Back in Berlin, some of the American residents were puzzled by Hanfstaengl’s abrupt disappearance. In previous years, Putzi had hosted a Washington’s Birthday party in his apartment, inviting people like Ambassador Dodd, Truman Smith and Louis Lochner, along with a few Germans. The invitations had already gone out for the party on February 22 before the host’s disappearance, and it was only a day or two before that his secretary called the invited guests to say the party was canceled, without giving any explanation. Lochner suspected Putzi was in trouble and began picking up strands of the story, including reports that he had managed to avoid a plane ride over Spain that probably would have ended badly.
At a cocktail party hosted by Martha Dodd on March 17, Lochner and other guests speculated about Putzi’s whereabouts. “There’s nothing mysterious about Hanfstaengl,” an assistant naval attache declared. “Why, I ran into him at the bar of the Hotel Bauer au Lac in Zurich only yesterday.”
Lochner hastily left the party and placed a call to the Zurich hotel. “How did you find out I was here?” Putzi asked. Lochner replied with the standard line that a newsman never reveals his sources. Since he already had his story, it gave the AP correspondent huge satisfaction that Hanfstaengl refused all calls after that.
By the time that Putzi made his escape, Ambassador Dodd was nearing the end of a four-year tour in Berlin that had proven more frustrating than productive. His early alienation from Hitler and his regime was fully understandable—and, in many ways, morally commendable. But it didn’t help his effectiveness as an envoy. After the Night of the Long Knives, he wrote in his diary that he would try to avoid meeting Hitler whenever he could. “I certainly would not ask to see any man who has committed a score of murders the last few days,” he wrote on July 4, 1934. And again and again throughout his four years, he ruminated about whether it made sense for him to stay in a post when he could see no hope of more positive developments.
At the State Department, his superiors were often frustrated as well. “What in the world is the use of having an ambassador who refuses to speak to the government to which he is accredited?” complained Undersecretary of State William Phillips. Since Dodd did maintain some contacts with German officials, this was overstating things— but not by much. And the scholar-turned-envoy didn’t help his case by his open disdain for many of the State Department officials he had to deal with and foreign service officers in general. As he rightly noted, they acted like pampered members of an exclusive fraternity, the products of privilege and Ivy League schools. They were highly critical of an outsider like himself, and he made no effort to temper their feelings.
In fact, Dodd reinforced them by almost obsessively pushing for budget cuts, including shorter cables. His embassy did produce numerous well-done reports during his tenure, including some lengthy ones; they demonstrated a deeper understanding of the Nazi regime than the reports of many other missions, including those of France and Britain. But by penny-pinching, he contributed to the impression that there was a “telegram deficiency,” as he acknowledged. He argued that he was only trying to eliminate three- or four-page telegrams when “one or two hundred words” would do, adding defensively: “I do not send what I think I should have to contradict in a week. This is my explanation. It may not be what the Department likes.”
Dodd wasn’t popular with his military attaches either. Truman Smith described him as “a historian of repute, and a pacifist.” According to Smith, he showed “a marked distaste for military matters” and a lack of interest in the work of the military attaches or in the rapid expansion of the German Army and Air Force. “The question perforce arises with respect to Dr. Dodd’s fitness for the ambassadorial post in Germany at this particular period in history,” Smith wrote later. In her unpublished memoir, Kay dispensed with any diplomatic wording. Claiming that Dodd’s pacifist beliefs prompted him to forbid Smith or other attaches to appear in uniform when they attended official ceremonies together, she declared: “I have seldom met a man for whom I developed so much contempt.”
Dodd hardly deserved that level of opprobrium. And as his biographer Robert Dallek and others have pointed out, it would be impossible to argue convincingly that a different ambassador, no matter how skillful, could have produced better results. But Dodd’s final period in Berlin was marked by his acute sense of disappointment—and the knowledge that many of the people he worked with were disappointed in him. By the end of 1936, he was considering resigning again—and openly saying that “four years’ service is enough.” After a two-and-a-half-month visit to the United States to deal with his deteriorating health, he returned to Germany in late October 1937. “In Berlin once more,” he wrote in his diary on October 29. “What can I do?”
