In The Garden Of Beasts Part 11

January 1934.

On January 9 the primary defendant in the Reichstag trial, Marinus van der Lubbe, received word from the public prosecutor that he was to be beheaded the next day.

"Thank you for telling me," van der Lubbe said. "I shall see you tomorrow."

The executioner wore top hat and tails and, in a particularly fastidious touch, white gloves. He used a guillotine.

Van der Lubbe's execution provided a clear if gory punctuation point to the Reichstag fire saga and thereby quelled a source of turbulence that had roiled Germany since the preceding February. Now anyone who felt the need for an ending could point to an official act of state: van der Lubbe had set the fire, and now van der Lubbe was dead. Dimitrov, still alive, was to be flown to Moscow. The way was clear for the restoration of Germany.

As the year opened, Germany did seem on a superficial level to have grown more stable, much to the disappointment of foreign observers and diplomats who still nurtured the belief that economic pressures would cause the collapse of the Hitler regime. At the end of his first year as chancellor, Hitler seemed more rational, almost conciliatory, and went so far as to hint that he might support some form of nonaggression pact with France and Britain. Anthony Eden, Britain's Lord Privy Seal, traveled to Germany to meet with him and, like Dodd, came away impressed with Hitler's sincerity in wanting peace. Sir Eric Phipps, Britain's amba.s.sador to Germany, wrote in his diary, "Herr Hitler seemed to feel a genuine sympathy for Mr. Eden, who certainly succeeded in bringing to the surface of that strange being certain human qualities which for me had hitherto remained obstinately dormant." In a letter to Thornton Wilder, Martha wrote: "Hitler is improving definitely."

This sense of looming normalcy was apparent in other spheres as well. The official tally of unemployed workers showed a rapid decline, from 4.8 million in 1933 to 2.7 million in 1934, although a good deal of this was due to such measures as a.s.signing one-man jobs to two men and an aggressive propaganda campaign that sought to discourage women from working. The "wild" concentration camps had been closed, thanks in part to Gestapo chief Rudolf Diels. Within the Reich Ministry of the Interior there was talk of doing away with protective custody and concentration camps altogether.

Even Dachau seemed to have become civilized. On February 12, 1934, a representative of the Quakers, Gilbert L. MacMaster, set out to visit the camp, after having been granted permission to see an inmate, a sixty-two-year-old former deputy of the Reichstag named George Simon, who had been arrested because he was a socialist. MacMaster caught a train in Munich and half an hour later got off in the village of Dachau, which he described as an "artists village." From there he walked another half hour to reach the camp.

He was surprised by what he found. "More atrocity reports have come from this camp than any other one in Germany," he wrote. "The outward appearance though is better than any camp I have seen." The former gunpowder plant in which the camp was located had been built during the past world war. "There were good houses for the chemists and the officers; the barracks for the workers were more stable, and the whole plant was steam heated," MacMaster saw. "This makes Dachau seem better equipped for the comfort of the prisoners, especially in cold weather, than the provisional camp in an old factory or farm house. In fact the appearance of the whole is more that of a permanent inst.i.tution than that of a camp."

The inmate, Simon, was soon brought to the guardhouse to meet with MacMaster. He wore a gray prison suit and seemed well. "He had no complaint," MacMaster wrote, "except that he was suffering a great deal from acute rheumatism."

Later that day MacMaster spoke to a police official who told him the camp housed two thousand prisoners. Only twenty-five were Jews, and these, the official insisted, were held for political offenses, not because of their religion. MacMaster, however, had heard reports that at least five thousand prisoners were housed within and that forty to fifty were Jews, of whom only "one or two" had been arrested for political offenses; others had been arrested following denunciations by people "who wanted to injure them in business and others because they were accused of a.s.sociating with non-Jewish girls." He was surprised to hear the official say that he saw the camps "as temporary and would welcome the day when they could be done away with."

