Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power (22 page)

She was hardly alone in that respect. Many Americans were still agnostic about Hitler and his movement, including some of the country’s leading literary figures. At a farewell dinner for the Dodds hosted by the German-American societies in Chicago, Martha sat between Thornton Wilder and Carl Sandburg. Wilder urged Martha to learn German quickly and spend her time with Germans instead of the foreign community in Berlin, while Sandburg offered this bit of advice: “Find out what this man Hitler is made of, what makes his brain go round, what his
bones and blood are made of. Before your eyes will pass the greatest pageant of crooks and gangsters, idealists, statesmen, criminals, diplomats, and geniuses. You will see every nationality in the world. Watch them, study them, dissect them. Don’t be frightened or diffident, don’t let them or your experiences spoil you or your eagerness for life. Be brave and truthful, keep your poetry and integrity.”

All of which inspired Martha to view this journey into the unknown as a great adventure, which she planned to experience with the “eagerness for life” that Sandburg commended to her. As for the other qualities—bravery, truthfulness, integrity—there would be plenty of disagreement among those who met Martha in Germany whether she lived up to them, along with endless gossip about her behavior, particularly with a procession of men of various ages and nationalities. If her father often appeared to be stumbling through his time in Berlin, not quite sure what he should or could be doing, Martha was anything but “frightened or diffident.” In that sense, she took Sandburg’s words very much to heart.

Growing up in Chicago, Martha had gone to University High School, which was labeled by students from rival schools as “Jew High.” By her own admission, Martha was also “slightly anti-Semitic.” As she put it, “I accepted the attitude that Jews were not as attractive physically as Gentiles and were less socially presentable.” She recalled that when she went to the University of Chicago, even some of her professors “resented the brilliance of Jewish colleagues and students.”

After college, Martha got a job as the assistant literary editor of the
Chicago Tribune.
She also married “for a short period unhappily.” But in matters of the heart, she wasn’t quite the naïve young woman that she appeared to be politically. She didn’t bother to inform most of her new acquaintances in Berlin that she was married—and not yet divorced. “I suppose I practiced a great deception on the diplomatic corps by not indicating that I was a married woman at that time,” she noted with evident amusement. “But I must admit I rather enjoyed being treated like a maiden of eighteen knowing all the while my dark secret.”

While no maiden, Martha succeeded in charming many of those who met her for the first time. Upon seeing her arrive with her parents in
Berlin on July 12, 1933, Bella Fromm described the daughter of the new ambassador as “
a perfect example
of the intelligent young American female.” When William Shirer, the new bureau chief of the Universal News Service and soon-to-be-famous CBS broadcaster, arrived in Berlin the following year, he noted in his diary that Martha spent many evenings at Die Taverne, the restaurant where American correspondents gathered almost every evening after filing their stories. Shirer described her as “
pretty, vivacious
, a mighty arguer.”

But Martha also triggered other feelings, particularly among the embassy wives. Kay Smith returned with her husband, Truman Smith, the military attaché who had been the first American official to meet Hitler in 1922, for a second tour at the Berlin embassy in 1935. “
Martha had an apartment
of her own on the top floor of the Embassy,” she wrote in her unpublished memoir. “She was small, delicate looking, blue eyed, pink and white complexion, a little Dresden figurine. Appearances are deceiving. Martha had a way with the gentlemen and it was said no scruples. As time went on I heard rumors that she entertained men at all hours in her apartment.”

Martha certainly had a predilection for romance, both political and personal. When it came to politics, her first judgment as a new arrival was that Germany and its new rulers had been unfairly condemned by world opinion—and she needed to help set the record straight. “
We liked Germany
, and I was enchanted by the kindness and simplicity of the people . . . everything was peaceful, romantic, strange, nostalgic,” she recalled. “I felt that the press had badly maligned the country and I wanted to proclaim the warmth and friendliness of the people, the soft summer night with its fragrance of trees and flowers, the serenity of the streets.” When she made the rounds of reasonably priced restaurants, she found herself comparing her experiences to what she knew of France: “
The Germans seemed
much more genuine and honest, even in the merchant class.”

