In the Garden of Beasts

by Erik Larson

  Messersmith also met with Moffat and Moffat’s wife. The three spent an afternoon talking about Germany. “We went over it from all angles,” