Hitlerland

by Nagorski, Andrew

  In her recollection of the day of her encounter, Martha added a somewhat sardonic note, which nonetheless reveals her state of mind: “Since I was appointed to change the history of Europe, I decided to dress in my most demure and intriguing best—which always appeals to the Germans: they want their women to be seen and not heard, and then only as appendages of the splendid male they accompany.”

  Putzi and Martha went to the Kaiserhof, Hitler’s favorite hotel, where they met Jan Kiepura, a Polish singer. They drank tea and chatted until Hitler, accompanied by his bodyguards and driver, sat down at a table nearby. Kiepura was called over to Hitler’s table and the two men talked for a few minutes. Then, Putzi walked over to Der Führer, bending his tall frame down to whisper something to him. Visibly excited, he returned to Martha, telling her that he had agreed to meet her. When Martha walked over to his table, Hitler stood up and kissed her hand, murmuring something that she didn’t catch since her German was still rudimentary then. Their encounter was very short, with Hitler kissing her hand once again as she went back to her table. From time to time, she recalled, he cast “curious, embarrassed stares” her way.

  That meeting left her “with a picture of a weak, soft face, with pouches under the eyes, full lips and very little bony facial structure.” She barely noticed his famous mustache, but she observed that his eyes were “startling and unforgettable—they seemed pale blue in color, were intense, unwavering, hypnotic.” Overall, she found the Hitler she met that afternoon to be “excessively gentle and modest” and “unobtrusive, communicative, informal.” She was struck by “a certain, quiet charm, almost a tenderness of speech and glance.”

  When Martha returned home that evening and told her father about her meeting with Hitler, the ambassador didn’t hide his amusement at how easily she was impressed by him. He did admit that Hitler could turn on personal charm, and, teasingly, told her not to wash her hands for a long time since she should preserve the extraordinary blessing of Hitler’s kiss. If anything, he persisted, she should wash carefully around the spot where his lips had blessed her. Martha was irritated by this ribbing, but she tried not to show it.

  Nothing more clearly demonstrated the difference in perceptions of Hitler up close than another even more fleeting encounter, this one with Robert Lochner, the teenage son of the AP bureau chief. Robert and his stepmother were at the opera in Berlin one evening, waiting for his father to arrive, when suddenly a phalanx of SS men burst in, clearing a path for Hitler. As the leader followed in their wake, there were shouts of “Heil Hitler,” and the Germans shot their right arms out in the obligatory right-handed salute. Instead of following suit, Robert lapsed into the pose of a surly American teenager. “I ostentatiously kept both of my hands in my pockets and demonstratively chewed gum, which the Nazis disapproved of,” he recalled. For a split second, this prompted Hitler to focus his attention on him, and the teenager was startled by the menacing intensity of his “piercing look.”

  Angus Thuermer, a cub reporter who worked in the AP bureau where Robert’s father was the boss, recalled how the younger Lochner explained his feelings after that short incident. “Ever afterwards, I could understand how young officers, or anyone else, for that matter, would be terrorized by Hitler’s eyes,” he said.

  Young as he was, Robert Lochner certainly understood Germany better than Martha Dodd—and was more attuned to the atmosphere of fear and intimidation that accompanied Hitler and the Nazis. But this wasn’t only a difference in the views of two young Americans. It also underscored how Hitler succeeded in favorably impressing women on so many occasions, particularly when in their company for the first time. Louis Lochner recalled attending a reception hosted by Joseph and Magda Goebbels in 1935, with many theater and movie people in attendance. Hitler appeared to love the company, pressing the hand of famed actress Dorothea Wieck, who blushed as he greeted her. Inviting her over to his table, he laughed and told stories, even slapping his thigh as he did so. And there was one thing that Lochner heard women saying over and over: “Once you look into Hitler’s eyes, you are his devoted follower forever.”

