She would have poured out her heart to Mildred, except they rarely saw each other anymore. Martha and Bill were under almost constant surveillance by the Gestapo and Soviet intelligence. If she and Mildred met other than at official embassy events, they would have been observed, endangering their entire resistance network. Martha wished she dared risk it. Kind, sympathetic Mildred would have found the words to comfort her.
Her father’s circumstances worsened throughout the winter, and spring brought his most difficult ordeal yet. Helmut Hirsch, a twenty-one-year-old German Jew and antifascist, had been sentenced to death for his part in a thwarted plot to bomb sites in Nuremberg, with Nazi Party headquarters and the offices ofDer Stürmeramong the suspected targets. Although Hirsch had never been to the United States, he held American citizenship through his father, and the State Department instructed Martha’s father to demand a new, fair, and legitimate trial. Outraged that the young man had been condemned to die although no bombing had occurred and no evidence connecting him to any plot had been produced, Martha’s father fought vigorously for clemency.
On April 27, in the midst of intense negotiations about Hirsch’s fate, her parents hosted a luncheon at Tiergartenstrasse 27a for members of the German Foreign Office. In the middle of the soup course, the doughy official seated beside Martha leaned closer to her and, breath thickly scented with alcohol, said, “You should warn your father that he is wasting his time.”
Martha regarded him archly. “What do you mean?”
“Helmut Hirsch, the American Jew who wanted to kill the Führer, cannot be let off with life imprisonment. He must be executed even though he did not actually commit the crime.”
“What sort of justice is that?” Martha asked, taken aback, but the official merely shrugged and took another drink of wine. As soon as their guests departed, Martha passed on the warning to her father, but he could not explain how Hirsch’s charges of a plot to bomb buildings in Nuremberg had been conflated with an attempt to assassinate Hitler.
Undaunted, her father continued to fight for Hirsch’s life. At the end of May, informed that Hirsch could be shown no leniency, he convinced two important Reich ministers, Otto Meissner and Konstantin von Neurath, to appeal personally to Hitler, warning him of the repercussions that would follow if they killed an American citizen under such questionable circumstances.
But her father’s tireless efforts were in vain. At sunrise on the morning of June 4, Helmut Hirsch was executed by guillotine.
Although Martha’s father had exhausted every option, his failure to save the young man struck him a bitter blow. His headaches increased in severity and duration until he suffered continuous pain for days without respite. Once Martha overheard him complain to his physician that intense pain spread over the nerve connections between his stomach, shoulders, and brain until he found it impossible to sleep. By early summer, the problems with his digestive tract had worsened so drastically that eating became torturous, forcing him on one occasion to go without food for thirty hours straight. Through it all, he kept up his rigorous schedule at the embassy, until Martha and her mother worried that he might literally work himself to death.
“Please, please, for our sakes, if not your own, take better care of yourself,” Martha’s mother begged. He promised to try.
Finally, in late July, Martha’s father was granted a three-month leave so he could rest and recover his health. Why their mother had not insisted upon accompanying him home to the United States, Martha and Bill could only wonder. Their parents were usually inseparable, and other embassy officials or their wives could have filled in for their mother at ceremonial occasions. Then, one afternoon, Martha ran into Mrs. Panofsky when she was returning from an outing with her son and daughter. They chatted briefly, long enough for Martha to observe the dark circles under Mrs. Panofsky’s eyes and the lines of tension around her mouth. As she led the two children to the elevator and up to their attic home, Martha suddenly understood why her parents were so keen to maintain an American presence at Tiergartenstrasse 27a.
But since Martha’s mother had remained behind, she was powerless to enforce the doctor’s orders. The family hoped he would rest, but soon his letters from America told a different story. Ambassador Dodd described the late summer beauty of Stoneleigh and the abundant harvest, regular checkups with his doctor, and fond reunions with old friends, but also meetings with President Roosevelt at the White House and conferences with State Department officials, some of them contentious. In mid-August he wrote that the president had urged him to deliver lectures on the state of affairs in Germany while he was in the States, to “speak the truth about things” as often and as emphatically as he could. These demands were hardly conducive to allowing a sixty-five-year-old overworked man to regain his strength and peace of mind, but Martha knew her father would endeavor to do whatever his president asked of him.
