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

by Erik Larson

The isolationists added another dimension to the debate by insisting, as did Hitler’s government, that Nazi oppression of Germany’s Jews was a domestic German affair and thus none of America’s business.

On the other side stood Jewish groups aligned with the American Jewish Committee, headed by Judge Proskauer, which counseled a quieter path, fearing that noisy protests and boycotts would only make things worse for Jews still in Germany.

He stated also that a boycott would “hamper efforts of friends in Germany to bring about a more conciliatory attitude through an appeal to reason and to self interest,” and could impair Germany’s ability to pay its bond debt to American holders. He feared the repercussions of an act that would be identified solely with Jews.

Where both factions did agree, however, was on the certainty that any campaign that explicitly and publicly sought to boost Jewish immigration to America could only lead to disaster. In early June 1933 Rabbi Wise wrote to Felix Frankfurter, at this point a Harvard law professor, that if debate over immigration reached the floor of the House it could “lead to an explosion against us.” Indeed, anti-immigration sentiment in America would remain strong into 1938, when a Fortune poll reported that some two-thirds of those surveyed favored keeping refugees out of the country.

Both Carr and Phillips favored strict adherence to a provision in the nation’s immigration laws that barred entry to all would-be immigrants considered “likely to become a public charge,” the notorious “LPC clause.” A component of the Immigration Act of 1917, it had been reinstated by the Hoover administration in 1930 to discourage immigration at a time when unemployment was soaring.

Immigration law also required that applicants provide a police affidavit attesting to their good character, along with duplicate copies of birth certificates and other government records. “It seems quite preposterous,” one Jewish memoirist wrote, “to have to go to your enemy and ask for a character reference.”

One result, according to Proskauer and other Jewish leaders, was that Jews simply did not apply for immigration to the United States. Indeed, the number of Germans who applied for visas was a tiny fraction of the twenty-six thousand allowed under the annual quota set for the country.

“The German authorities are treating the Jews shamefully and the Jews in this country are greatly excited,” Roosevelt told him. “But this is also not a governmental affair. We can do nothing except for American citizens who happen to be made victims. We must protect them, and whatever we can do to moderate the general persecution by unofficial and personal influence ought to be done.”

Hitler had been chancellor for six months, having received the appointment through a political deal, but he did not yet possess absolute power. Germany’s eighty-five-year-old president, Field Marshal Paul von Beneckendorff und von Hindenburg, still held the constitutional authority to appoint and remove chancellors and their cabinets and, equally important, commanded the loyalty of the regular army, the Reichswehr. By contrast to Hindenburg, Hitler and his deputies were surprisingly young—Hitler only forty-four, Hermann Göring forty, and Joseph Goebbels thirty-six.

He sensed a rising “hysteria” among midlevel leaders of the Nazi Party, expressed as a belief “that the only safety lies in getting everybody in jail.” The nation was quietly but aggressively readying itself for war, deploying propaganda to conjure the perception “that the whole world is against Germany and that it lies defenseless before the world.” Hitler’s vows of peaceful intent were illusory, meant only to buy time for Germany to rearm, Messersmith warned. “What they most want to do, however, definitely is to make Germany the most capable instrument of war that there has ever existed.”

Dodd also paid a call on the State Department’s chief of Western European affairs, Jay Pierrepont Moffat, who shared Carr’s and Phillips’s distaste for Jews as well as their hard-line attitude toward immigration. Moffat recorded his own impression of the new ambassador: “He is extremely sure of his opinion, expresses himself forcibly and didactically and tends to dramatize the points he makes. The only fly in the ointment is that he is going to try and run the Embassy with a family of four persons on his salary, and how he is going to do it in Berlin, where prices are high, is something beyond me.”

“the Jews should not be allowed to dominate economic or intellectual life in Berlin as they have done for a long time.” In this, Colonel House expressed a sentiment pervasive in America, that Germany’s Jews were at least partly responsible for their own troubles. Dodd encountered a more rabid form of it later that same day after returning to New York, when he and his family went to dinner at the Park Avenue apartment of Charles R. Crane, seventy-five, a philanthropist whose family had grown wealthy selling plumbing supplies. Crane was an Arabist said to be influential in certain Middle Eastern and Balkan nations and was a generous supporter of Dodd’s department at the University of Chicago, where he had endowed a chair for the study of Russian history and institutions. Dodd already knew that Crane was no friend of Jews. When Crane earlier had written to congratulate Dodd on his appointment, he had offered some advice: “The Jews, after winning the war, galloping along at a swift pace, getting Russia, England and Palestine, being caught in the act of trying to seize Germany, too, and meeting their first real rebuff have gone plumb crazy and are deluging the world—particularly easy America—with anti-German propaganda—I strongly advise you to resist every social invitation.”

