In the Garden of Beasts (28 page)

He was released.

MARTHA ASSIGNED HERSELF
the task of trimming the family tree, an enormous fir placed in the ballroom on the second floor of the house. She enlisted the help of Boris, Bill, butler Fritz, the family chauffeur, and various friends who stopped by to help. She resolved to have a tree that was entirely white and silver and so bought silver balls, silver tinsel, a large silver star, and white candles, eschewing electric lights for the more traditional and infinitely more lethal approach. “In those days,” she wrote, “it was heresy to think of electric lights for a tree.” She and her helpers kept pails of water nearby.

Her father, she wrote, was “bored with all this foolishness” and avoided the project, as did her mother, who was busy with myriad other holiday preparations. Bill was helpful to a point but had a tendency to drift away in search of more engaging pursuits. The project took two days and two evenings.

Martha found it funny that Boris was willing to help, given that he claimed not to believe in the existence of God. She smiled as she watched him at work atop a stepladder dutifully helping her trim a symbol of the foremost holy day of the Christian faith.

“My darling atheist,” she recalled telling him, “why do you help me decorate a Christmas tree to celebrate the birth of Christ?”

He laughed. “This isn’t for Christians or for Christ,
liebes Kind
,”
he said, “only for pagans like you and me. Anyway, it is very beautiful. What would you like?” He sat at the apex of the ladder. “Do you want me to put my white orchids on top? Or would you prefer a handsome red star?”

She insisted on white.

He protested. “But red
is
a more beautiful color than white, darling.”

Despite the tree and Boris and the overall cheer of the season, Martha felt that a fundamental element was absent from her life in Berlin. She missed her friends—Sandburg and Wilder and her colleagues at the
Tribune
—and her comfortable house in Hyde Park. By now her friends and neighbors would be gathering for cozy parties, caroling sessions, and mulled wine.

On Thursday, December 14, she wrote a long letter to Wilder. She felt keenly the withering of her connection to him. Just knowing him gave her a sense of credibility, as if by refraction she too possessed literary cachet. But she had sent him a short story of hers, and he had said nothing. “
Have you lost even your literary interest in me or shall I say your interest in the literary me (what there is left of it, if there was anything to begin with). And your trip to Germany. Has it been definitely passed up. Gosh, you have certainly given me the slip, to lapse back into Berlin slang for a moment!”

She had done little other writing, she told him, though she had found a certain satisfaction in talking and writing about books, thanks to her new friendship with Arvid and Mildred Harnack. Together, she told Wilder, “we have concluded we are the only people in Berlin genuinely interested in writers.” Mildred and she had begun their book column. “She is tall and beautiful with a heavy burden of honey colored hair—dark honey in some lights.… Very poor and real and fine and not much in favor though the family is old and respected. An oasis really to me mad with thirst.”

She alluded to her father’s sense that a conspiracy was mounting against him from within the State Department. “Mazes of hate and intrigue in our Embassy have as yet failed to trap us,” she wrote.

Hatreds of a more personal kind had touched her as well. In America her secret marriage to Bassett and her equally secret effort to divorce him had become public knowledge. “Nasty what my
enemies cooked up about me in Chicago,” she told Wilder. One woman in particular, whom Martha identified as Fanny, had begun spreading especially unpleasant rumors out of what Martha believed to be jealousy over Martha’s publication of a short story. “She insists that you and I have had an affair and it has come back to me from two people. I wrote to her the other day pointing out the dangers of slander unfounded and indicated the mess she might get into.” She added, “I feel sorry for her, but it does not alter the fact that she is a rather slimy mouthed bitch.”

She sought to capture for Wilder a sense of the wintry city outside her windows, this new world in which she found herself. “The snow is soft and deep lying here—a copper smoke mist over Berlin by day and the brilliance of the falling moon by night. The gravel squeaks under my window at night—the sinister faced, lovely lipped and gaunt Diels of the Prussian Secret Police must be watching and the gravel spits from under his soft shoes to warn me. He wears his deep scars as proudly as I would fling about in a wreath of edelweiss.”