Soon after her arrival, Martha met fellow countryman Quentin Reynolds, who was also a newcomer to Germany. Reynolds had been sent to Berlin in early 1933 by the International News Service to fill in for the regular correspondent, who had run afoul of the new Nazi rulers. He
went straight from writing baseball stories about the superstar Ty Cobb to covering the biggest foreign story of the era. By his own admission, he had only “
saloon German
” and “no special grasp of current events.” But he credited fellow correspondents with giving him a crash course in local politics. Knickerbocker urged him to read
Mein Kampf
right away. “
No American
I know of has taken the trouble to read it seriously, but it’s all there: his plan for the conquest of Europe,” he told him.

By the time he met Martha Dodd, Reynolds was also friendly with Putzi Hanfstaengl, who regularly dropped by Die Taverne. “
I regret to say
that on first acquaintance he struck me as a likeable fellow,” Reynolds recalled later. “He was a tremendous man physically, with heavy features, dark eyes, and a mane of coal-black hair that he kept tossing back. With an ingratiating manner, he was a compulsive and amusing talker and, unlike other Nazis I later had to do business with, he went out of his way to be cordial to Americans. You had to know Putzi to really dislike him.”

Martha was impressed that Reynolds, who had only been in the country a few months, already knew “
such legendary figures
” as Hanfstaengl and arranged for her to be introduced to him. At a party thrown by an English journalist—“a lavish and fairly drunken affair,” as Martha recalled—the Nazi propagandist lived up to her expectations. “Putzi came in late in a sensational manner, a huge man in height and build, towering over everyone present,” she noted. “He had a soft, ingratiating manner, a beautiful voice which he used with conscious artistry, sometimes whispering low and soft, the next minute bellowing and shattering the room. He was supposed to be the artist among the Nazis, erratic and interesting, the personal clown and musician to Hitler himself . . . Bavarian and American blood produced this strange phenomenon.”

Like other Americans, Martha would find herself frequently in Hanfstaengl’s company, dancing with him at parties and gladly taking advantage of his offers to introduce her to Nazi luminaries. But Reynolds was already developing a healthy sense of skepticism about him while remaining careful not to show it. About a month after Reynolds arrived, he ran into Hanfstaengl at the bar of the Adlon Hotel. “
You’ve been here
a month now, and you haven’t asked me about our so-called
Jewish problem or written anything about it to annoy me,” Putzi told him. “How come, Quent?”

“Give me time, Putzi,” Reynolds replied. “I haven’t been here long enough to know what’s going on.”

By the time he met Martha, Reynolds not only knew more but was eager to explore more for himself. In August, he suggested to Martha and her brother Bill that they take their Chevrolet and travel to southern Germany and Austria together with him—an idea that immediately appealed to Martha. As they drove south, she recognized the word “
Jude
” in banners strung across the road; they realized this was anti-Semitic propaganda but, as Martha put it, “
we didn’t
—at least I didn’t—take it too seriously.”

In fact, Martha was so swept up by the sight of marching Brown-shirts and the apparent enthusiasm of the people, she responded equally enthusiastically. When Germans saw their special license plate with a low number, they assumed the trio of Americans were top officials—and welcomed them with “
Heil Hitler
” greetings. “
The excitement of
the people was contagious and I ‘Heiled’ as vigorously as any Nazi,” she recalled. Although Reynolds and her brother mocked her behavior, “I felt like a child, ebullient and careless, the intoxication of the new regime working like wine in me,” she admitted.

Around midnight, the Americans stopped for the night in Nuremberg. As they reached their hotel on Königstrasse, they were surprised to find the street filled with an excited crowd and speculated that they may have run into a toymakers’ festival. As he registered, Reynolds asked the hotel clerk if there was going to be a parade. The clerk laughed. “
It will be
kind of a parade,” he replied. “They are teaching someone a lesson.”

The visitors walked out to join the crowd. Everyone seemed in a good mood, with the sound of a band adding to the festive atmosphere. Then they saw Nazi banners and swastikas, and the source of the music: a marching band of Storm Troopers. Two tall troopers were dragging someone between them. “I could not at first tell if it was a man or a woman,” Reynolds wrote. “Its head had been clipped bald, and face and head had been coated with white powder. Even though the figure wore a skirt, it might have been a man dressed as a clown.” As the Brownshirts
straightened out their victim, the Americans spotted the placard around its neck: “I wanted to live with a Jew.”