She also found herself absorbing a view that Jews, while generally brilliant, were rich and pushy. In this she reflected the attitude of a surprising proportion of other Americans, as captured in the 1930s by practitioners of the then-emerging art of public-opinion polling. One poll found that 41 percent of those contacted believed Jews had “too much power in the United States”; another found that one-fifth wanted to “drive Jews out of the United States.” (A poll taken decades in the future, in 2009, would find that the total of Americans who believed Jews had too much power had shrunk to 13 percent.)

A young Dutchman—a lapsed communist named Marinus van der Lubbe—was arrested and charged with the arson, along with four other suspects named as accomplices, though a widely endorsed rumor held that the Nazi regime itself had orchestrated the fire to stir fears of a Bolshevik uprising and thereby gain popular support for the suspension of civil liberties and the destruction of the Communist Party

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.

Here too stood Haus Vaterland, a five-story nightclub capable of serving six thousand diners in twelve restaurant milieus, including a Wild West bar, with waiters in immense cowboy hats, and the Rhineland Wine Terrace, where each hour guests experienced a brief indoor thunderstorm complete with lightning, thunder, and, to the chagrin of women wearing true silk, a sprinkling of rain. “What a youthful, carefree, won’t-go-home-till-morning, romantic, wonderful place!” one visitor wrote: “It is the jolliest place in Berlin.”

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.

heartfelt political belief but from private conflicts, with the trigger often breathtakingly trivial. In October 1933, for example, the clerk at a grocery store turned in a cranky customer who had stubbornly insisted on receiving three pfennigs in change. The clerk accused her of failure to pay taxes. Germans denounced one another with such gusto that senior Nazi officials urged the populace to be more discriminating as to what circumstances might justify a report to the police.

Hitler himself acknowledged, in a remark to his minister of justice, “we are living at present in a sea of denunciations and human meanness.”

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.

Yet even many Jewish residents failed to grasp the true meaning of what was occurring. Fifty thousand did see, and left Germany within weeks of Hitler’s ascension to chancellor, but most stayed. “Hardly anyone thought that the threats against the Jews were meant seriously,” wrote Carl Zuckmayer, a Jewish writer. “Even many Jews considered the savage anti-Semitic rantings of the Nazis merely a propaganda device, a line the Nazis would drop as soon as they won governmental power and were entrusted with public responsibilities.”

He quickly got a taste of life in the new Germany. On his first full day in Berlin, Hitler’s cabinet enacted a new law, to take effect January 1, 1934, called the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases, which authorized the sterilization of individuals suffering various physical and mental handicaps.

Deep fault lines ran through Hitler’s government. Hitler had been chancellor since January 30, 1933, when he was appointed to the post by President Hindenburg as part of a deal crafted by senior conservative politicians who believed they could keep him under control, a notion that by the time of Dodd’s arrival had been proved delusional. Hindenburg—known widely as the Old Gentleman—remained the last counterbalance to Hitler’s power and several days before Dodd’s departure had made a public declaration of displeasure at Hitler’s attempts to suppress the Protestant Church. Declaring himself an “Evangelical Christian,” Hindenburg in a published letter to Hitler warned of growing “anxiety for the inner freedom of the church” and that if things continued as they had, “the gravest damage must result to our people and fatherland, as well as injury to national unity.”

Increasingly Hitler saw the SA as an undisciplined and radical force that had outlasted its purpose. Röhm thought otherwise: he and his Storm Troopers had been pivotal in bringing about the National Socialist revolution and now, for their reward, wanted control of all the nation’s military, including the Reichswehr. The army found this prospect loathsome. Fat, surly, admittedly homosexual, and thoroughly dissipated, Röhm had none of the soldierly bearing the army revered. He did, however, command a fast-growing legion of over one million men.

