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

by Erik Larson

IN THE WORLD OUTSIDE Dodd’s windows, however, the shadows steadily deepened.

Once again Dodd weighed the idea of asking the State Department to “announce to the world that Americans are not safe in Germany and that travelers had best not go there,” but he ultimately demurred.

Persecution of Jews continued in ever more subtle and wide-ranging form as the process of Gleichschaltung advanced.

In September the government established the Reich Chamber of Culture, under the control of Goebbels, to bring musicians, actors, painters, writers, reporters, and filmmakers into ideological and, especially, racial alignment. In early October the government enacted the Editorial Law, which banned Jews from employment by newspapers and publishers and was to take effect on January 1, 1934. No realm was too petty: The Ministry of Posts ruled that henceforth when trying to spell a word over the telephone a calle...

Messersmith

wrote, “It is definitely the aim of the Government, no matter what it may say to the outside or in Germany, to eliminate the Jews from German life.”

One fact was certain, Messersmith believed: Germany now posed a real and grave threat to the world. He called it “the sore spot which may disturb our peace for years to come.”

On October 4, 1933, barely three months into his stay, Dodd sent Secretary Hull a letter marked “confidential and for you alone.” Citing the dampness of Berlin’s autumn and winter climate and his lack of a vacation since March, Dodd requested permission to take a lengthy leave early in the coming year so that he could spend time on his farm and do some teaching in Chicago. He hoped to depart Berlin at the end of February and return three months later. He asked Hull to keep his request secret. “Please do not refer to others if you have doubts yourself.” Hull granted Dodd’s leave request, suggesting that at this time Washington did not share Messersmith’s assessment of Germany as a serious and growing threat.

Ambassador Dodd’s papers are silent on the matter, but given his frugality he must have found Martha to be an unexpectedly, and alarmingly, costly presence on the family ledger.

Martha hoped to stake a place in Berlin’s cultural landscape all her own, not just by dint of her friendship with the Harnacks, and she wanted that place to be a prominent one.

Martha

grew bolder. The time had come, she knew, to start throwing some parties of her own.

she resigned herself to helping the Harnacks with their regular soirees and teas. They did have a gift for gathering loyal and compelling friends and holding them close. The idea that one day it would kill them would have seemed at the time, to Martha, utterly laughable.

Martha,

“Accustomed all my life to the free exchange of views,” she wrote, “the atmosphere of this evening shocked me and struck me as a sort of violation of the decencies of human relationship.”

DODD TOO WAS FAST GAINING an appreciation of the prickly sensitivities of the day.

Dodd explained his motivation in a letter to Jane Addams. “It was because I had seen so much of injustice and domineering little groups, as well as heard the complaints of so many of the best people of the country, that I ventured as far as my position would allow and by historical analogy warned men as solemnly as possible against half-educated leaders being permitted to lead nations into war.”

In defending himself later, Dodd wrote, “The President told me pointedly that he wanted me to be a standing representative and spokesman (on occasion) of American ideals and Philosophy.”

“In conclusion,” he said, “one may safely say that it would be no sin if statesmen learned enough of history to realize that no system which implies control of society by privilege seekers has ever ended in any other way than collapse.” To fail to learn from such “blunders of the past,” he said, was to end up on a course toward “another war and chaos.”

The applause, Dodd said in his diary, “was extraordinary.”

‘You have said what all of us have been denied the right to say.’ ” An official of the Deutsche Bank called to express his own agreement. He told Dodd, “Silent, but anxious Germany, above all the business and University Germany, is entirely with you and most thankful that you are here and can say what we can not say.”

Dodd was heartened by the response from his audience. He told Roosevelt, “My interpretation of this is that all liberal Germany is with us—and more than half of Germany is at heart liberal.”

The response elsewhere was decidedly less positive, as Dodd quickly found. Goebbels blocked publication of the speech, although three large newspapers published excerpts anyway. The next day,

Friday, Dodd arrived at Foreign Minister Neurath’s office for a previously scheduled meeting, only to be told Neurath could not see him—a clear breach of diplomatic custom. In a cable to Washington that afternoon, Dodd told Secretary Hull that Neurath’s action seemed “to constitute a serious affront to our Government.” Dodd finally got to see Neurath at eight o’clock that night. Neurath claimed to have been too busy to see him during the day, but Dodd knew that the minister had been free enough from pressing obligations to have lunch with a minor diploma...

Phillips and other senior men in the State Department, including Moffat, the Western European affairs chief, were becoming increasingly unhappy with the ambassador.

Dodd still seemed unaware of it, but several members of the Pretty Good Club had begun stepping up their campaign against him, with the ultimate aim of ousting him from their ranks.

Though Dodd continued to nurture the hope that the German government would grow more civil, he recognized that Hitler’s two decisions signaled an ominous shift away from moderation. The time had come, he knew, to meet with Hitler face-to-face. Dodd went to bed that night deeply troubled.

Hitler’s only all-consuming affair had been with his young niece, Geli Raubal. She was found shot to death in Hitler’s apartment, his revolver nearby.

Hanfstaengl telephoned Martha at home. “Hitler needs a woman,” he said. “Hitler should have an American woman—a lovely woman could change the whole destiny of Europe.” He got to the point: “Martha,” he said, “you are the woman!”

Dodd walked up a broad stairway toward Hitler’s office, at each bend encountering SS men with their arms raised “Caesar style,” as Dodd put it. He bowed in response and at last entered Hitler’s waiting room. After a few moments the black, tall door to Hitler’s office opened.

