A Look Over My Shoulder

by Richard Helms

  Another American I got to know was Martha Dodd, the daughter of William E. Dodd, who was ambassador to Germany from 1933 to 1938. Her story is a curious footnote to the history of that time.

  Martha was a lively, intelligent, and aggressive woman who became well known in the international and press community in Berlin. After being initially impressed by some of the Nazi leadership, she became passionately anti-Hitler. Our casual acquaintance—in a moment of transient affluence I once invited her to dinner—must have occurred after she was first courted by Boris Vinogradov, the press secretary at the Soviet embassy in Berlin. She fell deeply in love with Vinogradov, who was well known in Berlin as an attractive and outgoing Russian. Even in those days, he was a notable exception to the usual run of Soviet officials abroad. At the time, I doubt that there was any security official who might have suspected that Vinogradov was an intelligence officer and that whatever his personal feelings, his relationship with Dodd was known and approved of by his NKVD superiors.

  Vinogradov was transferred from Berlin in 1934 to Bucharest and subsequently to Warsaw, but continued his relationship with Martha Dodd until he disappeared in Moscow in 1938. He was one of the scores of intelligence officers put to death by Stalin in the purges. Martha often described Vinogradov as the love of her life, and although she married an American businessman, Alfred K. Stern, she continued for years to press Soviet officials and newspaper friends for information about the Russian’s disappearance.

  In 1957, Boris Morros, a well-known Hollywood producer, testified—very convincingly—that the Sterns were part of a Soviet spy ring. They were both indicted for conspiring to act as agents to transmit military, commercial, and political information to the Soviet Union. Rather than face trial, they fled to Czechoslovakia via Mexico and Cuba. When the case was reviewed in 1979, the Department of Justice asked a federal district court to dismiss the indictment. After twenty-two years, the deaths of various witnesses, and two persons whose testimony was essential, there was not enough evidence to make a prima facie case against the couple. Neither of the Sterns ever returned to this country. Alfred died in 1986. Martha was seventy when she died in Prague in 1990.

  The 1995 disclosure of deciphered Soviet intelligence cable traffic (code name VENONA) confirms the allegations that Martha was a recruited Soviet agent who passed classified documents taken from Ambassador Dodd’s files in Berlin to her Russian case officer, Boris Vinogradov. She continued to serve as a spy throughout her life. Despite her enthusiastic efforts, her work in Berlin was probably the peak of her spy career. Alfred Stern also remained on the KGB roster throughout his life.

  So much happened between 1936 and the defeat of Hitler in 1945 that it is difficult now to capture the atmosphere in Germany in the early days of the Nazi regime, and too easy to forget that despite the street fighting and warring factions, Hitler came to power legally in an open election in 1933. In his first three years in office, the Fuehrer took credit for curbing the disastrous inflation, ending the widespread unemployment, suppressing the flagrant vice in the cities, smashing German communism, and bringing the highly successful Olympics to Berlin. He was rapidly reestablishing the German military, playing heavily on what he dubbed the “Diktat” of the Versailles Treaty, and at every opportunity trumpeting the glory of Germany.

  On March 7, 1936, Hitler addressed the Reichstag, assembled for the occasion in the Kroll Opera House. For what seemed to be hours, he harangued his audience, inveighing against the Versailles Treaty. Suddenly, from my seat with the press, I noticed that Hitler had become pale, and that he was passing a handkerchief back and forth between his hands beneath the lectern. A few seconds later, he slowed his speech. Leaning forward over the lectern to command special attention, he said slowly, “At this moment German troops are crossing the Rhine bridges and occupying the Rhineland.”

  The Reichstag audience erupted: “Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil.” The Nazi chant rocked the rafters of the old opera house. This was the first of what became known as Hitler’s “Saturday surprises.” The lightly armed troops which had crossed the Rhine with orders to withdraw immediately if there was any resistance were soon safely in place. The French and British reacted with words. Hitler’s first big bluff had worked.

