Edgar still wanted to resist, at least delaying his departure until after the Nuremberg event to show that he would not be intimidated. But Ambassador Dodd urged him to leave sooner. “If you were not being moved by your paper anyway, we would go to the mat on this issue, but it only means hastening your departure by six days,” he told him. “Won’t you do this to avoid complications?” While Mowrer bitterly resented the new ambassador’s reluctance to take a stronger stand against the regime, even Messersmith and Knickerbocker concurred with Dodd’s judgment. They figured that the risks were too high for their friend and it was time for him to get out.
Mowrer finally agreed to leave on September 1, with Lilian and their daughter staying behind for a short while to pack up. Before Edgar’s departure, his British and American fellow correspondents presented him with a silver rose bowl inscribed to a “gallant fighter for the liberty of the Press.” And as he prepared to board a train for Paris from the Bahnhof Zoo, Messersmith rushed over from a dinner party to give him an embrace.
Others were at the train station in a more official capacity, making sure that the correspondent who had been such an irritant really departed. Shortly before his departure, a young German official sardonically asked him: “And when are you coming back to Germany, Herr Mowrer?”
“Why, when I can come back with two million of my countrymen,” the correspondent replied.
It took a moment for the official to absorb the import of his statement: Mowrer was envisaging a day when American soldiers would march into a defeated Germany. “
Mowrer didn’t let that pass; he wasn’t about to leave Germany without having the last word. “Not for the
“Like Football and Cricket”
Martha Dodd was twenty-four when she arrived in Berlin in the summer of 1933 with her father, the new American ambassador, her mother and brother. Recalling her state of mind later, she stressed how naive and uninformed she was about politics, with almost no idea about what Germany would be like—or what its new Nazi rulers represented. While her father had evident misgivings and mentioned several times that he wasn’t sure how long their Berlin assignment would last, Martha seemed largely oblivious to them. “I do not remember any of us being especially disturbed by the thought of living under a dictatorship,” she wrote in her Berlin memoir
She was hardly alone in that respect. Many Americans were still agnostic about Hitler and his movement, including some of the country’s leading literary figures. At a farewell dinner for the Dodds hosted by the German- American societies in Chicago, Martha sat between Thornton Wilder and Carl Sandburg. Wilder urged Martha to learn German quickly and spend her time with Germans instead of the foreign community in Berlin, while Sandburg offered this bit of advice: “Find out what this man Hitler is made of, what makes his brain go round, what his bones and blood are made of. Before your eyes will pass the greatest pageant of crooks and gangsters, idealists, statesmen, criminals, diplomats, and geniuses. You will see every nationality in the world. Watch them, study them, dissect them. Don’t be frightened or diffident, don’t let them or your experiences spoil you or your eagerness for life. Be brave and truthful, keep your poetry and integrity.”
All of which inspired Martha to view this journey into the unknown as a great adventure, which she planned to experience with the “eagerness for life” that Sandburg commended to her. As for the other qualities—bravery, truthfulness, integrity—there would be plenty of disagreement among those who met Martha in Germany whether she lived up to them, along with endless gossip about her behavior, particularly with a procession of men of various ages and nationalities. If her father often appeared to be stumbling through his time in Berlin, not quite sure what he should or could be doing, Martha was anything but “frightened or diffident.” In that sense, she took Sandburg’s words very much to heart.
Growing up in Chicago, Martha had gone to University High School, which was labeled by students from rival schools as “Jew High.” By her own admission, Martha was also “slightly anti-Semitic.” As she put it, “I accepted the attitude that Jews were not as attractive physically as Gentiles and were less socially presentable.” She recalled that when she went to the University of Chicago, even some of her professors “resented the brilliance of Jewish colleagues and students.”
After college, Martha got a job as the assistant literary editor of the
While no maiden, Martha succeeded in charming many of those who met her for the first time. Upon seeing her arrive with her parents in Berlin on July 12, 1933, Bella Fromm described the daughter of the new ambassador as “a perfect example of the intelligent young American female.” When William Shirer, the new bureau chief of the Universal News Service and soon-to-be-famous CBS broadcaster, arrived in Berlin the following year, he noted in his diary that Martha spent many evenings at Die Taverne, the restaurant where American correspondents gathered almost every evening after filing their stories. Shirer described her as “pretty, vivacious, a mighty arguer.”
But Martha also triggered other feelings, particularly among the embassy wives. Kay Smith returned with her husband, Truman Smith, the military attache who had been the first American official to meet Hitler in 1922, for a second tour at the Berlin embassy in 1935. “Martha had an apartment of her own on the top floor of the Embassy,” she wrote in her unpublished memoir. “She was small, delicate looking, blue eyed, pink and white complexion, a little Dresden figurine. Appearances are deceiving. Martha had a way with the gentlemen and it was said no scruples. As time went on I heard rumors that she entertained men at all hours in her apartment.”
Martha certainly had a predilection for romance, both political and personal. When it came to politics, her first judgment as a new arrival was that Germany and its new rulers had been unfairly condemned by world opinion—and she needed to help set the record straight. “We liked Germany, and I was enchanted by the kindness and simplicity of the people… everything was peaceful, romantic, strange, nostalgic,” she recalled. “I felt that the press had badly maligned the country and I wanted to proclaim the warmth and friendliness of the people, the soft summer night with its fragrance of trees and flowers, the serenity of the streets.” When she made the rounds of reasonably priced restaurants, she found herself comparing her experiences to what she knew of France: “The Germans seemed much more genuine and honest, even in the merchant class.”
Soon after her arrival, Martha met fellow countryman Quentin Reynolds, who was also a newcomer to Germany. Reynolds had been sent to Berlin in early 1933 by the International News Service to fill in for the regular correspondent, who had run afoul of the new Nazi rulers. He went straight from writing baseball stories about the superstar Ty Cobb to covering the biggest foreign story of the era. By his own admission, he had only “saloon German” and “no special grasp of current events.” But he credited fellow correspondents with giving him a crash course in local politics. Knickerbocker urged him to read
By the time he met Martha Dodd, Reynolds was also friendly with Putzi Hanfstaengl, who regularly dropped by Die Taverne. “I regret to say that on first acquaintance he struck me as a likeable fellow,” Reynolds recalled later. “He was a tremendous man physically, with heavy features, dark eyes, and a mane of coal-black hair that he kept tossing back. With an ingratiating manner, he was a compulsive and amusing talker and, unlike other Nazis I later had to do business with, he went out of his way to be cordial to Americans. You had to know Putzi to really dislike him.”
Martha was impressed that Reynolds, who had only been in the country a few months, already knew “such legendary figures” as Hanfstaengl and arranged for her to be introduced to him. At a party thrown by an English