  Aside from Hitler, Martha Dodd was initially attracted to many German men who showed up on the endless diplomatic social circuit. She wasn’t that taken with the young Reichswehr officers she met, whom she dismissed as “extremely pleasant, handsome, courteous, and uninteresting.” But aside from Putzi, she was happy to be in the company of the likes of Ernst Udet, the World War I flying ace who took her up in his plane (Martha later wrote Sowing the Wind, a mediocre novel about an Udet-like character); Prince Louis Ferdinand, the grandson of Kaiser Wilhelm II and a frequent guest of the Dodds and the Lochners; and numerous young Foreign Ministry and SS men. One of these young men she dated, whom she at first considered to be part of the “blond Aryan wholesome-looking talent,” pressed her repeatedly for information about her father’s views on events in Germany. Finally recognizing what he was doing, she confessed that he was “one of the first disillusions I had in German official life.”

  While she was still in what she characterized as her “most violent pro-Nazi period,” Martha met a young French diplomat, who began taking her out with her parents’ permission. Not that Martha cared much about such formalities. Although her German male friends warned her that he was a French spy and she considered herself anti-French and pro-German, she was drawn to “the tall boy, romantic and perfect of feature.” When he denounced the militarism of the Nazis, she argued with him—but later she conceded that some of his arguments made her begin “to think a little.” Sylvia Crane, one of Martha’s friends, maintained that her political thinking was always guided by her love life. “She just liked sleeping with attractive men, and that’s how she learned about politics and history,” she said.

  Martha was certainly eclectic in her tastes. Early in her stay, she met the Gestapo chief Rudolf Diels. He was a frequent visitor to the Dodds’ residence, often to assure the ambassador that he was doing what he could to prevent violence against Americans. Martha’s father and other diplomats viewed him as more sympathetic to their grievances than other German officials. Nonetheless, he was also presiding over the early concentration camps, and Martha admitted she heard from several people that “at least twelve people a day” were killed during that period. But none of that prevented Martha from going out with him, dancing in nightclubs and taking long drives in the country together. “I was intrigued and fascinated by this human monster of sensitive face and cruel, broken beauty,” she declared. Nor, of course, did it matter that Diels was married; Martha dismissed his wife as “a pathetic passive-looking creature.”

  A young Jew who met Martha at several cocktail parties warned her that Diels was using her as protection, probably in some internal Nazi battles. “Martha, you are very silly, and you are playing with fire,” he said. But she wasn’t about to be dissuaded and kept seeing the Gestapo chief. “I was extremely interested in his type and his conversation,” she wrote. “He gave me, consciously and unconsciously, a picture of the backstage workings of espionage that I could have not got anywhere else.” It was a revealing comment that later could be read as an indirect admission about her own spying for a different regime.

  Martha was soon infected by Diels’s evident nervousness about his rivals within the party, and in December 1933 even told Messersmith, the U.S. consul general, that he feared for his life. He wanted Messersmith to write a letter to the Nazi authorities praising him, suggesting that he was doing a lot to keep U.S.-German relations on an even keel. Messersmith and Ambassador Dodd sympathized with him but didn’t feel they could write such a letter.

  Martha worried both about inadvertently saying something to Diels about her German friends that might lead to their deaths, and about Diels himself. After one late night of dancing, Diels came into the Dodds’ residence for a drink in the library before going home. It was evident he wanted to talk about whatever latest intrigues he had on his mind. Martha grabbed a pillow from the sofa. When Diels aske
d her what she was doing, she indicated she was going to cover the phone. That prompted a fleeting sinister smile, as Martha recalled, and a nod of approval.

  While Martha continued to take such measures, she admitted she got herself into “a nervous state that almost bordered on the hysterical.” She began replaying conversations in her head with various Germans, wondering if they were recorded or overheard. From her second-floor bedroom, she was suddenly prone to hear ominous footsteps on the gravel driveway, see moving shadows, and to assume any popping sound was a gunshot. As for Diels, in the period leading up to the Night of the Long Knives, he was like “a frightened rabbit,” Martha recalled, clinging to her. Diels survived the bloodletting of June 30, 1934, but earlier he lost his post of Gestapo chief, never attaining that prominent a position in the Nazi hierarchy again.

