They remained there for four and a half years, but it is their first year that is the subject of the story to follow, for it coincided with Hitler’s ascent from chancellor to absolute tyrant, when everything hung in the balance and nothing was certain. The first year formed a kind of prologue in which all the themes of the greater epic of war and murder were soon laid down.
I have always wondered what it would have been like for an outsider to have witnessed first hand the gathering dark of Hitler’s rule. How did the city look, what did one hear, see, and smell, and how did the diplomats and other visitors interpret the events occurring around them? Hindsight tells us that during that fragile time the course of history could so easily have changed. Why, then did no one change it? Why did it take so long to recognize the real danger posed by Hitler and his regime?
Like most people, I acquired my initial sense of the era from books and photographs that left me with an impression that the world of then had no color, only gradients of gray and black. My two main protagonists, however, encountered the flesh-and-blood reality, while also managing the routine obligations of daily life. Every morning they moved through a city hung with immense banners of red, white, and black; they sat at the same outdoor cafes as did the lean, black-suited member’s of Hitler’s SS, and now and then they caught sight of Hitler himself, a smallish man in a large, open Mercedes. But they also walked each day past homes with balconies lush with red geraniums, they shopped in the city’s vast department stores, held tea parties, and breathed deep the spring fragrances of the Tiergarten, Berlin’s main park. They knew Goebbels and Goring as social acquaintances with whom they dined, danced, and joked – until, as their first year reached its end, an event occurred that proved to be the most significant in revealing the true character of Hitler and that laid the keystone for the decade to come: Kolibri- Operation Hummingbird, June 30, 1934. For father and daughter it changed everything. . .
How William Dodd’s countrymen judged his career as ambassador seemed to depend in large part on which side of the Atlantic they happened to be standing.
To the ‘isolationists’, he was needlessly provocative; to his opponents in the State Department, he was a maverick who complained too much and failed to uphold the standards of the Pretty Good Club. Roosevelt, in a letter to Bill Jr., was maddeningly noncommittal. ‘Knowing his passion for historical truth and his rare ability to illuminate the meanings of history,’ Roosevelt wore, ‘his passing is a real loss to the nation.’
To those who knew Dodd in Berlin and who witnessed first hand the oppression and terror of Hitler’s government, he would always be a hero. Sigrid Schultz called Dodd ‘the best ambassador we had in Germany’ and revered his willingness to stand up for American ideals even against the opposition of his own government. She wrote “Washington failed to give him the support due an ambassador in Nazi Germany, partly because too many of the men in the State Department were passionately fond of the Germans and because too many of the more influential businessmen of our country believed that one ‘could do business with Hitler.’ Rabbi Wise wrote in his memoir, Challenging Years, ‘Dodd was years ahead of the State Department in his grasp of the political as well as the moral implications of Hitlerism and paid the penalty of such understanding by being virtually removed from office for having the decency and the courage alone among the ambassadors to decline to attend the annual Nuremberg celebration, which was a glorification of Hitler.’
Late in life even Messersmith - general consul and senior American foreign service officer in Germany- applauded Dodd’s clarity of vision. ‘I often think that there were very few men who realized what was happening in Germany more thoroughly than he did, and certainly there were very few men who realized the implications for the rest of Europe and for us and for the whole world of what was happening in the country more than he did.’
The highest praise came from Thomas Wolfe, who during a visit to Germany in the spring of 1935 engaged in a brief affair with Dodd’s daughter Martha. He wrote to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, that Ambassador Dodd has helped conjure in him ‘a renewed pride and faith in America and a belief that somehow our great future remains.’ The Dodds’ house at Tiergartenstrasse 27a, he told Perkins, ‘has been a free and fearless harbor for people of all opinions, and people who live and walk in terror have been able to draw in their breath there without fear, and to speak their minds. This I know to be true, and further, the dry, plain, homely unconcern with which the Ambassador observes all the pomp and glitter and decorations and the tramp of marching men would do your heart good to see.’
Dodd’s successor was High Wilson, a diplomat of the old-fashioned mode that Dodd has long railed against. It was Wilson, in fact, who had first described the foreign service as ‘’a pretty good club.’ Wilson’s maxim, coined by Talleyrand before him, was not exactly stirring: ‘Above all, not too much zeal.’ As Ambassador, Wilson sought to emphasize the positive aspects of Nazi Germany and carried on a one-man campaign of appeasement. He promised Germany’s new foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, that if war began in Europe he would do all he could to keep America out. Wilson accused the American press of being ‘Jewish controlled’ and of singing ‘a hymn of hate while efforts are made over here to build a better future.’ He praised Hitler as ‘the man who has pulled his people from moral and economic despair into the state of pride and evident prosperity they now enjoyed.’ He particularly admired the Nazi ‘Strength through Joy’ program which provided all German workers with no-expense vacations and other entertainments. Wilson saw it a a powerful tool for helping Germany resist communist inroads and suppressing workers’ demands for higher wages – money that workers would squander on ‘idiotic things as a rule.’ He saw this approach as one that ‘is going to be beneficial to the world at large.’
William Bullitt, in a letter from Paris dated December 7, 1937, praised Roosevelt for choosing Wilson, stating, ‘ I do think that the chances for peace in Europe are increased definitively by your appointment of Hugh to Berlin, and I thank you profoundly.’
In the end, of course, neither Dodd’s nor Wilson’s approach mattered very much. As Hitler consolidated his power and cowed his public, only some extreme gesture of American disapproval could have had any effect, perhaps the ‘forcible intervention’; suggested by George Messersmith in September 1933. Such an act, however, would have been politically unthinkable with America succumbing more and more to the fantasy that it could avoid the squabble of Europe. ‘But history,’ wrote Dodd’s friend Claude Bowers, ambassador to Spain and later Chile, ‘will record that in a period when the forces of tyranny were mobilizing for the extermination of liberty and democracy everywhere, when a mistaken policy of ‘appeasement’ was stocking the arsenals of despotism, and when in many high social, and some political, circles, fascism was a fad and democracy anathema, he stood four square for our democratic way of life, fought the good fight and kept the faith, and when death touched him his flag was flying still.’
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