In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin

by Erik Larson

Dodd’s successor was Hugh Wilson, a diplomat of the old-fashioned mode that Dodd long had 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 Ge...

“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 foursquare for our democratic way of life, fought the good fight and kept the faith, and when death touched him his flag was flying still.” And indeed one has to wonder: For Goebbels’s Der Angriff to attack Dodd as he lay prostrate in a hospital bed, was he really so ineffectual as his enemies believed? In the end, Dodd proved to be exactly what Roosevelt had wanted, a lone beacon of American freedom and hope in a land of gathering darkness.

Martha and Alfred Stern lived in an apartment on Central Park West in New York City and owned an estate in Ridgefield, Connecticut. In 1939 she published a memoir entitled Through Embassy Eyes. Germany promptly banned the book, no surprise given some of Martha’s observations about the regime’s top leaders—for example: “If there were any logic or objectivity in Nazi sterilization laws Dr. Goebbels would have been sterilized quite some time ago.”

FOR A TIME AFTER leaving Berlin, Martha continued her covert flirtation with Soviet intelligence. Her code name was “Liza,” though this suggests more drama than surviving records support. Her career as a spy seems to have consisted mainly of talk and possibility, though the prospect of a less vaporous participation certainly intrigued Soviet intelligence officials. A secret cable from Moscow to New York in January 1942 called Martha “a gifted, clever and educated woman” but noted that “she requires constant control over her behavior.” One rather more prudish Soviet operative was unimpressed. “She considers herself a Communist and claims to accept the party’s program. In reality ‘Liza’ is a typical representative of American bohemia, a sexually decayed woman ready to sleep with any handsome man.”

Through Martha’s efforts, her husband also aligned himself with the KGB—his code name was “Louis.” Martha and Stern were very public about their mutual interest in communism and leftist causes, and in 1953 they drew the attention of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, chaired then by Representative Martin Dies, which issued subpoenas to have them testify. They fled to Mexico, but as pressure from federal authorities increased, they moved again, settling ultimately in Prague, where they lived a very noncommunistic lifestyle in a three-story, twelve-room villa attended by servants. They bought a new black Mercedes. At first, the idea of being an international fugitive appealed to Martha’s persistent sense of herself as a woman of danger, but as the years passed, a weariness overtook her. During the couple’s first years of exile, their son began exhibiting signs of severe psychic unrest and was diagnosed as schizophrenic. Martha became “obsessed”—her husband’s term—with the idea that the commotion of their flight and subsequent travels had caused Robert’s illness.

Martha learned during this time that one of her ex-loves, Rudolf Diels, had died, and in a fashion wholly unexpected for a man so adept at survival. After two years in Cologne, he had become regional commissioner in Hannover, only to be fired for exhibiting too much moral scruple. He took a job as director of inland shipping for a civilian company but was later arrested in the vast roundup that followed the July 20, 1944, assassination attempt against Hitler. Diels survived the war and during the Nuremberg trials testified on behalf of the prosecution. Later, he became a senior official in the government of West Germany. His luck ran out on November 18, 1957, during a hunting trip. As he was removing a rifle from his car, the weapon discharged and killed him.

MARTHA GREW DISILLUSIONED with communism as practiced in everyday life. Her disenchantment became outright disgust during the “Prague Spring” of 1968, when she awoke one day to find tanks rumbling past on the street outside her house during the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. “It was,” she wrote, “one of the ugliest and most repugnant sights we had ever seen.”

She died in 1990 at the age of eighty-two, not precisely a hero but certainly a woman of principle who never wavered in her belief that she had done the right thing in helping the Soviets against the Nazis at a time when most of the world was disinclined to do anything. She died still dancing on the rim of danger—a queer bird in exile, promising, flirting, remembering—unable after Berlin to settle into her role as hausfrau and needing instead to see herself once again as something grand and bright.