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

by Erik Larson

Dodd countered that Germany’s current approach was doing great damage to the country’s reputation in America. Oddly, Dodd now sought to find a kind of middle ground with the dictator. He told Hitler, “You know a number of high positions in our country are at present occupied by Jews, both in New York and Illinois.” He named several “eminent fair-minded Hebrews,” including Henry Morgenthau Jr., Roosevelt’s secretary of the Treasury since January. Dodd explained to Hitler “that where the question of over-activity of Jews in university or official life made trouble, we had managed to redistribute the offices in such a way as not to give great offense, and that wealthy Jews continued to support institutions which had limited the number of Jews who held high positions.” Dodd cited one such example in Chicago and added, “The Jews in Illinois constituted no serious problem.” Dodd in his memorandum explained: “My idea was to suggest a different procedure from that which has been followed here—of course never giving pointed advice.” Hitler shot back that “59 percent of all offices in Russia were held by Jews; that they had ruined that country and that they intended to ruin Germany.” More furious now than ever, Hitler proclaimed, “If they continue their activity, we shall make a complete end to all of them in this country.”

Dodd steered him back. Would Hitler agree to two points: that “no nation should cross another nation’s boundaries and that all European nations should agree to a supervisory commission and respect the rulings of such a body?” Yes, Hitler said, and did so, Dodd observed, “heartily.”

He would have been less heartened to learn of Hitler’s private reaction to their last meeting, as recorded by Putzi Hanfstaengl. “Dodd made no impression,” Hanfstaengl wrote. “Hitler was almost pitying.” After the meeting, Hitler had said: “Der gute Dodd. He can hardly speak German and made no sense at all.”

U.S. senator, Millard E. Tydings of Maryland, tried to force Roosevelt to speak against Jewish persecution by introducing in the Senate a resolution that would have instructed the president “to communicate to the Government of the German Reich an unequivocal statement of the profound feelings of surprise and pain experienced by the people of the United States upon learning of discriminations and oppressions imposed by the Reich upon its Jewish citizens.”

A State Department memorandum on the resolution written by Dodd’s friend R. Walton Moore, assistant secretary of state, sheds light on the government’s reluctance. After studying the resolution, Judge Moore concluded that it could only put Roosevelt “in an embarrassing position.” Moore explained: “If he declined to comply with the request, he would be subjected to considerable criticism. On the other hand, if he complied with it he would not only incur the resentment of the German Government, but might be involved in a very acrimonious discussion with that Government which conceivably might, for example, ask him to explain why the negroes of this country do not fully enjoy the right of suffrage; why the lynching of negroes in Senator Tydings’ State and other States is not prevented or severely punished; and how the anti-Semitic feeling in the United States, which unfortunately seems to be growing, is not checked.” The resolution failed.

Secretary Hull, according to one historian, “exerted his influence with the Foreign Relations C...

The fear Diels felt grew more pronounced, to the point where in March he again went to Martha for help, this time in hopes of using her to acquire assistance from the U.S. embassy itself. It was a moment freighted with irony: the chief of the Gestapo seeking aid from American officials. Somehow Diels had gotten wind of a plan by Himmler to arrest him, possibly that very day. He had no illusions. Himmler wanted him dead.

intimate quarters of the ship Hitler and Blomberg crafted a secret deal, truly a devil’s bargain, in which Hitler would neutralize Röhm and the SA in return for the army’s support for his acquisition of presidential authority upon Hindenburg’s death. The deal was of incalculable value to Hitler, for now he could go forward without having to worry about where the army stood. Röhm, meanwhile, became increasingly insistent on winning control over the nation’s armed forces. In April, during one of his morning rides in the Tiergarten, he watched a group of senior Nazis pass by, then turned to a companion. “Look at those people over there,” he said. “The Party isn’t a political force anymore; it’s turning into an old-age home. People like that … We’ve got to get rid of them quickly.”

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.

FOR DODD, PAPEN’S MARBURG SPEECH seemed a marker of what he had long believed—that Hitler’s regime was too brutal and irrational to last. Hitler’s own vice-chancellor had spoken out against the regime and survived. Was this indeed the spark that would bring Hitler’s government to an end? And if so, how strange that it should be struck by so uncourageous a soul as Papen.

