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

by Erik Larson

The master bathroom was immense, so elaborate and overdone as to be comical, at least in Martha’s view. Its floors and walls were “entirely done in gold and colored mosaics.” A large tub stood on a raised platform, like something on display in a museum. “For weeks,” Martha wrote, “I roared with laughter whenever I saw the bathroom and occasionally as a lark would take my friends up to see it, when my father was away.”

She noted that her mother—whom she called “Her Excellency”—was in good health “but a bit nervous [and] rather enjoying it all.” Her father, she wrote, was “flourishing incredibly,” and seemed “slightly pro-German.” She added, “We sort of don’t like the Jews anyway.”

Awful. Maybe this hatred for the Jews is what is causing Dodd's blindness to what is going on in Germany.

The Dodds soon learned they had a prominent and much-feared neighbor farther along Tiergartenstrasse, on a side street called Standartenstrasse: Captain Röhm himself, commander of the Storm Troopers. Every morning he could be seen riding a large black horse in the Tiergarten. Another nearby building, a lovely two-story mansion that housed Hitler’s personal chancellery, would soon become the home of a Nazi program to euthanize people with severe mental or physical disabilities, code-named Aktion (Action) T-4, for the address, Tiergartenstrasse 4.

OMG

To the horror of Counselor Gordon, Ambassador Dodd continued his practice of walking to work, alone, unguarded, in his plain business suits.

Dodd is naive.

Schlosskirche, or Castle Church, in Wittenberg, where Martin Luther nailed his “95 Theses” to the door and launched the Reformation.

ROUTE to Nuremberg, Martha and her companions encountered groups of men in the brown uniform of the SA, young and old, fat and skinny, parading and singing and holding Nazi banners aloft. Often, as the car slowed to pass through narrow village streets, onlookers turned toward them and made the Hitler salute, shouting “Heil Hitler,” apparently interpreting the low number on the license plate—traditionally America’s ambassador to Germany had number 13—as proof that those within must be the family of some senior Nazi official from Berlin. “The excitement of the people was contagious and I ‘Heiled’ as vigorously as any Nazi,” Martha wrote in her memoir. Her behavior dismayed her brother and Reynolds, but she ignored their sarcastic jibes. “I felt like a child, ebullient and careless, the intoxication of the new regime working like wine in me.”

Martha got caught up in the Nazi regime.

When the song ended, the procession moved on. “I wanted to follow,” Martha wrote, “but my two companions were so repelled that they pulled me away.” She too had been shaken by the episode, but she did not let it tarnish her overall view of the country and the revival of spirit caused by the Nazi revolution. “I tried in a self-conscious way to justify the action

of the Nazis, to insist that we should not condemn without knowing the whole story.”

Foreign

correspondents in Germany had reported on abuses of Jews, but so far their stories had been based on after-the-fact investigation that relied on the accounts of witnesses. Here was an act of anti-Jewish brutality that a correspondent had witnessed firsthand. “The Nazis had all along been denying the atrocities that were occasionally reported abroad, but here was concrete evidence,” Reynolds wrote. “No other correspondent,” he claimed, “had witnessed any atrocities.” His editor agreed it was an important story but feared that if Reynolds tried to send it by cable it would be intercepted by Nazi censors. He told Reynolds to send it by mail and recommended that he omit any reference to the Dodd children in order to avoid causing difficulties for the new ambassador.

Hanfstaengl was furious, unaware as yet that Martha and Bill also had witnessed the incident. “There isn’t one damned word of truth in your story!” he raged. “I’ve talked with our people in Nuremberg and they say nothing of the sort happened there.”

At a press conference soon afterward, Goebbels, the propaganda minister, did not wait for a reporter to raise the issue of abuse against Jews but did so himself. He assured the forty or so reporters in the room that such incidents were rare, committed by “irresponsible” men.

The United States made no formal protest of the incident. Nonetheless, an official of the German foreign office apologized to Martha. He dismissed the incident as isolated and one that would be severely punished. Martha was inclined to accept his view. She remained enthralled with life in the new Germany.

Officially the State Department endorsed Dodd’s demurral; unofficially, his decision rankled a number of senior officers, including Undersecretary Phillips and Western European affairs chief Jay Pierrepont Moffat. They viewed Dodd’s decision as needlessly provocative, further proof that his appointment as ambassador had been a mistake. Forces opposed to Dodd began to coalesce.

