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

by Erik Larson

But 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.

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.”

Nice days were still nice. “The sun shines,” wrote Christopher Isherwood in his Berlin Stories, “and Hitler is the master of this city. The sun shines, and dozens of my friends … are in prison, possibly dead.” The prevailing normalcy was seductive.

“It was easy to be reassured,” wrote historian John Dippel in a study of why many Jews decided to stay in Germany. “On the surface, much of daily life remained as it had been before Hitler came to power. Nazi attacks on the Jews were like summer thunderstorms that came and went quickly, leaving an eerie calm.”

DODD REITERATED HIS COMMITMENT to objectivity and understanding in an August 12 letter to Roosevelt, in which he wrote that while he did not approve of Germany’s treatment of Jews or Hitler’s drive to restore the country’s military power, “fundamentally, I believe a people has a right to govern itself and that other peoples must exercise patience even when cruelties and injustices are done. Give men a chance to try their schemes.”

Panofsky was sufficiently wealthy that he did not need the income from the lease, but he had seen enough since Hitler’s appointment as chancellor to know that no Jew, no matter how prominent, was safe from Nazi persecution. He offered 27a to the new ambassador with the express intention of gaining for himself and his mother an enhanced level of physical protection, calculating that surely even the Storm Troopers would not risk the international outcry likely to arise from an attack on the house shared by the American ambassador.

“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.”

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.” Reynolds quietly informed Hanfstaengl that he had watched the parade in the company of two important witnesses whom he had omitted from the story but whose testimony was unassailable. Reynolds named them. Hanfstaengl sank into his chair and held his head. He complained that Reynolds should have told him sooner. Reynolds invited him to call the Dodds to confirm their presence, but Hanfstaengl waved away the suggestion.

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.”

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.” He took her hands and looked at her. Until this moment the fact that her parents’ ancestors had owned slaves had always seemed merely an interesting element of their personal history that testified to their deep roots in America. Now, suddenly, she saw it for what it was—a sad chapter to be regretted.

“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.

a mere 8 percent of the world’s population, meaning Germany and Japan, was able “because of imperialistic attitude” to prevent peace and disarmament for the rest of the world.

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.

The next day an official of the foreign office called Fromm to convey his sorrow and an oblique message. “Frau Bella,” he said, “I am deeply shocked. I know how terrible your loss is. Frau von Huhn died of pneumonia.” “Nonsense!” Fromm snapped. “Who told you that? She committed—” “Frau Bella, please understand, our friend had pneumonia. Further explanations are undesirable. In your interest, as well.”

After a few moments, she said, “Bellachen, we are all so shocked that the new regulations should have this effect!” Fromm was startled. “But Mammi,” Fromm said, “don’t you realize? This is only the beginning. This thing will turn against all of you who helped to create it.” Mammi ignored the remark. “Frau von Neurath advises you to hurry up and get baptized,” she said. “They are very anxious at the foreign office to avoid a second casus Poulette.” Fromm found this astonishing—that someone could be so ignorant of the new realities of Germany as to think that mere baptism could restore one’s status as an Aryan.

If he published so inflammatory a report through the Associated Press, he risked enraging Göring to the point where Göring might shut down the AP’s Berlin bureau.

The official tally of unemployed workers showed a rapid decline, from 4.8 million in 1933 to 2.7 million in 1934, although a good deal of this was due to such measures as assigning one-man jobs to two men and an aggressive propaganda campaign that sought to discourage women from working.

Death was the penalty for anyone who, “for the purpose of agitating,” discussed politics or was caught meeting with others. Even collecting “true or false information about the concentration camp” or receiving such information or talking about it with others could get an inmate hanged.

President Hindenburg, the supposed last restraint against Hitler, seemed oblivious to the pressures building below. On January 30, 1934, Hindenburg issued a public statement congratulating Hitler on the “great progress” Germany had made in the year since his ascension to chancellor.

why were the State Department and President Roosevelt so hesitant to express in frank terms how they really felt about Hitler at a time when such expressions clearly could have had a powerful effect on his prestige in the world?

HITLER’S PURGE WOULD BECOME KNOWN as “The Night of the Long Knives” and in time would be considered one of the most important episodes in his ascent, the first act in the great tragedy of appeasement. Initially, however, its significance was lost. No government recalled its ambassador or filed a protest; the populace did not rise in revulsion.

“At a time when hundreds of men have been put to death without trial or any sort of evidence of guilt, and when the population literally trembles with fear, animals have rights guaranteed them which men and women cannot think of expecting.”

On January 13, 1938, at a dinner given in his honor at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, Dodd declared, “Mankind is in grave danger, but democratic governments seem not to know what to do. If they do nothing, Western civilization, religious, personal and economic freedom are in grave danger.”

“But history,” wrote Dodd’s friend Claude Bowers, ambassador to Spain and later Chile, “will record that in a period when the forces of tyranny were mobilizing for the extermination of liberty and democracy everywhere, when a mistaken policy of ‘appeasement’ was stocking the arsenals of despotism, and when in many high social, and some political, circles, fascism was a fad and democracy anathema, he stood foursquare for our democratic way of life, fought the good fight and kept the faith, and when death touched him his flag was flying still.”