In The Garden Of Beasts Part 7

"You're under arrest," Diels said.

Packebusch looked up abruptly. One instant he had been reading Diels's personal papers, and the next, Diels was standing before him. "Packebusch had no time to recover from his surprise," Diels wrote. "He stared at me as if I were an apparition."

Diels's men seized Packebusch. One officer took the SS captain's pistol from his gun belt on the wall, but apparently no one bothered to conduct a more thorough search of Packebusch himself. Police officers moved through the building to arrest other men whom Diels believed had taken part in the raid on his apartment. All the suspects were transported to Gestapo headquarters; Packebusch was brought to Diels's office.

There, in the early hours of morning, Diels and Packebusch sat facing each other, both livid. Diels's Alsatian wolf dog-in that time the official name for German shepherds-stood nearby, watchful.

Diels vowed to put Packebusch in prison.

Packebusch accused Diels of treason.

Infuriated by Packebusch's insolence, Diels rocketed from his chair in a flare of anger. Packebusch loosed his own freshet of obscenities and pulled a hidden pistol from a back pocket of his pants. He aimed it at Diels, finger on the trigger.

Diels's dog hurtled into the scene, leaping toward Packebusch, according to Diels's account. Two uniformed officers grabbed Packebusch and wrenched the gun from his hand. Diels ordered him placed in the Gestapo's house prison, in the bas.e.m.e.nt.

In short order, Goring and Himmler got involved and struck a compromise. Goring removed Diels as head of the Gestapo and made him a.s.sistant police commissioner in Berlin. Diels recognized that the new job was a demotion to a post with no real power-at least not the kind of power he would need to hold his own against Himmler if the SS chief chose to seek further revenge. Nonetheless he accepted the arrangement, and so things stood until one morning later that month, when two loyal employees flagged him down as he drove to work. They told him that agents of the SS were waiting for him in his office with an arrest order.

Diels fled. In his memoir he claims that his wife recommended he bring along a friend, an American woman, "who could be helpful when crossing borders." She lived in "a flat on Tiergartenstra.s.se," he wrote, and she liked risk: "I knew her enthusiasm for danger and adventure."

His clues bring Martha immediately to mind, but she made no mention of such a journey in her memoir or in any of her other writings.

Diels and his companion drove to Potsdam, then south to the border, where he left his car in a garage. He carried a false pa.s.sport. They crossed the border into Czechoslovakia and proceeded to the spa city of Carlsbad, where they checked into a hotel. Diels also took along some of his more sensitive files, as insurance.

"From his retreat in Bohemia," wrote Hans Gisevius, the Gestapo memoirist, "he threatened embarra.s.sing revelations, and asked a high price for keeping his mouth shut."

WITH DIELS GONE, many in Martha's growing circle of friends doubtless breathed a little more easily, especially those who harbored sympathy for communists or mourned the lost freedoms of the Weimar past. Her social life continued to blossom.

Of all her new friends, the one she found most compelling was Mildred Fish Harnack, whom she had first encountered on the train platform upon arriving in Berlin. Mildred spoke flawless German and by most accounts was a beauty, tall and slender, with long blond hair that she wore in a thick coil and large, serious blue eyes. She shunned all makeup. Later, after a certain secret of hers was revealed, a description of her would surface in Soviet intelligence files that sketched her as "very much the German Frau, an intensely Nordic type and very useful."

She stood out not just because of her looks, Martha saw, but also because of her manner. "She was slow to speak and express opinions," Martha wrote; "she listened quietly, weighing and evaluating the words, thoughts and motivations in conversation.... Her words were thoughtful, sometimes ambiguous when it was necessary to feel people out."

This art of parsing the motives and att.i.tudes of others had become especially important given how she and her husband, Arvid Harnack, had spent the preceding few years. The two had met in 1926 at the University of Wisconsin, where Mildred was an instructor. They married that August, moved to Germany, and eventually settled in Berlin. Along the way they demonstrated a talent for bringing people together. At each stop they formed a salon that convened at regular intervals for meals, conversation, lectures, even group readings of Shakespeare's plays, all echoes of a famous group they had joined in Wisconsin, the Friday Niters, founded by John R. Commons, a professor and leading Progressive who one day would become known as the "spiritual father" of Social Security.

