Erik Larson - In the Garden of Beasts

Martha eventually found herself deploying rudimentary codes in communications with friends, an increasingly common practice throughout Germany. Her friend Mildred used a code for letters home in which she crafted sentences that meant the opposite of what the words themselves indicated. That such practices had become usual and necessary was difficult for outsiders to understand. An American professor who was a friend of the Dodds, Peter Olden, wrote to Dodd on January 30, 1934, to tell him he had received a message from his brother-in-law in Germany in which the man described a code he planned to use in all further correspondence. The word “rain,” in any context, would mean he had been placed in a concentration camp. The word “snow” would mean he was being tortured. “It seems absolutely unbelievable,” Olden told Dodd. “If you think that this is really something in the nature of a bad joke, I wonder if you could mention so in a letter to me.”

Dodd’s careful reply was a study in deliberate omission, though his meaning was clear. He had come to believe that even diplomatic correspondence was intercepted and read by German agents. A subject of growing concern was the number of German employees who worked for the consulate and the embassy. One clerk in particular had drawn the attention of consular officials: Heinrich Rocholl, a longtime employee who helped prepare reports for the American commercial attaché, whose offices were on the first floor of the Bellevuestrasse consulate. In his spare time Rocholl had founded a pro-Nazi organization, the Association of Former German Students in America, which issued a publication called Rundbriefe . Lately Rocholl had been discovered trying “to find out the contents of confidential reports of the Commercial Attaché,” according to a memorandum that Acting Consul General Geist sent to Washington. “He has also had conversations with other German members of the staff who assist in the reporting work, and intimated to these that their work should be in every respect favorable to the present regime.” In one issue of the Rundbriefe Geist found an article in which “disparaging allusions were made to the Ambassador as well as to Mr. Messersmith.” For Geist this was the last straw. Citing the clerk’s “overt act of disloyalty to his chiefs,” Geist fired him.

Dodd realized that the best way to have a truly private conversation with anyone was to meet in the Tiergarten for a walk, as Dodd often did with his British counterpart, Sir Eric Phipps. “I shall be walking at 11:30 on the Hermann-Göring-Strasse alongside the Tiergarten,” Dodd told Phipps in a telephone call at ten o’clock one morning. “Would you be able to meet me there and talk for a while?” And Phipps, on another occasion, sent Dodd a handwritten note asking, “Could we meet tomorrow morning at 12 o’clock in the Siegesallee between the Tiergartenstrasse & the Charlottenburger Chaussee, on the right side (going from here)?”

WHETHER LISTENING DEVICES TRULY laced the embassy and the Dodds’ home cannot be known, but the salient fact was that the Dodds came to see Nazi surveillance as omnipresent. Despite the toll this perception increasingly took on their lives, they believed they had one significant advantage over their German peers—that no physical harm would come to them. Martha’s own privileged status offered no protection to her friends, however, and here Martha had particular cause for concern because of the nature of the men and women she befriended.

She had to be especially watchful in her relationship with Boris—as a representative of a government reviled by the Nazis, he was beyond doubt a target of surveillance—and with Mildred and Arvid Harnack, both of whom had grown increasingly opposed to the Nazi regime and were taking their first steps toward building a loose association of men and women committed to resisting Nazi power. “If I had been with people who had been brave or reckless enough to talk in opposition to Hitler,” Martha wrote in her memoir, “I spent sleepless nights wondering if a Dictaphone or a telephone had registered the conversation, or if men had followed and overheard.”

In that winter of 1933–34, her anxiety blossomed into a kind of terror that “bordered on the hysterical,” as she described it. Never had she been more afraid. She lay in her own bed, in her own room, with her parents upstairs, objectively as safe as could be, and yet as shadows cast by the dim streetlamps outside played across her ceiling, she could not keep the terror from staining the night.

She heard, or imagined she heard, the grating of hard-soled shoes on the gravel in the drive below, the sound tentative and intermittent, as if someone was watching her bedroom. By day the many windows in her room brought light and color; at night, they conjured vulnerability. Moonlight cast moving shadows on the lawns and walks and beside the tall pillars of the entrance gate. Some nights she imagined hearing whispered conversations, even distant gunshots, though by day she was able to dismiss these as the products of wind blowing across gravel and engine backfires.

But anything was possible. “I often felt such terror,” she wrote, “that occasionally I would wake up my mother and ask her to come and sleep in my room.”

In February 1934 rumors reached Dodd that suggested the conflict between Hitler and Captain Röhm had attained a new level of intensity. The rumors were well founded.

Toward the end of the month, Hitler appeared before a gathering of the top officers of Röhm’s SA, Heinrich Himmler’s SS, and the regular army, the Reichswehr. Present with him on the dais were Röhm and Minister of Defense Blomberg. The atmosphere in the room was charged. All present knew of the simmering conflict between the SA and the army and expected Hitler to address the issue.

First Hitler spoke of broader matters. Germany, he declared, needed more room in which to expand, “more living space for our surplus population.” And Germany, he said, must be ready to take it. “The Western powers will never yield this vital space to us,” Hitler said. “That is why a series of decisive blows may become necessary—first in the West, and then in the East.”

After further elaboration, he turned to Röhm. All in the room knew of Röhm’s ambitions. A few weeks earlier Röhm had made a formal proposal that the Reichswehr, SA, and SS be consolidated under a single ministry, leaving unsaid but implied that he himself should be the minister in charge. Now, looking directly at Röhm, Hitler said, “The SA must limit itself to its political task.”

Röhm maintained an expression of indifference. Hitler continued, “The Minister of War may call upon the SA for border control and for premilitary instruction.”

This too was a humiliation. Not only was Hitler consigning the SA to the decidedly inglorious tasks of border control and training, but he was explicitly placing Röhm in an inferior position to Blomberg as the recipient of orders, not the originator. Röhm still did not react.

Hitler said, “I expect from the SA loyal execution of the work entrusted to it.”

After concluding his speech, Hitler turned to Röhm, took his arm, and grasped his hand. Each looked into the other’s eyes. It was an orchestrated moment, meant to convey reconciliation. Hitler left. Acting his part, Röhm now invited the gathered officers to lunch at his quarters. The banquet, in typical SA style, was lavish, accompanied by a torrent of champagne, but the atmosphere was anything but convivial. At an appropriate moment, Röhm and his SA men stood to signal that the luncheon had come to an end. Heels clicked, a forest of arms shot outward in the Hitler salute, Heil s were barked, and the army leaders made their exit.