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

by Erik Larson

They continued on to the end of the street and crossed a small square into the 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.

Martha grew annoyed at Schultz’s effort to tarnish her rosy view, but she liked Schultz and saw that she would make a valuable friend, given her vast range of contacts among journalists and diplomats. They parted amicably, but with Martha unshaken in her view that the revolution unfolding around her was a heroic episode that could yield a new and healthy Germany. “I didn’t believe all her stories,” Martha wrote later. “I thought she was exaggerating and a bit hysterical.”

MARTHA’S CHEERY VIEW of things was widely shared by outsiders visiting Germany and especially Berlin. The fact was that on most days in most neighborhoods the city looked and functioned as it always had.

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.

Many American tourists returned home perplexed by the dissonance between the horrors they had read about in their hometown newspapers—the beatings and arrests of the preceding spring, the book pyres and concentration camps—and the pleasant times they actually experienced while touring Germany.

In his dispatches Messersmith reprised one theme again and again: how impossible it was for casual visitors to understand what was really happening in this new Germany. “The Americans coming to Germany will find themselves surrounded by influences of the Government and their time so taken up by pleasant entertainment, that they will have little opportunity to learn what the real situation is.”

while he did not approve of Germany’s treatment of Jews or Hitler’s drive to restore the country’s military power, “fundamentally, I believe a people has a right to govern itself and that other peoples must exercise patience even when cruelties and injustices are done. Give men a chance to try their schemes.”

In a letter to Carl Sandburg he wrote, “I can never adapt myself to the usual habit of eating too much, drinking five varieties of wine and saying nothing, yet talking, for three long hours.” He feared he was a disappointment to his wealthier junior men, who threw lavish parties at their own expense. “They can not understand me,” he wrote, “and I am sorry for them.”

“One can evade a danger that one recognizes,” wrote historian Friedrich Zipfel, “but a police working in the dark becomes uncanny. Nowhere does one feel safe from it. While not omnipresent, it could appear, search, arrest. The worried citizen no longer knows whom he ought to trust.”

It was through Diels that she began for the first time to temper her idealistic view of the Nazi revolution. “There began to appear before my romantic eyes … a vast and complicated network of espionage, terror, sadism and hate, from which no one, official or private, could escape.”

For a time Messersmith had been convinced that Germany’s economic crisis would unseat Hitler. No longer. He saw now that Hitler, Göring, and Goebbels were firmly in power. They “know practically nothing concerning the outside world,” he wrote. “They know only that in Germany they can do as they will. They feel their power within the country and are to that extent drunk with it.”

She staunchly defended the Nazi revolution as offering the best way out of the chaos that had engulfed Germany ever since the past war.

“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.”

“The Chancellor’s assurances were so satisfying and so unexpected that I think they are on the whole too good to be true,” Messersmith wrote. “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.”

After recounting the conversation in her diary, Fromm added, “There is nobody among the officials of the National Socialist party who would not cheerfully cut the throat of every other official in order to further his own advancement.”

THE FEAR AND OPPRESSION that Martha saw in Fallada crowned a rising mountain of evidence that throughout the spring had begun to erode her infatuation with the new Germany. Her blind endorsement of Hitler’s regime first faded to a kind of sympathetic skepticism, but as summer approached, she felt a deepening revulsion. Where once she had been able to wave away the beating incident in Nuremberg as an isolated episode, now 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.

Amid the many rumors of coming upheaval, it remained difficult for Dodd and his peers in the diplomatic corps to imagine that Hitler, Göring, and Goebbels could endure much longer. Dodd still saw them as inept and dangerous adolescents—“16 year olds,” as he now put it—who found themselves confronting an accumulation of daunting troubles.

The nation seemed poised at the climax of some cinematic thriller. “Tension was at the highest pitch,” Gisevius wrote. “The tormenting uncertainty was harder to bear than the excessive heat and humidity. No one knew what was going to happen next and everyone felt that something fearful was in the air.” Victor Klemperer, the Jewish philologist, sensed it as well. “Everywhere uncertainty, ferment, secrets,” he wrote in his diary in mid-June. “We live from day to day.”

The next day, June 21, 1934, Hitler flew to Hindenburg’s estate—without Papen, as certainly had been his intent all along. At Neudeck, however, he first encountered Defense Minister Blomberg. The general, in uniform, met him on the steps to Hindenburg’s castle. Blomberg was stern and direct. He told Hitler that Hindenburg was concerned about the rising tension within Germany. If Hitler could not get things under control, Blomberg said, Hindenburg would declare martial law and place the government in the army’s hands. When Hitler met with Hindenburg himself, he received the same message. His visit to Neudeck lasted all of thirty minutes. He flew back to Berlin.

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.

“Great Britain,” he said, “is terribly exasperated but also terribly desirous of peace.”

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.