In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin

By fall, Dodd was confined to bed, able to communicate only with a pad and pencil. He endured this condition for several more months, until early February 1940, when he suffered another round of pneumonia. He died in his bed at his farm on February 9, 1940, at 3:10 p.m., with Martha and Bill Jr. at his side, his life work—his Old South—anything but finished. He was buried two days later on the farm, with Carl Sandburg serving as an honorary pallbearer.

Five years later, during the final assault on Berlin, a Russian shell scored a direct hit on a stable at the western end of the Tiergarten. The adjacent Kurfurstendamm, once one of Berlin’s prime shopping and entertainment streets, now became a stage for the utterly macabre—horses, those happiest creatures of Nazi Germany, tearing wildly down the street with manes and tales aflame.

HOW DODD’S COUNTRYMEN JUDGED his career as ambassador seemed to depend in large part on which side of the Atlantic they happened to be standing.

To the isolationists, he was needlessly provocative; to his opponents in the State Department, he was a maverick who complained too much and failed to uphold the standards of the Pretty Good Club. Roosevelt, in a letter to Bill Jr., was maddeningly noncommittal. “Knowing his passion for historical truth and his rare ability to illuminate the meanings of history,” Roosevelt wrote, “his passing is a real loss to the nation.”

To those who knew Dodd in Berlin and who witnessed firsthand the oppression and terror of Hitler’s government, he would always be a hero. Sigrid Schultz called Dodd “the best ambassador we had in Germany” and revered his willingness to stand up for American ideals even against the opposition of his own government. She wrote: “Washington failed to give him the support due an ambassador in Nazi Germany, partly because too many of the men in the State Department were passionately fond of the Germans and because too many of the more influential businessmen of our country believed that one ‘could do business with Hitler.’ ” Rabbi Wise wrote in his memoir, Challenging Years, “Dodd was years ahead of the State Department in his grasp of the political as well as of the moral implications of Hitlerism and paid the penalty of such understanding by being virtually removed from office for having the decency and the courage alone among ambassadors to decline to attend the annual Nuremberg celebration, which was a glorification of Hitler.”

Late in life even Messersmith applauded Dodd’s clarity of vision. “I often think that there were very few men who realized what was happening in Germany more thoroughly than he did, and certainly there were very few men who realized the implications for the rest of Europe and for us and for the whole world of what was happening in the country more than he did.”

The highest praise came from Thomas Wolfe, who during a visit to Germany in the spring of 1935 engaged in a brief affair with Martha. He wrote to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, that Ambassador Dodd had helped conjure in him “a renewed pride and faith in America and a belief that somehow our great future still remains.” The Dodds’ house at Tiergartenstrasse 27a, he told Perkins, “has been a free and fearless harbor for people of all opinions, and people who live and walk in terror have been able to draw their breath there without fear, and to speak their minds. This I know to be true, and further, the dry, plain, homely unconcern with which the Ambassador observes all the pomp and glitter and decorations and the tramp of marching men would do your heart good to see.”

Dodd’s successor was Hugh Wilson, a diplomat of the old-fashioned mode that Dodd long had railed against. It was Wilson, in fact, who had first described the foreign service as “a pretty good club.” Wilson’s maxim, coined by Talleyrand before him, was not exactly stirring: “Above all, not too much zeal.” As ambassador, Wilson sought to emphasize the positive aspects of Nazi Germany and carried on a one-man campaign of appeasement. He promised Germany’s new foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, that if war began in Europe he would do all he could to keep America out. Wilson accused the American press of being “Jewish controlled” and of singing a “hymn of hate while efforts are made over here to build a better future.” He praised Hitler as “the man who has pulled his people from moral and economic despair into the state of pride and evident prosperity they now enjoyed.” He particularly admired the Nazi “Strength through Joy” program, which provided all German workers with no-expense vacations and other entertainments. Wilson saw it as a powerful tool for helping Germany resist communist inroads and suppressing workers’ demands for higher wages—money that workers would squander on “idiotic things as a rule.” He saw this approach as one that “is going to be beneficial to the world at large.”

William Bullitt, in a letter from Paris dated December 7, 1937, praised Roosevelt for choosing Wilson, stating, “I do think that the chances for peace in Europe are increased definitely by your appointment of Hugh to Berlin, and I thank you profoundly.”

In the end, of course, neither Dodd’s nor Wilson’s approach mattered very much. As Hitler consolidated his power and cowed his public, only some extreme gesture of American disapproval could have had any effect, perhaps the “forcible intervention” suggested by George Messersmith in September 1933. Such an act, however, would have been politically unthinkable with America succumbing more and more to the fantasy that it could avoid involvement in the squabbles of Europe. “But history,” wrote Dodd’s friend Claude Bowers, ambassador to Spain and later Chile, “will record that in a period when the forces of tyranny were mobilizing for the extermination of liberty and democracy everywhere, when a mistaken policy of ‘appeasement’ was stocking the arsenals of despotism, and when in many high social, and some political, circles, fascism was a fad and democracy anathema, he stood foursquare for our democratic way of life, fought the good fight and kept the faith, and when death touched him his flag was flying still.”

And indeed one has to wonder: For Goebbels’s Der Angriff to attack Dodd as he lay prostrate in a hospital bed, was he really so ineffectual as his enemies believed? In the end, Dodd proved to be exactly what Roosevelt had wanted, a lone beacon of American freedom and hope in a land of gathering darkness.

EPILOGUE

The Queer Bird in Exile

The Tiergarten after the Russian offensive, with the Reichstag building in the background (photo credit epl.1)

Martha and Alfred Stern lived in an apartment on Central Park West in New York City and owned an estate in Ridgefield, Connecticut. In 1939 she published a memoir entitled Through Embassy Eyes. Germany promptly banned the book, no surprise given some of Martha’s observations about the regime’s top leaders—for example: “If there were any logic or objectivity in Nazi sterilization laws Dr. Goebbels would have been sterilized quite some time ago.” In 1941 she and Bill Jr. published their father’s diary. The two also hoped to publish a book-length collection of letters to and from Dodd and asked George Messersmith to let them use several that he had posted to Dodd from Vienna. Messersmith refused. When Martha told him she would publish them anyway, Messersmith, never a fan of hers, got tough. “I told her that if she published my letters, either through an irresponsible or responsible publisher, that I would write a little article about what I knew about her and about certain episodes in her life and that my article would be much more interesting than anything that would be in her book.” He added, “That ended the matter.”

These were compelling years. The war Dodd had forecast was waged and won. In 1945, at long last, Martha achieved a goal she long had dreamed of: she published a novel. Entitled Sowing the Wind and clearly based on the life of one of her past lovers, Ernst Udet, the book described how Nazism seduced and degraded a good-hearted World War I flying ace. That same year, she and her husband adopted a baby and named him Robert.

Martha at last created her own successful salon, which from time to time drew the likes of Paul Robeson, Lillian Hellman, Margaret Bourke-White, and Isamu Noguchi. The talk was bright and good and evoked for Martha those lovely afternoons in the home of her friend Mildred Fish Harnack—although now the recollection of Mildred was bordered in black. Martha had received news about her old friend that suddenly made their last meeting in Berlin seem laced with portent. She recalled how they had chosen a remote table at an out-of-the-way restaurant and how pridefully Mildred had described the “growing effectiveness” of the underground network she and her husband, Arvid, had established. Mildred was not a physically demonstrative woman, but at the close of this lunch she gave Martha a kiss.