  Even in those early days, the entire atmosphere in Germany was dominated by the incessant and effective propaganda produced by Joseph Goebbels. The Nazis had already smothered most dissenting political opinion. Every element of the media was controlled, from the smallest local newspaper to the national dailies, and no countervailing news was easily available to the public. Radio, the theater, and films were equally dominated. Loudspeakers seemed to function twenty-four hours a day; billboards and posters were plastered everywhere. The otherwise immaculate streets were often littered with Nazi Party handouts and flyers. Most of the foreign press corps and the embassy staffs attempted to portray German fascism accurately, but there was no such reporting easily available within the Third Reich.

  The German population at large was, of course, well aware of the insistent Nazi anti-Semitism. This had reached such a raucous level in the summer of 1935 that Reichsbank President Hjalmar Schacht warned a group of senior Nazi officials that the continuing mistreatment of Jews had become serious enough to be bad for business. Important export orders were being canceled, and unless things changed, Schacht said, he could not complete the economic rearmament of Germany. Such moderates as there were within the Nazi Party then prevailed and won a brief partial cutback in the most obvious anti-Semitic activity. This relative quiet was to be permanently broken in November 1938 by the riots known as Kristallnacht. Hours after a German diplomat was assassinated by a young German Jew in Paris, the German police and security services stood by as some two hundred synagogues were burned and thousands of shops sacked throughout Germany. Although some of the initial outbursts by radical Nazis may have been spontaneous, it is clear that the rioting that followed was triggered by Goebbels and then hastily encouraged by Heinrich Himmler.

  In 1935 the middle and upper levels of Jewish society were so well integrated into the German communities that many, along with a number of otherwise well-informed Germans, still continued to dismiss the increasingly virulent and pervasive anti-Semitism as a vote-catching device rather than fundamental evidence of Hitler’s final intention. Even the well-established Jewish leaders, aware of their cultural and economic prominence and hence vulnerability, also tended to take this view. It took the violence and Nazi-encouraged riots of Kristallnacht to expose the Nazi anti-Semitism to an international audience.

  In 1936 the Parteitag,* the annual week-long Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, was considered a routine event, and Ed Beattie was scheduled to cover it. A last-minute family complication made this impossible and I was sent alone as his replacement. As I walked into my hotel one afternoon, the young SS officer who had recently replaced the amiable Putzi Hanfstaengl as Hitler’s press representative handed me an invitation for a “light luncheon” with the Fuehrer. This caught the Berlin office by surprise, but because I was the sole UP man on the scene the assignment fell to me.

  It was a real break. Hitler had received few foreign visitors since his rise to power, and the demands of his office and native prudence restricted interviews to well-established dignitaries and a few American publishers with wide audiences. The working press had no choice but to view the Fuehrer from a distance. The U.S. military attaché, the shrewd and intelligent Major Truman Smith, who, on a 1922 assignment as an assistant military attaché, had presciently recognized Hitler as a coming figure, contrived to have Charles Lindbergh visit Hermann Goering and look over the new Luftwaffe. Smith told me that he had arranged the trip because he was convinced that the famous Lone Eagle, then still at the height of his popularity, would learn more about the new air force than anyone else. He was right. The rate and quality of German warplane production alarmed Lindbergh and Smith. For their part, the Nazis were pleased that Lindbergh had taken notice.

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sp; The open Mercedes that called for me carried Alfred Rosenberg, who is now best remembered for drafting the Nazi racial laws, and a Polish reporter in the back seat. I sat beside the black-uniformed SS driver as we were whisked through the old town to the Luitpold Wiese, an open field with a massive podium at one end. Tens of thousands of Nazis, gathered in military formation, waited for their leader.

  “The wonder of this age is that you have found me—an unknown man among millions” was the highlight of the Fuehrer’s speech. “Sieg Heils” thundered and echoed across the transformed meadow while Hitler, godlike and alone, flicked a final Nazi salute and walked deliberately down the steps from the podium. He paused dramatically before saluting the black pylons honoring the Nazis who fell in the Munich Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. It was a perfectly executed and stage-managed political pageant.

