In the Garden of Beasts

eventually found herself deployingrudimentary codes in communications with friends, an increasingly common practice throughout Germany.Her friend Mildred used a code for letters home in which she crafted sentences that meant the opposite of what the words themselves indicated. That such practices had become usual and necessary was difficult for outsiders to understand. An American professor who was a friend of the Dodds, Peter Olden, wrote to Dodd on January 30, 1934, to tell him he had received a message from his brother-in-law in Germany in which the man described a code he planned to use in all further correspondence. The word “rain,” in any context, would mean he had been placed in a concentration camp. The word “snow” would mean he was being tortured. “It seems absolutely unbelievable,” Olden told Dodd. “If you think that this is really something in the nature of a bad joke, I wonder if you could mention so in a letter to me.”
    Dodd’s careful reply was a study in deliberate omission, though his meaning was clear. He had come to believe that even diplomatic correspondence was intercepted and read by German agents. A subject of growing concern was the number of German employees who worked for the consulate and the embassy. One clerk in particular had drawn the attention of consular officials: Heinrich Rocholl, a longtime employee who helped prepare reports for the American commercial attaché, whose offices were on the first floor of the Bellevuestrasse consulate. In his spare time Rocholl had founded a pro-Nazi organization, the Association of Former German Students in America, which issued a publication called
Rundbriefe
. Lately Rocholl had been discovered trying “to find out the contents of confidential reports of the Commercial Attaché,” according to a memorandum thatActing Consul General Geist sent to Washington. “He has also had conversations with other German members of the staff who assist in the reporting work, and intimated to these that their work should be in every respect favorable to the present regime.” In one issue of the
Rundbriefe
Geist found an article in which “disparaging allusions were made to the Ambassador as well as to Mr. Messersmith.” For Geist this was the last straw. Citing the clerk’s “overt act of disloyalty to his chiefs,” Geist fired him.
    Dodd realized that the best way to have a truly private conversation with anyone was to meet in the Tiergarten for a walk, as Dodd often did with his British counterpart, Sir Eric Phipps. “I shall be walking at 11:30 on the Hermann-Göring-Strasse alongside the Tiergarten,” Dodd told Phipps in a telephone call at ten o’clock one morning. “Would you be able to meet me there and talk for a while?” And Phipps, on another occasion, sent Dodd a handwritten note asking, “Could we meet tomorrow morning at 12 o’clock in the Siegesallee between the Tiergartenstrasse & the Charlottenburger Chaussee, on the right side (going from here)?”
    WHETHER LISTENING DEVICES TRULY laced the embassy and the Dodds’ home cannot be known, but the salient fact was that the Dodds came to see Nazi surveillance as omnipresent.Despite the toll this perception increasingly took on their lives, they believed they had one significant advantage over their German peers—that no physical harm would come to them. Martha’s own privileged status offered no protection to her friends, however, and here Martha had particular cause for concern because of the nature of the men and women she befriended.
    She had to be especially watchful in her relationship with Boris—as a representative of a government reviled by the Nazis, he was beyond doubt a target of surveillance—and with Mildred and Arvid Harnack, both of whom had grown increasingly opposed to the Nazi regime and were taking their first steps toward building a loose association of men and women committed to resisting Nazi power. “If I had been with people who had been brave or reckless enough to talkin opposition to Hitler,” Martha wrote in her memoir, “I spent sleepless nights wondering if a Dictaphone or a telephone had registered the conversation, or if men had followed and overheard.”
    In that winter of 1933–34, her anxiety blossomed into a kind of terror that “bordered on the hysterical,” as she described it. Never had she been more afraid. She lay in her own bed, in her own room, with her parents upstairs, objectively as safe as could be, and yet as