by Erik Larson
The stress of his post increased markedly as Captain Röhm pressed his demand for control of the military and as Heinrich Himmler sought to strengthen his grasp over secret-police operations throughout Germany. Diels had once said that his job required that he sit “on all sides of the fence at once,” but now even he recognized his position was no longer tenable. His insider’s view showed him the intensity of the passions at play and the unyielding character of the ambitions that underlay them. He knew as well that all parties involved viewed imprisonment and murder as useful political tools. He told Martha that even though he was now officially a colonel in Himmler’s SS, he was hated by Himmler and his associates. He began to fear for his life and at one point told Martha and Bill that he could be shot at any moment. “We didn’t take too seriously what he said,” she recalled. He had a tendency to be overly melodramatic, she knew, though she acknowledged that “his job was one in which anyone might become hysterical or paranoiac.” The strain did seem to be taking a toll on his health, however. He complained, she wrote, of “acute stomach and heart disorders.”
Sensing that a political eruption of some sort was inevitable, Diels met with Hermann Göring, still nominally his boss, to ask for a leave from the Gestapo. He cited illness as the reason. In his later memoir he described Göring’s reaction.
“You are sick?” Göring hissed. “You had better make up your mind to be very sick.”
“Yes, I am truly ill,” Diels said. He told Göring he had done all he could “to return the carriage of state to its proper path.” But now, he said, “I cannot go on.”
“All right, you are ill,” Göring said. “Therefore, you cannot remain in service, not for a single day longer. You are confined to your home since you are ill. You will not make any long-distance calls or write any letters. Above all else, watch your step.”
Prudence dictated an alternative course. Once again Diels left the country, but this time he checked himself into a sanatorium in Switzerland. Rumor held, not implausibly, that he had brought with him a cargo of damning secret files for delivery to a friend in Zurich who was to publish everything if Diels was shot.
A few weeks later Diels returned to Berlin, and soon afterward he invited Martha and Bill to his apartment. Diels’s wife led the pair into the living room, where they found Diels lying on a couch looking anything but cured. A couple of pistols lay on a table beside him next to a large map. Diels dismissed his wife, whom Martha described as “a pathetic passive-looking creature.”
The map, Martha saw, was covered with symbols and notations applied with inks of different colors that described a network of secret-police posts and agents. Martha found it terrifying, “a vast spider-web of intrigue.”
Diels was proud of it. “You know most of this is my work,” he said. “I have really organized the most effective system of espionage Germany has ever known.”
If he possessed such power, Martha asked him, why was he so clearly afraid?
He answered, “Because I know too much.”
Diels needed to shore up his defenses. He told Martha that the more he and she could be seen together in public, the safer he would feel. This was no mere line aimed at rekindling their romance. Even Göring was coming to see Diels as an asset of fading value. Amid the storm of clashing passions whirling through Berlin that spring, the gravest danger to Diels arose from the fact that he continued to resist choosing a side and as a result was distrusted in varying degrees by all camps. He grew sufficiently paranoid that he believed someone was trying to poison him.
Martha had no objection to spending more time with Diels. She liked being associated with him and having the insider’s view he afforded her. “I was young and reckless enough to want to be as closely in on every situation as I possibly could,” she wrote. But again, she possessed what Diels did not, the assurance that as the daughter of the American ambassador she was safe from harm.
A friend warned her, however, that in this case she was “playing with fire.”
Over the weeks that followed, Diels stayed close to Martha and behaved, she wrote, “like a frightened rabbit,” though she also sensed that a part of Diels—the old confident Lucifer—reveled in the game of extricating himself from his predicament.
“In some ways the danger he thought he was in was a challenge to his slyness and shrewdness,” she recalled. “Could he outwit them or not, could he escape them or not?”
