation. Throughout that first year in Germany, Dodd had been struck again and again by the strange indifference to atrocity that had settled over the nation, the willingness of the populace and of the moderate elements in the government to accept each new oppressive decree, each new act of violence, without protest. It was as if he had entered the dark forest of a fairy tale where all the rules of right and wrong were upended. He wrote to his friend Roper, “I could not have imagined the outbreak against the Jews when everybody was suffering, one way or another, from declining commerce. Nor could one have imagined that such a terroristic performance as that of June 30 would have been permitted in modern times.”
Dodd continued to hope that the murders would so outrage the German public that the regime would fall, but as the days passed he saw no evidence of any such outpouring of anger. Even the army had stood by, despite the murder of two of its generals. President Hindenburg sent Hitler a telegram of praise. “From the reports placed before me, I learn that you, by your determined action and gallant personal intervention, have nipped treason in the bud. You have saved the German nation from serious danger. For this I express to you my most profound thanks and sincere appreciation.” In another telegram Hindenburg thanked Goring for his “energetic and successful proceeding of the smashing of high treason.”
Dodd learned that Goring personally had ordered over seventy-five executions. He was glad when Goring, like Rohm before him, sent his regrets at not being able to attend the dinner party the Dodds had planned for Friday evening, July 6. Dodd wrote, “It was a relief that he did not appear. I don’t know what I would have done if he had.”
FOR DODD, DIPLOMAT by accident, not demeanor, the whole thing was utterly appalling. He was a scholar and Jeffersonian democrat, a farmer who loved history and the old Germany in which he had studied as a young man. Now there was official murder on a terrifying scale. Dodd’s friends and acquaintances, people who had been to his house for dinner and tea, had been shot dead. Nothing in Dodd’s past had prepared him for this. It brought to the fore with more acuity than ever his doubts about whether he could achieve anything as ambassador. If he could not, what then was the point of remaining in Berlin, when his great love, his
Something left him, a vital last element of hope. In his diary entry for July 8, one week after the purge began and just before the one-year anniversary of his arrival in Berlin, he wrote: “My task here is to work for peace and better relations. I do not see how anything can be done so long as Hitler, Goring and Goebbels are the directing heads of the country. Never have I heard or read of three more unfit men in high place. Ought I to resign?”
He vowed never to host Hitler, Goring, or Goebbels at the embassy or his home and resolved further “that I would never again attend an address of the Chancellor or seek an interview for myself except upon official grounds. I have a sense of horror when I look at the man.”
CHAPTER 52
Only the Horses
But like seemingly everyone else in Berlin, Dodd wanted to hear what Hitler had to say about the purge. The government announced that Hitler would speak on the evening of Friday, July 13, in an address before the deputies of the Reichstag at their temporary hall, the nearby Kroll opera house. Dodd decided not to attend but to listen over the radio. The prospect of being there in person and listening to Hitler justify mass murder as hundreds of sycophants repeatedly thrust out their arms was too abhorrent.
That Friday afternoon, he and Francois-Poncet arranged to meet in the Tiergarten, as they had done in the past to avoid eavesdropping. Dodd wanted to find out whether Francois-Poncet planned to attend the speech but feared that if he visited the French embassy, Gestapo watchers would observe his arrival and conclude that he was conspiring to have the great powers boycott the speech, as indeed he was. Dodd had called on Sir Eric Phipps at the British embassy earlier in the week and learned that Phipps too planned to forgo the speech. Two such visits to major embassies in so short a time would surely draw attention.
The day was cool and sunny, and as a consequence the park was crowded with people, most on foot but quite a few on horseback, moving slowly through shadow. Now and then the air was punctuated by laughter and the barking of dogs and plumed with the ghosts of cigars fading slowly in the stillness. The two ambassadors walked for an hour.
As they prepared to part company, Francois-Poncet volunteered,
“I shall not attend the address.” He then offered an observation that Dodd had never expected to hear from a modern diplomat in one of the great capitals of Europe. “I would not be surprised any time to be shot on the streets of Berlin,” he said. “Because of this my wife remains in Paris. The Germans hate us so and their leadership is so