She expressed a deep and pervading sorrow. “The smell of peace is abroad, the air is cold, the skies are brittle, and the leaves have finally fallen. I wear a pony coat with skin like watered silk and muff of lamb. My fingers lie in depths of warmth. I have a jacket of silver sequins and heavy bracelets of rich corals. I wear about my neck a triple thread-like chain of lapis lazulis and pearls. On my face is softness and content like a veil of golden moonlight. And I have never in all my lives been so lonely.”

THOUGH MARTHA’S REFERENCE
to “mazes of hate” was a bit strong, Dodd had indeed begun to sense that a campaign was gathering against him within the State Department and that its participants were the men of wealth and tradition. He suspected also that they were assisted by one or more people on his own staff providing intelligence in sotto voce fashion about him and the operation of the embassy. Dodd grew increasingly suspicious and guarded, so much so that he began writing his most sensitive letters in longhand because
he did not trust the embassy stenographers to keep their contents confidential.

He had reason to be concerned. Messersmith continued his back-channel correspondence with Undersecretary Phillips. Raymond Geist, Messersmith’s number-two officer (another Harvard man) also kept watch on the affairs of Dodd and the embassy. During a stop in Washington, Geist had a long and secret conversation with Wilbur Carr, chief of consular services, during which Geist provided a wide range of intelligence, including details about unruly parties thrown by Martha and Bill that sometimes lasted until five in the morning. “
On one occasion the hilarity was so great,” Geist told Carr, that it drew a written complaint to the consulate. This prompted Geist to call Bill into his office, where he warned him, “If there was a repetition of that conduct it would have to be reported officially.” Geist also offered a critique of Ambassador Dodd’s performance: “The Ambassador is mild mannered and unimpressive whereas the only kind of person who can deal successfully with the Nazi Government is a man of intelligence and force who is willing to assume a dictatorial attitude with the Government and insist upon his demands being met. Mr. Dodd is unable to do this.”

The arrival in Berlin of a new man, John C. White, to replace George Gordon as counselor of embassy could only have increased Dodd’s wariness. In addition to being wealthy and prone to hosting elaborate parties, White also happened to be married to the sister of Western European affairs chief Jay Pierrepont Moffat. The two brothers-in-law carried on a chummy correspondence, calling each other “Jack” and “Pierrepont.” Dodd would not have found the opening line of one of White’s first letters from Berlin to be terribly reassuring: “
There appears to be a spare typewriter round here, so I can write you without other witnesses.” In one reply, Moffat called Dodd “
a curious individual whom I find it almost impossible to diagnose.”

To make matters even more claustrophobic for Dodd, another new officer, Orme Wilson, who arrived at about the same time to become a secretary of embassy, was Undersecretary Phillips’s nephew.

When the
Chicago Tribune
printed an article about Dodd’s request for leave in the coming year, along with conjecture that he might
quit his post, Dodd complained to Phillips that someone within the department must have revealed his leave request, intending harm. What especially galled Dodd was a comment in the article attributed to an unnamed State Department spokesman. The article stated: “
Permanent retirement from the post of Ambassador to Germany is not contemplated by Professor Dodd, it was insisted here.” With the perverse logic of publicity, the denial actually raised the question of Dodd’s fate—would he retire or was he being forced from his post? The situation in Berlin was difficult enough without such speculation, Dodd told Phillips. “I believe von Neurath and his colleagues would be considerably displeased if this report were forwarded to them.”

Phillips replied, with his now-familiar textual smirk, “
I cannot imagine who gave the
Tribune
information regarding your possible leave next Spring,” he wrote. “Certainly no one has asked the question of me.… One of the principal joys of the newspaper world is to start gossip about resignations. At times we all suffer from that phobia and do not take it seriously.”

In closing, Phillips noted that Messersmith, who was then in Washington on leave, had visited the department. “Messersmith has been with us for a few days and we have had some good talks on the various phases of the German situation.”

Dodd would have been right to read those last lines with a degree of anxiety. During one of these visits to Phillips’s office, Messersmith provided what Phillips described in his diary as “
an inside glimpse of conditions in the Embassy in Berlin.” Here too the subject of Martha and Bill came up. “Apparently,” Phillips wrote, “the Ambassador’s son and daughter are not assisting the Embassy in any way and are too much inclined to running around to night clubs with certain Germans of not particularly good standing and with the press.”

