Erik Larson - In the Garden of Beasts

Here was the kicker: “It would be better for him and it would be better for us if he no longer existed.”

Some 45.1 million Germans were qualified to vote, and 96.5 percent did so. Of these, 95.1 percent voted in favor of Hitler’s foreign policy. More interesting, however, was the fact that 2.1 million Germans—just shy of 5 percent of the registered electorate—made the dangerous decision to vote no.

Hitler issued a proclamation afterward thanking the German people for the “historically unique acknowledgment they have made in favor of real love of peace, at the same time also their claim to our honor and to our eternal equal rights.”

The outcome was clear to Dodd well before the votes were counted. He wrote to Roosevelt, “The election here is a farce.”

Nothing indicated this more clearly than the vote within the camp at Dachau: 2,154 of 2,242 prisoners—96 percent—voted in favor of Hitler’s government. On the fate of the 88 souls who either failed to vote or voted no, history is silent.

ON MONDAY, NOVEMBER 13, President Roosevelt took a few moments to compose a letter to Dodd. He complimented him on his letters thus far and, in an apparent allusion to Dodd’s concerns after his interview with Hitler, told Dodd, “I am glad you have been frank with certain people. I think that is a good thing.”

He mused on an observation by columnist Walter Lippmann that a mere 8 percent of the world’s population, meaning Germany and Japan, was able “because of imperialistic attitude” to prevent peace and disarmament for the rest of the world.

“I sometimes feel,” the president wrote, “that the world problems are getting worse instead of better. In our own country, however, in spite of sniping, ‘chiseling’ and growling by the extreme right and by the extreme left, we are actually putting people back to work and raising values.”

He closed with a jovial “Keep up the good work!”

IN WASHINGTON, SECRETARY HULL and other senior officials, including Undersecretary Phillips, spent the first half of the month consumed by planning for the impending visit of Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet commissar for foreign affairs, who was to begin discussions with Roosevelt aimed at U.S. recognition of the Soviet Union. The idea was deeply unpopular with America’s isolationists, but Roosevelt saw important strategic benefits, such as opening Russia to American investment and helping check Japanese ambitions in Asia. The “Roosevelt-Litvinov conversations,” often difficult and frustrating for both parties, ultimately resulted in Roosevelt’s asserting formal recognition on November 16, 1933.

Seven days later, Dodd once again put on his cutaway and stovepipe and paid his first official visit to the Soviet embassy. An Associated Press photographer asked for a picture of Dodd standing beside his Soviet counterpart. The Russian was willing, but Dodd begged off, fearing “that certain reactionary papers in America would exaggerate the fact of my call and repeat their attacks upon Roosevelt for his recognition.”

Now Martha and Boris felt freer about revealing their relationship to the world, though both recognized that discretion was still necessary given the continuing disapproval of Boris’s superiors and Martha’s parents. Their affair grew steadily more serious, despite Martha’s efforts to keep things light and noncommittal. She continued to see Armand Berard of the French embassy, and possibly Diels, and to accept dates from potential new suitors, and this drove Boris wild with jealousy. He sent a blizzard of notes, flowers, and music and telephoned her repeatedly. “I wanted to love him only lightly,” Martha wrote, in an unpublished account; “I tried to treat him as casually as I did other friends. I forced myself to be indifferent to him one week; then the next, I became stupidly jealous. I was forgetful of him, then absorbed in him. It was an unbearable contradiction, grievous and frustrating to us both.”

Martha was still committed to seeing the best in the Nazi revolution, but Boris had no illusions about what was occurring around them. To Martha’s irritation, he was always looking for the underlying motives that governed the actions of Nazi leaders and the various figures who visited the U.S. embassy.

“You always see the bad things,” she said angrily. “You should try to see the positive things in Germany, and in our visitors, not always suspect them of ulterior motives.”

She suggested that at times he too was guilty of hiding his motives—“I think you’re jealous of Armand,” she said, “or anyone else who takes me out.”

The next day, she received a package from Boris. Inside she found three ceramic monkeys and a card that read, “See no Evil, Hear no Evil, Speak no Evil.” Boris closed the note: “I love you.”

Martha laughed. In return, she sent him a small carved-wood figure of a nun, along with a note that assured him she was following the monkeys’ orders.

Behind it all was that looming question: where could their relationship possibly go? “I could not bear to think of the future, either with or without him,” she wrote. “I loved my family, my country, and did not want to face the possibility of separation from either.”

This tension led to misunderstandings and grief. Boris suffered.

“Martha!” he wrote in one pain-flushed letter. “I am so sad that I cannot find the right words for everything that happened. Forgive me if I have done something mean or bad to you. I did not mean or wish to do so. I understand you, but not completely, and I do not know what I ought to do. What shall I do?

“Farewell, Martha, be happy without me, and do not think bad about me.”

Always they came back together. Each separation seemed to intensify their attraction all the more but also amplified the moments of misunderstanding and anger—until one Sunday afternoon in late November their relationship underwent a material change. She recalled it all in fine-grained detail.

A bleak day, the sky like smudged charcoal, the air cold, but not so cold as to prompt Boris to raise the top on his Ford. They set out for a cozy restaurant they both loved that was housed in a boathouse on pilings over a lake in the Wannsee district. A fragrant pine forest walled the shoreline.

They found the restaurant to be almost empty but still charming. Wood tables surrounded a small dance floor. When the jukebox wasn’t playing, the sound of water gently smacking the pilings outside was clearly audible.

Martha ordered onion soup, salad, and beer; Boris chose vodka, shashlik, and herring immersed in sour cream and onions. And more vodka. Boris loved food, Martha noted, but never seemed to gain ein Pfund .

After lunch they danced. Boris was improving but still tended to treat dancing and walking as interchangeable phenomena. At one point as their bodies came together, both became very still, Martha recalled; she felt suddenly radiant with heat.

Boris pulled away abruptly. He took her arm and led her outside onto a wooden deck that jutted over the water. She looked at him and saw pain—eyebrows drawn together, lips compressed. He seemed agitated. They stood together at the rail watching a squadron of white swans.

He turned to her, his expression almost somber. “Martha,” he said, “I love you.” He confessed now that he had felt that way ever since the first time he had seen her at Sigrid Schultz’s apartment. He held her before him, his hands firmly vised around her elbows. The mad-cap gaiety was gone.

He stepped back and looked at her. “Don’t play with me, darling,” he said. “Du hast viele Bewerber.” You have a lot of suitors. “You should not decide yet. But don’t treat me lightly. I could not bear it.”