  Martha Dodd claimed that a variety of factors—everything from the crudeness of German propaganda to her exposure to a widening circle of friends—transformed her from an apologist for the Nazis into a fervent opponent in the spring of 1934. Not coincidentally, this was also the period when Martha began what was probably her most passionate affair. Her new lover was Boris Vinogradov. In her 1939 memoir Through Embassy Eyes, she never mentioned him by name, but he was “the young secretary in a foreign embassy” who took her to the lakeside beach on June 30. He was a tall, blond, handsome first secretary in the Soviet Embassy, and, because he had served earlier as the press secretary, was well known to American correspondents in Berlin. They found him to be good company when Martha would bring him by Die Taverne, the Italian restaurant where they gathered in the evenings.

  The other important new person in Martha’s life was Mildred Harnack, a fellow midwesterner who found herself in Germany. She had met Arvid Harnack, a German exchange student, at the University of Wisconsin and soon married into his distinguished, scholarly Prussian family. In 1929, the couple moved to Germany, and Mildred at first taught classes on American and British literature at the University of Berlin and later at a night school for adults. Watching the impact of the Depression on her students, she noted their sense of weariness since they knew “they had no future.” Like her German husband, she was troubled by the rise of the Nazis, but she was confident that they would fail to seize power. “It is said by people who are capable of estimating the present situation that no such dictatorship as is in Italy can be erected in Germany,” she wrote on July 24, 1932.

  Mildred’s confidence flowed from her faith that there was already an alternative model that would serve as the solution to the crisis of the capitalist system. She and Arvid had visited Russia, where she was awed by the atmosphere of “hopefulness and achievement.” She enthusiastically explained in a letter to her mother that the country was “the scene of an enormously important experiment in loving your neighbor as yourself.” Back in Berlin, the Harnacks became regular guests at Soviet Embassy receptions.

  Once the Nazis came to power, the Harnacks had to be careful to hide their political views, and Mildred avoided any more pro-Russian commentaries in her letters home. But when she met Martha, the two instantly hit it off. Mildred and Martha, with her new political outlook and Soviet lover, felt free to share their private thoughts with each other. And they were both quick to pass judgment on those who they felt hadn’t seen the light the way they had. Martha professed herself “amazed at the naïveté” of any Americans who still could have profascist leanings, seemingly oblivious to the irony that she would make such a statement so soon after her own conversion.

  On May 27, 1934, Mildred, Martha and Boris—along with Heinrich Maria Ledig-Rowohlt, the son of the publisher Ernst Rowohlt—drove to the farm of writer Hans Fallada, whose 1932 novel Little Man, What Now? was a huge bestseller in Germany and a major hit abroad. While the Nazis liked his grim portrayal of life in Weimar Germany, they were highly suspicious of him. Fallada tried to skirt current politics and even sought to ingratiate himself with the Nazis on occasion. Nonetheless, as numerous press attacks on him indicated, the lack of ideology in his books was enough to make the authorities discern an undercurrent of dangerously independent thinking.

  But Martha was irritated by Fallada’s decision to concentrate on his life on the farm with his wife and children, and his ostensibly apolitical writing. “He was isolated from life and happy in his isolation,” she wrote reproachfully. From their conversation, she continued, “though I got the impression that he was not and could not be a Nazi—what artist is?—I felt a certain resignation in his attitude.” Mildred was less judgmental, telling her companions that Fallada was a man with a conscience. “He is not happy, he is not a Nazi, he is not hopeless,” she said. In fact, Fallada’s last novel, Every Man Dies Alone, which he wrote right after World War II, would prove to be one of the most powerful fictional portrayals of the horrors of life in Germany under Hitler—and of the terrifying price that anyone paid who dared to resist the Nazis.

  That summer, with Vinogradov’s help, Martha made her first pilgrimage to her new ideal state: Russia. “I had had enough of blood and terror to last me for the rest of my life,” she declared by way of explaining why she was eager to take a break from Germany. And, of course, what other country was freer of blood and terror than the Soviet Union? From the moment she set foot in Moscow, and probably even before she made her trip, her blind admiration of Stalin’s Russia knew no bounds, even exceeding her earlier zeal for Hitler’s Germany. There was a complete lack of militarism, arrogance, insolent behavior and regimentation, she giddily reported. The Bolshevik Revolution had been a triumph for humanity. “One felt in Moscow that the struggle was over, that the fruits of victory were being cherished and enjoyed by everyone.”

