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

by Erik Larson

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.

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.

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.

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.

“Nowhere have I had such lovely friends as in Germany,” she wrote. “Looking back on it all is like seeing someone you love go mad—and do horrible things.”

“We must keep in mind, I believe, that when Hitler says anything he for the moment convinces himself that it is true. He is basically sincere; but he is at the same time a fanatic.”

“If the police were allowed to be influenced in a particular direction,” Göring said, “then, in any case, they were only influenced in the proper direction.” “That is your opinion,” Dimitrov countered. “My opinion is quite different.” Göring snapped, “But mine is the one that counts.”

comical if the stakes had not been so high and raised a question: 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?

she recognized that German persecution of Jews was a national pastime. She found herself repulsed by the constant thunder of Nazi propaganda that portrayed Jews as enemies of the state.

“By the spring of 1934,” she wrote, “what I had heard, seen, and felt, revealed to me that conditions of living were worse than in pre-Hitler days, that the most complicated and heartbreaking system of terror ruled the country and repressed the freedom and happiness of the people, and that German leaders were inevitably leading these docile and kindly masses into another war against their will and their knowledge.”

The Jewish owners of the Frankfurter Zeitung had been forced to abandon their controlling interest, as had the last Jewish owners of the famed Ullstein publishing empire. A large rubber company was told it must provide proof that it had no Jewish employees before it could submit bids to municipalities. The German Red Cross was suddenly required to certify that new contributors were of Aryan origin. And two judges in two different cities granted permission to two men to divorce their wives for the sole reason that the women were Jewish, reasoning that such marriages would yield mixed offspring that would only weaken the German race.

Throughout that first year in Germany, Dodd had been struck again and again by the strange indifference to atrocity that had settled over the nation, the willingness of the populace and of the moderate elements in the government to accept each new oppressive decree, each new act of violence, without protest.

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.

Rudolf Diels, in his memoir, acknowledged that at first he also missed the point. “I … had no idea that this hour of lightning was announcing a thunderstorm, the violence of which would tear down the rotten dams of the European systems and would put the entire world into flames—because this was indeed the meaning of June 30, 1934.”

“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.” He added, “One might easily wish he were a horse!”

In the end, Dodd proved to be exactly what Roosevelt had wanted, a lone beacon of American freedom and hope in a land of gathering darkness.