That same Wednesday, Papen went to Hitler to complain about the suppression of his speech. “I spoke at Marburg as an emissary of the president,” he told Hitler. “Goebbels’s intervention will force me to resign. I shall inform Hindenburg immediately.” To Hitler this was a serious threat. He recognized that President Hindenburg possessed the constitutional authority to unseat him and commanded the loyalty of the regular army, and that both these factors made Hindenburg the one truly potent force in Germany over which he had no control. Hitler understood as well that Hindenburg and Papen—the president’s “Fränzchen”—maintained a close personal relationship and knew that Hindenburg had telegraphed Papen to congratulate him on his speech.

Papen now told Hitler he would go to Hindenburg’s estate, Neudeck, and ask Hindenburg to authorize full publication of the speech. Hitler tried to mollify him. He promised to remove the propaganda minister’s ban on publication and told Papen he would go with him to Neudeck, so that they could meet with Hindenburg together. In a moment of surprising naïveté, Papen agreed.

“Presumably the Ambassador has been complaining to the President,” Phillips groused in his diary. Dodd “always complains because of the fact that they are spending in Berlin more than their salaries. This he objects to strenuously, probably for the simple reason that he himself has not the money to spend beyond that of his salary. It is, of course, a small town attitude.”

That Friday evening, June 29, 1934, Hitler settled in at the Hotel Dreesen, a favorite of his, in the resort of Bad Godesberg, situated along the Rhine just outside central Bonn. He had traveled here from Essen, where he had received yet another dose of troubling news—that Vice-Chancellor Papen planned to make good on his threat and meet with President Hindenburg the next day, Saturday, June 30, to persuade the Old Gentleman to take steps to rein in Hitler’s government and the SA.

Despite these killings, the army continued to stand aside, its loathing for the SA trumping its distaste for the murder of two of its own. Gregor Strasser, a former Nazi leader with past ties to Schleicher, was having lunch with his family when two Gestapo cars pulled up outside his home and six men came to his door. He was taken away and shot in a cell in the basement prison at Gestapo headquarters. Hitler was the godfather of his twins. A friend of Strasser’s, Paul Schulz, a senior SA leader, was taken into a forest and shot. As his would-be executioners went back to their car to get a sheet for his body, he got up and bolted, and survived. It was this escape, apparently, that had triggered Göring’s outburst of bloodthirsty rage.

Again there were moments of dark comedy. One target, Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus, a minister under General Schleicher when he was chancellor, was in the middle of a tennis game at the Wannsee Tennis Club when he spotted four SS men outside. Wisely trusting his instincts, he excused himself and ran. He scaled a wall, caught a taxi, and eventually made his way to England.

PUTZI HANFSTAENGL, WHOSE RELATIONSHIP with Hitler had grown strained, was rumored to have been on Hitler’s list of targets. Providently, he was in America to take part in the twenty-fifth reunion of his class at Harvard. The invitation to attend had caused an outcry in America, and until the last moment Hanfstaengl had offered no indication as to whether he actually would attend. On the night of June 10, 1934, he threw a dinner party, whose timing in retrospect seemed all too convenient given that surely he knew the purge was coming. In midmeal, he stepped from the dining room, disguised himself in a raincoat and sunglasses, and left. He took a night train to Cologne, where he climbed into a mail plane that took him directly to Cherbourg, France, and there he boarded his ship, the Europa, bound for New York. He brought five suitcases and three crates containing sculptural busts meant as gifts.

Guests arrived bearing fresh news. Now and then a correspondent or embassy staffer pulled Dodd away for a few moments of conversation. One topic, surely, was a law enacted the day before by Hitler’s cabinet that made all the murders legal; it justified them as actions taken in “emergency defense of the state.”

What most occupied the attention of the State Department was the outstanding German debt to American creditors. It was a strange juxtaposition. In Germany, there was blood, viscera, and gunfire; at the State Department in Washington, there were white shirts, Hull’s red pencils, and mounting frustration with Dodd for failing to press America’s case. In a telegram from Berlin dated Friday, July 6, Dodd reported that he had met with Foreign Minister Neurath on the bond issue and that Neurath had said he would do what he could to ensure that interest was paid but that “this would be extremely difficult.”

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.

Dodd continued to hope that the murders would so outrage the German public that the regime would fall, but as the days passed he saw no evidence of any such outpouring of anger. Even the army had stood by, despite the murder of two of its generals. President Hindenburg sent Hitler a telegram of praise. “From the reports placed before me, I learn that you, by your determined action and gallant personal intervention, have nipped treason in the bud. You have saved the German nation from serious danger. For this I express to you my most profound thanks and sincere appreciation.” In another telegram Hindenburg thanked Göring for his “energetic and successful proceeding of the smashing of high treason.”