MacMaster found Dachau even had a certain beauty. "It was a very cold morning," he wrote. "There had been such a dense fog the night before that I had had a hard time finding my hotel. This morning there was a perfect blue sky, Bavarian colors were white, for the clouds, and blue for the Bavarian sky, and the fog of the night before covered the trees with a thick h.o.a.r-frost." Everything was coated with a glistening lace of ice crystals that gave the camp an ethereal look, like something from a fable. In the sun the birches of the surrounding moor became spires of diamond.

But as in so many situations in the new Germany, the outward appearance of Dachau was misleading. The cleanliness and efficiency of the camp had little to do with a desire to treat the inmates in a humane fashion. The preceding June an SS officer named Theodor Eicke had taken command of Dachau and composed a set of regulations that later became the model for all camps. Issued on October 1, 1933, the new rules codified the relationship between guards and prisoners and in so doing removed the act of punishment from the realm of impulse and caprice to a plane where discipline became systematic, dispa.s.sionate, and predictable. Now everyone at least knew the rules, but the rules were harsh and explicitly left no room for pity.

"Tolerance means weakness," Eicke wrote in the introduction to his rules. "In the light of this conception, punishment will be mercilessly handed out whenever the interests of the fatherland warrant it." Minor offenses drew beatings with a cane and stints in solitary confinement. Even irony was costly. Eight days' solitary and "twenty-five strokes" were meted out to "anyone making depreciatory or ironical remarks to a member of the SS, deliberately omitting the prescribed marks of respect, or in any other way demonstrating unwillingness to submit himself to disciplinary measures." A catchall clause, Article 19, dealt with "incidental punishments," which were to include reprimands, beatings, and "tying to stakes." Another section laid out the rules for hangings. Death was the penalty for anyone who, "for the purpose of agitating," discussed politics or was caught meeting with others. Even collecting "true or false information about the concentration camp" or receiving such information or talking about it with others could get an inmate hanged. "If a prisoner attempts to escape," Eicke wrote, "he is to be shot without warning." Gunfire also was the required response to prisoner uprisings. "Warning shots," Eicke wrote, "are forbidden on principle."

Eicke made sure all new guards were fully indoctrinated, as one of his trainees, Rudolf Hoss, would later attest. Hoss became a guard at Dachau in 1934 and recalled how Eicke repeatedly drummed home the same message. "Any pity whatsoever for 'enemies of the State' was unworthy of an SS-man. There was no place in the ranks of the SS for men with soft hearts and any such would do well to retire quickly to a monastery. He could only use hard, determined men who ruthlessly obeyed every order." An adept pupil, Hoss went on to become commandant at Auschwitz.

AT FIRST GLANCE, persecution of Jews seemed also to have eased. "Outwardly Berlin presented during my recent stay there a normal appearance," wrote David J. Schweitzer, a senior official with the American Joint Distribution Committee, nicknamed the Joint, a Jewish relief organization. "The air is not charged, general courtesy prevails." Jews who had fled during the previous year now actually had begun returning, he wrote. Some ten thousand Jews who had left in early 1933 had returned by the start of 1934, though outbound emigration-four thousand Jews in 1934-continued as well. "So much is this the actual situation or so well masked is it that I heard an American, one who has just spent a week pa.s.sing on to a neighboring country, remark that he could not see that anything has actually happened that so stirred the outside world."

But Schweitzer understood this was in large part an illusion. Overt violence against Jews did appear to have receded, but a more subtle oppression had settled in its place. "What our friend had failed to see from outward appearances is the tragedy that is befalling daily the job holders who are gradually losing their positions," Schweitzer wrote. He gave the example of Berlin's department stores, typically owned and staffed by Jews. "While on the one hand one can observe a Jewish department store crowded as usual with non-Jews and Jews alike, one can observe in the very next department store the total absence of a single Jewish employee." Likewise the situation varied from community to community. One town might banish Jews, while in the next town over Jews and non-Jews continued "to live side by side with their neighbors and pursue their occupations as best they can unmolested."