In Berlin, in the winter of 193031, Arvid founded yet another group, this devoted to the study of Soviet Russia's planned economy. As the n.a.z.i Party gained sway, his field of interest became decidedly problematic, but he nonetheless arranged and led a tour of the Soviet Union for some two dozen German economists and engineers. While abroad he was recruited by Soviet intelligence to work secretly against the n.a.z.is. He agreed.

When Hitler came to power, Arvid felt compelled to disband his planned-economy group. The political climate had grown lethal. He and Mildred retreated to the countryside, where Mildred spent her time writing and Arvid took a job as a lawyer for the German airline Lufthansa. After the initial spasm of anticommunist terror subsided, the Harnacks returned to their apartment in Berlin. Surprisingly, given his background, Arvid got a job within the Ministry of Economics and began a rapid rise that prompted some of Mildred's friends in America to decide that she and Arvid had "gone n.a.z.i."

Early on, Martha knew nothing of Arvid's covert life. She loved visiting the couple's apartment, which was bright and cozy and pasteled with comforting hues: "dove tans, soft blues, and greens." Mildred filled large vases with lavender cosmos and placed them in front of a pale yellow wall. Martha and Mildred came to see each other as kindred spirits, both deeply interested in writing. By late September 1933 the two had arranged to write a column on books for an English-language newspaper called Berlin Topics Berlin Topics. In a September 25, 1933, letter to Thornton Wilder, Martha described the newspaper as "lousy" but said she hoped it might serve as a catalyst "to build up a little colony in the English-speaking group here.... Get people together who like books and authors."

When the Harnacks traveled, Mildred sent Martha postcards upon which she wrote poetic observations of the scenery before her and warm expressions of affection. On one card Mildred wrote, "Martha, you know that I love you and think of you through it all." She thanked Martha for reading and critiquing some of her writing. "It shows a gift in you," she wrote.

She closed with an inked sigh: "Oh my Dear, my Dear...life-" The ellipsis was hers.

To Martha these cards were like petals falling from an unseen place. "I prized these post-cards and short letters with their delicate, almost tremblingly sensitive prose. There was nothing studied or affected about them. Their feeling sprang simply from her full and joyous heart and had to be expressed."

Mildred became a regular guest at emba.s.sy functions, and by November she was earning extra pay typing the ma.n.u.script of the first volume of Dodd's Old South Old South. Martha, in turn, became a regular attendee at a new salon that Mildred and Arvid established, the Berlin equivalent of the Friday Niters. Ever the organizers, they acc.u.mulated a society of loyal friends-writers, editors, artists, intellectuals-who convened at their apartment several times a month for weekday suppers and Sat.u.r.day-afternoon teas. Here, Martha noted in a letter to Wilder, she met the writer Ernst von Salomon, notorious for having played a role in the 1922 a.s.sa.s.sination of Weimar foreign minister Walter Rathenau. She loved the cozy atmosphere Mildred conjured, despite having little money to spare. There were lamps, candles and flowers, and a tray of thin bread, cheese, liverwurst, and sliced tomatoes. Not a banquet, but enough. Her host, Martha told Wilder, was "the kind of person who has the sense or nonsense to put a candle behind a bunch of p.u.s.s.y willows or alpen rosen."

The talk was bright, smart, and daring. Too daring at times, at least in the view of Salomon's wife, whose perspective was shaped partly by the fact she was Jewish. She was appalled at how casually the guests would call Himmler and Hitler "utter fools" in her presence, without knowing who she was or where her sympathies lay. She watched one guest pa.s.s a yellow envelope to another and then wink like an uncle slipping a piece of forbidden candy to a nephew. "And there I sit on the sofa," she said, "and can hardly breathe."

Martha found it thrilling and gratifying, despite the group's anti-n.a.z.i bent. She staunchly defended the n.a.z.i revolution as offering the best way out of the chaos that had engulfed Germany ever since the past war. Her partic.i.p.ation in the salon reinforced her sense of herself as a writer and intellectual. In addition to attending the correspondents' Stammtisch Stammtisch at Die Taverne, she began spending a lot of time in the great old Berlin cafes, those still not fully "coordinated," such as the Josty on Potsdamer Platz and the Romanisches on the Kurfurstendamm. The latter, which could seat up to a thousand people, had a storied past as a haven for the likes of Erich Maria Remarque, Joseph Roth, and Billy Wilder, though all by now had been driven from Berlin. She went out to dinner often and to nightclubs like Ciro's and the Eden roof. Amba.s.sador Dodd's papers are silent on the matter, but given his frugality he must have found Martha to be an unexpectedly, and alarmingly, costly presence on the family ledger. at Die Taverne, she began spending a lot of time in the great old Berlin cafes, those still not fully "coordinated," such as the Josty on Potsdamer Platz and the Romanisches on the Kurfurstendamm. The latter, which could seat up to a thousand people, had a storied past as a haven for the likes of Erich Maria Remarque, Joseph Roth, and Billy Wilder, though all by now had been driven from Berlin. She went out to dinner often and to nightclubs like Ciro's and the Eden roof. Amba.s.sador Dodd's papers are silent on the matter, but given his frugality he must have found Martha to be an unexpectedly, and alarmingly, costly presence on the family ledger.

