21 Facts About Martha Dodd

Martha Eccles Dodd was an American journalist and novelist.

Martha Dodd became involved in left-wing politics after she witnessed first-hand the violence of the Nazi state.

Martha Dodd studied at the University of Chicago and for a time in Washington, DC, and Paris.

Martha Dodd 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 Martha Dodd arrived at the Reichsprasidentenpalais to present his credentials to President Paul von Hindenburg as the ambassador of the United States to the German Reich, which were accepted.

Martha Dodd found Hitler "excessively gentle and modest in his manners"; no romance followed their meeting.

Martha Dodd had numerous relationships while in Berlin, including with Ernst Udet and with French diplomat Armand Berard, later France's ambassador to the United Nations.

Martha Dodd was greatly helped by the fact that both her parents went to bed early, and were unaware of her relationships.

Wolfe recalled that during his time in Berlin, Martha Dodd was "like a butterfly hovering around my penis".

Several American diplomats at the embassy in Berlin reported to Washington that Martha Dodd's relationships were the subject of much gossip in Berlin, and urged that Ambassador Dodd be recalled as his daughter's behavior was damaging the image of the United States in the Reich.

In September 1933, Martha Dodd first met a young Soviet diplomat, Boris Vinogradov, at a dance in Berlin.

Martha Dodd later recalled: "Incredible as it sounds, I had the sensation after he left that air around me was more luminous and vibrant".

People in her social circle were begging the Americans for help and the Martha Dodd family found its phones tapped and their servants enlisted as spies.

Martha Dodd's mother wrote that Dodd "got into a nervous state that almost bordered on the hysterical [and] had terrible nightmares".

Vinogradov and Martha Dodd began a romantic relationship that lasted for years, even after he left Berlin; in 1936 they asked Joseph Stalin for permission to marry.

In Summer 1938, while still romantically involved with the filmmaker Sidney Kaufman, with whom she lived for several months, Dodd married New York millionaire Alfred K Stern Jr.

Martha Dodd felt he had many contacts that could be valuable in this sort of work.

In 1939, Martha Dodd published a memoir of her years in Berlin, Through Embassy Eyes.

In 1955, Martha Dodd published The Searching Light, a defense of academic freedom that told the story of a professor under pressure to sign a loyalty oath.

Martha Dodd's letters were deposited at the Library of Congress.