Erik Larson - In the Garden of Beasts

Martha delighted in the very entertainments that so wore on her father. As the daughter of the American ambassador she possessed instant cachet and in short order found herself sought after by men of all ranks, ages, and nationalities. Her divorce from her banker husband, Bassett, was still pending, but all that remained were the legal formalities. She considered herself free to behave as she wished and to disclose or not disclose the legal reality of her marriage. She found secrecy a useful and engaging tool: outwardly she looked the part of a young American virgin, but she knew sex and liked it, and especially liked the effect when a man learned the truth. “I suppose I practiced a great deception on the diplomatic corps by not indicating that I was a married woman at that time,” she wrote. “But I must admit I rather enjoyed being treated like a maiden of eighteen knowing all the while my dark secret.”

She had ample opportunity to meet new men. The house on Tiergartenstrasse was always full of students, German officials, embassy secretaries, correspondents, and men from the Reichswehr, the SA, and the SS. The Reichswehr officers carried themselves with aristocratic élan and confessed to her their secret hopes for a restoration of the German monarchy. She found them “extremely pleasant, handsome, courteous, and uninteresting.”

She caught the attention of Ernst Udet, a flying ace from the Great War, who in the years since had become famous throughout Germany as an aerial adventurer, explorer, and stunt pilot. She went falcon hunting with Udet’s fellow ace, Göring, at his vast estate, Carinhall, named for his dead Swedish wife. Martha had a brief affair with Putzi Hanfstaengl, or so his son, Egon, later claimed. She was frankly sexual and put the house to good use, taking full advantage of her parents’ habit of going to bed early. Eventually she would have an affair with Thomas Wolfe when the writer visited Berlin; Wolfe would tell a friend later that she was “like a butterfly hovering around my penis.”

One of her lovers was Armand Berard, third secretary of the French embassy—six and a half feet tall and “incredibly handsome,” Martha recalled. Before Berard asked her out on their first date, he asked Ambassador Dodd for permission, an act that Martha found both charming and amusing. She did not tell him of her marriage, and as a consequence, much to her secret delight, he treated her at first as a sexual ingenue. She knew that she possessed great power over him and that even some casual act or comment could drive him to despair. In their estranged periods she would see other men—and make sure he knew it.

“You are the only person on earth who can break me,” he wrote at one point, “but how well you know it and how you seem to rejoice in doing so.” He begged her not to be so hard. “I can’t stand it,” he wrote. “If you realized how unhappy I am, you would probably pity me.”

For one suitor, Max Delbrück, a young biophysicist, the recollection of her skill at manipulation remained fresh even four decades later. He was slender and had a cleanly sculpted chin and masses of dark, neatly combed hair, for a look that evoked a young Gregory Peck. He was destined for great things, including a Nobel Prize that would be awarded in 1969.

In a late-life exchange of letters, Martha and Delbrück reminisced about their time together in Berlin. She recalled their innocence as they sat together in one of the reception rooms and wondered if he did as well.

“Of course I remember the green damask room off the dining room in the Tiergartenstrasse,” he wrote. But his recollection diverged a bit from hers: “We did not only sit there modestly.”

With a bit of dusty pique he reminded her of one rendezvous at the Romanisches Café. “You came terribly late and then yawned away, and explained that you did that because you felt relaxed in my company, and that it was a compliment to me.”

With no small degree of irony, he added, “I became quite enthusiastic about this idea (after first getting upset), and have been yawning at my friends ever since.”

Martha’s parents gave her full independence, with no restrictions on her comings or goings. It was not uncommon for her to stay out until early in the morning with all manner of escorts, yet family correspondence is surprisingly free of censorious comment.

Others noticed, however, and disapproved, among them Consul General George Messersmith, who communicated his distaste to the State Department, thereby adding fuel to the quietly growing campaign against Dodd. Messersmith knew of Martha’s affair with Udet, the flying ace, and believed she had been involved in romantic affairs with other ranking Nazis, including Hanfstaengl. In a “personal and confidential” letter to Jay Pierrepont Moffat, the Western European affairs chief, Messersmith wrote that these affairs had become grist for gossip. He assessed them as mostly harmless—except in the case of Hanfstaengl. He feared that Martha’s relationship with Hanfstaengl and her seeming lack of discretion caused diplomats and other informants to be more reticent about what they told Dodd, fearing that their confidences would make their way back to Hanfstaengl. “I often felt like saying something to the Ambassador about it,” Messersmith told Moffat, “but as it was rather a delicate matter, I confined myself to making it clear as to what kind of a person Hanfstaengl really is.”

Messersmith’s view of Martha’s behavior hardened over time. In an unpublished memoir he wrote that “she had behaved so badly in so many ways, especially in view of the position held by her father.”

The Dodds’ butler, Fritz, framed his own criticism succinctly: “That was not a house, but a house of ill repute.”

MARTHA’S LOVE LIFE took a dark turn when she was introduced to Rudolf Diels, the young chief of the Gestapo. He moved with ease and confidence, yet unlike Putzi Hanfstaengl, who invaded a room, he entered unobtrusively, seeping in like a malevolent fog. His arrival at a party, she wrote, “created a nervousness and tension that no other man possibly could, even when people did not know his identity.”

What most drew her attention was the tortured landscape of his face, which she described as “the most sinister, scar-torn face I have ever seen.” One long scar in the shape of a shallow “V” marked his right cheek; others arced below his mouth and across his chin; an especially deep scar formed a crescent at the bottom of his left cheek. His overall appearance was striking, that of a damaged Ray Milland—a “cruel, broken beauty,” as Martha put it. His was the opposite of the bland handsomeness of the young Reichswehr officers, and she was drawn to him immediately, his “lovely” lips, his “jet-black luxuriant hair,” and his penetrating eyes.

She was hardly alone in feeling this attraction. Diels was said to have great charm and to be sexually talented and experienced. As a student he had gained a reputation as a drinker and philanderer, according to Hans Bernd Gisevius, a Gestapo man who had been a student at the same university. “Involved affairs with women were a regular thing with him,” Gisevius wrote in a memoir. Men also acknowledged Diels’s charm and manner. When Kurt Ludecke, an early associate of Hitler’s, found himself under arrest and summoned to Diels’s office, he found the Gestapo chief unexpectedly cordial. “I felt at ease with this tall, slender, and polished young man, and found his consideration instantly comforting,” Ludecke wrote. “It was an occasion when good manners were doubly welcome.” He noted, “I went back to my cell feeling I’d rather be shot by a gentleman than drubbed by a churl.” Nonetheless, Ludecke ultimately wound up imprisoned, under “protective custody,” at a concentration camp in Brandenburg an der Havel.