Martha hoped to stake a place in Berlin's cultural landscape all her own, not just by dint of her friends.h.i.+p with the Harnacks, and she wanted that place to be a prominent one. She brought Salomon to one staid U.S. emba.s.sy function, clearly hoping to cause a stir. She succeeded. In a letter to Wilder she exulted in the crowd's reaction as Salomon appeared: "the astonishment (there was a little hushed gasping and whispering behind hands from the oh so proper gathering)...Ernst von Salomon! accomplice in the Rathenau murder..."

She coveted attention and got it. Salomon described the guests gathered at one U.S. emba.s.sy party-possibly the same one-as "the capital's jeunesse doree, smart young men with perfect manners...smiling attractively or laughing gaily at Martha Dodd's witty sallies."

She grew bolder. The time had come, she knew, to start throwing some parties of her own.

MEANWHILE DIELS, STILL ABROAD and living well at a sw.a.n.k hotel in Carlsbad, began putting out feelers to gauge the mood back in Berlin, whether it was safe yet for him to return; for that matter, whether it would ever be safe. and living well at a sw.a.n.k hotel in Carlsbad, began putting out feelers to gauge the mood back in Berlin, whether it was safe yet for him to return; for that matter, whether it would ever be safe.

CHAPTER 18.

Warning from a Friend Martha grew increasingly confident about her social appeal, enough so that she organized her own afternoon salon, modeled on the teas and evening discussion groups of her friend Mildred Fish Harnack. She also threw herself a birthday party. Both events unfolded in ways markedly different from what she had hoped for.

In selecting guests for her salon she used her own contacts as well as Mildred's. She invited several dozen poets, writers, and editors, for the ostensible purpose of meeting a visiting American publisher. Martha hoped "to hear amusing conversation, some exchange of stimulating views, at least conversation on a higher plane than one is accustomed to in diplomatic society." But the guests brought an unexpected companion.

Instead of forming a lively and vibrant company with her at its center, the crowd became atomized, small groups here and there. A poet sat in the library with several guests cl.u.s.tered near. Others gathered tightly around the guest of honor, exhibiting what Martha termed "a pathetic eagerness to know what was happening in America." Her Jewish guests looked especially ill at ease. The talk lagged; the consumption of food and alcohol surged. "The rest of the guests were standing around drinking heavily and devouring plates of food," Martha wrote. "Probably many of them were poor and actually ill-fed, and the others were nervous and anxious to conceal it."

In all, Martha wrote, "it was a dull and, at the same time, tense afternoon." The uninvited guest was fear, and it haunted the gathering. The crowd, she wrote, was "so full of frustration and misery...of tension, broken spirits, doomed courage or tragic and hated cowardice, that I vowed never to have such a group again in my house."

Instead she resigned herself to helping the Harnacks with their regular soirees and teas. They did have a gift for gathering loyal and compelling friends and holding them close. The idea that one day it would kill them would have seemed at the time, to Martha, utterly laughable.

THE GUEST LIST for her birthday party, set for October 8, her actual birth date, included a princess, a prince, several of her correspondent friends, and various officers of the SA and SS, "young, heel-clicking, courteous almost to the point of absurdity." Whether Boris Winogradov attended is unclear, though by now Martha was seeing him "regularly." It's possible, even likely, that she didn't invite him, for the United States still had not recognized the Soviet Union. for her birthday party, set for October 8, her actual birth date, included a princess, a prince, several of her correspondent friends, and various officers of the SA and SS, "young, heel-clicking, courteous almost to the point of absurdity." Whether Boris Winogradov attended is unclear, though by now Martha was seeing him "regularly." It's possible, even likely, that she didn't invite him, for the United States still had not recognized the Soviet Union.

