In the Garden of Beasts

and forever bent the minds of his audience when for one performance he dressed as a Dutch girl named Gretchen Spootsfeiffer. He had come to know classmate Theodore Roosevelt Jr., eldest son of Teddy Roosevelt, and had become a regular visitor to the White House.One story held that Hanfstaengl had played a piano in the White House basement with such verve that he broke seven strings. As an adult he had run his family’s art gallery in New York, where he had met his wife-to-be. After moving to Germany, the couple had grown close to Hitler and made him godfather of their newborn son, Egon. The boy called him “Uncle Dolf.” Sometimes when Hanfstaengl played for Hitler, the dictator wept.
    Martha liked Hanfstaengl. He was not at all what she expected a senior Nazi official to be, “so blatantly proclaiming his charm andtalent.” He was big and full of energy, with giant, long-fingered hands—hands that Martha’s friend Bella Fromm would describe as being “of almost frightening dimensions”—and a personality that bounded readily from one extreme to another. Martha wrote, “He had a soft, ingratiating manner, a beautiful voice which he used with conscious artistry, sometimes whispering low and soft, the next minute bellowing and shattering the room.” He dominated any social milieu. “He could exhaust anyone and, from sheer perseverance, out-shout or out-whisper the strongest man in Berlin.”
    Hanfstaengl took a liking to Martha as well but did not think much of her father. “He was a modest little Southern history professor, who ran his embassy on a shoestring and was probably trying to save money out of his pay,” Hanfstaengl wrote in a memoir. “At a time when it needed a robust millionaire to compete with the flamboyance of the Nazis, he teetered round self-effacingly as if he were still on his college campus.” Hanfstaengl dismissively referred to him as “Papa” Dodd.
    “The best thing about Dodd,” Hanfstaengl wrote, “was his attractive blond daughter, Martha, whom I got to know very well.” Hanfstaengl found her charming, vibrant, and clearly a woman of sexual appetite.
    Which gave him an idea.

CHAPTER 9
Death Is Death
    Dodd sought to maintain his objective stance despite early encounters with visitors who had experienced a Germany very different from the cheery, sun-dappled realm he walked through each morning. One such visitor was Edgar A. Mowrer, at the time the most famous correspondent in Berlin and the center of a maelstrom of controversy. In addition to reporting for the
Chicago Daily News
, Mowrer had written a best-selling book,
Germany Puts the Clock Back
, which had angered Nazi officials to the point where Mowrer’s friends believed he faced mortal danger. Hitler’s government wanted him out of the country. Mowrer wanted to stay and came to Dodd to ask him to intercede.
    Mowrer had long been a target of Nazi ire. In his dispatches from Germany he had managed to cut below the patina of normalcy to capture events that challenged belief, and he used novel reporting techniques to do it.One of his foremost sources of information was his doctor, a Jew who was the son of the grand rabbi of Berlin. Every two weeks or so Mowrer would make an appointment to see him, ostensibly for a persistent throat complaint. Each time the doctor would give him a typed report of the latest Nazi excesses, a method that worked until the doctor came to suspect that Mowrer was being followed. The two arranged a new rendezvous point: every Wednesday at 11:45 a.m. they met in the public restroom underneath Potsdamer Platz. They stood at adjacent urinals. The doctor would drop the latest report, and Mowrer would pick it up.
    Putzi Hanfstaengl tried to undermine Mowrer’s credibility byspreading a false rumor that the reason his reports were so aggressively critical was that he was a “secret” Jew. In fact, the same thought had occurred to Martha. “I was inclined to think him Jewish,” she wrote; she “considered his animus to be prompted only by his racial self-consciousness.”
    Mowrer was appalled at the failure of the outside world to grasp what was really happening in Germany. He found that even his own brother had come to doubt the truth of his reports.
    Mowrer invited Dodd to dinner at his apartment overlooking the Tiergarten and tried to clue him in to certain hidden realities. “To no purpose,” Mowrer wrote. “He knew better.” Even the periodic assaults against Americans appeared