crowd brutally shoving about a young woman with a placard hanging around her neck. The words on it were translated for the brother and sister: “I have offered myself to a Jew.”

A disturbing matter, yes, certainly, the ambassador’s daughter thought, yet an “isolated case” and not really important, as it “did not reveal actually what was going on in Germany” and had nothing to do with the “constructive work” being done, the important accomplishments. She heard of other excesses, but found excuses for them. Her father “gently labeled me a young Nazi.” That made her defensive, and “I became temporarily an ardent defender of everything going on,” the “glowing and inspiring faith in Hitler, the good that was being done for the unemployed.” She wrote home that the rebirth of the country was as exciting as anything she had ever seen, that press stories and atrocity reports were blown up out of proportion. Berlin was clean and orderly, the people warm and openhearted. When the reporter Edgar Ansel Mowrer told her that “all the decencies had been violated in Germany” and that the German soul was being “crippled and distorted,” she speculated that perhaps he was a Jew. (He wasn’t.) Hitler’s eyes captured Dodd: “They are unforgettable, intense and unwavering.” But he was “gentle and modest.”

She moved in high circles, attending teas, lunches, dinners, balls, and receptions, went to movies and nightclubs, was often at the Potsdam palace of the crown prince, whose father, the former kaiser, had fled to the Netherlands. Prince Louis Ferdinand, the crown prince’s son and heir to the throne after his father, became one of her closest friends. The Führer’s aide  and pianist Ernst (“Putzi”) Hanfstängl, said, “Hitler needs a woman. Hitler should have an American woman— a lovely woman could change the whole destiny of Europe. Martha, you are the woman!” He took her to tea with the Führer, who kissed her hand. She had expected “a glamorous and brilliant personality who must have great power and charm” but found, instead, someone “excessively gentle and modest in his manners” with “almost a tenderness of speech and glance.” He kissed her hand again when they parted. Ambassador Dodd sardonically told his daughter that she ought not to wash the site of the kisses. “He said I should remember the exact spot and if I must wash, could wash carefully round it.” Her father had come to hate the new Germany of Nazi flags, shouts, singing, military parades, the blaring display of what he considered medieval concepts. Hitler’s eyes had captured his daughter— “They are unforgettable, intense and unwavering”—but the Hitler-Martha romance that Putzi had envisioned did not take.

Yet it began to come to her that not everything was happy and care-free and constructive in Germany. People she had met suddenly vanished into concentration camps to emerge months later, if at all, with broken bodies and spirits. They had, they whispered to her, been forced to stand at attention

for days on end until their legs and feet swelled and they could not walk. They had been beaten with clubs in which nails were embedded. Human waste had been flung on them, in their mouths. “I was sobered and silenced.”

In June of 1934, there came what was called the Night of the Long Knives, when Hitler dispatched without indictment or trial anyone who might present him with a problem. A prominent victim was one of his most intimate associates in the days of his rise to power, Ernst Röhm. Martha Dodd had been to a party at Röhm’s house a week earlier.

No one was now safe in Germany. People came broken and tragic to plead for help from the American ambassador. He could do little. At soirees, Martha Dodd moved among people pale, jumpy, preoccupied, frightened, with deep circles under their swollen eyes, while Gestapo agents took note of what was said by everybody—including the ambassador and his family, whose mail was tampered with, whose phones were tapped. Their servants were spies. “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.”

Ambassador Dodd could hardly bear to shake hands with murderers, as his work required, and, although she liked Frau Goering personally and found Frau Goebbels highly intelligent, Mrs. Dodd’s health declined from the strain of living amid fear, rumors, the sense of great threat everywhere. Martha’s illusions about Germany vanished. “She got into a nervous state that almost bordered on the hysterical and had terrible nightmares,” according to her mother. At the 1936 Olympics, she sat very near Hitler. He had changed, she saw, his bearing become arrogant, face harsh, voice hard. He was a distorted, diseased, terrifying creature, she felt.

After four and a half years in what he thought of as a hell, Ambassador Dodd resigned his position. The family left Europe on the last day of 1937. Mrs. Dodd was dead within five months, the ambassador following a little less than two years later. Martha Dodd married an investment broker, Alfred K. Stern. In 1957, she and her husband were indicted as members of a Soviet espionage ring. They fled to Czechoslovakia, where she said the United States persecuted the progressive-minded. A decade passed, and the Prague Spring came, and then the invasion by Warsaw Pact forces; another decade passed, and the Sterns remained part of an expatriate group of people who could not go home, exiled leftists, Greeks who had been on the Communist side of their country’s civil war.

Life had turned out oddly for a girl who hadn’t wanted to hear her father talk about history and politics.