In the Garden of Beasts

Kershaw’s
Hubris
foremost among them, provedexceptionally 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.
    Of particular, and obvious, value were
Ambassador Dodd’s Diary
, edited by Martha and Bill Jr., and Martha’s memoir,
Through Embassy Eyes
. Neither work is wholly trustworthy; both must be treated with care and used only in conjunction with other, corroborative sources. Martha’s memoir is necessarily her own rendering of the people and events she encountered and as such is indispensable as a window into her thoughts and feelings, but it contains interesting omissions. Nowhere, for example, does she refer by name to Mildred Fish Harnack or to Boris Winogradov, presumably because to have done so in a work published in 1939 would have placed both of them at grave risk. However, documents among Martha’s papers in the Library of Congress reveal by triangulation the points in her memoir where both Harnack and Winogradov make appearances. Her papers include her detailed and never-published accounts of her relationships with Boris and Mildred and correspondence from both. Boris wrote his letters in German, salted with English phrases and the occasional “Darling!” For translations of these, I turned to a fellow Seattle resident, Britta Hirsch, who also gamely translated lengthy portions of far more tedious documents, among them an old bill of sale for the house on Tiergartenstrasse and portions of Rudolf Diels’s memoir,
Lucifer Ante Portas
.
    As for Ambassador Dodd’s diary, questions persist as to whether itis truly a diary as conventionally understood or rather a compendium of his writings pieced together in diary form by Martha and Bill. Martha always insisted the diary was real. Robert Dallek, biographer of presidents, wrestled with the question in his 1968 biography of Dodd, titled
Democrat and Diplomat
, and had the benefit of having received a letter from Martha herself in which she described its genesis. “It is absolutely authentic,” she told Dallek. “Dodd had a couple of dozen of black shiny medium size notebooks in which he wrote every night he could possibly do so, in his Berlin study before going to bed, and at other times as well.” These, she explained, formed the core of the diary, though she and her brother included elements of speeches, letters, and reports that they found appended to the pages within. The initial draft, Martha wrote, was a diary 1,200 pages long, pared down by a professional editor hired by the publisher. Dallek believed the diary to be “generally accurate.”
    All I can add to the discussion are some little discoveries of my own. In my research at the Library of Congress, I found one leather-bound diary full of entries for the year 1932. At the very least, this testifies to Dodd’s inclination to keep such a record. It resides in Box 58. In Dodd’s other papers, I found oblique references to a more comprehensive and confidential diary. The most telling such reference appears in a letter dated March 10, 1938, from Mrs. Dodd to Martha, written shortly before the then-retired ambassador made a trip to New York. Mrs. Dodd tells Martha, “He is taking some of his diary for you to look over. Send them back by him as he will need them. Be careful what you quote.”
    Finally, after having read Martha’s memoir, her Udet novel, and her papers, and after reading thousands of pages of Ambassador Dodd’s correspondence, telegrams, and reports, I can offer one of those intangible observations that comes only after long exposure to a given body of material, and that is that Dodd’s published diary
sounds
like Dodd,
feels
authentic, and expresses