In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin

by Erik Larson

it is their first year that is the subject of the story to follow, for it coincided with Hitler’s ascent from chancellor to absolute tyrant,

That first year formed a kind of prologue in which all the themes of the greater epic of war and murder soon to come were laid down.

Hindsight tells us that during that fragile time the course of history could so easily have been changed. Why, then, did no one change it? Why did it take so long

to recognize the real danger posed by Hitler and his regime?

They knew Goebbels and Göring as social acquaintances with whom they dined, danced, and joked—until, as their first year reached its end, an event occurred that proved to be one of the most significant in revealing the true character of Hitler and that laid the keystone for the decade to come. For both father and daughter it changed everything.

These were complicated people moving through a complicated time, before the monsters declared their true nature.

Schachno had been visited at his home by a squad of uniformed men responding to an anonymous denunciation of him as a potential enemy of the state.

Something fundamental had changed in Germany.

He understood it, but he was convinced that few others in America did. He was growing increasingly disturbed by the difficulty of persuading the world of the true magnitude of Hitler’s threat.

If this Government remains in power for another year and carries on in the same measure in this direction, it will go far towards making Germany a danger to world peace for years to come.”

Dodd also discovered in himself an abiding interest in the political life, triggered in earnest when in August 1916 he found himself in the Oval Office of the White House for a meeting with President Woodrow Wilson. The encounter, according to one biographer, “profoundly altered his life.”

sinecure,

As ambassadorial posts went, Berlin should have been a plum—not London or Paris, surely, but still one of the great capitals of Europe, and at the center of a country going through revolutionary change under the leadership of its newly appointed chancellor, Adolf Hitler.

Roosevelt was engaged in an all-consuming fight to pass his National Industrial Recovery Act, a centerpiece of his New Deal,

Berlin, moreover, was not yet the supercharged outpost it would become within the year. There existed at this time a widespread perception that Hitler’s government could not possibly endure.

Time was running out, and there were far more pressing matters to be dealt with as the nation sank ever more deeply into economic despair.

He kept it brief. He told Dodd: “I want to know if you will render the government a distinct

service. I want you to go to Germany as ambassador.”

Dodd told Roosevelt he needed time to think and to talk with his wife. Roosevelt gave him two hours.

Two days later Roosevelt placed Dodd’s appointment before the Senate, which confirmed him that day, requiring neither Dodd’s presence nor the kind of interminable hearing that one

day would become commonplace for key nominations.

Martha and Bill were lucky to have jobs—Martha’s as assistant literary editor of the Chicago Tribune, Bill’s as a teacher of history and a scholar in training—though

Roosevelt now brought the conversation around to what he expected of Dodd. First he raised the matter of Germany’s debt, and here he expressed ambivalence. He acknowledged that American bankers had made what he called “exorbitant profits” lending money to German businesses and cities and selling associated bonds to U.S. citizens. “But our people are entitled to repayment, and while it is altogether beyond governmental responsibility, I want you to do all you can to prevent a moratorium”—a German suspension of payment.

“It would tend to retard recovery.”

The president turned next to what everyone seemed to be calling the Jewish “...

Roosevelt as “immovable, incurable and even inaccessible excepting to those of his Jewish friends whom he can safely trust not to trouble him with any Jewish problems.”

Roosevelt understood that the political costs of any public condemnation of Nazi persecution or any obvious effort to ease the entry of Jews into America were likely to be immense, because American political discourse had framed the Jewish problem as an immigration problem.

Germany’s persecution of Jews raised the specter of a vast influx of Jewish refugees at a time when America was reeling from the Depression. The isolationists added another dimension to the debate by insisting, as did Hitler’s government, that Nazi oppression of Germany’s Jews was a domestic German affair and thus none of America’s business.

anti-immigration sentiment in America would remain strong into 1938, when a Fortune poll reported that some two-thirds of those surveyed favored keeping refugees out of the country.

department’s most senior officers harbored an outright dislike of Jews.

