stores, law firms, doctors’ offices. And there were the book burnings, the firings of Jews from businesses, the seemingly endless marches of Storm Troopers, and the suppression of Germany’s once-vibrant free press, which according to Messersmith had been placed under government control to a degree greater than “has probably ever existed in any country. The press censorship may be considered an absolute.”
In one of his latest dispatches, however, Messersmith took a markedly more positive tone, which Dodd doubtless found heartening. With uncharacteristic optimism Messersmith now reported seeing signs that Germany was growing more stable and attributed this to the growing confidence of Hitler, Goring, and Goebbels. “Responsibility has already changed the primary leaders of the Party very considerably,” he wrote. “There is every evidence that they are becoming constantly more moderate.”
Dodd, however, never got the chance to read a letter that Messersmith wrote soon afterward in which he retracted this cheerier assessment. Marked “Personal & Confidential,” he sent it to Undersecretary Phillips. The letter, dated June 26, 1933, reached Phillips just as the Dodds were about to leave for Berlin.
“I have tried to point out in my dispatches that the higher leaders of the party are growing more moderate, while the intermediary leaders and the masses are just as radical as ever, and that the question is whether the higher leaders will be able to impose their moderate will on the masses,” Messersmith wrote. “It begins to look pretty definitely that they will not be able to do so, but that the pressure from the bottom is becoming stronger all the time.” Goring and Goebbels in particular no longer seemed so moderate, he wrote. “Dr. Goebbels is daily preaching that the revolution has just begun and what has so far been done is just an overture.”
Priests were being arrested. A former president of Lower Silesia, whom Messersmith knew personally, had been placed in a concentration camp. He sensed a rising “hysteria” among midlevel leaders of the Nazi Party, expressed as a belief “that the only safety lies in getting everybody in jail.” The nation was quietly but aggressively readying itself for war, deploying propaganda to conjure the perception “that the whole world is against Germany and that it lies defenseless before the world.” Hitler’s vows of peaceful intent were illusory, meant only to buy time for Germany to rearm, Messersmith warned. “What they most want to do, however, definitely is to make Germany the most capable instrument of war that there has ever existed.”
WHILE IN WASHINGTON, Dodd attended a reception thrown for him by the German embassy, and there he met Wilbur Carr for the first time. Later, Carr jotted a quick description of Dodd in his diary: “Pleasing, interesting person with fine sense of humor and simple modesty.”
Dodd also paid a call on the State Department’s chief of Western European affairs, Jay Pierrepont Moffat, who shared Carr’s and Phillips’s distaste for Jews as well as their hard-line attitude toward immigration. Moffat recorded his own impression of the new ambassador: “He is extremely sure of his opinion, expresses himself forcibly and didactically and tends to dramatize the points he makes. The only fly in the ointment is that he is going to try and run the Embassy with a family of four persons on his salary, and how he is going to do it in Berlin, where prices are high, is something beyond me.”
What neither Carr nor Moffat expressed in these entries was the surprise and displeasure they and many of their peers had felt at Dodd’s appointment. Theirs was an elite realm to which only men of a certain pedigree could expect ready admission. Many had gone to the same prep schools, mainly St. Paul’s and Groton, and from there to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Undersecretary Phillips grew up in Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood in a giant Victorian pile of a house. He was independently wealthy from the age of twenty-one and later in life became a regent of Harvard College. Most of his peers in the State Department also had money and while abroad spent heavily from their own funds with no expectation of reimbursement. One such official, Hugh Wilson, in praise of his fellow diplomats wrote, “They have all felt that they belonged to a pretty good club. That feeling has fostered a healthy esprit de corps.”
By the club’s standards, Dodd was about as poor a fit as could be imagined.
