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

by Erik Larson

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.” In 1941 she and Bill Jr. published their father’s diary. The two also hoped to publish a book-length collection of letters to and from Dodd and asked George Messersmith to let them use several that he had posted to Dodd from Vienna. Messersmith refused.

In 1945, at long last, Martha achieved a goal she long had dreamed of: she published a novel. Entitled Sowing the Wind and clearly based on the life of one of her past lovers, Ernst Udet, the book described how Nazism seduced and degraded a good-hearted World War I flying ace. That same year, she and her husband adopted a baby and named him Robert.

By now, however, Martha knew that a few years after that meeting Mildred had been arrested by the Gestapo, along with Arvid and dozens of others in their network. Arvid was tried and condemned to death by hanging; he was executed at Berlin’s Plötzensee Prison on December 22, 1942. The executioner used a short rope to ensure slow strangulation. Mildred was forced to watch. At her own trial she was sentenced to six years in prison. Hitler himself ordered a retrial. This time the sentence was death. On February 16, 1943, at 6:00 p.m., she was executed by guillotine. Her last words: “And I have loved Germany so.”

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.

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

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.

“We can’t say we like it here, to be perfectly honest,” she wrote to a friend. “Naturally we would prefer to go home but home won’t take us yet.… It is a life of considerable limitations intellectually and creatively (also we don’t speak the language; a great handicap) and we feel isolated and often very lonely.”

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.”

But one great love now appeared to burn just as bright as ever. Martha began writing to Bassett, her former husband—the first of her three great loves—and soon they were corresponding as if they were back in their twenties, parsing their past romance to try to figure out what had gone wrong. Bassett confessed he had destroyed all the love letters she had ever sent him, having realized “that, even with the passage of time, I could never bear to read them, much less would I want anyone else to share them after I’ve gone.” Martha, however, had kept his. “Such love letters!” she wrote.

In 1979 a federal court cleared her and Stern of all charges, albeit grudgingly, citing lack of evidence and the deaths of witnesses. They longed to return to America, and considered doing so, but realized another obstacle remained in their path. For all those years in exile they had not paid U.S. taxes. The accumulated debt was now prohibitively high.

By now the years and illness had taken a serious toll on the world of Martha’s recollection. Bill Jr. had died in October 1952 of cancer, leaving a wife and two sons. He had spent his years after Berlin moving from job to job, ending as a clerk in the book department of Macy’s in San Francisco.

Quentin Reynolds died on March 17, 1965, at the not-very-old age of sixty-two. Putzi Hanfstaengl, whose sheer size had seemed to make him invulnerable, died on November 6, 1975, in Munich. He was eighty-eight. Sigrid Schultz, the Dragon from Chicago, died on May 14, 1980, at eighty-seven. And Max Delbrück, presumably with a full head of hair, passed away in March 1981, his exuberance quenched at last. He was seventy-four.

In March 1984, when Martha was seventy-five years old and Stern eighty-six, Martha asked a friend, “Where do you think we should die if we could choose? Here or abroad?

Martha was the survivor. Stern died in 1986. Martha remained in Prague even though, as she wrote to friends, “Nowhere could be as lonely for me as it is here.”

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.

Bassett, old loyal Bassett, outlasted her by another six years. He had forsaken the magnificent copper beech of Larchmont for an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where he died peacefully at age 102.

Years after the war, a cache of documents came to light that proved to be transcripts of conversations between Hitler and his men, recorded by his deputy Martin Bormann. One of these transcripts concerned a conversation over dinner in October 1941 at Wolfsschanze, or Wolf’s Lair, Hitler’s redoubt in East Prussia. The subject of Martha Dodd came up.

For a time I kept on my desk a copy of Ian Kershaw’s Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris, a work of grand scope that served as my field guide to the politics of the era.

Certain books, Kershaw’s Hubris foremost among them, proved exceptionally helpful in detailing the broad play of forces and men in the years that preceded World War II. I include here a couple of old but still worthy classics, Alan Bullock’s Hitler: A Study in Tyranny and William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, as well as the more recent works of Kershaw’s doppelgänger in scholarship, Richard J. Evans, whose The Third Reich in Power: 1933–1939 and The Third Reich at War: 1939–1945 are massive volumes lush with compelling, if appalling, detail.

A number of books that focused more closely on my particular parcel of ground proved very useful, among them Resisting Hitler: Mildred Harnack and the Red Orchestra, by Shareen Blair Brysac; The Haunted Wood, by KGB historians Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev; and Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, by Vassiliev, John Earl Haynes, and Harvey Klehr.

The National Archives branch in College Park, Maryland—known as National Archives II—proved to have an amazing collection of materials, twenty-seven boxes’ worth, relating to the Berlin embassy and consulate, including a count of all the dinnerware in each, down to the number of finger bowls. The Library of Congress, home to the papers of William and Martha Dodd, Cordell Hull, and Wilbur J. Carr, proved as always to be heaven’s gift to research. At the University of Delaware in Newark, I examined the papers of George Messersmith, one of the most beautifully archived collections

Anyone who wishes can also digitally thumb through the so-called Venona Intercepts, communications between Moscow Center and KGB agents in America intercepted and decoded by American intelligence officials, including missives involving Martha Dodd and Alfred Stern. Once one of America’s most closely guarded secrets, these materials now reside on the public Web site of the National Security Agency and reveal not only that America was rife with spies but that spying tended to be an excruciatingly mundane pursuit.

The memoirlike novels of Christopher Isherwood, namely The Last of Mr. Norris and Goodbye to Berlin, proved especially useful for their observations about the look and feel of the city in the years immediately preceding Hitler’s rise, when Isherwood was himself a resident of Berlin.

took great delight in now and then visiting YouTube.com to search for old film footage of Berlin and found quite a bit, including the 1927 silent film Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, which sought to capture one full day of Berlin life.

was especially pleased to find a 1935 propaganda film, Miracle of Flight, intended to attract young men to the Luftwaffe, in which Martha’s onetime lover Ernst Udet stars as himself and even shows off his Berlin apartment, whi...

I found the State Historical Society of Wisconsin to be a trove of relevant materials that conveyed a sense of the woof and weave of life in Hitler’s Berlin. There, in one locale, I found the papers of Sigrid Schultz, Hans V. Kaltenborn, and Louis Lochner. A short and lovely walk away, in the library of the University of Wisconsin, I found as well a supply o...

What I found most striking was how close everything was to the Dodds’ home, with every major government office an easy walk away, including Gestapo headquarters and Hitler’s chancellery, neither of which exists today. Where the Dodds’ home at Tiergartenstrasse 27a once stood there is now a vacant, overgrown lot surrounded by a chain-link fence. The Bendler Block is visible in the background.

owe special thanks to Gianna Sommi Panofsky and her husband, Hans, son of Alfred Panofsky, the Dodds’ landlord in Berlin. The couple settled in Evanston, Illinois; Hans taught at Northwestern University. Mrs. Panofsky graciously provided me with the original floor plans for the house on Tiergartenstrasse (which a Northwestern journalism graduate student, Ashley Keyser, carefully secured and copied on my behalf). Mrs. Panofsky was a delight to talk to. Sadly, she died in early 2010 of colon cancer.

WHEN I WAS IN BERLIN a strange thing happened, one of those odd little moments of space-time congruity that always seem to occur when I’m most deeply immersed in researching a book. I stayed at the Ritz-Carlton near the Tiergarten, not because it was a Ritz but because it was a brand-new Ritz offering rooms at compellingly low come-hither rates.