Likewise Schweitzer detected divergent outlooks among Berlin's Jewish leaders. "The one tendency is that there is nothing to hope for, that things are bound to get worse," he wrote. "The other tendency, however, is quite the opposite but just as definite, namely a tendency resulting from thinking in terms of March 1934 instead of March 1933, reconciling themselves to the present situation, accepting the status of the inevitable, adjusting themselves to move in their own restricted circles and hoping that just as things have changed from March 1933 to March 1934 they will continue to improve in a favorable manner."

HITLER'S CONTINUED PROTESTATIONS of peace const.i.tuted the most blatant official deception. Anyone who made an effort to travel the countryside outside Berlin knew it at once. Raymond Geist, acting consul general, routinely made such journeys, often on a bicycle. "Before the end of 1933, during my frequent excursions, I discovered outside of Berlin on nearly every road leaving from the city new large military establishments, including training fields, airports, barracks, proving grounds, anti-aircraft stations and the like." of peace const.i.tuted the most blatant official deception. Anyone who made an effort to travel the countryside outside Berlin knew it at once. Raymond Geist, acting consul general, routinely made such journeys, often on a bicycle. "Before the end of 1933, during my frequent excursions, I discovered outside of Berlin on nearly every road leaving from the city new large military establishments, including training fields, airports, barracks, proving grounds, anti-aircraft stations and the like."

Even the newly arrived Jack White recognized the true reality of what was occurring. "Any one motoring out in the country of a Sunday can see brown shirts drilling in the woods," he told his brother-in-law, Moffat.

White was astonished to learn that the young daughter of a friend was required to spend every Wednesday afternoon practicing the art of throwing hand grenades.

THE SUPERFICIAL NORMALCY of Germany also masked the intensifying conflict between Hitler and Rohm. Dodd and others who had spent time in Germany knew full well that Hitler was intent on increasing the size of the regular army, the Reichswehr, despite the explicit prohibitions of the Treaty of Versailles, and that Captain Rohm of the SA wanted any increase to include the incorporation of entire SA units, part of his campaign to gain control of the nation's military. Defense Minister Blomberg and the army's top generals loathed Rohm and disdained his uncouth legions of brown-shirted Storm Troopers. Goring hated Rohm as well and saw his drive for power as a threat to Goring's own control of Germany's new air force, his pride and joy, which he was now quietly but energetically working to construct. of Germany also masked the intensifying conflict between Hitler and Rohm. Dodd and others who had spent time in Germany knew full well that Hitler was intent on increasing the size of the regular army, the Reichswehr, despite the explicit prohibitions of the Treaty of Versailles, and that Captain Rohm of the SA wanted any increase to include the incorporation of entire SA units, part of his campaign to gain control of the nation's military. Defense Minister Blomberg and the army's top generals loathed Rohm and disdained his uncouth legions of brown-shirted Storm Troopers. Goring hated Rohm as well and saw his drive for power as a threat to Goring's own control of Germany's new air force, his pride and joy, which he was now quietly but energetically working to construct.

What remained unclear was where exactly Hitler stood on the matter. In December 1933, Hitler made Rohm a member of his cabinet. On New Year's Eve he sent Rohm a warm greeting, published in the press, in which he praised his longtime ally for building so effective a legion. "You must know that I am grateful to destiny, which has allowed me to call such a man as you my friend and brother-in-arms."

Soon afterward, however, Hitler ordered Rudolf Diels to compile a report on the outrages committed by the SA and on the h.o.m.os.e.xual practices of Rohm and his circle. Diels later claimed that Hitler also asked him to kill Rohm and certain other "traitors" but that he refused.

President Hindenburg, the supposed last restraint against Hitler, seemed oblivious to the pressures building below. On January 30, 1934, Hindenburg issued a public statement congratulating Hitler on the "great progress" Germany had made in the year since his ascension to chancellor. "I am confident," he wrote, "that in the coming year you and your fellow workers will successfully continue, and with G.o.d's help complete, the great work of German reconstruction which you have so energetically begun, on the basis of the new happily attained national unity of the German people."

