Huntsville-Madison County Public Library discussion

“Get out of the country!”

This historical account of the U.S. Ambassador William Dodd’s service in Nazi-dominated Germany during the first few years of Hitler’s rise to power can be described, without exaggeration, as a real-life horror story. I kept yelling inwardly to the Dodd family to ‘get out of the country before it’s too late!’ In 1933, during the first few months of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency Dodd was appointed, after the refusal of three previous candidates, to what had to have been one of the worst jobs on the planet at that time.

William Dodd was at heart a bookish academic, a serious historian whose primary field of interest was his study of the American South, to be given the obvious title of ‘Old South’. He really belonged on the faculty of one of the leading universities in the country rather than as a diplomat attempting to reason with a regime built on insanity. However, he was also at heart a Jeffersonian democrat as well as a patriot and when his county called him to service felt it was his duty to obey.

He was also a stubbornly frugal man who detested the pretension and pomposity of those who would advertise their wealth and prestige. When he, his wife, and his two adult children, Bill Jr., and Martha arrived in Berlin he had his old dependable Chevrolet shipped overseas as well. No chauffeur-driven limousines for William Dodd and his family, thank you very much. He quickly became an object of ridicule and humor by the ‘pretty good club’ of the U.S. State Department, comprised mostly by wealthy careerists who were attracted to the work as much by the ‘perks’ of displays of ostentatious wealth and the impression they hoped to convey to their foreign counterparts through wining and dining at lavish parties. Dodd hosted parties because it was expected of him in his job but he always found them tiresome and stressful affairs and looked forward to the moment when he could safely retire for the evening to the comfort of a glass of milk and a good book.

While Dodd was apprehensively walking a tight rope of diplomacy with Nazis, his daughter Martha was a leftover flapper of the Jazz Age, flirtatious and promiscuous as she willingly became involved in many affairs with many foreign diplomats, including the Russian embassy diplomat Boris Vinogradov and the head of the Gestapo Rudolph Diels, all while legally still married to an American back home that she hoped to divorce.

Although none at the time could accurately foresee what would happen over the next twelve years, in 1933 many Americans in the State Department shared a strain of anti-Semitism with the Nazis, even if not to the point that they felt Jews should be exterminated. Dodd felt that himself and Martha admitted that she felt it as well. Initially, she shared the hope that Hitler could pull his country out of their post-World War I slump and restore stability and order. She was initially drawn to the bright uniforms, the elegant old world manners, and the cultured and worldly wise demeanor of many of the young officers she encountered. She grew quite reckless and, in an afterword, Larson cites a quote from Hitler in 1941 recorded by his deputy Martin Bormann, years after Dodd and his wife were dead and Martha and her brother had long since departed the country.
“Hitler, who had once kissed her hand, said, “To think that there was nobody in all this ministry who could get his clutches on the daughter of the former American ambassador, Dodd—and yet she wasn’t that difficult to approach. That was their job, and it should have been done. In short, the girl should have been subjugated…In the old days when we wanted to lay siege to an industrialist, we attacked him through his children. Old Dodd, who was an imbecile, we’d have got him through his daughter.”

Luckily, Hitler’s diplomats were not that efficient, allowing Dodd to serve over four years in Germany despite the protestations of fellow Americans and their frustration at Dodd’s failure to compel German officials to pay back their debts. In this isolationist era, more U.S. officials seemed to be concerned with being paid back while being willfully oblivious to the crimes against humanity that Dodd viewed from the front row. Dodd grew steadily disillusioned and lost all hope after the “Night of the Long Knives”, the June 30-July 2, 1934 massacre of huge swaths of Hitler’s opponents in the SA, as well as numerous suspected enemies. Dodd personally knew many of the victims of this purge through the many diplomatic functions he’d attended or hosted and was even more convinced that a madman was seizing the reins of power as each official that might have enforced some degree of humane rule was exterminated. After this event he refused to attend any function at which Hitler, Goebbels, Goring, Himmler, or any of the other upper tier officials might be present. This gesture offended not only the Nazi officials but State Department personnel back home who clamored to have FDR remove him from his position. Dodd felt that, as long as his president trusted him in this capacity he would continue to serve.

The stress took its toll, however, as Dodd’s health began to decline. Although initially he seemed obvious to many of the atrocities being committed daily he began to strengthen his moral foundation and resist, in his own subtle, careful way, the rise of this insane power. Roosevelt had requested that Dodd stay on at least until March of 1938, to avoid the impression that he was caving to the demands in the State Department for Dodd’s removal. After they talked in October, Roosevelt bowed to pressure to have Dodd leave Berlin before the end of year. He received a curt telegram from the State Department to leave Berlin by December 15. His request for an extension was denied and so he left for America at the end of December. Over the next couple of years his health deteriorated progressively until his death in February of 1940.

Although there was much difference in opinion on Dodd’s performance as ambassador, as time went on his stance in Berlin came to be seen in a more admirable light. In summation, Larson feels that:
“For Goebbel’s ‘Der Angriff’ to attack Dodd as he lay prostrate in a hospital bed, was he really so ineffectual as his enemies believed? In the end, Dodd proved to be exactly what Roosevelt had wanted, a lone beacon of American freedom and hope in a land of gathering darkness.”

But what of Martha? She too grew disillusioned as one of her friends committed suicide and others were discredited. The Night of the Long Knives traumatized her as well and her affair with Boris led her to identify more strongly with the Soviet cause to the point where she became a somewhat amateur spy during and after the war. She edited collections of her father’s letters and published a novel and a memoir. She too grew disillusioned by the Soviet system, culminating in the Prague Spring of 1968 when tanks rolled down the street past her home. Even into her last days she still identified herself as the glamorous flirt of the 1930’s.
Larson’s decision to provide a window into 1930’s Nazi Germany through the contrasting perspectives of William Dodd and his daughter Martha without any detached authorial foreknowledge of the outcome is wise, as well as novelistic. Larson claims that everything between quotation marks comes from a journal, letter, or documented record. Unlike many historians who trot out fact after quote after anecdote, he has the novelist’s gift of rendering this episode as the riveting, compelling horror story that it was.