Traitor's Odyssey (eBook)

1. THE FLYING HAMBURGER

Back in Chicago, the Tribune’s foreign editor had told Martha that, with the Nazis now in power, she could forget about Berlin’s legendary social scene. It was dead. As a result, when they packed for the move, Martha and her mother brought only a few of their gowns and dresses. They also didn’t bring any furniture or household items with them, which diplomats normally did, so the small amount of baggage the Dodds brought aboard the SS Washington made them seem more like tourists than the family of a US ambassador travelling to a new duty station.

They did, however, bring along the family car, a not-new Chevrolet. Martha’s father, William E. Dodd, simple, resolutely unadorned man that he was, cringed at the thought of being seen riding inside any of the grand limousines which the embassy kept for the ambassador’s use. His idea was that, whenever there might be an official function to attend, he’d use the Chevvy with his son, Bill Jr, acting as chauffer. One of the points Dodd had stipulated to President Roosevelt when he’d offered him the ambassadorship was that he be allowed to live within his salary. FDR agreed right off, like it went without saying. But then, hadn’t he been the one who had said his reason for sending a Jeffersonian Democrat like Dodd to Berlin was so that Hitler and the Nazis would see what America was about?

The Chevvy was at that moment in the ship’s hold, and once they were docked and passenger disembarkation was underway, a dockside crane would lift it out and set it gently down on the pier. They’d load it up and Bill Jr would drive it down to Berlin to their hotel. Then Dodd and some embassy bigwig named Gordon would go off together on some special train called ‘The Flying Hamburger’ for a briefing on ‘the political situation’, which needed to be discussed right away and in private. As for Martha and her mother, there’d be people from the embassy who’d come up with Gordon and would get them on the regular train, and they’d all travel down to Berlin together.

Her father’s appointment had caught everyone in Chicago by surprise, since no one in the Cook County political machine had ever heard of him. All anyone knew was William E. Dodd, a Chicago Democrat, university professor, eminent historian and apparently one of President Roosevelt’s personal friends, had been appointed ambassador to Berlin and FDR’s personal envoy to Adolf Hitler! Since no one knew who the Dodds were, it didn’t take much for the Chicago papers to grab the few available facts and concoct an engaging and acceptable narrative. The Dodds were an All-American family: Mom, Dad, Buddy and Sis off to Berlin to show Mr Hitler just what America is all about. It worked. Readers ate it up. But then, strangely, the story got picked up by the papers in other cities,1 so by the time the Dodds reached New York, they discovered they were celebrities. When they boarded their ship, the SS Washington, the next morning, there was a crowd of people, mostly strangers, gathered at the dock to see them off, along with numerous press photographers. As the lines were cast off and the ship’s screws began churning the water, some of the photographers, seeing the Dodds looking down from the rail, shouted at them to wave goodbye for the cameras. The Dodds obliged and the photographers snapped their picture. The shot that made the papers appeared to show the new ambassador and his family giving ‘Heil Hitler’ salutes. But as the ship headed out of New York Harbor and into the Atlantic, a calm finally came over everything and the Dodds’ brush with celebrity was ended.

The voyage from New York lasted nine days. The whole time the sea was calm and for Dodd, it was a time of quiet reflection about what lay ahead. He hadn’t used his German in years and now, in an effort to quickly regain his former fluency, he had his wife and children sit with him in his stateroom for an hour or two each morning while he read aloud to them in German. The rest of the time he spent going through the thick sheaf of reports and briefing documents which the State Department had prepared for him.

As for Martha, for the first two days at sea she ‘wept copiously and sentimentally’ for things and people she’d never come back to. There was the comfortable, if anonymous, middle-class existence which the Dodds had led up until then, and for Martha, there were the many friends and more than a few lovers, and even, it turned out, a husband she hadn’t quite gotten around to telling her parents about. There was also her job as Assistant Books Editor at the Chicago Tribune, a plum position she’d only recently started but had already grown bored with.