HE RETURNED TO CHICAGO to pack and attend various good-bye functions, after which he and his wife and Martha and Bill all set out by train for Virginia and a last stay at the Round Hill farm. His eighty-six-year-old father, John, lived relatively near, in North Carolina, but Dodd, despite his wish that his own children remain close at hand, did not at first plan to visit him, given that Roosevelt wanted his new ambassador in Berlin as soon as possible. Dodd had written to his father to tell him of his appointment and that he would not have a chance to visit before his departure. He enclosed a little money and wrote, “I am sorry to be so far away all my life.” His father immediately replied how proud he was that Dodd had received “this great honor from D.C.,” but added that tincture of vinegar that only parents seem to know how to apply—that little something that causes guilt to flare and plans to change. The elder Dodd wrote, “If I never see you any more while I live it will be alright I shall be proud of you to the last hours I live.”
Dodd changed his plans. On July 1, a Saturday, he and his wife boarded a sleeper car bound for North Carolina. During their visit with Dodd’s father, they made time for a tour of local landmarks. Dodd and his wife touched old ground, as if saying good-bye for the last time. They visited the family cemetery, where Dodd stood before the grave of his mother, who had died in 1909. As he walked the grass he came upon the plots of ancestors caught up in the Civil War, including two who surrendered with General Robert E. Lee at Appomattox. It was a visit filled with reminders of “family misfortune” and the precariousness of life. “A rather sorrowful day,” he wrote.
He and his wife returned to Virginia and the farm, then proceeded by train to New York. Martha and Bill drove the family’s Chevrolet, intending to drop it off at the wharf for transit to Berlin.
DODD WOULD HAVE PREFERRED to spend the next couple of days with his family, but the department had insisted that once he got to New York he attend a number of meetings with bank executives on the issue of Germany’s debt—a subject in which Dodd had little interest—and with Jewish leaders. Dodd feared that both the American and German press could twist these meetings to taint the appearance of objectivity that he hoped to present in Berlin. He complied, however, and the result was a day of encounters that evoked the serial visits of ghosts in Dickens’s
First, however, Dodd met the bankers, and did so at the offices of the National City Bank of New York, which years later would be called Citibank. Dodd was startled to learn that National City Bank and Chase National Bank held over one hundred million dollars in German bonds, which Germany at this point was proposing to pay back at a rate of thirty cents on the dollar. “There was much talk but no agreement other than that I should do all I possibly could to prevent Germany’s defaulting openly,” Dodd wrote. He had little sympathy for the bankers. The prospect of high interest rates on German bonds had blinded them to the all-too-obvious risk that a war-crushed, politically volatile country might default.
That evening the Jewish leaders arrived as scheduled, among them Felix M. Warburg, a leading financier who tended to favor the quieter tactics of the American Jewish Committee, and Rabbi Wise of the noisier American Jewish Congress. Dodd wrote in his diary: “For an hour and a half the discussion went on: The Germans are killing Jews all the time; they are being persecuted to the point where suicide is common (the Warburg family is reported to have had cases of this kind); and all Jewish property is being confiscated.”
During this meeting, Warburg appears to have mentioned the suicide of two elderly relatives, Moritz and Kathie Oppenheim, in Frankfurt some three weeks earlier. Warburg wrote later, “No doubt the Hitler Regime made life for them a plague and they were yearning for the end of their days.”
Dodd’s visitors urged him to press Roosevelt for official intervention, but he demurred. “I insisted that the government could not intervene officially but assured the members of the conference that I would exert all possible personal influence against unjust treatment of German Jews and of course protest against maltreatment of American Jews.”
Afterward, Dodd caught an 11:00 p.m. train to Boston and, upon his arrival early the next morning, July 4, was driven by chauffeured car to the home of Colonel Edward M. House, a friend who was a close adviser to Roosevelt, for a meeting over breakfast.
In the course of a wide-ranging conversation, Dodd learned for the first time how far he had been from being Roosevelt’s first choice. The news was humbling. Dodd noted in his diary that it tamped any inclination on his part to be “over-egotistical” about his appointment.
