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

by Erik Larson

In May, he reported, the Nazi Party had launched a campaign against “grumblers and faultfinders” that was meant to reenergize Gleichschaltung. Inevitably it also increased pressure on Jews. Goebbels’s newspaper Der Angriff began urging readers “to keep a sharp eye on the Jews and report any of their shortcomings,” Dodd wrote. 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.