Martha Dodd: The American Soviet Spy and Hitler’s Would-Be Lover Who Dreamed of a Communist World

History Unplugged Podcast

History Unplugged

Society & Culture, History

4.2 • 3.7K Ratings

🗓️ 11 August 2020

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In 1933, Martha Dodd, a 24-year-old aspiring writer who had already had several affairs and a failed marriage embarked with her family to Berlin, where her father was America's ambassador to Hitler's regime. Within a few weeks, she was romantically involved with Rudolf Diels, the first director of the Gestapo. Dodd was so celebrated by the Nazi elite that some believed she could become Hitler's wife (the two met but nothing came of it). She soon soured on the Nazis after witnessing their brutal anti-Semitism, but became involved with Boris Vinogradov, an agent of the Soviet secret police. Over the next several decades, Dodd's life was a whirlwind of spying, communist recruitment in America, and eventually, permanent exile.

Dodd was a dreamer who believed in the power of communism to right the wrongs of an unjust. But after decades abroad (first in Mexico, then in Prague) she ended up disillusioned with the promises of the Soviet Union. Her story is one of what happens when you cast your lot with a movement that ends up losing its political and ideological battles.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Did you know choosing the train can take up to 500 cars off the road? Just one train at a time.
0:07.0	One gig at a time, one last minute plan, one festival, one going then, why not at a time?
0:18.0	One train journey at a time can help create a greener future.
0:23.0	So when will you take your next trip? Find out more at nationalrail.co.uk for what's
0:29.0	last greener.
0:42.0	History is in just a bunch of names and dates and facts. It's the collection of all the stories
0:47.0	throughout human history that explained how and why we got here. Welcome to the History
0:52.0	Unplugged Podcast where we look at the forgotten, neglected, strange, and even
0:57.0	counterfactual stories that made our world what it is. I'm your host, Scott Rank.
1:09.0	Crawford Killian is an author and professor who is raised in America, but he spent a large
1:15.0	part of his childhood in Mexico in the middle of the 20th century. He and his family lived
1:20.0	in the American expatriate community in Mexico City and he had a lot of memories of the people he met there,
1:26.0	but there was one strange couple that stuck out. And when their past came to light, it caused a major scandal.
1:33.0	The story starts in 1953. Killian's mother was teaching at the American
1:39.0	school in Mexico City and she did some private tutoring on the side. One of the children she
1:44.3	tutored was a boy named Bobby Stern and the family got to know his parents. The parents were known
1:50.8	to the American community there. Many of them were part of the Hollywood Blacklist exile community.
1:57.0	These were left-leaning filmmakers who had relocated abroad during the Red Scare and Joseph McCarthy purge
2:04.0	of Hollywood. The husband was Alfred Stern and he was a famous left-winged financeer who got involved in a number
2:12.0	of communist causes. His wife, Martha Dodd Stern, was a writer who'd spent the 1930s in Berlin as the daughter
2:20.0	of the then US ambassador William Dodd. The Killians had few memories of the Sterns. They had visited their huge house that was
2:28.0	set in Waldgarden's and Alfred had given Young Killian Stern a copy of the French medieval writer Roblet,
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from History Unplugged, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of History Unplugged and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.