Two prominent n.a.z.i officials made appearances at the party. One was Putzi Hanfstaengl, the other Hans Thomsen, a young man who served as liaison between the Foreign Ministry and Hitler's chancellery. He had never exhibited the overheated swoon so evident in other n.a.z.i zealots, and as a consequence he was well liked by members of the diplomatic corps and a frequent visitor to the Dodds' home. Martha's father often spoke with him in terms more blunt than diplomatic protocol allowed, confident that Thomsen would relay his views to senior n.a.z.i officials, possibly even to Hitler himself. At times Martha had the impression that Thomsen might harbor personal reservations about Hitler. She and Dodd called him "Tommy."

Hanfstaengl arrived late, as was his custom. He craved attention, and by dint of his immense height and energy always got it, no matter how crowded the room. He had become immersed in conversation with a musically knowledgeable guest about the merits of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony Unfinished Symphony when Martha walked to the family's Victrola and put on a recording of the n.a.z.i hymn to Horst Wessel, the anthem she had heard sung in Nuremberg by the parading Storm Troopers. when Martha walked to the family's Victrola and put on a recording of the n.a.z.i hymn to Horst Wessel, the anthem she had heard sung in Nuremberg by the parading Storm Troopers.

Hanfstaengl seemed to enjoy the music. Hans Thomsen clearly did not. He stood abruptly, then marched to the record player and switched it off.

In her most innocent manner, Martha asked him why he didn't like the music.

Thomsen glared, his face hard. "That is not the sort of music to be played for mixed gatherings and in a flippant manner," he scolded. "I won't have you play our anthem, with its significance, at a social party."

Martha was stunned. This was her house, her party, and, moreover, American ground. She could do as she pleased.

Hanfstaengl looked at Thomsen with what Martha described as "a vivid look of amus.e.m.e.nt tinged with contempt." He shrugged his shoulders, then sat down at the piano and began hammering away with his usual boisterous elan.

Later, Hanfstaengl took Martha aside. "Yes," he said, "there are some people like that among us. People who have blind spots and are humorless-one must be careful not to offend their sensitive souls."

For Martha, however, Thomsen's display had a lingering effect of surprising power, for it eroded-albeit slightly-her enthusiasm for the new Germany, in the way a single ugly phrase can tilt a marriage toward decline.

"Accustomed all my life to the free exchange of views," she wrote, "the atmosphere of this evening shocked me and struck me as a sort of violation of the decencies of human relations.h.i.+p."

DODD TOO WAS FAST GAINING an appreciation of the p.r.i.c.kly sensitivities of the day. No event provided a better measure of these than a speech he gave before the Berlin branch of the American Chamber of Commerce on Columbus Day, October 12, 1933. His talk managed to stir a furor not only in Germany but also, as Dodd was dismayed to learn, within the State Department and among the many Americans who favored keeping the nation from entangling itself in European affairs. an appreciation of the p.r.i.c.kly sensitivities of the day. No event provided a better measure of these than a speech he gave before the Berlin branch of the American Chamber of Commerce on Columbus Day, October 12, 1933. His talk managed to stir a furor not only in Germany but also, as Dodd was dismayed to learn, within the State Department and among the many Americans who favored keeping the nation from entangling itself in European affairs.

Dodd believed that an important part of his mission was to exert quiet pressure toward moderation or, as he wrote in a letter to the Chicago lawyer Leo Wormser, "to continue to persuade and entreat men here not to be their own worst enemies." The invitation to speak seemed to present an ideal opportunity.

His plan was to use history to telegraph criticism of the n.a.z.i regime, but obliquely, so that only those in the audience with a good grasp of ancient and modern history would understand the underlying message. In America a speech of this nature would have seemed anything but heroic; amid the mounting oppression of n.a.z.i rule, it was positively daring. Dodd explained his motivation in a letter to Jane Addams. "It was because I had seen so much of injustice and domineering little groups, as well as heard the complaints of so many of the best people of the country, that I ventured as far as my position would allow and by historical a.n.a.logy warned men as solemnly as possible against half-educated leaders being permitted to lead nations into war."

He gave the talk the innocuous t.i.tle "Economic Nationalism." By citing the rise and fall of Caesar and episodes from French, English, and U.S. history, Dodd sought to warn of the dangers "of arbitrary and minority" government without ever actually mentioning contemporary Germany. It was not the kind of thing a traditional diplomat might have undertaken, but Dodd saw it as simply fulfilling Roosevelt's original mandate. In defending himself later, Dodd wrote, "The President told me pointedly that he wanted me to be a standing representative and spokesman (on occasion) of American ideals and Philosophy."