And so the year began, with an outward sense of better times ahead and, for the Dodds, a fresh round of parties and banquets. Formal invitations arrived on printed cards in envelopes, followed as always by seating diagrams. The n.a.z.i leadership favored an awkward arrangement in which tables formed a large rectangular horseshoe with guests arrayed along the inside and outside of the configuration. Those seated along the inside flank spent the evening in an abyss of social discomfort, watched from behind by their fellow guests. One such invitation arrived for Dodd and his family from their neighbor Captain Rohm.

Martha later would have cause to save a copy of the seating chart. Rohm, the Hausherr Hausherr, or host, sat at the top of the horseshoe and had full view of everyone seated before him. Dodd sat on Rohm's right, in a position of honor. Directly across the table from Rohm, in the most awkward seat of the horseshoe, was Heinrich Himmler, who loathed him.

CHAPTER 29.

Sniping In Washington, Undersecretary Phillips called Jay Pierrepont Moffat into his office "to read a whole series of letters from Amba.s.sador Dodd," as Moffat noted in his diary. Among these were recent letters in which Dodd repeated his complaints about the wealth of Foreign Service officers and the number of Jews on his staff, and one that dared to suggest a foreign policy that America should pursue. The nation, Dodd had written, must discard its "righteous aloofness" because "another life and death struggle in Europe would bother us all-especially if it was paralleled by a similar conflict in the Far East (as I believe is the understanding in secret conclaves)." Dodd acknowledged Congress's reluctance to become entangled abroad but added, "I do, however, think facts count; even if we hate them."

Although Phillips and Moffat were disenchanted with Dodd, they recognized that they had limited power over him because of his relationship with Roosevelt, which allowed Dodd to skirt the State Department and communicate directly with the president whenever he wished. Now, in Phillips's office, they read Dodd's letters and shook their heads. "As usual," Moffat wrote in his diary, "he is dissatisfied with everything." In one letter Dodd had described two of his emba.s.sy officers as "competent but unqualified"-prompting Moffat to snipe, "Whatever that may mean."

On Wednesday, January 3, Phillips, his tone remote and supercilious, wrote to Dodd to address some of Dodd's complaints, one of which centered on the transfer of Phillips's nephew, Orme Wilson, to Berlin. Wilson's arrival the previous November had caused an upwelling of compet.i.tive angst within the emba.s.sy. Phillips now chided Dodd for not managing the situation better. "I hope it will not be difficult for you to discourage any further talk of an undesirable nature amongst the members of your staff."

As to Dodd's repeated complaint about the work habits and qualifications of Foreign Service men, Phillips wrote, "I confess I am at a loss to understand your feeling that 'somebody in the Department is encouraging people in mistaken att.i.tudes and conduct.'"

He cited Dodd's past observation that there were too many Jews on the emba.s.sy's clerical staff but professed to be "somewhat confused" as to how to resolve the issue. Dodd previously had told him he did not want to transfer anyone out, but now it appeared he did. "Do you desire any transfers?" Phillips asked. He added, "If...the racial question is one that needs correction in view of the special conditions in Germany, it will be perfectly possible for the Department to do this upon definite recommendation from you."

THAT SAME WEDNESDAY, in Berlin, Dodd wrote a letter to Roosevelt that he deemed so sensitive he not only wrote it in longhand but also sent it first to his friend Colonel House, so that House could give it to the president in person. Dodd urged that Phillips be removed from his position as undersecretary and given a different sort of posting, perhaps as an amba.s.sador somewhere. He suggested Paris and added that Phillips's departure from Washington "would limit a little the favoritisms that prevail there."

He wrote, "Do not think I have any personal axe to grind or any personal grievances about anything. I hope"-hope-"it is the public service alone that motivates [this] letter."

