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

by Erik Larson

The killings demonstrated in what should have been unignorable terms how far Hitler was willing to go to preserve power, yet outsiders chose to misinterpret the violence as merely an internal settling of scores—“a type of gangland bloodbath redolent of Al Capone’s St. Valentine’s Day massacre,” as historian Ian Kershaw put it. “They still thought that in the business of diplomacy they could deal with Hitler as a responsible statesman. The next years would provide a bitter lesson that the Hitler conducting foreign affairs was the same one who had behaved with such savage and cynical brutality at home on 30 June 1934.”

The controlled press, not surprisingly, praised Hitler for his decisive behavior,

So weary had Germans become of the Storm Troopers’ intrusions in their lives that the purge seemed like a godsend. An intelligence report from the exiled Social Democrats found that many Germans were “extolling Hitler for his ruthless determination” and that many in the working class “have also become enslaved to the uncritical deification of Hitler.”

On August 2, three weeks after Hitler’s speech, Hindenburg died at his country estate. Hitler moved quickly. Before the day was out he assumed the duties of president as well as chancellor, thereby at last achieving absolute power over Germany. Contending with false humility that the title “president” could only be associated with Hindenburg, who had borne it so long, Hitler proclaimed that henceforth his own official title would be “Führer and Reich Chancellor.”

“The people hardly notice this complete coup d’etat,” he wrote in his diary. “It all takes place in silence, drowned out by hymns to the dead Hindenburg. I would swear that millions upon millions have no idea what a monstrous thing has occurred.”

“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!”

He wrote, “It is so humiliating to me to shake hands with known and confessed murderers.” He became one of the few voices in U.S. government to warn of the true ambitions of Hitler and the dangers of America’s isolationist stance.

He told Secretary Hull in a letter dated August 30, 1934, “With Germany united as it has never before been, there is feverish arming and drilling of 1,500,000 men, all of whom are taught every day to believe that continental Europe must be subordinated to them.” He added, “I think we must abandon our so-called isolation.” He wrote to the army chief of staff, Douglas MacArthur, “In my judgment, the German authorities are preparing for a great continental struggle. There is ample evidence. It is only a question of time.”

GERMANY CONTINUED ITS MARCH toward war and intensified its persecution of Jews, passing a collection of laws under which Jews ceased to be citizens no matter how long their families had lived in Germany or how bravely they had fought for Germany in the Great War.

Dodd watched, utterly helpless, as German troops occupied the Rhineland on March 7, 1936, without resistance. He saw Berlin transformed for the Olympics as the Nazis polished the city and removed their anti-Jewish banners, only to intensify their persecution once the foreign crowds were gone. He saw Hitler’s stature within Germany grow to that of a god.

“That you have found me … among so many millions is the miracle of our time!” he cried. “And that I have found you, that is Germany’s fortune!”

On September 19, 1936, in a letter marked “Personal and Confidential,” Dodd wrote to Secretary Hull of his frustration at watching events unfold with no one daring to intercede. “With armies increasing in size and efficiency every day; with thousands of airplanes ready on a moment’s notice to drop bombs and spread poison gas over great cities; and with all other countries, little and great, arming as never before, one can not feel safe anywhere,” he wrote. “What mistakes and blunders since 1917, and especially during the past twelve months—and no democratic peoples do anything, economic or moral penalties, to halt the process!”

He went to Washington and on Wednesday, August 11, met with Roosevelt. During their hourlong conversation, Roosevelt said he’d like him to stay in Berlin a few months longer. He urged Dodd to do as many lectures as he could while in America and “speak the truth about things,” a command that affirmed for Dodd that he still had the president’s confidence.

She told Boris of her marriage in a letter dated July 9, 1938. “You know, honey, that for me, you meant more in my life than anybody else. You also know that, if I am needed, I will be ready to come when called.” She added, “I look into the future and see you in Russia again.” By the time her letter arrived in Russia, Boris was dead, executed, one of countless NKVD operatives who fell victim to Stalin’s paranoia. Martha learned later that Boris had been accused of collaborating with the Nazis.

With that speech, Dodd embarked on a campaign to raise the alarm about Hitler and his plans, and to combat the increasing drift in America toward isolationism; later he would be dubbed the Cassandra of American diplomats. He founded the American Council Against Nazi Propaganda and became a member of the American Friends of Spanish Democracy. At a speech in Rochester, New York, on February 21, 1938, before a Jewish congregation, Dodd warned that once Hitler attained control of Austria—an event that appeared imminent—Germany would continue seeking to expand its authority elsewhere, and that Romania, Poland, and Czechoslovakia were at risk. He predicted, moreover, that Hitler would be free to pursue his ambitions without armed resistance from other European democracies, as they would choose concessions over war. “Great Britain,” he said, “is terribly exasperated but also terribly desirous of peace.”

She was deeply concerned about events in Europe. In another letter to Martha soon afterward she wrote, “The world seems in such a mess now, I don’t know what will happen. Too bad that maniac was allowed to go his way so long uncurbed. We may be, sooner or later, involved, God forbid.”

In a June 10, 1938, speech in Boston, at the Harvard Club—that den of privilege—Dodd talked of Hitler’s hatred of Jews and warned that his true intent was “to kill them all.”

Five months later, on November 9 and 10, came Kristallnacht, the Nazi pogrom that convulsed Germany and at last drove Roosevelt to issue a public condemnation. He told reporters he “could scarcely believe that such a thing could occur in twentieth century civilization.”

In September 1939, Hitler’s armies invaded Poland and sparked war in Europe. On September 18, Dodd wrote to Roosevelt that it could have been avoided if “the democracies in Europe” had simply acted together to stop Hitler, as he always had urged. “If they had co-operated,” Dodd wrote, “they would have succeeded. Now it is too late.”

To the isolationists, he was needlessly provocative; to his opponents in the State Department, he was a maverick who complained too much and failed to uphold the standards of the Pretty Good Club. Roosevelt, in a letter to Bill Jr., was maddeningly noncommittal. “Knowing his passion for historical truth and his rare ability to illuminate the meanings of history,” Roosevelt wrote, “his passing is a real loss to the nation.”

To those who knew Dodd in Berlin and who witnessed firsthand the oppression and terror of Hitler’s government, he would always be a hero.

Sigrid Schultz called Dodd “the best ambassador we had in Germany” and revered his willingness to stand up for American ideals even against the opposition of his own government. She wrote: “Washington failed to give him the support due an ambassador in Nazi Germany, partly because too many of the men in the State Department were passionately fond of the Germans and because too many ...

“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.”

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.

Martha and Alfred Stern lived in an apartment on Central Park West in New York City and owned an estate in Ridgefield, Connecticut. In 1939 she published a memoir entitled Through Embassy Eyes. Germany promptly banned the book, no surprise given some of Martha’s observations about the regime’s top leaders—for

She died in 1990 at the age of eighty-two, not precisely a hero but certainly a woman of principle who never wavered in her belief that she had done the right thing in helping the Soviets against the Nazis at a time when most of the world was disinclined to do anything.

One of these transcripts concerned a conversation over dinner in October 1941 at Wolfsschanze, or Wolf’s Lair, Hitler’s redoubt in East Prussia. The subject of Martha Dodd came up. Hitler, who once had kissed her hand, said, “To think that there was nobody in all this ministry who could get his clutches on the daughter of the former American ambassador, Dodd—and yet she wasn’t difficult to approach. That was their job, and it should have been done. In short, the girl should have been subjugated.… In the old days when we wanted to lay siege to an industrialist, we attacked him through his children. Old Dodd, who was an imbecile, we’d have got him through his daughter.”