He was Fritz Haber. To any German the name was well known and revered, or had been until the advent of Hitler. Until recently, Haber had been director of the famed Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry. He was a war hero and a Nobel laureate. Hoping to break the stalemate in the trenches during the Great War, Haber had invented poison chlorine gas. He had devised what became known as Haber’s rule, a formula, C × t = k, elegant in its lethality: a low exposure to gas over a long period will have the same result as a high exposure over a short period. He also invented a means to distribute his poison gas at the front and was himself present in 1915 for its first use against French forces at Ypres. On a personal level, that day at Ypres cost him dearly. His wife of thirty-two years, Clara, had long condemned his work as inhumane and immoral and demanded he stop, but to such concerns he gave a stock reply: death was death, no matter the cause. Nine days after the gas attack at Ypres, she committed suicide. Despite international outcry over his poison-gas research, Haber was awarded the 1918 Nobel Prize for chemistry for discovering a means of mining nitrogen from air and thus allowing the manufacture of plentiful, cheap fertilizer—and, of course, gunpowder.

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. He claimed in his diary that he had managed to keep several attacks against Americans out of the newspapers altogether and had “otherwise tried to prevent unfriendly demonstrations.”

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.”

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.”

The more Martha came to know Diels, the more she saw that he too was afraid. He felt “he was constantly facing the muzzle of a gun,” she wrote. He was most at ease during their drives, when no one could overhear their conversations or monitor their behavior. They would stop and walk through forests and have coffee in remote, little-known cafés. He 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.

He 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. Another source of stress was his own embassy’s disapproval of his relationship with Martha. His superiors issued a reprimand. He ignored it.

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.

Neurath asked Dodd whether the United States “did not have a Jewish problem” of its own. “You know, of course,” Dodd said, “that we have had difficulty now and then in the United States with Jews who had gotten too much of a hold on certain departments of intellectual and business life.” He added that some of his peers in Washington had told him confidentially that “they appreciated the difficulties of the Germans in this respect but that they did not for a moment agree with the method of solving the problem which so often ran into utter ruthlessness.”

another. Even the language used by Hitler and party officials was weirdly inverted. The term “fanatical” became a positive trait. Suddenly it connoted what philologist Victor Klemperer, a Jewish resident of Dresden, described as a “happy mix of courage and fervent devotion.” Nazi-controlled newspapers reported an endless succession of “fanatical vows” and “fanatical declarations” and “fanatical beliefs,” all good things. Göring was described as a “fanatical animal lover.” Fanatischer Tierfreund.

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 caller could no longer say “D as in David,” because “David” was a Jewish name. The caller had to use “Dora.” “Samuel” became “Siegfried.” And so forth.

In Berlin, in the winter of 1930–31, Arvid founded yet another group, this devoted to the study of Soviet Russia’s planned economy. As the Nazi Party gained sway, his field of interest became decidedly problematic, but he nonetheless arranged and led a tour of the Soviet Union for some two dozen German economists and engineers. While abroad he was recruited by Soviet intelligence to work secretly against the Nazis. He agreed.

After the initial spasm of anticommunist terror subsided, the Harnacks returned to their apartment in Berlin. Surprisingly, given his background, Arvid got a job within the Ministry of Economics and began a rapid rise that prompted some of Mildred’s friends in America to decide that she and Arvid had “gone Nazi.”

“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.”

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. Seriously ill patients could ask to be euthanized, but if unable to make the request, their families could do so for them. 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.”

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.

One result was unexpected. Instead of embittered estrangement between Dodd and Papen, there grew instead a warm and lasting association. “From that day on,” Sigrid Schultz observed, “Papen himself cultivated the friendship of Ambassador Dodd with the greatest assiduity.” Papen’s behavior toward Schultz also improved. He seemed to have decided, she wrote, that “it was better to display his Sunday manners toward me.” This, she found, was typical of a certain kind of German. “Whenever they come up against someone who will not stand for their arrogance, they climb down from their perch and behave,” she wrote. “They respect character when they meet it, and if more people had shown firmness to Hitler’s handyman Papen and his acolytes in small every day contacts, as well as in big affairs of state, the Nazi growth could have been slowed up.”

