journalist—“a lavish and fairly drunken affair,” as Martha recalled—the Nazi propagandist lived up to her expectations. “Putzi came in late in a sensational manner, a huge man in height and build, towering over everyone present,” she noted. “He had a soft, ingratiating manner, a beautiful voice which he used with conscious artistry, sometimes whispering low and soft, the next minute bellowing and shattering the room. He was supposed to be the artist among the Nazis, erratic and interesting, the personal clown and musician to Hitler himself… Bavarian and American blood produced this strange phenomenon.”
Like other Americans, Martha would find herself frequently in Hanfstaengl’s company, dancing with him at parties and gladly taking advantage of his offers to introduce her to Nazi luminaries. But Reynolds was already developing a healthy sense of skepticism about him while remaining careful not to show it. About a month after Reynolds arrived, he ran into Hanfstaengl at the bar of the Adlon Hotel. “You’ve been here a month now, and you haven’t asked me about our so-called Jewish problem or written anything about it to annoy me,” Putzi told him. “How come, Quent?”
“Give me time, Putzi,” Reynolds replied. “I haven’t been here long enough to know what’s going on.”
By the time he met Martha, Reynolds not only knew more but was eager to explore more for himself. In August, he suggested to Martha and her brother Bill that they take their Chevrolet and travel to southern Germany and Austria together with him—an idea that immediately appealed to Martha. As they drove south, she recognized the word “
In fact, Martha was so swept up by the sight of marching Brown-shirts and the apparent enthusiasm of the people, she responded equally enthusiastically. When Germans saw their special license plate with a low number, they assumed the trio of Americans were top officials—and welcomed them with “
Around midnight, the Americans stopped for the night in Nuremberg. As they reached their hotel on Konigstrasse, they were surprised to find the street filled with an excited crowd and speculated that they may have run into a toymakers’ festival. As he registered, Reynolds asked the hotel clerk if there was going to be a parade. The clerk laughed. “It will be kind of a parade,” he replied. “They are teaching someone a lesson.”
The visitors walked out to join the crowd. Everyone seemed in a good mood, with the sound of a band adding to the festive atmosphere. Then they saw Nazi banners and swastikas, and the source of the music: a marching band of Storm Troopers. Two tall troopers were dragging someone between them. “I could not at first tell if it was a man or a woman,” Reynolds wrote. “Its head had been clipped bald, and face and head had been coated with white powder. Even though the figure wore a skirt, it might have been a man dressed as a clown.” As the Brownshirts straightened out their victim, the Americans spotted the placard around its neck: “I wanted to live with a Jew.”
As the “lesson” continued, the Americans learned from the crowd that this was a woman named Anna Rath. The reason for her harsh punishment: she had tried to marry her Jewish fiance, defying the ban on mixed marriages. Martha remembered the image of her “tragic and tortured face, the color of diluted absinthe.” She also was startled by Reynolds’s reaction. She had believed him to be a “hard-boiled” journalist, but “he was so shaken by the whole scene that he said the only thing he could do was to get drunk, to forget it.”
The Nazis wound up the evening by playing the “Horst Wessel Song” as about 5,000 people stood singing, their right arms extended—and then everyone disappeared. Although she suddenly felt nervous and cold, with her earlier elation fully gone, Martha still tried to convince Reynolds that he shouldn’t file anything about the incident. She argued that her presence and that of her brother would make this a sensational story, and, after all, who knew what the Nazi side of the story really was. And it had to be an isolated case.
Although Martha claimed that the three of them made good on Reynolds’s vow to get drunk, proceeding to tank up on red champagne, the journalist was sober enough when he went up to his room. He promptly called Hudson Hawley, his bureau chief in Berlin, excited that he had proof of exactly the kind of atrocity story that many journalists had heard about but not witnessed—and the Nazis routinely denied. Hawley cautioned that he might not be allowed to wire it and suggested he send it by mail instead. He also advised him to leave out any mention of the presence of Martha and Bill Dodd to avoid negative repercussions for the new ambassador. “Writing the story, I found myself trembling,” Reynolds recalled. “The grotesque white face of Anna Rath haunted me.” The next morning he mailed it in.
