by Erik Larson
She was deeply concerned about events in Europe. In another letter to Martha soon afterward she wrote, “The world seems in such a mess now, I don’t know what will happen. Too bad that maniac was allowed to go his way so long uncurbed. We may be, sooner or later, involved, God forbid.”
Mrs. Dodd did not share her husband’s deep love of the Round Hill farm. It was fine for summers and vacations, but not as a full-time residence. She hoped they could secure an apartment in Washington where she could live for a portion of each year, with or without him. In the meantime, she set out to make the farm more habitable. She bought curtains in gold silk, a new General Electric refrigerator, and a new stove. As spring advanced, she grew increasingly unhappy about the lack of progress both in finding the Washington pied-à-terre and in fixing up the farmhouse. She wrote to Martha, “So far I can’t get anything done that I want in the house but about 8 or 10 men [are] working on stone fences, beautifying his fields, picking up rocks, hauling, etc. It makes me feel like ‘throwing up the sponge’ and quitting the whole d—business.”
On May 23, 1938, in another letter to her daughter, she wrote, “Wish I did have a home—Washington instead of Chicago. It would be lovely.”
Four days later, Mrs. Dodd was dead. On the morning of May 28, 1938, she failed to join Dodd for breakfast, as was her custom. They kept separate bedrooms. He went to check on her. “It was the greatest shock that ever came to me,” he wrote. She died of heart failure in her bed, with no advance warning of trouble. “She was only sixty-two years old, and I was sixty-eight,” Dodd wrote in his diary. “But there she lay, stone dead, and there was no help for it; and I was so surprised and sad I could hardly decide what to do.”
Martha attributed her mother’s death to “the strain and terror of life” in Berlin. On the day of the funeral Martha pinned roses to her mother’s burial dress and wore matching roses in her own hair. Now, for only the second time, Martha saw tears in her father’s eyes.
Suddenly the farm at Round Hill was not so much a place of rest and peace as one of melancholy. Dodd’s sorrow and loneliness took a toll on his already fragile health, but still he pressed on and gave lectures around the country, in Texas, Kansas, Wisconsin, Illinois, Maryland, and Ohio, always reprising the same themes—that Hitler and Nazism posed a great risk to the world, that a European war was inevitable, and that once war began the United States would find it impossible to remain aloof. One lecture drew an audience of seven thousand people. In a June 10, 1938, speech in Boston, at the Harvard Club—that den of privilege—Dodd talked of Hitler’s hatred of Jews and warned that his true intent was “to kill them all.”
Five months later, on November 9 and 10, came Kristallnacht, the Nazi pogrom that convulsed Germany and at last drove Roosevelt to issue a public condemnation. He told reporters he “could scarcely believe that such a thing could occur in twentieth century civilization.”
On November 30, Sigrid Schultz wrote to Dodd from Berlin. “My hunch is that you have lots of chances to say or think ‘didn’t I say so beforehand?’ Not that it is such a great consolation to have been right when the world seems divided between ruthless Vandals and decent people unable to cope with them. We were witnesses when much of the wrecking and looting occurred and yet there are times when you wonder whether what you actually saw was really true—there is a nightmarish quality around the place, even surpassing the oppressiveness of June 30.”
A STRANGE EPISODE SIDETRACKED DODD. On December 5, 1938, as he was driving to a speaking engagement in McKinney, Virginia, his car struck a four-year-old black girl named Gloria Grimes. The impact caused significant injury, including an apparent concussion. Dodd did not stop. “It was not my fault,” he later explained to a reporter. “The youngster ran into the path of my automobile about thirty feet ahead. I put on the brakes, turned the car and drove on because I thought the child had escaped.” He made things worse by seeming to be insensitive when, in a letter to the girl’s mother, he added, “Besides, I did not want the newspapers all over the country to publish a story about the accident. You know how newspapers love to exaggerate things of this sort.”
He was indicted, but on the day his trial was to begin, March 2, 1939, he changed his plea to guilty. His friend, Judge Moore, sat beside him, as did Martha. The court fined him $250 but did not sentence him to jail, citing his poor health and the fact he had paid $1,100 in medical costs for the child, who by now was, reportedly, nearly recovered. He lost his driving privileges and his right to vote, an especially poignant loss for so ardent a believer in democracy.