  While she confessed that there was still some startling poverty, everything was being done to eliminate it, she insisted. Stalin was setting an example by living modestly, the workers were living happily in their workers’ state, and “the conscience and idealism that lie latent in most mankind were being stimulated and awakened in me,” she wrote. That didn’t prevent her from boasting that she was served caviar three times a day on a Volga cruise ship, along with “marvelous nourishing Russian soups, excellent meats, butter, ice cream, fish . . .” Or from “marveling over the fact that everything good in life was being supplied for the vast majority of the population.” Unlike Germany, she added, Russia was “almost like a democratic country,” and threatened no one.

  Despite her new anti-Nazi, pro-Soviet orientation, Martha was still the same woman when it came to matters of the heart. When she returned to Germany, she was, as always, more than eager to associate with any man who looked glamorous to her, no matter what his views. This was certainly the case with Thomas Wolfe, whose novel Look Homeward, Angel was a smash hit in Germany as elsewhere. When he visited Berlin in 1935, the young but already widely known writer was treated like a conquering hero. Arriving in Berlin, he was greeted at the American Express office by a huge number of letters, telegrams and phone messages from journalists, diplomats and admirers, all seeking to see him. Describing all this in a letter to his editor Max Perkins, Wolfe marveled that “for the last two weeks at least I have been famous in Berlin.”

  As Martha put it, “Tom, a huge man of six foot six, with the face of a great poet, strode the streets, oblivious of the sensation he created . . . To the desolateness of the intellectual life in Germany, Thomas Wolfe was like a symbol of the past, when great writers were great men.” Wolfe had visited Germany in the mid-1920s, and his fond memories of that era combined with his recent literary successes there prompted him to feel that Berlin was still a magical place. In his letter to Perkins from Berlin, he declared: “I feel myself welling up with energy and life again . . .” He had finally finished a new novel, Of Time and the River, and he was reveling in the adulation he found in Germany, going from party to party, where he was always the center of attention.

  “Part of Tom’s uncritical attitude towards Nazism can be explained by his own state of delirium,” Martha wrote.
Her own forgiving attitude was just as easy to explain: she loved escorting a celebrity like Wolfe around town and adding him to her list of conquests. It was a tempestuous affair, with Martha often reprimanding him for his heavy drinking. Decades later, Ledig-Rowohlt, the son of his German publisher, revealed to an interviewer a conversation that he and Wolfe had about Martha. Wolfe told him that Martha was “like a butterfly hovering around my penis.”

  Wolfe indicated that he did notice some “disturbing things” during his 1935 visit to Germany, but it wasn’t until he returned in the summer of the following year that his intoxication with his reception there wore off and he began to recognize what Nazi rule meant in practice. In an interview that Ledig-Rowohlt arranged for him with the Berliner Tageblatt, he still waxed poetic about Germany’s virtues. “If there were no Germany, it would be necessary to invent one,” he declared. “It is a magical country. I know Hildesheim, Nuremberg, Munich, the architecture of Germany, the soul of the place, the glory of her history and art.” But, as Martha explained, Wolfe returned to Germany “a much soberer person, this time eager to learn what lay beneath the surface of Nazi success and effectiveness.”

  After that visit, Wolfe wrote I Have a Thing to Tell You, a novella that was spread over three issues of the New Republic in March 1937; he later expanded his story and made it part of You Can’t Go Home Again, one of two novels that were published after his death from a brain disease in 1938, before he reached his thirty-eighth birthday. The novella is unabashedly autobiographical in terms of Wolfe’s feelings about Germany. It is the story of an American writer as he leaves Germany, “that great land whose image had been engraved upon my spirit in my childhood and my youth, before I had ever seen it . . . I had been at home in it and it in me.”

  But this Germany is one that the narrator realizes he must leave for the last time. A German friend frets about losing his job, his mistress and possibly even his life because “these stupid people”—the Nazis—are capable of anything. At the same time, he warns the American that he must not write too truthfully about what he observed, since the authorities would then ban his books and destroy his exalted reputation. “A man must write what he must write,” Wolfe’s narrator and alter ego replies. “A man must do what he must do.”