CHAPTER 30.

Premonition Martha became consumed with Boris. Her French lover, Armand Berard, upon finding himself consigned to the background, grieved. Diels too receded, though he remained a frequent companion.

Early in January, Boris arranged a tryst with Martha that yielded one of the most unusual romantic encounters she had ever experienced, though she had no advance warning of what was to occur other than Boris's plea that she wear his favorite dress-gold silk, off the shoulders, deep and revealing neckline, close fitted at the waist. She added a necklace of amber and a corsage that Boris had provided, of gardenias.

Fritz, the butler, greeted Boris at the front door, but before he could announce the Russian's presence, Boris went bounding up the stairway to the main floor. Fritz followed. Martha was just then walking along the hall toward the stairs, as she wrote in a detailed recollection of the evening. Upon seeing her, Boris dropped to one knee.

"Oh my darling!" he said, in English. Then, in German: "You look wonderful." he said, in English. Then, in German: "You look wonderful."

She was delighted and mildly embarra.s.sed. Fritz grinned. Boris led her out to his Ford-the top raised, mercifully, against the cold-and drove them to Horcher's restaurant on Lutherstra.s.se, a few blocks south of the Tiergarten. It was one of Berlin's finest restaurants, specializing in game, and was said to be Goring's favorite place to dine. It was identified also, in a 1929 short story by then-popular writer Gina Kaus, as the place to go if your goal was seduction. You could be seated on one of its leather banquettes and a few tables over, there would be Goring, resplendent in his uniform of the moment. In another time there might have been famous writers, artists, and musicians and prominent Jewish financiers and scientists, but by this point most had fled or else had found themselves suddenly isolated in circ.u.mstances that did not permit costly nights on the town. The restaurant endured, however, as if unmindful that anything had changed in the world outside.

Boris had reserved a private room, where he and Martha dined lavishly on smoked salmon, caviar, turtle soup, and chicken in the style coming to be known as "Kievsky." For dessert they had brandied Bavarian cream. They drank champagne and vodka. Martha loved the food, the drink, the lofty setting, but was perplexed. "Why all this, Boris?" she asked him. "What are we celebrating?"

In answer he gave only a smile. After dinner, they drove north and turned onto Tiergartenstra.s.se as if heading for the Dodds' house, but instead of stopping there, Boris kept driving. They tooled along the darkly forested boundary of the park until they reached the Brandenburg Gate and Unter den Linden, its two-hundred-foot width clogged with automobiles whose headlights transformed it into a sluiceway of platinum. One block east of the gate, Boris pulled to a stop at the Soviet emba.s.sy, at Unter den Linden 7. He led Martha into the building and along several corridors, then up a flight of stairs, until they stood before an unmarked door.

He smiled and opened the door, then stepped aside to let her pa.s.s. He switched on a table lamp and lit two red candles. The room reminded her at first of a student's residence in a dormitory, though Boris had done what he could to make it something more. She saw a straight-backed chair, two armchairs, and a bed. Over the pillow he had spread an embroidered cloth that he identified as coming from the Caucasus. A samovar for making tea occupied a table by the window.

In one corner of the room, in a bookcase, Martha found a collection of photographs of Vladimir Lenin centered around a single large portrait that showed him in a manner Martha had not seen before, like a friend captured in a snapshot, not the stern-visaged Lenin of Soviet propaganda. Here too lay a number of pamphlets in Russian, one with the scintillating t.i.tle, as translated by Boris, "Workers and Peasant Inspection Teams." Boris identified all this as his "Lenin corner," his Soviet equivalent of the religious images that Orthodox Russians traditionally hung high in one corner of a room. "My people, as you may have read in the Russian novels you love, used to have, and still have, icon corners," he told her. "But I am a modern Russian, a communist!"