But when it really came time to leave, Dodd changed his mind, arguing that his term should be extended. By then, Roosevelt was no longer in sympathy with the envoy he had dispatched to Berlin in 1933, still hoping the new regime might be influenced by a convinced democrat like the historian from the University of Chicago. On one initiative of his envoy, the president was even in basic agreement with Hitler: neither leader had the least patience for Dodd’s push for a new world peace conference.
Dodd left Berlin for the last time on December 29, 1937, nurturing a sense of grievance that, in the end, he was forced to resign sooner than he wanted to. “There were and are still officials in the State Department who do not like me or the things I stand for,” he wrote. After retiring to his farm in Virginia, his physical condition kept declining. When World War II broke out, the man who was often labeled a pacifist wrote to Roosevelt: “Hitler intends to conquer the whole world. If we do not join England and France, we shall have a hard time.” He died on February 9, 1940, at the age of seventy, long before his country joined the fight.
Dodd hadn’t left Berlin alone; his family went with him. That, of course, included his daughter Martha, whose conversion to a new cause had prompted her to take some extraordinary actions during the latter part of her stay in Berlin. Although Boris Vinogradov, her lover, was recalled to Moscow, she arranged to meet him there and in Paris—and, when he was transferred to the Soviet Embassy in Warsaw, she visited him there as well. But it wasn’t only romance that kept her connected to the Soviet regime. In the memoir she wrote of her Berlin days, she discreetly commented: “The Russians of the Embassy in Berlin were, on the whole, charming people—natural, informal, sprightly and clever.”
One of the charming people was an agent named Bukhartsev, the Berlin correspondent for the Soviet daily
Harnack was the German husband of Mildred Harnack, Martha’s American friend, a teacher who had also enlisted in the Communist cause. Like Martha, Mildred had to be careful to hide her allegiances in Germany—but, unlike the daughter of the ambassador, she would remain in Berlin, with fateful consequences.
Although Martha was hardly a patient, faithful lover, she still had her heart set on Vinogradov. On March 14, 1937, she petitioned the Soviet government, saying “we have agreed to ask official permission to marry.” Two weeks later in Moscow, she met with the head of the NKVD’s Foreign Department, Abram Slutsky. At his request, she prepared a statement elaborating on her willingness to serve the Kremlin: “It goes without saying that my services of any kind and at any time are proposed to the party for use at its discretion. Currently, I have access mainly to the personal, confidential correspondence of my father with the U.S. State Department and the U.S. President.” It was clear her father had no idea what she was doing.
Then she switched course in her statement, pointing out that she had lost almost all personal connections with German society, and that her extensive diplomatic contacts yielded meager results. In other words, her usefulness was ending in Berlin. “Is the information which I get from my father, who is hated in Germany and who occupies an isolated position among foreign diplomats and therefore has no access to any secret information, important enough for me to remain in Germany?” she asked rhetorically. “Couldn’t I conduct more valuable work in America or in some European organization such as the International Conference for Peace… ?”
She also noted that, while she was trying to get her father’s tour in Berlin extended, it was likely to end soon. With that in mind, she was positioning herself to help Moscow elsewhere. And, at the same time, she clearly hoped that might still bring her and Vinogradov back together.
But after the Dodds returned to the United States, Vinogradov was recalled to Moscow from Warsaw. It was 1938, and Stalin’s purges were at their height. Among the prime targets: anyone who had contacts with foreigners. It made no difference if that person was carrying out direct orders from Moscow. Martha’s lover was arrested. Not knowing his fate, Martha responded to a letter he wrote to her at the NKVD’s behest. She wrote back in a jaunty tone on July 9. “Boris, dear! Finally I got your letter… Are you happy? Did you find a girl you can love instead of me?” she asked. Then she added: “You haven’t had time yet to know that I really got married. On June
