Martha Dodd

Martha Eccles Dodd (October 8, 1908 – August 10, 1990) was an American journalist and novelist. The daughter of William Edward Dodd, US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's first Ambassador to Germany, Dodd lived in Berlin from 1933–1937 and was a witness to the rise of the Third Reich. She became involved in left-wing politics after she witnessed first-hand the violence of the Nazi state. With her second husband, Alfred Stern Jr., she engaged in espionage for the Soviet Union from before World War II until the height of the Cold War. Life and career Martha Dodd was born in Ashland, Virginia. She studied at the University of Chicago and also for a time in Washington, D.C., and Paris. She served briefly as assistant literary editor of the Chicago Tribune. In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed her father, the historian William Dodd, as the American ambassador to Germany and the Dodd family arrived in Berlin in August 1933. On 30 August 1933, Ambassador Dodd arrived at the Reichspräsidentenpalais to present his credentials to President Paul von Hindenburg as the ambassador of the United States to the German Reich, which were accepted. Dodd and her brother, William E. Dodd, Jr., accompanied their parents to Berlin when her father took up the post of U.S. Ambassador. She initially found the Nazi movement attractive. She later wrote that she "became temporarily an ardent defender of everything going on" and admired the "glowing and inspiring faith in Hitler, the good that was being done for the unemployed." She made a number of friends in high circles, and Ernst Hanfstaengl, her sometime lover and an aide to Adolf Hitler, tried to encourage a romantic relationship between Hitler and Dodd. Dodd found Hitler "excessively gentle and modest in his manners"; no romance followed their meeting. She had numerous relationships while in Berlin, including with Ernst Udet and with French diplomat Armand Berard, later France's ambassador to the United Nations. Berard in a letter to her stated: "You are the only person in the world who can break me, but how well you know it and how you seem to rejoice in doing so. I can't stand it. If you realized how unhappy I am, you would pity me". Other lovers included Max Delbrück and Rudolf Diels. Dodd was greatly helped by the fact that both her parents went to bed early, and were unaware of her relationships. When the writer Thomas Wolfe visited Berlin, he had a torrid romance with Dodd.