In another corner she found a second shrine, but the centerpiece of this one, she saw, was herself. Boris called it his "Martha corner." A photograph of her stood on a small table, shimmying in the red flicker of one of Boris's candles. He also had set out several of her letters and more photographs. An enthusiastic amateur photographer, he had taken many pictures during their travels around Berlin. There were keepsakes as well-a linen handkerchief she had given him and that stalk of wild mint from their picnic in September 1933, now dried but still exuding a faint tang. And here too was the carved wooden statue of a nun that she had sent to him as a reply to his three "see no evil" monkeys-except Boris had accessorized the nun by adding a tiny halo fashioned out of fine gold wire.

More recently he had added pinecones and freshly cut evergreen boughs to his Martha shrine, and these filled the room with the scent of forest. He included these, he told her, to symbolize that his love for her was "ever green."

"My G.o.d, Boris," she laughed, "you are a romantic! Is this a proper thing for a tough communist like you to do?"

Next to Lenin, he told her, "I love you most." He kissed her bare shoulder and suddenly became very serious. "But in case you don't understand yet," he said, "my party and country must always come first."

The sudden shift, the look on his face-again Martha laughed. She told Boris she understood. "My father thinks of Thomas Jefferson almost the way you do about Lenin," she said.

They were getting cozy, when suddenly, quietly, the door opened and in stepped a blond girl whom Martha guessed to be about nine years old. She knew at once this had to be Boris's daughter. Her eyes were just like her father's-"extraordinary, luminous eyes," Martha wrote-though in most other ways she seemed very unlike him. Her face was plain and she lacked her father's irrepressible mirth. She looked somber. Boris rose and went to her.

"Why is it so dark in here?" his daughter said. "I don't like it."

She spoke in Russian, with Boris translating. Martha suspected the girl knew German, given her schooling in Berlin, but that she spoke Russian now out of petulance.

Boris turned on an overhead light, a bare bulb. Its harsh glow instantly dispersed the romantic air he had managed to create with his candles and shrines. He told his daughter to shake Martha's hand, and the girl did so, though with obvious reluctance. Martha found the girl's hostility unpleasant but understandable.

The girl asked her, in Russian, "Why are you so dressed up?"

Boris explained that this was the Martha he had told her about. She was dressed so nicely, he said, because this was her very first visit to the Soviet emba.s.sy and thus a special occasion.

The girl appraised Martha. A hint of a smile appeared. "She is very pretty," the girl said. "But she's too thin."

Boris explained that nonetheless Martha was healthy.

He checked his watch. The time was almost ten o'clock. He sat his daughter in his lap, held her close, and gently ran his hand through her hair. He and Martha spoke of trivial matters as the girl stared at Martha. After a few moments Boris stopped stroking her hair and gave her a hug, his signal that it was time for her to go to bed. She curtsied and in grudging, quiet German said, "Auf Wiedersehen, Fraulein Marta."

Boris took the girl's hand and walked her from the room.

In his absence, Martha gave his quarters a closer examination, and she continued doing so after his return. Now and then she glanced in his direction.

"Lenin was very human," he said, smiling. "He would have understood your your corner." corner."

They lay on the bed and held each other. He told her of his life-how his father had abandoned his family, and how at sixteen he had joined the Red Guard. "I want my daughter to have an easier life," he said. He wanted the same for his country. "We've had nothing but tyranny, war, revolution, terror, civil war, starvation. If we aren't attacked again, we may have a chance to build something new and unique in human history. You understand?"

At times as he told his story tears slipped down his cheeks. She was used to it now. He told her his dreams for the future.

"Then he held me close to his body," she wrote. "From below his collarbone to his navel, his honey-colored hair covered him, as soft as down.... Truly, it was beautiful to me, and gave me a deep feeling of warmth, comfort and closeness."

As the evening came to an end, he made tea and poured it into the traditional cup-clear gla.s.s in a metal frame.

"Now, my darling," he said, "in the last few hours you have had a small taste of a Russian Russian evening." evening."

