Erik Larson - In the Garden of Beasts

Boris found her defensiveness hilarious and laughed with unrestrained delight.

In the next instant, he adopted a look and tone that she recalled as being “solemn in the extreme.”

“Congratulations, my noble, gracious, little Marta! I too am also of ancient lineage, even older than yours. I am a direct descendant of Neanderthal man. And pure? Yes, pure human. ”

They collapsed against each other with laughter.

THEY BECAME REGULAR COMPANIONS, though they tried to keep their emerging relationship as discreet as possible. The United States had not yet recognized the Soviet Union (and would not do so until November 16, 1933). To have the daughter of the American ambassador openly consorting with a first secretary of the Soviet embassy at official functions would have constituted a breach of protocol that would have put both her father and Boris at risk of criticism from inside and outside their respective governments. She and Boris left diplomatic receptions early, then met for secret meals at such fine restaurants as Horcher’s, Pelzer, Habel, and Kempinski. To cut costs a bit, Boris also cultivated the chefs of small, inexpensive restaurants and instructed them on how to prepare foods he liked. After dinner he and Martha would go dancing at Ciro’s or at the club on the roof of the Eden Hotel, or to political cabarets such as the Kabarett der Komiker.

Some nights Martha and Boris would join the correspondents gathered at Die Taverne, where Boris was always welcomed. The reporters liked him. The now-exiled Edgar Mowrer had found Boris a refreshing change from other officials in the Soviet embassy. Boris, he recalled, spoke his mind without slavish adherence to party doctrine and “seemed totally unintimidated by the kind of censorship which seemed to silence other members of the Embassy.”

Like Martha’s other suitors, Boris sought to escape Nazi intrusion by taking her on long drives into the countryside. He drove a Ford convertible, which he loved dearly. Agnes Knickerbocker recalled that he “made some ceremony of putting on his fine leather gloves before taking the wheel.” He was “an unswerving communist,” she wrote, but “he liked the so-called good things in life.”

He almost always kept the top down, closing it only on the coldest nights. As his relationship with Martha deepened, he insisted on placing his arm around her as he drove. He seemed to need her touch at all times. He would place her hand on his knee or insert her fingers into his glove. On occasion they took these drives late at night, sometimes staying out until dawn, Martha wrote, “to welcome the rising sun in the black-green forests spangled with autumn gold.”

Though his English was limited, he learned and adored the word “darling” and used it every chance he got. He also deployed Russian endearments, which he refused to translate, claiming that to do so would diminish their beauty. In German, he called her “my little girl,” or “my sweet child,” or “my little one.” She mused that he did so partly because of her height, partly because of his overall perception of her character and maturity. “He once said I had a naïveté and idealism he could not easily understand,” she wrote. She sensed that he found her too “flighty” to even attempt to indoctrinate her in the tenets of communism. This was a period, she acknowledged, when “I must have appeared a most naive and stubborn young American, a vexation to all sensible people I knew.”

She found that Boris also took the world lightly, at least outwardly. “At thirty-one,” she wrote, “Boris had a childlike gaiety and faith, a mad-cap humor and charm not often found in mature men.” Now and then, however, reality intruded on what Martha called their “personal dream-world of dinners and concerts, theaters and joyous festivities.” She sensed in him a seam of tension. He was especially dismayed to see how readily the world accepted Hitler’s protestations of peace even as he so obviously girded the country for war. The Soviet Union seemed a likely target. Another source of stress was his own embassy’s disapproval of his relationship with Martha. His superiors issued a reprimand. He ignored it.

Martha, meanwhile, experienced pressure of a less official variety. Her father liked Boris, she thought, but he was often reticent in Boris’s presence, “even antagonistic at times.” She attributed this mainly to his fear that she and Boris might get married.

“My friends and family are disturbed about us,” she told Boris. “What can come of it? Only complications, some joy now, and then perhaps long despair.”

FOR ONE OF THEIR September dates, Boris and Martha packed a picnic lunch and drove into the countryside. They found a private glade, where they spread their blanket. The air was suffused with the scent of freshly cut grass. As Boris lay on the blanket, smiling at the sky, Martha plucked a length of wild mint and used it to tickle his face.

He saved it, as she later discovered. He was a romantic, a collector of treasures. Even this early in their relationship he was deeply smitten—and, as it happens, closely watched.

Martha appeared at this point to have no knowledge of what many correspondents suspected: that Boris was no mere first secretary of embassy, but rather an operative for Soviet intelligence, the NKVD, precursor to the KGB.

As ambassador, Dodd’s main point of contact in the German government was Foreign Minister Neurath. Spurred by the Kaltenborn incident, Dodd arranged to meet with Neurath on Thursday morning, September 14, 1933, to make a formal protest, against not just that episode but also the many other attacks on Americans and the regime’s apparent unwillingness to bring the perpetrators to justice.

Their conversation took place in Neurath’s office in the Foreign Ministry on Wilhelmstrasse.

It began amiably enough with a discussion of economic matters, but the atmosphere quickly grew tense as Dodd broached the subject of “SA brutalities” and reviewed for Neurath half a dozen incidents. The most recent had occurred on August 31 in Berlin—the Samuel Bossard incident, in which Bossard was assaulted by members of the Hitler Youth after failing to offer the Hitler salute. A week earlier another American, Harold Dahlquist, had been struck by a Storm Trooper for failing to stop to watch an SA parade. Overall the frequency of such attacks had decreased as compared with the preceding spring, but incidents continued to occur at a steady rate of one or two a month. Dodd warned Neurath that press accounts of these attacks had caused real damage to Germany’s reputation in America and noted that this happened despite his own efforts to mute negative coverage by American correspondents. “I may say to you that the embassy has endeavored successfully on several occasions to prevent unimportant events from being reported and also warned reporters from exaggerating their stories,” he told Neurath.

He revealed now that on one occasion his own car had been stopped and searched, apparently by an SA officer, but that he had kept the incident from being publicized “to prevent widespread discussions which as you know would have been inevitable.”

Neurath thanked him and said he was aware of Dodd’s efforts to temper press coverage of Storm Trooper violence, including the incident that Martha and Bill Jr. had witnessed in Nuremberg. He professed to be very grateful.

Dodd turned to the Kaltenborn episode. He told Neurath that the reaction in the United States could have been far worse if Kaltenborn himself had been inclined to publicize it. “He was generous enough, however, to ask us not to allow any report of the episode to get out, and both Mr. Messersmith and I urged the American press not to mention this story,” Dodd said. “It did, however, get out and did Germany incalculable injury.”