One of these was William Phillips, undersecretary of state, the second-highest-ranking man in the department after Secretary Hull. Phillips’s wife and Eleanor Roosevelt were childhood friends; it was FDR, not Hull, who had chosen Phillips to be undersecretary. In his diary Phillips described a business acquaintance as “my little Jewish friend from Boston.” Phillips loved visiting Atlantic City, but in another diary entry he wrote, “The place is infested with Jews. In fact, the whole beach scene on Saturday afternoon and Sunday was an extraordinary sight—very little sand to be seen, the whole beach covered by slightly clothed Jews and Jewesses.”

How awful.

A component of the Immigration Act of 1917, it had been reinstated by the Hoover administration in 1930 to discourage immigration at a time when unemployment was soaring.

Jewish activists charged that America’s consulates abroad had been instructed quietly to grant only a fraction of the visas allowed for each country, a charge that proved to have merit.

The Labor Department’s own solicitor, Charles E. Wyzanski, discovered in 1933 that consuls had been given informal oral instructions to limit the number of immigration visas they approved to 10 percent of the total allowed by each nation’s quota.

“The German authorities are treating the Jews shamefully and the Jews in this country are greatly excited,” Roosevelt told him. “But this is also not a governmental affair. We can do nothing except for American citizens who happen to be made victims. We must protect them, and whatever we can do to moderate the general persecution by unofficial and personal influence ought to be done.”

Dodd insisted he would live within his designated salary

of $17,500, a lot of money during the Depression but a skimpy sum for an ambassador who would have to entertain European diplomats and Nazi officials.

“Aside from two or three general dinners and entertainments, you need not indulge in any expensive social affairs. Try to give fair attention to Americans in Berlin and occasional dinners to Germans who are interested in American relations. I think you can manage to live within your income and not sacrifice any essential parts of the service.”

Hitler had been chancellor for six months, having received the appointment through a political deal, but he did not yet possess absolute power.

Germany’s eighty-five-year-old president, Field Marshal Paul von Beneckendorff und von Hindenburg, still held the constitutional authority to appoint and remove chancellors and their cabinets and, equally important, commanded the loyalty of the regular army, the Reichswehr. By contrast to Hindenburg, Hitler and his deputies were surprisingly young—Hitler only forty-four, Hermann Göring forty, and Joseph Goebbels thirty-six.

It was one thing to read newspaper stories about Hitler’s erratic behavior and his government’s brutality toward Jews, communists, and other opponents, for throughout America there was a widely held belief that such reports must be exaggerated, that surely no modern state could behave in such a manner. Here at the State Department, however, Dodd read dispatch after dispatch in w...

WHILE IN WASHINGTON, Dodd attended a reception thrown for him by the German embassy, and there he met Wilbur Carr for the first time. Later, Carr jotted a quick description of Dodd in his diary: “Pleasing, interesting person with fine sense of humor and simple modesty.” Dodd also paid a call on the State Department’s chief of Western European affairs, Jay Pierrepont Moffat, who shared Carr’s and Phillips’s distaste for Jews as well as their hard-line attitude toward immigration. Moffat recorded his own impression of the new ambassador: “He is extremely sure of his opinion, expresses himself forcibly and didactically and tends to dramatize the points he makes. The only fly in the ointment is that he is going to try and run the Embassy with a family of four persons on his salary,

and how he is going to do it in Berlin, where prices are high, is something beyond me.”

Roosevelt knew Dodd would have a difficult time living on his small salary

What neither Carr nor Moffat expressed in these entries was the surprise and displeasure they and many of their peer...

By the club’s standards, Dodd was about as poor a fit as could be imagined.

the department had insisted that once he got to New York he attend a number of meetings with bank executives on the issue of

Germany’s debt—a subject in which Dodd had little interest—and with Jewish leaders. Dodd feared that both the American and German press could twist these meetings to taint the appearance of objectivity that he hoped to present in Berlin.

Dodd met the bankers, and did so at the offices of the National City Bank of New York, which years later would be called Citibank. Dodd was startled to learn that National City Bank and Chase National Bank held over one hundred million dollars in German bonds, which Germany at this point was proposing to pay back at a rate of thirty cents on the dollar.

When the conversation turned to Germany’s persecution of Jews, Colonel House urged Dodd to do all he could “to ameliorate Jewish sufferings” but added a caveat: “the Jews should not be allowed to dominate

economic or intellectual life in Berlin as they have done for a long time.”