"HOW COULD I TELL HIM," she wrote later, "that it was one of the strangest evenings I had ever spent in my life?" A sense of foreboding tempered her enjoyment. She wondered whether Boris, by becoming so involved with her-establishing his Martha corner in the emba.s.sy and daring to bring her to his private quarters-had somehow transgressed an unwritten prohibition. She sensed that some "malevolent eye" had taken note. "It was," she recalled, "as if a dark wind had entered the room." she wrote later, "that it was one of the strangest evenings I had ever spent in my life?" A sense of foreboding tempered her enjoyment. She wondered whether Boris, by becoming so involved with her-establishing his Martha corner in the emba.s.sy and daring to bring her to his private quarters-had somehow transgressed an unwritten prohibition. She sensed that some "malevolent eye" had taken note. "It was," she recalled, "as if a dark wind had entered the room."

Late that night Boris drove her home.

CHAPTER 31.

Night Terrors The lives of the Dodds underwent a subtle change. Where once they had felt free to say anything they wished within their own home, now they experienced a new and unfamiliar constraint. In this their lives reflected the broader miasma suffusing the city beyond their garden wall. A common story had begun to circulate: One man telephones another and in the course of their conversation happens to ask, "How is Uncle Adolf?" Soon afterward the secret police appear at his door and insist that he prove that he really does have an Uncle Adolf and that the question was not in fact a coded reference to Hitler. Germans grew reluctant to stay in communal ski lodges, fearing they might talk in their sleep. They postponed surgeries because of the lip-loosening effects of anesthetic. Dreams reflected the ambient anxiety. One German dreamed that an SA man came to his home and opened the door to his oven, which then repeated every negative remark the household had made against the government. After experiencing life in n.a.z.i Germany, Thomas Wolfe wrote, "Here was an entire nation...infested with the contagion of an ever-present fear. It was a kind of creeping paralysis which twisted and blighted all human relations."

Jews, of course, experienced it most acutely. A survey of those who fled Germany, conducted from 1993 through 2001 by social historians Eric A. Johnson and Karl-Heinz Reuband, found that 33 percent had felt "constant fear of arrest." Among those who had lived in small towns, more than half recalled feeling such fear. Most non-Jewish citizens, however, claimed to have experienced little fear-in Berlin, for example, only 3 percent described their fear of arrest as constant-but they did not feel wholly at ease. Rather, most Germans experienced a kind of echo of normality. There arose among them a recognition that their ability to lead normal lives "depended on their acceptance of the n.a.z.i regime and their keeping their heads down and not acting conspicuously." If they fell into line, allowed themselves to be "coordinated," they would be safe-though the survey also found a surprising tendency among non-Jewish Berliners to occasionally step out of line. Some 32 percent recalled telling anti-n.a.z.i jokes, and 49 percent claimed to have listened to illegal radio broadcasts from Britain and elsewhere. However, they only dared to commit such infractions in private or among trusted friends, for they understood that the consequences could be lethal.

For the Dodds, at first, it was all so novel and unlikely as to be almost funny. Martha laughed the first time her friend Mildred Fish Harnack insisted they go into a bathroom for a private conversation. Mildred believed that bathrooms, being spa.r.s.ely furnished, were more difficult to fit with listening devices than a cluttered living room. Even then Mildred would "whisper almost inaudibly," Martha wrote.

It was Rudolf Diels who first conveyed to Martha the unfunny reality of Germany's emerging culture of surveillance. One day he invited her to his office and with evident pride showed her an array of equipment used for recording telephone conversations. He led her to believe that eavesdropping apparatus had indeed been installed in the chancery of the U.S. emba.s.sy and in her home. Prevailing wisdom held that n.a.z.i agents hid their microphones in telephones to pick up conversations in the surrounding rooms. Late one night, Diels seemed to confirm this. Martha and he had gone dancing. Afterward, upon arrival at her house, Diels accompanied her upstairs to the library for a drink. He was uneasy and wanted to talk. Martha grabbed a large pillow, then walked across the room toward her father's desk. Diels, perplexed, asked what she was doing. She told him she planned to put the pillow over the telephone. Diels nodded slowly, she recalled, and "a sinister smile crossed his lips."

