The Spy Was a Femme Fatale, But Came Away Empty-Handed

Martha Dodd’s remarkable life as a Nazi paramour and would-be top Soviet spy is re-told with extended espionage details

THE BEST AND MOST TIMELY LESSON WE CAN TAKE from Traitor’s Odyssey, the latest biography of wartime Soviet mole Martha Dodd, is that, with luck, sometimes a well-placed U.S. turncoat can end up being an abject failure. Otherwise, Dodd, the daughter of William Edward Dodd, U.S. ambassador to Germany at the beginning of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, might have done serious damage.

Martha Dodd circa 1930 (Web Archive)

As thoroughly revisited by Brendan McNally, Martha was a 25-year-old assistant literary editor at the Chicago Tribune when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt chose her little-known father to serve in Berlin, mostly because other more prominent choices had turned down the job. Martha quit work, abandoned a secret marriage to one of many suitors, and set sail for Germany in the summer of 1933 to accompany her father on the new diplomatic assignment along with her mother, Mattie, and ne'er-do-well brother, Bill Jr, 27. They hadn’t even left port in New York before she and her family caused a minor furor aboard the SS Washington when they appeared to pose in a “Heil Hitler” salute. Or perhaps, said Erik Larson, author of a best-selling account of the Dodds, In the Garden of Beasts, it was only an unintended “mid-Heil.”

The young woman’s arrival in Germany was the start of her life-long romance with Europe—and European men of all stripes. Not that she was partial only to Europeans. She had bedded many others besides her lovesick husband.

There was poet Carl Sandberg, her father’s longtime friend; possibly FDR Jr., who happened to be traveling to Europe that summer on the SS Washington with the Dodd’s; and eventually the author Thomas Wolfe, who wrote to his editor, Max Perkins, that the ambassador’s daughter was “like a butterfly, hovering around my penis.” 

McNally, also the author of Germania, a madcap 2011 novel set in the last days of the Third Reich, takes delight in describing as many of Martha Dodd’s serial trysts as he can track down. His choice is logical: Martha Dodd’s love life is central to the spy story. At first, she just adored the jib and contours of those fancy Nazi uniforms. There was the Luftwaffe fighter pilot, Ernst Udet, and Rudolf Diels, a protégé of Hermann Goering and an early head of the Gestapo.