He spoke in a banquet room at the Adlon Hotel before a large audience that included a number of senior government officials, including Reichsbank president Hjalmar Schacht and two men from Goebbels's ministry of propaganda. Dodd knew he was about to step upon very sensitive terrain. He understood as well, given the many foreign correspondents in the room, that the talk would get wide press coverage in Germany, America, and Britain.

As he began to read, he sensed a quiet excitement permeate the hall. "In times of great stress," he began, "men are too apt to abandon too much of their past social devices and venture too far upon uncharted courses. And the consequence has always been reaction, sometimes disaster." He stepped into the deep past to begin his allusive journey with the examples of Tiberius Gracchus, a populist leader, and Julius Caesar. "Half-educated statesmen today swing violently away from the ideal purpose of the first Gracchus and think they find salvation for their troubled fellows in the arbitrary modes of the man who fell an easy victim to the cheap devices of the lewd Cleopatra." They forget, he said, that "the Caesars succeeded only for a short moment as measured by the test of history."

He described similar moments in English and French history and here offered the example of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the powerful minister of finance under Louis XIV. In an apparent allusion to the relations.h.i.+p between Hitler and Hindenburg, he told his audience how Colbert "was granted despotic powers. He dispossessed hundreds of great families of newly rich folk, handed their properties over to the Crown, condemned thousands to death because they resisted him.... The recalcitrant landed aristocracy was everywhere subdued, parliaments were not allowed to a.s.semble." Autocratic rule persisted in France until 1789, the start of the French Revolution, when "with a crash and a thunder" it collapsed. "Governments from the top fail as often as those from the bottom; and every great failure brings a sad social reaction, thousands and millions of helpless men laying down their lives in the unhappy process. Why may not statesmen study the past and avoid such catastrophes?"

After a few more allusions, he came to his ending. "In conclusion," he said, "one may safely say that it would be no sin if statesmen learned enough of history to realize that no system which implies control of society by privilege seekers has ever ended in any other way than collapse." To fail to learn from such "blunders of the past," he said, was to end up on a course toward "another war and chaos."

The applause, Dodd said in his diary, "was extraordinary." In describing the moment to Roosevelt, Dodd noted that even Schacht "applauded extravagantly," as did "all other Germans present. I have never noted more unanimous approval." He wrote to Secretary Hull, "When the thing was over about every German present showed and expressed a kind of approval which revealed the thought: 'You have said what all of us have been denied the right to say.'" An official of the Deutsche Bank called to express his own agreement. He told Dodd, "Silent, but anxious Germany, above all the business and University Germany, is entirely with you and most thankful that you are here and can say what we can not say."

That these listeners understood the true intent of Dodd's speech was obvious. Afterward, Bella Fromm, the society columnist for the Vossische Zeitung Vossische Zeitung, who was fast becoming a friend of the Dodd family, told him, "I enjoyed all these nicely disguised hints against Hitler and Hitlerism."

Dodd gave her an arch grin. "I had no delusions about Hitler when I was appointed to my post in Berlin," he answered. "But I had at least hoped to find some decent people around Hitler. I am horrified to discover that the whole gang is nothing but a horde of criminals and cowards."

Fromm later chided the French amba.s.sador to Germany, Andre Francois-Poncet, for missing the speech. His response encapsulated a fundamental quandary of traditional diplomacy. "The situation is very difficult," he said, with a smile. "One is at once a diplomat and must hide one's feelings. One must please one's superiors at home and yet not be expelled from here but I too am glad that his Excellency Mr. Dodd cannot be subverted by flattery and high honor."

Dodd was heartened by the response from his audience. He told Roosevelt, "My interpretation of this is that all liberal Germany is with us-and more than half of Germany is at heart liberal."

The response elsewhere was decidedly less positive, as Dodd quickly found. Goebbels blocked publication of the speech, although three large newspapers published excerpts anyway. The next day, Friday, Dodd arrived at Foreign Minister Neurath's office for a previously scheduled meeting, only to be told Neurath could not see him-a clear breach of diplomatic custom. In a cable to Was.h.i.+ngton that afternoon, Dodd told Secretary Hull that Neurath's action seemed "to const.i.tute a serious affront to our Government." Dodd finally got to see Neurath at eight o'clock that night. Neurath claimed to have been too busy to see him during the day, but Dodd knew that the minister had been free enough from pressing obligations to have lunch with a minor diplomat. Dodd wrote in his diary that he suspected Hitler himself might have forced the postponement "as a sort of rebuke for my speech of yesterday."