Not everyone appreciated his loyalty and perseverance. Her father was besieged on all sides by obnoxious political enemies trying to push him out of office—not only Hitler’s men but Americans too, petty bureaucrats who complained that her father’s antipathy for the Nazis rendered him unfit for his post. Martha and Bill firmly believed that anyone who wasnotrepulsed by Hitler and his Nazi regime was unqualified to represent the United States in Germany, on the grounds of intellectual weakness or moral bankruptcy or both. Their father, unimpressed by fascist spectacle, ethically incorruptible, was absolutely the best man for the job, but they worried that President Roosevelt could not perceive this from so far away. They feared even more that the job would put their father into an early grave.
Thus when they first glimpsed him descending from the train to the platform at the Lehrter Bahnhof, well rested and vigorous, they exchanged relieved glances and blinked back tears before making their way through the crowd to his side. He was smiling again, Martha observed, and how immeasurably grateful she was to see it. The haunted look had left his eyes, and he had acquired a healthy tan from hours basking in the Virginia sunshine as he puttered about his farm.
At long last, they were all together again, safe and sound. Embracing joyfully, they complimented him on his appearance and teased that he had come back just in time to save Germany from itself. “I’m not so sure about that,” he replied, rueful. “As we sailed down the Elbe, I spotted an astonishing number of army trucks on the roads hauling arms and equipment. My heart sank to see them, and all the other signs of the coming catastrophe.”
“Those awful instruments of death and destruction,” Martha’s mother said, shuddering as she took her husband’s arm. “Is there no possible way to stop men and nations from destroying each other?”
“What kind of talk is this for a family reunion?” Bill protested, draping his arms over his parents’ shoulders. “Let’s save the gloom and doom for tomorrow.”
Martha chimed in her agreement, and her father good-naturedly consented. His time back home in the States had apparently restored his energy and optimism, just as his family had hoped. As soon as they arrived at Tiergartenstrasse 27a, he took a book from his valise and proudly presented it to his wife. “How wonderful,” she exclaimed, holding out the book so that Martha could read the title,The Old South: Struggles for Democracy. “Congratulations, my dear.”
“Yes, congrats, Dad,” said Martha, rising up on tiptoe to kiss his cheek. “How marvelous it must be to hold a finished copy of your own book, your life’s work.” She hoped she would know that feeling herself someday.
“This is only volume one of my life’s work,” he corrected, smiling. “My publisher is eager for me to begin the second volume.”
Martha and her mother exchanged pensive glances. “Will your duties at the embassy leave you any time to write?” her mother asked. “You’ve only just regained your health. Promise me you won’t exhaust yourself from overwork.”
“I won’t, dear,” he said, clasping her hand. “I had several good conversations with the president, and he has agreed that I may resign in March.”
Martha’s mother cried out, surprised and thankful. Bill grinned and clapped their father on the back. But Martha felt her heart sink. She too felt homesick for America from time to time, and she had become thoroughly sick and tired of the oppressive Third Reich, but she could not help the resistance from Chicago. And how would her romance with Boris survive if they were an ocean apart? She already sensed his interest in marriage dwindling, and he was only in Warsaw.
Well, Martha thought, that’s it for dallying. They had until March to resolve things once and for all. Perhaps the thought of losing her forever would finally prompt Boris to propose.
“Why March?” asked Bill. “Why not now?”
“President Roosevelt asked me to stay on until spring to give him time to find the right man to succeed me. I also want to tie up some loose ends to smooth the transition.” He hesitated, wincing. “Also, if I left any sooner, it would give the impression that my rivals and critics, American and German alike, had succeeded in their efforts to have me removed.”
Martha nodded. The appearance that he had been abruptly fired would humiliate her father. A few more months at his post was a small price to pay for his dignity.
In the days that followed, Martha’s father resumed his duties with a new resolve to serve, as President Roosevelt had charged him to do more than four years before, as a steadfast example of American liberalism against fascism. To Martha, it seemed an increasingly futile task. She sensed dangerous forces at work in Germany, strengthening every day, driving the whole world toward an abyss. Although people like her father, the Harnacks, and her friends in the international press corps perceived the gaping emptiness ahead, no one with the power to act seemed willing or able to stop the inexorable rush into the darkness.
Then, on the afternoon of November 23, Martha was reading in the library when she heard her mother cry out. Racing to see what was the matter, she found her parents at the top of the grand staircase, her father home early from the embassy, pale and haggard, her mother taking his arm and guiding him to a chair. “What is it?” Martha asked, hurrying over.
“I’ve been relieved of my duties,” her father said, his voice strangely flat and distant.