She told her father about it the next day. The news surprised him. Though he accepted the fact of intercepted mail, tapped telephones and telegraph lines, and the likelihood of eavesdropping at the chancery, he never would have imagined a government so brazen as to place microphones in a diplomat's private residence. He took it seriously, however. By now he had seen enough unexpected behavior from Hitler and his underlings to show him that anything was possible. He filled a cardboard box with cotton, Martha recalled, and used it to cover his own telephone whenever a conversation in the library shifted to confidential territory.

As time pa.s.sed the Dodds found themselves confronting an amorphous anxiety that infiltrated their days and gradually altered the way they led their lives. The change came about slowly, arriving like a pale mist that slipped into every crevice. It was something everyone who lived in Berlin seemed to experience. You began to think differently about whom you met for lunch and for that matter what cafe or restaurant you chose, because rumors circulated about which establishments were favorite targets of Gestapo agents-the bar at the Adlon, for example. You lingered at street corners a beat or two longer to see if the faces you saw at the last corner had now turned up at this one. In the most casual of circ.u.mstances you spoke carefully and paid attention to those around you in a way you never had before. Berliners came to practice what became known as "the German glance"-der deutsche Blick-a quick look in all directions when encountering a friend or acquaintance on the street.

The Dodds' home life became less and less spontaneous. They grew especially to distrust their butler, Fritz, who had a knack for moving soundlessly. Martha suspected that he listened in when she had friends and lovers in the house. Whenever he appeared in the midst of a family conversation, the talk would wither and become desultory, an almost unconscious reaction.

After vacations and weekends away, the family's return was always darkened by the likelihood that in their absence new devices had been installed, old ones refreshed. "There is no way on earth one can describe in the coldness of words on paper what this espionage can do to the human being," Martha wrote. It suppressed routine discourse-"the family's conferences and freedom of speech and action were so circ.u.mscribed we lost even the faintest resemblance to a normal American family. Whenever we wanted to talk we had to look around corners and behind doors, watch for the telephone and speak in whispers." The strain of all this took a toll on Martha's mother. "As time went on, and the horror increased," Martha wrote, "her courtesy and graciousness towards the n.a.z.i officials she was forced to meet, entertain, and sit beside, became so intense a burden she could scarcely bear it."

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 emba.s.sy. One clerk in particular had drawn the attention of consular officials: Heinrich Rocholl, a longtime employee who helped prepare reports for the American commercial attache, whose offices were on the first floor of the Bellevuestra.s.se consulate. In his spare time Rocholl had founded a pro-n.a.z.i organization, the a.s.sociation of Former German Students in America, which issued a publication called Rundbriefe Rundbriefe. Lately Rocholl had been discovered trying "to find out the contents of confidential reports of the Commercial Attache," 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 a.s.sist 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 Rundbriefe Geist found an article in which "disparaging allusions were made to the Amba.s.sador 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. Geist found an article in which "disparaging allusions were made to the Amba.s.sador 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-Goring-Stra.s.se 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 Tiergartenstra.s.se & the Charlottenburger Chaussee, on the right side (going from here)?"

WHETHER LISTENING DEVICES TRULY laced the emba.s.sy and the Dodds' home cannot be known, but the salient fact was that the Dodds came to see n.a.z.i 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. laced the emba.s.sy and the Dodds' home cannot be known, but the salient fact was that the Dodds came to see n.a.z.i 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 n.a.z.is, he was beyond doubt a target of surveillance-and with Mildred and Arvid Harnack, both of whom had grown increasingly opposed to the n.a.z.i regime and were taking their first steps toward building a loose a.s.sociation of men and women committed to resisting n.a.z.i 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 193334, 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."

CHAPTER 32.