As the “lesson” continued, the Americans learned from the crowd that this was a woman named Anna Rath. The reason for her harsh punishment: she had tried to marry her Jewish fiancé, defying the ban on mixed marriages. Martha remembered the image of her “
tragic and tortured
face, the color of diluted absinthe.” She also was startled by Reynolds’s reaction. She had believed him to be a “hard-boiled” journalist, but “he was so shaken by the whole scene that he said the only thing he could do was to get drunk, to forget it.”

The Nazis wound up the evening by playing the “Horst Wessel Song” as about 5,000 people stood singing, their right arms extended—and then everyone disappeared. Although she suddenly felt nervous and cold, with her earlier elation fully gone,
Martha still tried
to convince Reynolds that he shouldn’t file anything about the incident. She argued that her presence and that of her brother would make this a sensational story, and, after all, who knew what the Nazi side of the story really was. And it had to be an isolated case.

Although Martha claimed that the three of them made good on Reynolds’s vow to get drunk, proceeding to tank up on red champagne, the journalist was sober enough when he went up to his room. He promptly called
Hudson Hawley
, his bureau chief in Berlin, excited that he had proof of exactly the kind of atrocity story that many journalists had heard about but not witnessed—and the Nazis routinely denied. Hawley cautioned that he might not be allowed to wire it and suggested he send it by mail instead. He also advised him to leave out any mention of the presence of Martha and Bill Dodd to avoid negative repercussions for the new ambassador. “Writing the story, I found myself trembling,” Reynolds recalled. “The grotesque white face of Anna Rath haunted me.” The next morning he mailed it in.

By the time he and the Dodds returned to Berlin a week later, the story had received big play. Hanfstaengl had left a message for him, requesting an urgent meeting. “
There isn’t one
damn word of truth in your story!” Putzi shouted at Reynolds, dropping all pretense of conviviality. “I’ve talked with our people in Nuremberg and they say nothing of the sort happened there.”

But the veteran British correspondent Norman Ebbutt had followed up on the story, getting one of his reporters to confirm it. He told Reynolds that the reporter had learned that Rath had been locked up in a mental hospital.

The Foreign Ministry didn’t bother to deny the story the way Hanfstaengl did. In fact,
they dispatched officials
to the Dodds’ residence to apologize for what they characterized as an incident of isolated brutality—providing the explanation that Martha had already suggested to Reynolds. They also claimed that the perpetrators would be punished. That, apparently, was enough to allow Martha to continue to nourish her initial illusions that the only problem with the new Germany was that it was misunderstood by the outside world.

As for Reynolds, he was rapidly shedding any illusions he still had not just about the nature of the Nazi regime but also about Hanfstaengl. Because of the Anna Rath incident, he got to see the real Putzi, not just the jocular one who charmed many Americans. When Reynolds’s parents visited Berlin, the correspondent threw a big dinner party for them, inviting Martha and Bill Dodd along with several of his journalistic colleagues and German acquaintances. Showing up late as usual, Putzi sat down at the piano and turned to Reynolds’s mother, announcing that he would sing a song for her that he had written himself. “
Putzi serenaded
my mother with a foul song in which the Third Reich’s enemies were jingled out as Jews, Catholics, and Negroes,” Reynolds recalled. Putzi had lowered his voice so only the small group at the piano could hear his words, which indicated he knew very well what he was doing. He was paying Reynolds back for the Anna Rath story by targeting his mother as the correspondent looked on.

Reynolds felt like hitting him right there, but another German guest talked him out of making a scene that would only reflect badly on him. Relishing his sense of self-importance, Putzi soon announced that he had to leave early because Hitler wanted him at the Chancellery to play some Liszt. Escorting Putzi to the door, Reynolds summoned enough self-control to look like he was the genial host sending his guest off with a pleasant good-bye. But his final words, delivered so only Putzi could hear, couldn’t have been blunter: “
Never come
to my house again, you louse.”