  We followed Hitler out of the stadium to the waiting military and party vehicles. Hitler stood in the familiar, massive, open Horch motorcar directly ahead of us as the cavalcade moved slowly through the city to the Burg, the medieval Nuremberg Castle. Every building was draped with swastika-spattered bunting and flags, the open windows and curbs lined with cheering crowds. Children, their arms rigid in the Nazi salute, edged closer to the moving vehicles. Hitler turned slowly, seeming to study the crowds on each side of the street before offering a slight, almost imperceptible smile, and flipping his customary stylized salute.

  There was, I must admit, something mesmerizing about this ride. Only a seasoned movie star might have resisted the weird, vicarious sense that somehow some of the blind adulation of the crowds, who could have had no idea who was riding in the limousine directly behind Hitler, was meant for oneself. It was not difficult to imagine the feelings of the provincial Nazi Party functionaries in the cars that followed.

  However much one loathed Nazis, and I certainly did, this was heady stuff. There could be no question about the German people’s intoxication with their leader. It is easy today to forget that in his prime—the word sticks on one’s tongue—Hitler was a masterful politician. He had studied German grievances from the First World War, and there was little that was irrational or ascetic in his stark identification of causes. Almost instinctively Hitler offered every group what it most wanted. Logic notwithstanding, Jews were simultaneously capitalists, communists, pacifists, and, in a hazy way, those responsible for usurping the influence of the Germanic Balts in Russia. Hitler threaded his obsessive hatred of Jews and communists into the fabric of his ranting against the enemies of whatever group he might be addressing.

  The spacious battlement of the medieval castle looked out beyond the red gabled roofs of the town to the spreading farmland of the Franconian plain. In contrast to the emotion roiled by the Fuehrer’s passage through the city, the warm autumn sun bathed the bright landscape in a lazy peace. Introductions were made to Rudolf Hess, in uniform, and Joachim von Ribbentrop. We chatted calmly until a throaty voice cut in.

  “Das ist ein schoener Blick”—it was a pronouncement, “That is a beautiful view,” not an observation, “What a beautiful sight.”

  Adolf Hitler had stepped out onto the balcony and was waiting to be introduced. His greeting—a firm handshake, the stylized Nazi salute, hand flipped almost casually back over the shoulder—came with a slight smile, more practiced than warm. The Germans returned the salute, foreigners did not. It was not expected.

  At arm’s length, Hitler appeared shorter and less impressive than at a distance. Fine, dark brown hair, rusty in front, slightly graying along the crown; bright blue eyes, coarse skin, with a pinkish tinge. His neatly trimmed mustache was shot slightly with gray. When Hitler spoke face-to-face, active salivary glands seemed to make his voice indistinct, possibly the reason some words were blurred and difficult to understand in his speeches. The lower row of teeth, bordered with gold, were perhaps false. He wore the usual brown shirt, uniform trousers, Sam Browne belt, and brightly polished boots. An Iron Cross was pinned to the shirt, and a brightly embroidered Nazi emblem blazoned on the left sleeve.

  Hitler’s manner was pleasant, if not exactly at ease. As he stood talking with the handful of correspondents, his knees moved back and forth nervously. His arms and shoulders as well as his hands were involved in every gesture.

  When asked why he produced the massive and stunningly staged annual ceremonies of the Parteitag, Hitler smiled. “The party units all over Germany work hard for me and for the cause all year long. What should I do? Money prizes would break the Treasury. So I bring the most effective leaders here for a couple of days, give them this show and a chance to meet us all. They pay their own expenses. If they can’t afford it, the local party units help them out. They go home stimulated, ready to work for me again. Then, their places are filled by others.” He paused a moment before saying, “Besides, this is exactly the kind of exercise the Reichsbahn [German railways] would be required to perform in the event of war.” The last word—Krieg—hung in the air.

  Hitler did not venture opinions or introduce comments with “I believe” or “I think.” In response to questions, he simply offered his views as facts.

  The Parteitag inflicted more than one learning experience on me. Most of the important speeches at the Nuremberg gathering were signaled to the press well in advance and could be covered from Berlin. Paul Kecskemeti, the gnomelike deskman, would stand at the radio table in the UP Berlin offices, and scribble the highlights in English as the speech went along. After a few sentences, Paul would hand the “takes” to a colleague who would read them over the telephone to the London bureau, where they would be relayed by radio to New York.