Hitler did not cut a particularly striking figure. He rarely did. Early in his rise it was easy for those who met him for the first time to dismiss him as a nonentity.

Recalling his first impression of Hitler, Hanfstaengl wrote, “Hitler looked like a suburban hairdresser on his day off.”

First Dodd raised the subject of the many attacks against Americans. Hitler was cordial and apologetic and assured Dodd that the perpetrators of all such attacks would be “punished to the limit.”

That night, over dinner, she told her parents all about the day’s encounter and how charming and peaceful the Führer had been. Dodd was amused and conceded “that Hitler was not an unattractive man personally.”

The American vice consul in Leipzig, Henry Leverich, found the draft an extraordinary document and wrote an analysis: “For the first time, therefore, in German legal history the draft code contains definite suggestions for protection of the German Race from what is considered the disintegration caused by an intermixture of Jewish and colored blood.” If the code became law—and he had no doubt it would—then henceforth “it shall be considered as a crime for a gentile man or woman to marry a Jewish or colored man or woman.” He noted also that the code made paramount the protection of the family and thus outlawed abortion, with the exception that a court could authorize the procedure when the expected offspring was a mix of German and Jewish or colored blood.

Another newly proposed law caught Dodd’s particular attention—a law “to permit killing incurables,” as he described it in a memorandum to the State Department dated October 26, 1933.

This proposal, “together with legislation already enacted governing the sterilization of persons affected by hereditary imbecility and other similar defects, is in line with Hitler’s aim to raise the physical standard of the German people,” Dodd wrote. “According to Nazi philosophy only Germans who are physically fit belong in the Third Reich, and they are the ones who are expected to raise large families.”

What Dodd had failed as yet to fully appreciate was that in complaining about the wealth, dress, and work habits of embassy officers, he was in fact attacking Undersecretary Phillips, Western European Affairs Chief Moffat, and their colleagues, the very men who sustained and endorsed the foreign-service culture—the Pretty Good Club—that Dodd found so distressing.

DODD BELIEVED THAT one artifact of past excess—“another curious hangover,” he told Phillips—was that his embassy had too many personnel, in particular, too many who were Jewish. “We have six or eight members of the ‘chosen race’ here who serve in most useful but conspicuous positions,” he wrote. Several were his best workers, he acknowledged, but he feared that their presence on his staff impaired the embassy’s relationship with Hitler’s government and thus impeded the day-to-day operation of the embassy. “I would not for a moment consider transfer. However, the number is too great and one of them”—he meant Julia Swope Lewin, the embassy receptionist—“is so ardent and in evidence every day that I hear echoes from semi-official circles.” He also cited the example of the embassy’s bookkeeper, who, while “very competent,” was also “one of the ‘Chosen People’ and that puts him at some disadvantage with the Banks here.”

Dodd following Hitler's lead.

On Friday, October 27, Messersmith held a lunch at his house at which he introduced Dodd to a number of especially rabid Nazis, to help Dodd gain a sense of the true character of the party. One seemingly sober and intelligent Nazi stated as fact a belief common among party members that President Roosevelt and his wife had nothing but Jewish advisers.

That Dodd imagined Phillips would retain this confidence suggests he was unaware that Phillips and Messersmith maintained a regular and frequent exchange of correspondence outside the stream of official reportage.

Party men and the SA monitored who voted and who did not; laggards got a visit from a squad of Storm Troopers who emphasized the desirability of

an immediate trip to the polls. For anyone dense enough to miss the point, there was this item in the Sunday-morning edition of the official Nazi newspaper, Völkischer Beobachter: “In order to bring about clarity it must be repeated again. He who does not attach himself to us today, he who does not vote and vote ‘yes’ today, shows that he is, if not our bloody enemy, at least a product of destruction and that he is no more to be helped.” Here was the kicker: “It would be better for him and it would be better for us if he no longer existed.”

The outcome was clear to Dodd well before the votes were counted. He wrote to Roosevelt, “The election here is a farce.” Nothing indicated this more clearly than the vote within the camp at Dachau: 2,154 of 2,242 prisoners—96 percent—voted in favor of Hitler’s government. On the fate of the 88 souls who either failed to vote or voted no, history is silent.

He closed with a jovial “Keep up the good work!”

Roosevelt indicated he was happy with Dodd's approach to things in Germany.

Now Martha and Boris felt freer about revealing their relationship to the world, though both recognized that discretion was still necessary given the continuing disapproval of Boris’s superiors and Martha’s parents.

Martha was still committed to seeing the best in the Nazi revolution, but Boris had no illusions about what was occurring around them. To Martha’s irritation, he was always looking for the underlying motives that governed the actions of Nazi leaders and the various figures who visited the U.S. embassy.

“You always see the bad things,” she said angrily. “You should try to see the positive things in Germany, and in our visitors, not always suspect them of ulterior motives.”

With Hindenburg in his camp, Papen and fellow intriguers had imagined they could control Hitler. “I have Hindenburg’s confidence,” Papen once crowed. “Within two months we will have pushed Hitler so far into a corner that he’ll squeak.” It was possibly the greatest miscalculation of the twentieth century. As historian John Wheeler-Bennett put it, “Not until they had riveted the fetters upon their own wrists did they realize who indeed was captive and who captor.”

Dodd too viewed Papen with distaste, but for reasons stemming from treachery of a more concrete variety. Shortly before the United States had entered the past world war, Papen had been a military attaché assigned to the German embassy in Washington, where he had planned and abetted various acts of sabotage, including the dynamiting of rail lines. He had been arrested and thrown out of the country.