Something left him, a vital last element of hope. In his diary entry for July 8, one week after the purge began and just before the one-year anniversary of his arrival in Berlin, he wrote: “My task here is to work for peace and better relations. I do not see how anything can be done so long as Hitler, Göring and Goebbels are the directing heads of the country. Never have I heard or read of three more unfit men in high place. Ought I to resign?”

“Only a ferocious and bloody repression could nip the revolt in the bud,” he told his audience. He himself had led the attack in Munich, he said, while Göring, with his “steel fist,” had done so in Berlin. “If someone asks me why we did not use the regular courts I would reply: at the moment I was responsible for the German nation; consequently, it was I alone who, during those twenty-four hours, was the Supreme Court of Justice of the German People.”

shall die of it.” He cited the “foreign diplomat’s” meeting with Röhm and other alleged plotters and the diplomat’s subsequent declaration that the meeting was “entirely inoffensive.” It was a clear allusion to the dinner François-Poncet had attended in May at the home of Wilhelm Regendanz.

He closed, “I am ready before history to take the responsibility for the twenty-four hours of the bitterest decision of my life, during which fate has again taught me to cling with every thought to the dearest thing we possess—the German people and the German Reich.”

Dodd turned off his radio. On his side of the park the night was cool and serene. The next day, Saturday, July 14, he sent a coded telegram to Secretary Hull: “NOTHING MORE REPULSIVE THAN TO WATCH THE COUNTRY OF GOETHE AND BEETHOVEN REVERT TO THE BARBARISM OF STUART ENGLAND AND BOURBON FRANCE

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.

The most satisfying reaction from a public official in America came from General Hugh Johnson, administrator of the National Recovery Administration, who by now had become notorious for intemperate speeches on a variety of subjects. (When a general strike had taken place in San Francisco in July led by a longshoreman who had emigrated from Australia, Johnson had called for deportation of all immigrants.) “A few days ago, in Germany, events occurred which shocked the world,” Johnson said in public remarks. “I don’t know how they affected you, but they made me sick—not figuratively, but physically and very actively sick. The idea that adult, responsible men can be taken from their homes, stood up against a wall, backs to the rifles and shot to death is beyond expression.”

One fact seemed most clearly to refute the official line: when the SA’s Berlin chief, Karl Ernst, was arrested, he was about to set off on a honeymoon cruise, not exactly the behavior of a man supposedly plotting a coup for that same weekend. Whether Hitler at first believed his own story is unclear. Certainly Göring, Goebbels, and Himmler had done all they could to make him believe it.

In this appraisal he came closest to grasping the true message of the Röhm purge, which continued to elude the world. 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.” 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.”

The controlled press, not surprisingly, praised Hitler for his decisive behavior, and among the public his popularity soared. 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.”

Dodd continued to hope for some catalyst to cause the end of the regime and believed the imminent death of Hindenburg—whom Dodd called modern Germany’s “single distinguished soul”—might provide it, but again he was to be disappointed. 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 associ...

The Munich newspaper Münchner Neueste Nachrichten gushed, “Today Hitler is the Whole of Germany,” apparently choosing to ignore the fact that just a month earlier its own gentle music critic had been shot dead by mistake.

“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.”

At some point during her journey, Martha was approached by emissaries of the Soviet NKVD seeking to recruit her as a source of covert information. It is likely that Boris was ordered to stay away from her so as not to interfere with the process, although he also played a role in her recruitment, according to Soviet intelligence records uncovered and made available to scholars by a leading expert on KGB history (and a former KGB agent), Alexander Vassiliev. Boris’s superiors felt he was not energetic enough in formalizing Martha’s role. They transferred him back to Moscow and then to an embassy post in Bucharest, which he loathed.

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.” Roosevelt largely shared his view, but most of America seemed more intent than ever on staying out of Europe’s squabbles. Dodd marveled at this. He wrote to Roosevelt in April 1935, “If Woodrow Wilson’s bones do not turn in the Cathedral grave, then bones never turn in graves. Possibly you can do something, but from reports of Congressional attitudes, I have grave doubts. So many men … think absolute isolation a coming paradise.” Dodd resigned himself to what he called “the delicate work of watching and carefully doing nothing.”

