Erik Larson - In the Garden of Beasts

Mrs. Dodd and Martha drove to Dahlem to see Mrs. Regendanz. A servant girl met them at the door, her eyes red. Soon Mrs. Regendanz herself appeared, looking dark and thin, her eyes deeply shadowed and her mannerisms halting and nervous. She knew Martha and Mattie and was perplexed to see them there in her home. She led them inside. After a few moments of conversation, the Dodds told Mrs. Regendanz about the message from her husband. She put her hands to her face and wept softly.

Mrs. Regendanz recounted how her house had been searched and her passport confiscated. “When she spoke of her son,” Martha wrote, “her self-control collapsed and she became hysterical with fear.” She had no idea where Alex was, whether he was alive or dead.

She pleaded with Martha and her mother to locate Alex and visit him, bring him cigarettes, anything to demonstrate to his captors that he had drawn the attention of the U.S. embassy. The Dodds promised to try. Mrs. Dodd and Mrs. Regendanz agreed that henceforth Mrs. Regendanz would use a code name, Carrie, in any contact with the Dodds or the embassy.

Over the next few days the Dodds spoke with influential friends, diplomats, and friendly government officials about the situation. Whether their intercession helped or not can’t be known, but Alex was freed after about a month of incarceration. He left Germany immediately, by night train, and joined his father in London.

Through connections, Mrs. Regendanz managed to acquire another passport and to secure passage out of Germany by air. Once she and her children were also in London, she sent a postcard to Mrs. Dodd: “Arrived safe and sound. Deepest gratitude. Love. Carrie.”

IN WASHINGTON, WESTERN EUROPEAN affairs chief Jay Pierrepont Moffat noted a surge of inquiries from American travelers asking whether it was still safe to visit Germany. “We have replied to them,” he wrote, “that in all the trouble to date no foreigner has been molested and we see no cause for worry if they mind their own business and keep out of trouble’s way.”

His mother, for one, had survived the purge unscathed and professed to have found it “quite exciting,” Moffat wrote in a later entry.

His sister’s home was in the Tiergarten district, where it “was blocked off by soldiers and they had to make quite a detour to get in or out.” Nonetheless, mother, daughter, and granddaughter set off by car, with chauffeur, for their previously planned tour of Germany.

What most occupied the attention of the State Department was the outstanding German debt to American creditors. It was a strange juxtaposition. In Germany, there was blood, viscera, and gunfire; at the State Department in Washington, there were white shirts, Hull’s red pencils, and mounting frustration with Dodd for failing to press America’s case. In a telegram from Berlin dated Friday, July 6, Dodd reported that he had met with Foreign Minister Neurath on the bond issue and that Neurath had said he would do what he could to ensure that interest was paid but that “this would be extremely difficult.” When Dodd asked Neurath whether the United States could at least expect the same treatment as other international creditors, Neurath “merely expressed the hope that this might be possible.”

The telegram infuriated Secretary Hull and the elders of the Pretty Good Club. “By his own showing,” Moffat wrote in his diary, Dodd “put up very little fight and rather let von Neurath walk away with the situation. The Secretary knows that [Dodd] has scant sympathy with our financial interests but even so was pretty fed up with the Dodd telegram.”

Hull angrily ordered Moffat to compose a harsh response to Dodd to compel him “not only to take but to create every opportunity to drive home the justice of our complaints.”

The result was a cable transmitted at 4:00 p.m. on Saturday, July 7, under Secretary Hull’s name that questioned whether Dodd had challenged Germany’s failure to pay its bond debt “with the utmost vigor alike from the point of view of logic, equity, and its effect upon the estimated 60,000 mainly innocent holders in this country….”

Moffat wrote, “It was a fairly stiff telegram, one sentence of which the Secretary with his intense kindly nature modified to salve Dodd’s feelings.” Moffat noted that “the irreverent ones” in the department had begun referring to Dodd as “Ambassador Dud.”

During another meeting on the bond situation later that week, Hull continued to express his dissatisfaction with Dodd. Moffat wrote, “The Secretary kept repeating while Dodd was a very fine man in many ways, he certainly had a peculiar slant to his make-up.”

That day Moffat attended a garden party at the home of a wealthy friend—the friend with the pool—who had invited as well “the entire State Department.” There were exhibition tennis matches and swimming races. Moffat had to leave early, however, for a cruise down the Potomac on a power yacht “fitted out with a luxury that would satisfy the soul of any sybarite.”

IN BERLIN, DODD WAS UNMOVED. He thought it pointless to pursue full payment, because Germany simply did not have the money, and there were far more important issues at stake. In a letter to Hull a few weeks later he wrote, “Our people will have to lose their bonds.”

EARLY ON THE MORNING of Friday, July 6, Martha went to her father’s bedroom to tell him good-bye. She knew he disapproved of her journey to Russia, but as they hugged and kissed he seemed at ease. He urged her to be careful but hoped she would have “an interesting trip.”

Her mother and brother took her to Tempelhof Airport; Dodd remained in the city, aware, no doubt, that the Nazi press might try to capitalize on his presence at the airport, waving farewell as his daughter flew off to the hated Soviet Union.

Martha climbed a tall set of steel stairs to the three-engine Junker that would take her on the first leg of her journey. A photographer captured her looking jaunty at the top of the stairs, her hat at a rakish angle. She wore a plain jumper over a polka-dotted blouse and matching scarf. Improbably, given the heat, she carried a long coat draped over her arm and a pair of white gloves.

She claimed later that she had no idea her trip would be of interest to the press or that it would create something of a diplomatic scandal. This hardly seems credible, however. After a year in which she had come to know intimately such intriguers as Rudolf Diels and Putzi Hanfstaengl, she could not have failed to realize that in Hitler’s Germany even the smallest actions possessed exaggerated symbolic power.

On a personal level her departure marked the fact that the last traces of the sympathy she had felt for the strange and noble beings of the Nazi revolution had disappeared, and whether she recognized it or not, her departure, as captured by news photographers and duly registered by embassy officials and Gestapo watchers alike, was a public declaration of her final disillusionment.

She wrote, “I had had enough of blood and terror to last me for the rest of my life.”

HER FATHER REACHED a similar moment of transformation. Throughout that first year in Germany, Dodd had been struck again and again by the strange indifference to atrocity that had settled over the nation, the willingness of the populace and of the moderate elements in the government to accept each new oppressive decree, each new act of violence, without protest. It was as if he had entered the dark forest of a fairy tale where all the rules of right and wrong were upended. He wrote to his friend Roper, “I could not have imagined the outbreak against the Jews when everybody was suffering, one way or another, from declining commerce. Nor could one have imagined that such a terroristic performance as that of June 30 would have been permitted in modern times.”