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’.

To all her friends in Berlin, Martha would show odd bits of information from her father’s office

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.

It is sometimes difficult to disentangle the story of Martha – the ‘traitor’ of the title – from Brendan McNally’s mass of complex background material, filled with minor characters, subsidiary plots and political dramas. What emerges clearly, though, is that the American ambassador who stepped into this maelstrom was possibly the most unsuitable person who could possibly have been found for that prestigious post. A patriotic farmer’s son who believed in the simple life, William Dodd refused to live in the embassy because it was too grand; he slashed the entertainment budget, substituted his son as embassy chauffeur and regarded the lifestyle of his staff, many of whom were wealthy, as a ‘betrayal of American egalitarianism’. He soon became an object of ridicule; but far worse, rather than listening to his able and experienced aides, he turned to his family for counsel, in particular his daughter, giving her the run of his desk.