To his greater surprise, he also sensed a groundswell of criticism from America and took steps to defend himself. He promptly sent Roosevelt a verbatim copy and told the president he was doing so because he feared "that some embarra.s.sing interpretations may have been put out at home." That same day he also sent a copy to Undersecretary Phillips, "in the hope that you, acquainted with all the precedents, may explain to Secretary Hull-i.e., if he or anybody else in the Department seems to think I have done our cause here any harm."

If he expected Phillips to rise to his defense, he was mistaken.

Phillips and other senior men in the State Department, including Moffat, the Western European affairs chief, were becoming increasingly unhappy with the amba.s.sador. These ranking members of Hugh Wilson's "pretty good club" seized upon Dodd's speech as further evidence that he was the wrong man for the post. Moffat in his diary likened Dodd's performance to "the schoolmaster lecturing his pupils." Phillips, master of the art of palace whisper, took delight in Dodd's discomfort. He ignored several of Dodd's letters, in which the amba.s.sador sought official advice on whether to accept future public-speaking offers. At last Phillips did reply, with apologies, explaining "that I was in doubt whether any words from me could be of help or guidance to you who are living in a world so wholly different from that in which most amba.s.sadors find themselves."

Though he congratulated Dodd on the "high art" he exhibited in crafting a speech that let him speak his mind yet avoid giving direct offense, Phillips also offered a quiet rebuke. "In brief, my feeling is that an Amba.s.sador, who is a privileged guest of the country to which he is accredited, should be careful not to give public expression to anything in the nature of criticism of his adopted country, because in so doing, he loses ipso facto the confidence of those very public officials whose good-will is so important to him in the success of his mission."

Dodd still seemed unaware of it, but several members of the Pretty Good Club had begun stepping up their campaign against him, with the ultimate aim of ousting him from their ranks. In October his longtime friend Colonel House sent him a quiet, sidesaddle warning. First came the good news. House had just met with Roosevelt. "It was delightful to hear the President say that he was pleased beyond measure with the work you are doing in Berlin."

But then House had visited the State Department. "In the strictest confidence, they did not speak of you with the same enthusiasm as the President," he wrote. "I insisted on something concrete and all that I could get was that you did not keep them well informed. I am telling you this so you may be guided in the future."

ON SAt.u.r.dAY, OCTOBER 14, two days after his Columbus Day address, Dodd was in the middle of a dinner party he was hosting for military and naval attaches when he received startling news. Hitler had just announced his decision to withdraw Germany from the League of Nations and from a major disarmament conference that had been under way in Geneva, off and on, since February 1932. 14, two days after his Columbus Day address, Dodd was in the middle of a dinner party he was hosting for military and naval attaches when he received startling news. Hitler had just announced his decision to withdraw Germany from the League of Nations and from a major disarmament conference that had been under way in Geneva, off and on, since February 1932.

Dodd found a radio and immediately heard the coa.r.s.e voice of the chancellor, though he was struck by the absence of Hitler's usual histrionics. Dodd listened intently as. .h.i.tler portrayed Germany as a well-meaning, peace-seeking nation whose modest desire for equality of armaments was being opposed by other nations. "It was not the address of a thinker," Dodd wrote in his diary, "but of an emotionalist claiming that Germany had in no way been responsible for the World War and that she was the victim of wicked enemies."

It was a stunning development. In one stroke, Dodd realized, Hitler had emasculated the League and virtually nullified the Treaty of Versailles, clearly declaring his intention to rearm Germany. He announced as well that he was dissolving the Reichstag and would hold new elections on November 12. The ballot also would invite the public to pa.s.s judgment upon his foreign policy through a yes-or-no plebiscite. Secretly Hitler also gave orders to General Werner von Blomberg, his minister of defense, to prepare for possible military action by League members seeking to enforce the Treaty of Versailles-although Blomberg knew full well that Germany's small army could not hope to prevail against a combined action by France, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. "That the allies at this time could easily have overwhelmed Germany is as certain as it is that such an action would have brought the end of the Third Reich in the very year of its birth," wrote William s.h.i.+rer in his cla.s.sic work, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, but Hitler "knew the mettle of his foreign adversaries as expertly and as uncannily as he had sized up that of his opponents at home."