  The morning after our lunch, I drifted out to the Luitpold Wiese meeting area a few minutes late but in ample time to cover the scheduled events. It was a moment before I learned that Hitler had opted for a surprise speech and that it was not being broadcast. Using an upturned oil barrel which the genie protecting young reporters had stationed beside a fire exit, I managed to hear and make a note of the most dramatic bit of Hitler’s hyperbole. In effect, he mused that if Germany had the riches of the Ukraine, the country would be “swimming in plenty.”

  A few hours later, my hotel phone rang. Half expecting congratulations for my report, I learned that in the lead bulletin covering the speech, the Associated Press had reported that just as Hitler mentioned the Ukraine, a flight of Luftwaffe bombers streaked over Nuremberg, and that the Fuehrer had then pointed east, toward the Ukraine.

  “What about it?” my editor demanded.

  “Well,” I admitted, “some bombers did fly low, right across the crowd, but it was just a peaceful rehearsal for a flyover scheduled for later this week.”

  “Do you expect me to tell that to the New York office after every newspaper in the United States has featured the AP version of the story?” I must have mumbled some sort of excuse before he said, “In future, you’d better take the time to give this office the quotes that the AP thinks worth featuring.”

  When I got back to the Berlin office, Paul Kecskemeti grinned, tapped his nose, and said, “So lernt man, Dick.” Indeed, and so I did learn to report everything and let the editors do the cutting.

  The 1936 Summer Olympic Games were another occasion Hitler and Goebbels used to impress the world press with the reborn Germany, its prosperity and effective reorganization. I was lucky enough to be in the press box atop the stadium the day Jesse Owens won the 200-meter race. He burst into the lead at the turn and never looked back. In August, sixty years later, I was eerily reminded of that incident when I watched the television image of Michael Johnson running almost exactly the same race. In an interview, Johnson said, “Jesse was always my hero, I’ll never forget him. His widow wrote me a letter of encouragement before these games.”

  In setting the world record, Johnson ran faster than Owens, but in 1936 there were no starting blocks or scientific timers—runners troweled holes in the track at the starting line, and stopwatches measured the records. Crossing on the Queen Mary after the G
ames, Owens explained to me one of the means that he and his Ohio State coach had worked out to improve his speed. “At the gun, runners tend to clench their fists. This causes a tension to run through the body, and this slightly slows the first steps. What I do at the start is to place my thumbs on my first finger—it’s just enough to keep me from clenching.” Owens was a quiet, modest man. He did not feel he had been insulted, as conventional reporting had it, when Hitler failed to award him the gold medal. Hitler followed the track events closely, and on several occasions congratulated the German gold medal winners, but he did not present any of the gold medals.

  Berlin was a rewarding experience, and the disciplines involved in the daily struggle to get the news first, get it straight, and get it succinctly across to the reader was to prove useful.

  But by mid-1937 it was time to go home.

  *Literally “Party Day” but usually translated by American newsmen as “Party Congress.”

  Chapter 3

  —

  SIGNING ON

  After a few years on the beat some reporters dream of having their own newspaper. My ambition took shape a little earlier. Even before graduation from Williams I had begun to hope that one day I might run or perhaps even own an American newspaper. As it happened, George Hawkins, a fraternity brother whose father, William, was head of Scripps-Howard newspapers, shared the same ambition. It never worked out, but George and I considered joining forces after graduation.

  The possibility of running one’s own paper stayed with me, and I left the UP in 1937 because the need for hands-on business experience, and a lot of it, had been driven home to me as an essential underpinning to newspaper management. Editorial work was important but I learned that, in the flinty eyes of the owners, reporters were easy to find and a dime a dozen. Good advertising salesmen and topflight circulation managers were comparatively rare. As exciting as my UP job was, I knew I had better get to the business side as soon as possible. Still, it was more of a wrench than I expected at the time to leave the excitement of Berlin to gamble on a future which even then looked remote.