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. Now on his walks through the Tiergarten Dodd saw that some benches had been painted yellow to indicate they were for Jews. The rest, the most desirable, were reserved for Aryans.

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.

Drew Pearson, primary author with Robert S. Allen of a United Features Syndicate column called “Washington Merry-Go-Round,” published a harsh assault on Dodd, “attacking me violently as a complete failure here and pretending that the President is of the same opinion,” Dodd wrote on December 13. “This is news to me.” Pearson’s attack deeply wounded Dodd. He had spent the better part of four years seeking to fulfill Roosevelt’s mandate to serve as a model of American values and believed he had done as well as any man could have been expected to do, given the strange, irrational, and brutal nature of Hitler’s government. He feared that if he resigned now, under such a black cloud, he would leave the impression that he had been forced to do so. “My position is difficult, but under such criticism I cannot resign, as I planned, next spring,” he wrote in his diary. “To give up my work here under these circumstances would put me in a defensive and positively false position at home.”

Back in America, true to her nature if not to Boris, Martha met and promptly fell in love with a new man, Alfred Stern, a New Yorker of left-leaning sensibility. He was a decade older, five foot ten, handsome, and rich, having received a lush settlement upon his earlier divorce from an heiress of the Sears Roebuck empire. They became engaged and in breathtakingly short order they married, on June 16, 1938,

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. She dismissed the charge as “insane.” She wondered long afterward if her relationship with him, especially that final, unauthorized meeting in Berlin, had played a role in sealing his fate.

She never learned that Boris’s last letter, in which he claimed to dream of her, was a fake, written by Boris at the direction of the NKVD shortly before his execution, in order to keep his death from destroying her sympathy for the Soviet cause. CHAPTER 55

He struck a different tone once he arrived in America. 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.”

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.

Four days later, Mrs. Dodd was dead. On the morning of May 28, 1938, she failed to join Dodd for breakfast, as was her custom. They kept separate bedrooms. He went to check on her. “It was the greatest shock that ever came to me,” he wrote. She died of heart failure in her bed, with no advance warning of trouble. “She was only sixty-two years old, and I was sixty-eight,” Dodd wrote in his diary. “But there she lay, stone dead, and there was no help for it; and I was so surprised and sad I could hardly decide what to do.” Martha attributed her mother’s death to “the strain and terror of life” in Berlin.

A STRANGE EPISODE SIDETRACKED DODD. On December 5, 1938, as he was driving to a speaking engagement in McKinney, Virginia, his car struck a four-year-old black girl named Gloria Grimes. The impact caused significant injury, including an apparent concussion. Dodd did not stop. “It was not my fault,” he later explained to a reporter. “The youngster ran into the path of my automobile about thirty feet ahead. I put on the brakes, turned the car and drove on because I thought the child had escaped.” He made things worse by seeming to be insensitive when, in a letter to the girl’s mother, he added, “Besides, I did not want the newspapers all over the country to publish a story about the accident. You know how newspapers love to exaggerate things of this sort.”

He was indicted, but on the day his trial was to begin, March 2, 1939, he changed his plea to guilty. His friend, Judge Moore, sat beside him, as did Martha. The court fined him $250 but did not sentence him to jail, citing his poor health and the fact he had paid $1,100 in medical costs for the child, who by now was, reportedly, nearly recovered. He lost his driving privileges and his right to vote, an especially poignant loss for so ardent a believer in democracy.

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 of the more influential businessmen of our country believed that one ‘could do business with Hitler.’ ” Rabbi Wise wrote in his memoir, Challenging Years, “Dodd was years ahead of the State Department in his grasp of the political as well as of the moral implications of Hitlerism and paid the penalty of such understanding by being virtually removed from office for having the decency and the courage alone among ambassadors to decline to attend the annual Nuremberg celebration, which was a glorification of Hitler.”

The highest praise came from Thomas Wolfe, who during a visit to Germany in the spring of 1935 engaged in a brief affair with Martha. He wrote to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, that Ambassador Dodd had helped conjure in him “a renewed pride and faith in America and a belief that somehow our great future still remains.” The Dodds’ house at Tiergartenstrasse 27a, he told Perkins, “has been a free and fearless harbor for people of all opinions, and people who live and walk in terror have been able to draw their breath there without fear, and to speak their minds. This I know to be true, and further, the dry, plain, homely unconcern with which the Ambassador observes all the pomp and glitter and decorations and the tramp of marching men would do your heart good to see.”