The gloom was leavened somewhat by the play of lights on wet streets—sidewalk lamps, storefronts, headlights, the warmly lit interiors of countless streetcars—and by the city’s habitual embrace of Christmas. Candles appeared in every window and large trees lit with electric lights graced squares and parks and the busiest street corners, reflecting a passion for the season that even the Storm Troopers could not suppress and in fact used to their financial advantage. The SA monopolized the sale of Christmas trees, selling them from rail yards, ostensibly for the benefit of the Winterhilfe—literally, Winter Help—the SA’s charity for the poor and jobless, widely believed by cynical Berliners to fund the Storm Troopers’ parties and banquets, which had become legendary for their opulence, their debauchery, and the volume of champagne consumed. Troopers went door-to-door carrying red donation boxes. Donors received little badges to pin on their clothing to show they had given money, and they made sure to wear them, thereby putting oblique pressure on those brave or foolhardy souls who failed to contribute.

It was Diels, indeed, who earlier in the month had persuaded Göring and Hitler to decree a Christmas amnesty for inmates of concentration camps who were not hardened criminals or clearly dangerous to state security.

Article 19, dealt with “incidental punishments,” which were to include reprimands, beatings, and “tying to stakes.” Another section laid out the rules for hangings. 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. “If a prisoner attempts to escape,” Eicke wrote, “he is to be shot without warning.” Gunfire also was the required response to prisoner uprisings. “Warning shots,” Eicke wrote, “are forbidden on principle.” Eicke made sure all new guards were fully indoctrinated, as one of his trainees, Rudolf Höss, would later attest. Höss became a guard at Dachau in 1934 and recalled how Eicke repeatedly drummed home the same message. “Any pity whatsoever for ‘enemies of the State’ was unworthy of an SS-man. There was no place in the ranks of the SS for men with soft hearts and any such would do well to retire quickly to a monastery. He could only use hard, determined men who ruthlessly obeyed every order.” An adept pupil, Höss went on to become commandant at Auschwitz.

What remained unclear was where exactly Hitler stood on the matter. In December 1933, Hitler made Röhm a member of his cabinet. On New Year’s Eve he sent Röhm a warm greeting, published in the press, in which he praised his longtime ally for building so effective a legion. “You must know that I am grateful to destiny, which has allowed me to call such a man as you my friend and brother-in-arms.” Soon afterward, however, Hitler ordered Rudolf Diels to compile a report on the outrages committed by the SA and on the homosexual practices of Röhm and his circle. Diels later claimed that Hitler also asked him to kill Röhm and certain other “traitors” but that he refused.

A common story had begun to circulate: One man telephones another and in the course of their conversation happens to ask, “How is Uncle Adolf?” Soon afterward the secret police appear at his door and insist that he prove that he really does have an Uncle Adolf and that the question was not in fact a coded reference to Hitler. Germans grew reluctant to stay in communal ski lodges, fearing they might talk in their sleep. They postponed surgeries because of the lip-loosening effects of anesthetic. Dreams reflected the ambient anxiety. One German dreamed that an SA man came to his home and opened the door to his oven, which then repeated every negative remark the household had made against the government.

After experiencing life in Nazi Germany, Thomas Wolfe wrote, “Here was an entire nation … infested with the contagion of an ever-present fear. It was a kind of creeping paralysis which twisted and blighted all human relations.”

You began to think differently about whom you met for lunch and for that matter what café or restaurant you chose, because rumors circulated about which establishments were favorite targets of Gestapo agents—the bar at the Adlon, for example. You lingered at street corners a beat or two longer to see if the faces you saw at the last corner had now turned up at this one. In the most casual of circumstances you spoke carefully and paid attention to those around you in a way you never had before. Berliners came to practice what became known as “the German glance”—der deutsche Blick—a quick look in all directions when encountering a friend or acquaintance on the street.

After vacations and weekends away, the family’s return was always darkened by the likelihood that in their absence new devices had been installed, old ones refreshed. “There is no way on earth one can describe in the coldness of words on paper what this espionage can do to the human being,” Martha wrote. It suppressed routine discourse—“the family’s conferences and freedom of speech and action were so circumscribed we lost even the faintest resemblance to a normal American family. Whenever we wanted to talk we had to look around corners and behind doors, watch for the telephone and speak in whispers.”

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?

The next day, Friday, March 2, Ambassador Luther had a second meeting with Secretary Hull to protest the trial. Hull himself would have preferred that the mock trial not occur. It complicated things and had the potential of further reducing Germany’s willingness to pay its debts. At the same time, he disliked the Nazi regime. Although he avoided any direct statement of criticism, he took a certain pleasure in telling the German ambassador that the men slated to speak at the trial “were not in the slightest under the control of the Federal Government,” and therefore the State Department was powerless to intervene.