Shattered by the accident, disillusioned by his experience as ambassador, and worn down by declining health, Dodd retreated to his farm. His health worsened. He was diagnosed as suffering from a neurological syndrome called bulbar palsy, a slow, progressive paralysis of the muscles of the throat. In July 1939 he was admitted to Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City for minor abdominal surgery, but before the operation took place he contracted bronchial pneumonia, a frequent complication of bulbar palsy. He became gravely ill. As he lay near death, he was taunted from afar by the Nazis.
A front-page article in Goebbels’s newspaper Der Angriff said Dodd was in a “Jewish clinic.” The headline stated: “End of notorious anti-German agitator Dodd.”
The writer spat a puerile brand of malice typical of Der Angriff. “The 70-year-old man who was one of the strangest diplomats who ever existed is now back among those whom he served for 20 years—the activist war-mongering Jews.” The article called Dodd a “small, dry, nervous, pedantic man… whose appearance at diplomatic and social functions inevitably called forth yawning boredom.”
It took note of Dodd’s campaign to warn of Hitler’s ambitions. “After returning to the United States, Dodd expressed himself in the most irresponsible and shameless fashion over the German Reich, whose officials had for four years, with almost superhuman generosity, overlooked his and his family’s scandalous affairs, faux pas and political indiscretions.”
Dodd emerged from the hospital and retired to his farm, where he continued to nurture the hope that he would have time to finish the remaining volumes of his Old South. The governor of Virginia restored his right to vote, explaining that at the time of the accident Dodd was “ill and not entirely responsible.”
In September 1939, Hitler’s armies invaded Poland and sparked war in Europe. On September 18, Dodd wrote to Roosevelt that it could have been avoided if “the democracies in Europe” had simply acted together to stop Hitler, as he always had urged. “If they had co-operated,” Dodd wrote, “they would have succeeded. Now it is too late.”
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 Kurfürstendamm, 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 Ber
lin 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.
By now, however, Martha knew that a few years after that meeting Mildred had been arrested by the Gestapo, along with Arvid and dozens of others in their network. Arvid was tried and condemned to death by hanging; he was executed at Berlin’s Plötzensee Prison on December 22, 1942. The executioner used a short rope to ensure slow strangulation. Mildred was forced to watch. At her own trial she was sentenced to six years in prison. Hitler himself ordered a retrial. This time the sentence was death. On February 16, 1943, at 6:00 p.m., she was executed by guillotine. Her last words: “And I have loved Germany so.”
FOR A TIME AFTER leaving Berlin, Martha continued her covert flirtation with Soviet intelligence. Her code name was “Liza,” though this suggests more drama than surviving records support. Her career as a spy seems to have consisted mainly of talk and possibility, though the prospect of a less vaporous participation certainly intrigued Soviet intelligence officials. A secret cable from Moscow to New York in January 1942 called
Martha “a gifted, clever and educated woman” but noted that “she requires constant control over her behavior.” One rather more prudish Soviet operative was unimpressed. “She considers herself a Communist and claims to accept the party’s program. In reality ‘Liza’ is a typical representative of American bohemia, a sexually decayed woman ready to sleep with any handsome man.”
Through Martha’s efforts, her husband also aligned himself with the KGB—his code name was “Louis.” Martha and Stern were very public about their mutual interest in communism and leftist causes, and in 1953 they drew the attention of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, chaired then by Representative Martin Dies, which issued subpoenas to have them testify. They fled to Mexico, but as pressure from federal authorities increased, they moved again, settling ultimately in Prague, where they lived a very noncommunistic lifestyle in a three-story, twelve-room villa attended by servants. They bought a new black Mercedes.
At first, the idea of being an international fugitive appealed to Martha’s persistent sense of herself as a woman of danger, but as the years passed, a weariness overtook her. During the couple’s first years of exile, their son began exhibiting signs of severe psychic unrest and was diagnosed as schizophrenic. Martha became “obsessed”—her husband’s term—with the idea that the commotion of their flight and subsequent travels had caused Robert’s illness.
Martha and Stern found Prague an alien place with an unfathomable language. “We can’t say we like it here, to be perfectly honest,” she wrote to a friend. “Naturally we would prefer to go home but home won’t take us yet…. It is a life of considerable limitations intellectually and creatively (also we don’t speak the language; a great handicap) and we feel isolated and often very lonely.” She spent her time housekeeping and gardening: “fruit trees, lilacs, vegetables, flowers, birds, insects… only one snake in four years!”