Messersmith met with Dodd and asked whether the time had come for the State Department to issue a definitive warning against travel in Germany. Such a warning, both men knew, would have a devastating effect on Nazi prestige.

Dodd favored restraint. From the perspective of his role as ambassador, he found these attacks more nuisance than dire emergency and in fact tried whenever possible to limit press attention.

On a personal level, however, Dodd found such episodes repugnant, utterly alien to what his experience as a student in Leipzig had led him to expect. During family meals he condemned the attacks, but if he hoped for a sympathetic expression of outrage from his daughter, he failed to get it.

Martha remained inclined to think the best of the new Germany, partly, as she conceded later, out of the simple perverseness of a daughter trying to define herself. “I was trying to find excuses for their excesses, and my father would look at me a bit stonily if tolerantly, and both in private and in public gently label me a young Nazi,” she wrote. “That put me on the defensive for some time and I became temporarily an ardent defender of everything going on.”

Martha’s parents gave her full independence, with no restrictions on her comings or goings. It was not uncommon for her to stay out until early in the morning with all manner of escorts, yet family correspondence is surprisingly free of censorious comment. Others noticed, however, and disapproved, among them Consul General George Messersmith, who communicated his distaste to the State Department, thereby adding fuel to the quietly growing campaign against Dodd. Messersmith knew of Martha’s affair with Udet, the flying ace, and believed she had been involved in romantic affairs with other ranking Nazis, including Hanfstaengl.

He feared that Martha’s relationship with Hanfstaengl and her seeming lack of discretion caused diplomats and other informants to be more reticent about what they told Dodd, fearing that their confidences would make their way back to Hanfstaengl. “I often felt like saying something to the Ambassador about it,” Messersmith told Moffat, “but as it was rather a delicate matter, I confined myself to making it clear as to what kind of a person Hanfstaengl really is.” Messersmith’s view of Martha’s behavior hardened over time. In an unpublished memoir he wrote that “she had behaved so badly in so many ways, especially in view of the position held by her father.” The Dodds’ butler, Fritz, framed his own criticism succinctly: “That was not a house, but a house of ill repute.”

MARTHA’S LOVE LIFE took a dark turn when she was introduced to Rudolf Diels, the young chief of the Gestapo. He moved with ease and confidence, yet unlike Putzi Hanfstaengl, who invaded a room, he entered unobtrusively, seeping in like a malevolent fog. His arrival at a party, she wrote, “created a nervousness and tension that no other man possibly could, even when people did not know his identity.”

Diels was the fact that everyone else was afraid of him. He was often referred to as the “Prince of Darkness,”

Diels early on had allied himself closely with Göring, and when Hitler became chancellor, Göring, as the new Prussian minister of the interior, rewarded Diels’s loyalty by making him head of the newly created Gestapo, despite the fact that Diels was not a member of the Nazi Party.

By the time of the Dodds’ arrival in Berlin, the Gestapo had become a terrifying presence, though it was hardly the all-knowing, all-seeing entity that people imagined it to be.

The Gestapo enhanced its dark image by keeping its operations and its sources of information secret.

Out of the blue people received postcards requesting that they appear for questioning. These were uniquely terrifying. Despite their prosaic form, such summonses could not be discarded or ignored. They put citizens in the position of having to turn themselves in at that most terrifying of buildings to respond to charges of offenses about which they likely had no inkling, with the potential—often imagined but in many cases quite real—that by day’s end they would find themselves in a concentration camp, under “protective custody.” It was this accumulation of unknowns that made the Gestapo so fearsome.

Yet under Diels the Gestapo played a complex role. In the weeks following Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, Diels’s Gestapo acted as a curb against a wave of violence by the SA, during which Storm Troopers dragged thousands of victims to their makeshift prisons. Diels led raids to close them and found prisoners in appalling conditions, beaten and garishly bruised, limbs broken, near starvation, “like a mass of inanimate clay,” he wrote, “absurd puppets with lifeless eyes, burning with fever, their bodies sagging.”

Martha’s father liked Diels. To his surprise, he found the Gestapo chief to be a helpful intermediary for extracting foreign nationals and others from concentration camps and for exerting pressure on police authorities outside Berlin to find and punish the SA men responsible for attacks against Americans.