Though Dodd continued to nurture the hope that the German government would grow more civil, he recognized that Hitler's two decisions signaled an ominous s.h.i.+ft away from moderation. The time had come, he knew, to meet with Hitler face-to-face.

Dodd went to bed that night deeply troubled.

SHORTLY BEFORE NOON ON TUESDAY, October 17, 1933, Roosevelt's "standing liberal" set out in top hat and tails for his first meeting with Adolf Hitler.

CHAPTER 19.

Matchmaker Putzi Hanfstaengl knew of Martha's various romantic relations.h.i.+ps, but by the fall of 1933 he had begun to imagine for her a new partner.

Having come to feel that Hitler would be a much more reasonable leader if only he fell in love, Hanfstaengl appointed himself matchmaker. He knew this would not be easy. As one of Hitler's closest a.s.sociates, he recognized that the history of Hitler's relations.h.i.+ps with women was an odd one, marred by tragedy and persistent rumors of unsavory behavior. Hitler liked women, but more as stage decoration than as sources of intimacy and love. There had been talk of numerous liaisons, typically with women much younger than he-in one case a sixteen-year-old named Maria Reiter. One woman, Eva Braun, was twenty-three years his junior and had been an intermittent companion since 1929. So far, however, Hitler's only all-consuming affair had been with his young niece, Geli Raubal. She was found shot to death in Hitler's apartment, his revolver nearby. The most likely explanation was suicide, her means of escaping Hitler's jealous and oppressive affection-his "clammy possessiveness," as historian Ian Kershaw put it. Hanfstaengl suspected that Hitler once had been attracted to his own wife, Helena, but she a.s.sured him there was no cause for jealousy. "Believe me," she said, "he's an absolute neuter, not a man."

Hanfstaengl telephoned Martha at home.

"Hitler needs a woman," he said. "Hitler should have an American woman-a lovely woman could change the whole destiny of Europe."

He got to the point: "Martha," he said, "you are the woman!"

PART IV.

How the Skeleton Aches

The Tiergarten, January 1934 ( (photo credit p4.1)

CHAPTER 20.

The Fuhrer's Kiss.

Dodd walked up a broad stairway toward Hitler's office, at each bend encountering SS men with their arms raised "Caesar style," as Dodd put it. He bowed in response and at last entered Hitler's waiting room. After a few moments the black, tall door to Hitler's office opened. Foreign Minister Neurath stepped out to welcome Dodd and to bring him to Hitler. The office was an immense room, by Dodd's estimate fifty feet by fifty feet, with ornately decorated walls and ceiling. Hitler, "neat and erect," wore an ordinary business suit. Dodd noted that he looked better than newspaper photographs indicated.

Even so, Hitler did not cut a particularly striking figure. He rarely did. Early in his rise it was easy for those who met him for the first time to dismiss him as a nonent.i.ty. He came from plebeian roots and had failed to distinguish himself in any way, not in war, not in work, not in art, though in this last domain he believed himself to have great talent. He was said to be indolent. He rose late, worked little, and surrounded himself with the lesser lights of the party with whom he felt most comfortable, an entourage of middlebrow souls that Putzi Hanfstaengl derisively nicknamed the "Chauffeureska," consisting of bodyguards, adjutants, and a chauffeur. He loved movies-King Kong was a favorite-and he adored the music of Richard Wagner. He dressed badly. Apart from his mustache and his eyes, the features of his face were indistinct and unimpressive, as if begun in clay but never fired. Recalling his first impression of Hitler, Hanfstaengl wrote, "Hitler looked like a suburban hairdresser on his day off." was a favorite-and he adored the music of Richard Wagner. He dressed badly. Apart from his mustache and his eyes, the features of his face were indistinct and unimpressive, as if begun in clay but never fired. Recalling his first impression of Hitler, Hanfstaengl wrote, "Hitler looked like a suburban hairdresser on his day off."

Nonetheless the man had a remarkable ability to transform himself into something far more compelling, especially when speaking in public or during private meetings when some topic enraged him. He had a knack as well for projecting an aura of sincerity that blinded onlookers to his true motives and beliefs, though Dodd had not yet come to a full appreciation of this aspect of his character.