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

by Erik Larson

Dodd partly embraced Crane’s notion that the Jews shared responsibility for their plight. He wrote to Crane later, after arriving in Berlin, that while he did not “approve of the ruthlessness that is being applied to the Jews here,” he did think the Germans had a valid grievance. “When I have occasion to speak unofficially to eminent Germans, I have said very frankly that they had a very serious problem but that they did not seem to know how to solve it,” he wrote. “The Jews had held a great many more of the key positions in Germany than their numbers or their talents entitled them to.”

Dodd’s misgivings flared. By this point he had begun to dread leaving Chicago and his old life.

She was ambivalent about the Jewish situation. As a student at the University of Chicago she had experienced a “subtle and undercurrent propaganda among the undergraduates” that promulgated hostility toward Jews. Martha found “that even many of the college professors resented the brilliance of Jewish colleagues and students.” As for herself: “I was slightly anti-Semitic in this sense: I accepted the attitude that Jews were not as physically attractive as Gentiles and were less socially desirable.” She also found herself absorbing a view that Jews, while generally brilliant, were rich and pushy.

THE DODDS REACHED GERMANY on Thursday, July 13, 1933. Dodd had assumed erroneously that all arrangements for the family’s arrival were in place, but after a slow and tedious passage up the Elbe they disembarked in Hamburg to find that no one from the embassy had booked a train, let alone the customary private railcar, to take them to Berlin.

a Jewish newspaper, the Hamburger Israelitisches Familienblatt, which subsequently published an article implying that Dodd’s primary mission was to stop Nazi persecution of Jews—exactly the kind of distortion Dodd had hoped to avoid.

Gordon warned Dodd that his frugality and his resolve to live only within his State Department income would prove a barrier to establishing a relationship with Hitler’s government.

Messersmith returned this initial goodwill. “I liked Dodd from the outset,” Messersmith wrote. “He was a very simple man in his manner and in his approach.” He noted, however, that Dodd “gave the impression of being rather fragile.”

After this and several other outbursts that Martha conceded were imprudent, the protocol officer leaned toward her and hissed, “Sssh! Young lady, you must learn to be seen and not heard. You mustn’t say so much and ask so many questions. This isn’t America and you can’t say all the things you think.” She stayed quiet for the rest of the drive.

Messersmith had booked the Imperial Suite, a collection of rooms that included a large double-bedded room with private bath, two single bedrooms also with private baths, one drawing room, and one conference room, all arrayed along the even-numbered side of a hall, from room 116 through room 124. Two reception rooms had walls covered with satin brocade. The suite was suffused with a springlike scent imparted by flowers sent by well-wishers, so many flowers, Martha recalled, “that there was scarcely space to move in—orchids and rare scented lilies, flowers of all colors and descriptions.” Upon entering the suite, she wrote, “we gasped at its magnificence.”

Dodd retired to a bedroom with a book. Martha found it all hard to grasp. Cards from well-wishers continued to arrive, accompanied by still more flowers. She and her mother sat in awe of the luxury around them, “wondering desperately how all this was to be paid for without mortgaging our souls.”

Tiergarten, Berlin’s equivalent of Central Park. The name, in literal translation, meant “animal garden” or “garden of the beasts,” which harked back to its deeper past, when it was a hunting preserve for royalty.

Schultz and Martha chatted at first about innocuous things, but soon the conversation turned to the rapid transformation of Berlin during the six months since Hitler had become chancellor. Schultz told stories of violence against Jews, communists, and anyone the Nazis saw as unsympathetic to their revolution. In some cases the victims had been American citizens.

Martha grew annoyed at Schultz’s effort to tarnish her rosy view, but she liked Schultz and saw that she would make a valuable friend, given her vast range of contacts among journalists and diplomats. They parted amicably, but with Martha unshaken in her view that the revolution unfolding around her was a heroic episode that could yield a new and healthy Germany.

