Erik Larson - In the Garden of Beasts

Fromm later chided the French ambassador to Germany, André François-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 Washington that afternoon, Dodd told Secretary Hull that Neurath’s action seemed “to constitute 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 embarrassing 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 ambassador. 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 ambassador 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 ambassadors 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 Ambassador, 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 SATURDAY, 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 attachés 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 coarse voice of the chancellor, though he was struck by the absence of Hitler’s usual histrionics. Dodd listened intently as Hitler 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 pass 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 Shirer in his classic work, 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 shift 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.

Putzi Hanfstaengl knew of Martha’s various romantic relationships, 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 associates, he recognized that the history of Hitler’s relationships 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 assured him there was no cause for jealousy. “Believe me,” she said, “he’s an absolute neuter, not a man.”