As for what lay ahead, Martha had no idea, either. Her life’s dream had always been to be a famous writer, and even though she was now, officially speaking, a newspaperwoman, she’d never had any interest in journalism. As for all that was going on in Germany, Martha had given it very little thought. Her interests lay in literature and poetry, not politics. It didn’t matter that she’d grown up in an intellectually vibrant household, alive with endless spirited discussions about history, politics and economics, none of it particularly interesting to her. Hitler was, to Martha, little more than ‘a clown who looked like Charlie Chaplin… who burned books and had set up a dictatorship’.2

Martha’s basic indifference to world affairs and the situation in Nazi Germany was largely lost on the poet Carl Sandburg, one of her father’s closest friends and, apparently, one of Martha’s occasional lovers, who extolled her to ‘find out what this man Hitler is made of, what makes his brain go round, what his bones and brains are made of!’3 What Martha made of Sandburg’s sage advice at the time is not known. For her, it was enough that she was going on an adventure abroad in a faraway, exotic place, and at the same time extracting herself from her secret marriage and other personal complications, which she hoped might then sort themselves out without any great participation on her own part.

It wasn’t that she no longer loved the man she’d married. She did love him, but it had been done on a whim a year earlier. She loved him just as she loved other men too, and with all of them, she blew hot and then cold. Mostly Martha loved the art of pursuit and of being pursued. But much as Martha loved men, there were never any whose company she preferred over her father’s and no place she’d rather be than with her family.

After two days, Martha’s weeping ended and once again she was ready for fun. Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr, the President’s son, was also aboard, on his way to spend a summer in France. He fit the bill perfectly for a shipboard playmate. They danced, they drank. If it went beyond that, neither mentioned it afterwards. When the SS Washington docked at Le Havre, she got off with him and walked with him to the train station before returning to the ship.

While Martha claimed to have had ‘not the faintest idea of anti-Semitism in either its mild or vicious forms’,4 prior to entering university, the same could not be said of her father. William E. Dodd considered himself a liberal democrat, but only in the ‘Jeffersonian’ sense. His interest and sympathies were with the ‘yeomanry’: farmers who worked their own smallholdings with, at most, the help of a hired hand or two. These and the mechanics and tradesmen who supported them and made an agrarian economy possible was what he cared about. Dodd opposed slavery, not so much because of its inhumanity as its inherent inefficiency. Unlike many Southerners, Dodd professed no warm feelings for Black people, or for the teeming ethnic masses who lived in cities and toiled in factories. A perfect America was, in Dodd’s mind, one peopled by men and women from the British Isles and northern Europe. This was particularly so for the Jews. Dodd’s anti-Semitism was of the mild, socially acceptable form. He probably didn’t have it in him to be mean to Jews, or vicious. While he read the reports in the newspapers of what the Nazis were doing to Jews in Germany, he mostly took a dim view of those reports, just as he had of the entreaties of different Jewish leaders he’d had meetings with in the days before his departure. If there was any truth to it, Dodd couldn’t help but believe it was something they’d probably brought on themselves.

When the SS Washington reached Hamburg on the morning of 13 July 1933, a crowd of Germans and Americans were there on the United States Lines terminal pier after traveling up from Berlin to greet, or at least get a glimpse of, the new American Ambassador and his family. Many brought flowers, though probably no one there had ever met or seen the Dodds before this. They’d come because the arrival of a new American Ambassador was a very big deal. Sackett, the last ambassador, had been extremely popular, and in a city that viewed itself as ‘almost-American’, he was seen as a sort of spiritual godfather. With all that was going on with Hitler and the Brownshirts, people couldn’t help but wonder whether this new ambassador might have the same kind of magic as his predecessor. Everyone hoped so, but some had their doubts.

Among the crowd was a small delegation of embassy staff, headed by George Anderson Gordon, the notoriously tightly wound Counselor, and Ambassador Dodd’s soon to be chief...