MARTHA’S CHEERY VIEW of things was widely shared by outsiders visiting Germany and especially Berlin.

Beneath the surface, however, Germany had undergone a rapid and sweeping revolution that reached deep into the fabric of daily life. It had occurred quietly and largely out of easy view. At its core was a government campaign called Gleichschaltung—meaning “Coordination”—to bring citizens, government ministries, universities, and cultural and social institutions in line with National Socialist beliefs and attitudes.

Change came to Germany so quickly and across such a wide front that German citizens who left the country for business or travel returned to find everything around them altered, as if they were characters in a horror movie who come back to find that people who once were their friends, clients, patients, and customers have become different in ways hard to discern.

The Gestapo’s reputation for omniscience and malevolence arose from a confluence of two phenomena: first, a political climate in which merely criticizing the government could get one arrested, and second, the existence of a populace

eager not just to step in line and become coordinated but also to use Nazi sensitivities to satisfy individual needs and salve jealousies.

One study of Nazi records found that of a sample of 213 denunciations, 37 percent arose not from heartfelt political belief but from private conflicts, wit...

Hitler himself acknowledged, in a remark to his minister of justice, “we are living at present in a sea of denunciations and human meanness.”

As of January 1933 only about 1 percent of Germany’s sixty-five million people were Jewish, and most lived in major cities, leaving a negligible presence throughout the rest of the country. Nearly a third—just over 160,000—lived in Berlin alone, but they constituted less than 4 percent of the city’s overall population of 4.2 million, and many lived in close-knit neighborhoods not typically included on visitors’ itineraries.

Yet Hitler was able to blame the economic problems of Germany on the Jews.

Shopkeepers saluted customers. Children were required to salute their teachers several times a day. At the close of theatrical performances, a newly established custom demanded that audiences stand and salute as they sang first the German national anthem, “Deutschland über Alles,” and second the Storm Trooper anthem, the “Horst Wessel Lied,” or “Horst Wessel Song,” named for its composer, an SA thug killed by communists but whom Nazi propaganda subsequently transformed into a hero. The German public had so avidly embraced the salute as to make the act of incessantly saluting almost comical, especially in the corridors of public buildings where everyone from the lowliest messenger to the loftiest official saluted and Heiled one another, turning a walk to the men’s room into an exhausting affair.

Mens room!! LOL

Messersmith stood respectfully, as he would have in America for the “Star-Spangled Banner.”

He did not think it funny when now and then Ambassador Dodd threw him a mock salute.

He met with a group of American correspondents and then with some twenty German reporters, who—as Dodd feared—had seen the report in the Jewish Hamburger Israelitisches Familienblatt claiming that he had “come to Germany to rectify the wrongs to the Jews.” Dodd read them what he described as a “brief disavowal.”

He quickly got a taste of life in the new Germany. On his first full day in Berlin, Hitler’s cabinet enacted a new law, to take effect January 1, 1934, called the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases, which authorized the sterilization of individuals suffering various physical and mental handicaps. He also learned that staff at the embassy and at Messersmith’s consulate had become convinced that German authorities were intercepting incoming and outgoing mail and that this had prompted Messersmith to take extraordinary measures to ensure that the most sensitive correspondence reached America unopened. The consul general now dispatched messengers to hand such mail directly to the captains of ships bound for America, who would be met dockside by U.S. agents.

From the start Dodd found their work habits to be less than desirable. His more senior people came in each day at whatever hour seemed to please them and periodically disappeared to hunt or play

golf.

this new world was proving to be far more nuanced and complex than Dodd had expected.