By the time he and the Dodds returned to Berlin a week later, the story had received big play. Hanfstaengl had left a message for him, requesting an urgent meeting. “There isn’t one damn word of truth in your story!” Putzi shouted at Reynolds, dropping all pretense of conviviality. “I’ve talked with our people in Nuremberg and they say nothing of the sort happened there.”
But the veteran British correspondent Norman Ebbutt had followed up on the story, getting one of his reporters to confirm it. He told Reynolds that the reporter had learned that Rath had been locked up in a mental hospital.
The Foreign Ministry didn’t bother to deny the story the way Hanfstaengl did. In fact, they dispatched officials to the Dodds’ residence to apologize for what they characterized as an incident of isolated brutality— providing the explanation that Martha had already suggested to Reynolds. They also claimed that the perpetrators would be punished. That, apparently, was enough to allow Martha to continue to nourish her initial illusions that the only problem with the new Germany was that it was misunderstood by the outside world.
As for Reynolds, he was rapidly shedding any illusions he still had not just about the nature of the Nazi regime but also about Hanfstaengl. Because of the Anna Rath incident, he got to see the real Putzi, not just the jocular one who charmed many Americans. When Reynolds’s parents visited Berlin, the correspondent threw a big dinner party for them, inviting Martha and Bill Dodd along with several of his journalistic colleagues and German acquaintances. Showing up late as usual, Putzi sat down at the piano and turned to Reynolds’s mother, announcing that he would sing a song for her that he had written himself. “Putzi serenaded my mother with a foul song in which the Third Reich’s enemies were jingled out as Jews, Catholics, and Negroes,” Reynolds recalled. Putzi had lowered his voice so only the small group at the piano could hear his words, which indicated he knew very well what he was doing. He was paying Reynolds back for the Anna Rath story by targeting his mother as the correspondent looked on.
Reynolds felt like hitting him right there, but another German guest talked him out of making a scene that would only reflect badly on him. Relishing his sense of self-importance, Putzi soon announced that he had to leave early because Hitler wanted him at the Chancellery to play some Liszt. Escorting Putzi to the door, Reynolds summoned enough self-control to look like he was the genial host sending his guest off with a pleasant good-bye. But his final words, delivered so only Putzi could hear, couldn’t have been blunter: “Never come to my house again, you louse.”
Writing to his daughter Betty at the University of Chicago on June 30, 1933, the AP’s Louis Lochner mused about President Roosevelt’s decision to send historian William Dodd to represent the United States in Berlin. “Roosevelt must have a sense of humor to send this exponent of the most liberal Jeffersonian democracy… into this anti-democratic country,” he wrote. “He’ll fit into here about like a square peg into a round hole!”
When Dodd arrived in Germany in July, he began cautiously exploring his new surroundings, gauging the reception he received, and sizing up the political situation. Meeting Konstantin von Neurath, Dodd found the foreign minister “most agreeable.” Hans Luther, Germany’s ambassador to the United States, who was also in Berlin that July, visited his new American counterpart to discuss Hitler’s plans for economic recovery and tariff policy. As for the touchier issues of how the Nazi government would treat its immediate neighbors, Luther sought to be reassuring. “He showed no belligerent spirit toward France and did not mention the Polish corridor,” Dodd wrote in his diary.
Dodd was particularly interested in the views of his fellow academics, and what he heard left him with an uneasy feeling. Professor Otto Hoetzsch of the University of Berlin, a former member of the Reichstag and “well- known internationalist,” as Dodd wrote, expressed “his comparative satisfaction with the Hitler regime.” As the new ambassador observed, “So far nearly all university men seem to acquiesce in their own intimidation, but one sees that it is fear of unemployed status rather than a willing surrender.”
On July 28, Dodd described “the saddest story of Jewish persecution I have yet heard.” Acclaimed chemist