CHAPTER 35
Confronting the Club
Dodd’s ship arrived at quarantine in New York harbor on Friday, March 23. He had hoped that his arrival would escape notice by the press, but once again his plans were frustrated. Reporters routinely met the great ocean liners of the day on the presumption, generally valid, that someone of importance would be aboard. Just in case, Dodd had prepared a brief, five-sentence statement, and he soon found himself reading it to two reporters who had spotted him. He explained that he had come back to America “on a short leave … in order to get some much-needed rest from the tense European atmosphere.” He added, “Contrary to the predictions of many students of international problems, I feel fairly certain that we shall not have war in the near future.”
He was heartened to find that the German vice consul in New York had come to meet the ship bearing a letter from Hitler for delivery to Roosevelt. Dodd was especially pleased that his friend Colonel House had sent his “handsome limousine” to pick him up and bring him to the colonel’s Manhattan home at East Sixty-eighth Street and Park Avenue to wait for his train to Washington, D.C.—a lucky thing, Dodd wrote in his diary, because taxi drivers were on strike “and if I had gone to a hotel the newspaper folk would have pestered me until my train for Washington departed.” Dodd and the colonel had a candid talk. “House gave me valuable information about unfriendly officials in the State Department with whom I would have to deal.”
Best of all, soon after his arrival Dodd received the latest chapter of his Old South, freshly typed by Martha’s friend Mildred Fish Harnack and sent via diplomatic pouch.
IN WASHINGTON, DODD CHECKED into the Cosmos Club, which at the time stood on Lafayette Square, just north of the White House. On his first morning in Washington, he walked to the State Department for the first of many meetings and lunches.
At eleven o’clock he met with Secretary Hull and Undersecretary Phillips. All three spent a good deal of time puzzling out how to respond to Hitler’s letter. Hitler praised Roosevelt’s efforts to restore America’s economy and stated that “duty, readiness for sacrifice, and discipline” were virtues that should be dominant in any culture. “These moral demands which the President places before every individual citizen of the United States, are also the quintessence of the German State philosophy which finds its expression in the slogan, ‘The Public Weal Transcends the Interests of the Individual.’ ”
Phillips called it a “strange message.” To Dodd, as well as to Hull and Phillips, it was obvious that Hitler hoped to draw a parallel between himself and Roosevelt and that the obligatory U.S. reply would have to be drafted very carefully. That task fell to Phillips and Western European affairs chief Moffat, the goal being, Moffat wrote, “to prevent our falling into the Hitler trap.” The resulting letter thanked Hitler for his kind words but noted that his message applied not to Roosevelt personally but rather to the American people as a whole, “who have freely and gladly made heroic efforts in the interest of recovery.”
In his diary Phillips wrote, “We sought to sidestep the impression that the President was becoming a Fascist.”
The next day, Monday, March 26, Dodd strolled to the White House for lunch with Roosevelt. They discussed a surge of hostility toward Germany that had arisen in New York in the wake of the mock trial earlier in the month. Dodd had heard one New Yorker express the fear that “there might easily be a little civil war” in New York City. “The president also spoke of this,” Dodd wrote, “and asked me, if I would do so, to get Chicago Jews to call off their Mock Trial set for mid-April.”
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Dodd agreed to try. He wrote to Jewish leaders, including Leo Wormser, to ask them “to quiet things if possible” and wrote as well to Colonel House to ask him to exert his influence in the same direction.
As anxious as Dodd was to get to his farm, he did relish the prospect of a conference set for early that week at which he at last would have the opportunity to bring his criticism of the policies and practices of the Foreign Service directly to the boys of the Pretty Good Club.
HE SPOKE BEFORE an audience that included Hull, Moffat, Phillips, Wilbur Carr, and Sumner Welles. Unlike in his Columbus Day speech in Berlin, Dodd was blunt and direct.
The days of “Louis XIV and Victoria style” had passed, he told them. Nations were bankrupt, “including our own.” The time had come “to cease grand style performances.” He cited an American consular official who had shipped enough furniture to fill a twenty-room house—and yet had only two people in his family. He added that a mere assistant of his “had a chauffeur, a porter, a butler, a valet, two cooks and two maids.”