Deep fault lines ran through Hitler’s government. Hitler had been chancellor since January 30, 1933, when he was appointed to the post by President Hindenburg as part of a deal crafted by senior conservative politicians who believed they could keep him under control, a notion that by the time of Dodd’s arrival had been proved delusional. Hindenburg—known widely as the Old Gentleman—remained the last counterbalance to Hitler’s power and several days before Dodd’s departure had made a public declaration of displeasure at Hitler’s attempts to suppress the Protestant Church. Declaring himself an “Evangelical Christian,” Hindenburg in a published letter to Hitler warned of growing “anxiety for the inner freedom of the church” and that if things continued as they had, “the gravest damage must result to our people and fatherland, as well as injury to national unity.” In addition to holding the constitutional authority to appoint a new chancellor, Hindenburg commanded the loyalty of the regular army, the Reichswehr. Hitler understood that if the nation began falling back into chaos, Hindenburg might feel compelled to replace the government and declare martial

law.

Neurath saw himself as a sobering force in the government and believed he could help control Hitler and his party. As one peer put it, “He was trying to train the Nazis and turn them into really serviceable partners in a moderate nationalist regime.” But Neurath also thought it likely that Hitler’s government eventually would do itself in.

“Hitler will fall into line with these wiser men and ease up on a tense situation.”

“It has been a favorite pastime of the SA men to attack the Jews and one cannot avoid the plain language of stating that they do not like to be deprived of their prey.”

Those who lived in Germany and who paid attention understood that something fundamental had changed and that a darkness had settled over the landscape. Visitors failed to see it.

this was because the German government had begun a campaign “to influence Americans coming to Germany in forming a favorable opinion concerning happenings in the country.”

Martha inserted herself readily into the social fabric of Berlin.

She also became a regular at a nightly gathering of twenty or so correspondents who convened in an Italian restaurant,

The group had achieved a kind of fame. “Everybody else in the restaurant is watching them and trying to overhear what they are saying,” wrote Christopher Isherwood in Goodbye to Berlin. “If you have a piece of news to bring them—the details of an arrest, or the address of a victim whose relatives might be interviewed—then one of the journalists leaves the table and walks up and down with you outside, in the street.” The table often drew cameo visits from the first and second secretaries of foreign embassies and various Nazi press officials, and on occasion even Gestapo chief Rudolf Diels.

Hanfstaengl took a liking to Martha as well but did not think much of her father. “He was a modest little Southern history professor, who ran his embassy on a shoestring and was probably trying to save money

out of his pay,” Hanfstaengl wrote in a memoir. “At a time when it needed a robust millionaire to compete with the flamboyance of the Nazis, he teetered round self-effacingly as if he were still on his college campus.” Hanfstaengl dismissively referred to him as “Papa” Dodd.

“Dodd announced he had no wish to mix in Germany’s affairs.”

Mowrer

The Nazis wanted him gone immediately.

Dodd remained convinced that the government was growing more moderate and that Nazi mistreatment of Jews was on the wane.

“Briefly it may be said that the situation of the Jews in every respect except that of personal safety, is constantly growing more difficult and that the restrictions in effect are becoming daily more effective in practice and that new restrictions are constantly appearing.” He cited several new developments. Jewish dentists were now barred from taking care of patients under Germany’s social insurance system, an echo

of what had happened to Jewish doctors earlier in the year. A new “German fashion office” had just excluded Jewish dressmakers from participating in an upcoming fashion show. Jews and anyone who had even the appearance of a non-Aryan were forbidden to become policemen. And Jews, Messersmith reported, were now officially banned from the bathing beach at Wannsee.

One right after another taken away from the German Jews.

Even more systemic persecution was on the way, Messersmith wrote. He had learned that a draft existed of a new law that would effectively deprive Jews of their citizenship and all civil rights. Germany’s Jews, he wrote, “look upon this proposed law as the most serious moral blow which could be delivered to them. They have and are being deprived of practically all means of making a livelihood and understand that the new citizenship law is to practically deprive them of all civil rights.”

The Dodds found many properties to choose from, though at first they failed to ask themselves why so many grand old mansions were available for lease so fully and luxuriously furnished, with ornate tables and chairs, gleaming pianos, and rare vases, maps,

and books still in place.