Messersmith also met with Moffat and Moffat’s wife. The three spent an afternoon talking about Germany. “
We went over it from all angles,” Moffat wrote in his diary. The next day he and Messersmith had lunch, and several weeks later they met again. During one conversation, according to Moffat’s diary, Messersmith claimed to be “
much concerned at letters received from Dodd indicating that he was turning against his staff.”

Dodd’s recently departed counselor, George Gordon, happened to be on a lengthy leave in the United States at the same time as Messersmith. Though Gordon’s relationship with Dodd had begun badly, by now Dodd grudgingly had come to see Gordon as an asset. Gordon wrote to Dodd, “
Our mutual friend G.S.M.”—meaning Messersmith—“has been staging a most active campaign in support of his candidacy for the Legation at Prague.” (Messersmith had long hoped to leave the Foreign Service behind and become a full-fledged diplomat; now, with the embassy in Prague available, he saw an opportunity.) Gordon noted that a torrent of letters and newspaper editorials testifying to Messersmith’s “sterling work” had begun flowing into the department. “A familiar touch was imparted to all this,” Gordon wrote, “when I heard that he had told one of the high officials that he really was a little embarrassed by all the press eulogies of himself because he did not like that kind of thing!!!!”

Gordon added, in longhand: “O sancta virginitas simplicitasque,” Latin for “Such pious maidenly innocence!”

ON DECEMBER
22, a Friday, Dodd got a visit from Louis Lochner, who brought troubling news. The visit itself was not unusual, for by now Dodd and the Associated Press bureau chief had become friends and met often to discuss events and exchange information.
Lochner told Dodd that an official high in the Nazi hierarchy had informed him that the next morning the court in the Reichstag trial would declare its verdict, and that all but van der Lubbe would be acquitted. This was stunning news by itself and, if true, would constitute a serious blow to the prestige of Hitler’s government and in particular to Göring’s standing. It was precisely the “botch” Göring had feared. But Lochner’s informant also had learned that Göring, still incensed at Dimitrov’s impudence during their courtroom confrontation, now wanted Dimitrov dead. His death was to occur soon after the end of the trial. Lochner refused to identify his source but told Dodd that in conveying the information the source hoped to prevent further damage to Germany’s already poor international reputation. Dodd believed the informant to be Rudolf Diels.

Lochner had come up with a plan to scuttle the assassination by
publicizing it but wanted first to run the idea past Dodd, in case Dodd felt the diplomatic repercussions would be too great. Dodd approved but in turn consulted Sir Eric Phipps, the British ambassador, who also agreed that Lochner should go ahead.

Lochner weighed precisely how to execute his plan. Oddly enough, the initial idea of publicizing the impending assassination had been brought to him by Göring’s own press adjutant, Martin Sommerfeldt, who also had learned of the imminent murder. His source, according to one account, was Putzi Hanfstaengl, though it is entirely possible that Hanfstaengl learned of it from Diels. Sommerfeldt told Lochner that he knew from experience that “there is one way of dissuading the general. When the foreign press claims one thing about him, he stubbornly does the opposite.” Sommerfeldt proposed that Lochner attribute the story to an “unimpeachable source” and stress that the murder would have “far reaching international consequences.” Lochner faced a quandary, however. If he published so inflammatory a report through the Associated Press, he risked enraging Göring to the point where Göring might shut down the AP’s Berlin bureau. It was far better, Lochner reasoned, to have the story break in a British newspaper. He, Sommerfeldt, and Hanfstaengl revised their plan.

Lochner knew that a very green reporter had just joined the Berlin bureau of Reuters. He invited him out for drinks at the Adlon Hotel, where Hanfstaengl and Sommerfeldt soon joined them. The new reporter savored his luck at this apparently chance convergence of senior officials.

After a few moments, Lochner mentioned to Sommerfeldt the rumor of a threat against Dimitrov. Sommerfeldt, as per plan, feigned surprise—surely Lochner had gotten it wrong, for Göring was a man of honor and Germany was a civilized land.