Diels was no saint, however. During his tenure as chief, thousands of men and women were arrested, ...

In Diels’s view, violence and terror were valuable tools for the preservation of political power. During a gathering of foreign correspondents at Putzi Hanfstaengl’s home, Diels told the reporters, “The value of the SA and the SS, seen from my viewpoint of inspector-general responsible for the suppression of subversive tendencies and activities, lies in the fact that they spread terror. That is a wholesome thing.”

Martha loved being known as the woman who slept with the devil—and that she did sleep with him seems beyond doubt, though it is equally likely that Dodd, like naive fathers everywhere and in every time, had no idea.

Diels,

told her stories of how everyone in the Nazi hierarchy distrusted everyone else, how Göring and Goebbels loathed each other and spied on each other, how both spied on Diels, and how Diels and his men spied on them in turn.

It was through Diels that she began for the first time to temper her idealistic view of the Nazi revolution. “There began to appear before my romantic eyes … a vast and complicated network of espionage, terror, sadism and hate, from which no one, official or private, could escape.”

With an unconscious note of pride in her voice, she added that both families had once owned slaves—“Mother’s about twelve or so, Father’s five or six.” Boris went quiet. His expression shifted abruptly to one of sorrow. “Martha,” he said, “surely you are not proud that your ancestors owned the lives of other human beings.”

Boris

was especially dismayed to see how readily the world accepted Hitler’s protestations of peace even as he so obviously girded the country for war. The Soviet Union seemed a likely target.

Even this early in their relationship he was deeply smitten—and, as it happens, closely watched.

Martha appeared at this point to have no knowledge of what many correspondents suspected: that Boris was no mere first secretary of embassy, but rather an operative for Soviet intelligence, the NKVD, precursor to the KGB.

Dodd warned that if the attacks continued and if the assailants still evaded punishment, the United States might indeed be forced to “publish a statement which would greatly damage the rating of Germany all over the world.”

Dodd pressed on, now venturing into even more charged territory: the Jewish “problem,” as Dodd and Neurath both termed it.

Neurath asked Dodd whether the United States “did not have a Jewish problem” of its own.

Dodd said, “You cannot expect world opinion of your conduct to moderate so long as eminent leaders like Hitler and Goebbels announce from platforms, as in Nuremberg, that all Jews must be wiped off the earth.”

Dodd rose to leave. He turned to Neurath. “Shall we have a war?” he asked. Again Neurath flushed: “Never!” At the door, Dodd said, “You must realize that Germany would be ruined by another war.” Dodd left the building, “a little concerned that I had been so frank and critical.”

THE VERY NEXT DAY, the American consul in Stuttgart, Germany, sent a “strictly confidential” communiqué to Berlin in which he reported that the Mauser Company, in his jurisdiction, had sharply increased its production of arms. The consul wrote, “No doubt can be entertained any longer that large scale preparation for a renewal of aggression against other countries is being planned in Germany.” Soon afterward the same consul reported that German police had begun close su...

On one notorious occasion the government ordered a nationwide halt of all traffic between noon and 12:40 so that squads of police could search all trains, trucks, and cars then in transit. The official explanation, quoted by German newspapers, was that the police were hunting for weapons, foreign propaganda, and evidence of communist resistance. Cynical Berliners embraced a different theory then making the rounds: that what the police really hoped to find, and conf...

The attacks against Americans, his protests, the unpredictability of Hitler and his deputies, and the need to tread with so much delicacy in the face of official behavior that anywhere else might draw time in prison—all of it wore Dodd down. He was plagued by headaches and stomach troubles. In a letter to a friend he described his ambassadorship as “this disagreeable and difficult business.”

Panofsky was bringing his family back to Berlin because Dodd’s presence ensured their safety.

The Dodds, like abused tenants everywhere, resolved at first to be patient and to hope that the new din of children and servants would subside. It did not. The clatter of comings and goings and the chance appearances of small children caused awkward moments, especially when the Dodds entertained diplomats and senior Reich officials, the latter already disposed to belittle Dodd’s frugal habits—his plain suits, the walks to work, the old Chevrolet. And now the unexpected arrival of an entire household of Jews.

sub-human, meaning “Jew.”