The ambassador’s daughter bent on betrayal

In June 1933, the 24-year-old Martha Dodd, the daughter of the newly appointed American ambassador to Berlin, arrived in the German capital with her parents and older brother. She knew little and cared less about politics. To her, Adolf Hitler, who had just seized supreme power in Germany, was merely ‘a clown who looked like Charlie Chaplin’.           

The Berlin in which the Dodds found themselves was a ferment of intrigue, uncertainty, plots, counterplots, sudden disappearances and febrile gaiety. Three months earlier, the Reichstag had burned down and a state of emergency had been declared, which Hitler, as chancellor, then used to justify the imprisonment or execution of opponents, unleashing his brownshirts to harass Jews and generally enforce a dictatorship. Around him members of the Nazi party jockeyed for position, plotting against each other, torturing those suspected of withholding information and subverting democratic institutions.