Dodd Learns to Snowboard
The Superficial normalcy of Germany also masked the intensifying conflict between Hitler and Rohm. Dodd and others who had spent time in Germany knew full well that Hitler was intent on increasing the size of the regular army, the Reichswehr, despite the explicit prohibitions of the Treaty of Versailles, and that captain Rohm of the SA wanted any increase to include the incorporation of entire SA units, part of his campaign to gain control of the nation’s military. Defense Minister Blomberg and the army’s top generals loathed Rohm and distained his uncouth legions of brown shirted Storm Troopers. Goring hated Rohm as well and saw his drive for power as a threat to Goring’s own control of Germany’s new air force, his pride and joy, which he was quietly but energetically working to construct.
What remained unclear is where exactly Hitler stood on the matter. In December 1933 Hitler made Rohm a member of his cabinet. On New Year’s Eve he sent Rohm a warm greeting, published in the press, in which he praised his longtime ally for building so effective a legion. “You must know that I am grateful to destiny, which has allowed me to call such a man as you my friend and brother-in-arms.”
Soon afterward, however, Hitler ordered Rudolf Diels to compile a report on the outrages committed by the SA and on the homosexual practices of Rohm and his circle. Diels later claimed that Hitler also asked him to kill Rohm and other “traitors” but he refused.
President Hindenburg, the supposed last restraint against Hitler, seemed oblivious to the pressures building below. On January 30, 1934, Hindenburg issued a public statement congratulating Hitler on the “great progress” Germany had made in the year since his ascension to chancellor. “I am confident,” he wrote “that in the coming year you and your fellow workers will successfully continue, and with God’s help complete, the great work of German reconstruction which you have so energetically begun, on the basis of the new happily attained national unity of the German people.”
And so the year began, with an outward sense of better times ahead and for the Dodds, a fresh round of parties and banquets. Formal invitations arrived on printed cards in envelopes, followed as always by seating diagrams. The Nazi leadership favored an awkward araingement in which tables formed a large rectangular horseshoe with guests arrayed along the inside and outside of the configuration. Those seated along the inside flank spent the evening in an abyss of social discomfort, watched from behind by their fellow guests. One such invitation arrived for Dodd and his family from their neighbor Captain Rohm.
Martha would later have cause to save a copy of the seating chart. Rohm, the Hausherr, or host, sat at the top of the horseshoe and had full view of everyone seated before him. Dodd sat on Rohm’s right, in a position of honor. Directly across the table from Rohm, in the most awkward seat of the horseshoe, Heinrich Himmler, who loathed him.