Every official, he said, should be required to live within his salary, be it the $3,000 a year of a junior officer or the $17,500 that he himself received as a full-fledged ambassador, and everyone should be required to know the history and customs of his host country. The only men sent abroad should be those “who think of their country’s interests, not so much about a different suit of clothes each day or sitting up at gay but silly dinners and shows every night until 1 o’clock.”
Dodd sensed that this last point struck home. He noted in his diary, “Sumner Welles winced a little: the owner of a mansion in Washington which outshines the White House in some respects and is about as large.” Welles’s mansion, called by some the “house with a hundred rooms,” stood on Massachusetts Avenue off Dupont Circle and was renowned for its opulence. Welles and his wife also owned a 255-acre country estate just outside the city, Oxon Hill Manor.
After Dodd concluded his remarks, his audience praised him and applauded. “I was not fooled, however, after two hours of pretended agreement.”
Indeed, his lecture only deepened the ill feelings of the Pretty Good Club. By the time of his talk, some of its members, most notably Phillips and Moffat, privately had begun to express real hostility.
Dodd paid a visit to Moffat’s office. Later that day Moffat wrote a brief assessment of the ambassador in his diary: “He is … by no means a clear thinker. He will express great dissatisfaction with a situation and then reject every proposal to remedy it. He dislikes all his staff but yet does not wish any transferred. He is suspicious by turns of nearly everyone with whom he comes in contact and a little jealous.” Moffat called him “an unfortunate misfit.”
Dodd seemed unaware that he might be conjuring forces that could endanger his career. Rather he delighted in pricking the clubby sensibilities of his opponents. With clear satisfaction he told his wife, “Their chief protector”—presumably he meant Phillips or Welles—“is not a little disturbed. If he attacks it certainly is not in the open.”
CHAPTER 36
Saving Diels
The fear Diels felt grew more pronounced, to the point where in March he again went to Martha for help, this time in hopes of using her to acquire assistance from the U.S. embassy itself. It was a moment freighted with irony: the chief of the Gestapo seeking aid from American officials. Somehow Diels had gotten wind of a plan by Himmler to arrest him, possibly that very day. He had no illusions. Himmler wanted him dead.
Diels knew he had allies at the American embassy, namely Dodd and Consul General Messersmith, and believed they might be able to provide a measure of safety by expressing to Hitler’s regime their interest in his continued well-being. But Dodd, he knew, was on leave. Diels asked Martha to speak with Messersmith, who by now had returned from his own leave, to see what he could do.
Despite Martha’s inclination to view Diels as overly dramatic, this time she did believe he faced mortal peril. She went to see Messersmith at the consulate.
She was “obviously in a greatly perturbed situation,” Messersmith recalled. She broke down in tears and told him that Diels was to be arrested that day “and that it was almost certain that he would be executed.”
She composed herself, then pleaded with Messersmith to meet with Göring at once. She tried flattery, calling Messersmith the only man who could intercede “without being in danger of his own life.”
Messersmith was unmoved. By now he had grown to dislike Martha. He found her behavior—her various love affairs—repugnant. Given her presumed relationship with Diels, Messersmith was not surprised that she had come to his office in “this hysterical state.” He told her he could do nothing “and after a great deal of difficulty was able to get her out of my office.”
After she left, however, Messersmith began to reconsider. “I began thinking about the matter and realized that she was correct in saying one thing, and that is that Diels after all was one of the best in the regime, as was Göring and that in case anything happened to Diels and Himmler came in, it would weaken the position of Göring and of the more reasonable element in the party.” If Himmler ran the Gestapo, Messersmith believed, he and Dodd would have far more difficulty resolving future attacks against Americans, “for Himmler was known to be even more cold-blooded and ruthless than Dr. Diels.”
Messersmith was scheduled to attend a luncheon that afternoon at the Herrenklub, a men’s club for conservatives, hosted by two prominent Reichswehr generals, but now, recognizing that a talk with Göring was far more important, Messersmith saw that he might have to cancel. He called Göring’s office to arrange the meeting and learned that Göring had just left for a luncheon of his own—at the Herrenklub. Messersmith hadn’t known until then that Göring was to be the guest of honor at the generals’ lunch.
He realized two things: first, that the task of speaking with Göring had suddenly become much simpler, and second, that the luncheon was a landmark: “It was the first time since the Nazis came to power that the highest ranking officers of the German Army … were going to sit down to a table with Göring or any high ranking member of the Nazi regime.” It struck him that the lunch might signal that the army and government were closing ranks against Captain Röhm and his Storm Troopers. If so, it was an ominous sign, for Röhm was not likely to jettison his ambitions without a fight.
MESSERSMITH ARRIVED AT THE CLUB shortly after noon and found Göring conversing with the generals. Göring put his arm around Messersmith’s shoulders and told the others, “Gentlemen, this is a man who doesn’t like me at all, a man who doesn’t think very much of me, but he is a good friend of our country.”
Messersmith waited for an appropriate moment to take Göring aside. “I told him in very few words that a person in whom I had absolute confidence had called on me that morning and told me that Himmler was bent on getting rid of Diels during the course of the day and that Diels was actually to be bumped off.”
Göring thanked him for the information. The two rejoined the other guests, but a few moments later Göring offered his regrets and left.
What happened next—what threats were made, what compromises struck, whether Hitler himself intervened—isn’t clear, but by five o’clock that afternoon, April 1, 1934, Messersmith learned that Diels had been named Regierungspräsident, or regional commissioner, of Cologne and that the Gestapo would now be headed by Himmler.
Diels was saved, but Göring had suffered a significant defeat. He had acted not for the sake of past friendship but out of anger at the prospect of Himmler trying to arrest Diels in his own realm. Himmler, however, had won the greatest prize, the last and most important component of his secret-police empire. “It was,” Messersmith wrote, “the first setback that Göring had had since the beginning of the Nazi regime.”
A photograph of the moment when Himmler officially took control of the Gestapo, at a ceremony on April 20, 1934, shows Himmler speaking at the podium, his aspect bland as ever, as Diels stands nearby, faci
ng the camera. His face seems swollen as if from excess drink or lack of sleep, and his scars are exceptionally pronounced. He is the portrait of a man under duress.
In a conversation with a British embassy official that occurred at about this time, quoted in a memorandum later filed with the foreign office in London, Diels delivered a monologue on his own moral unease: “The infliction of physical punishment is not every man’s job, and naturally we were only too glad to recruit men who were prepared to show no squeamishness at their task. Unfortunately, we knew nothing about the Freudian side of the business, and it was only after a number of instances of unnecessary flogging and meaningless cruelty that I tumbled to the fact that my organization had been attracting all the sadists in Germany and Austria without my knowledge for some time past. It had also been attracting unconscious sadists, i.e. men who did not know themselves that they had sadist leanings until they took part in a flogging. And finally it had been actually creating sadists. For it seems that corporal chastisement ultimately arouses sadistic leanings in apparently normal men and women. Freud might explain it.”
APRIL BROUGHT STRANGELY LITTLE RAIN but a bumper crop of fresh secrets. Early in the month, Hitler and Defense Minister Blomberg learned that President Hindenburg had become ill, gravely so, and was unlikely to survive the summer. They kept the news to themselves. Hitler coveted the presidential authority still possessed by Hindenburg and planned upon his death to combine in himself the roles of chancellor and president and thereby at last acquire absolute power. But two potential barriers remained: the Reichswehr and Röhm’s Storm Troopers.
In mid-April, Hitler flew to the naval port of Kiel and there boarded a pocket battleship, the Deutschland, for a four-day voyage, accompanied by Blomberg; Admiral Erich Raeder, head of the navy; and General Werner von Fritsch, chief of the army command. Details are scarce, but apparently in the intimate quarters of the ship Hitler and Blomberg crafted a secret deal, truly a devil’s bargain, in which Hitler would neutralize Röhm and the SA in return for the army’s support for his acquisition of presidential authority upon Hindenburg’s death.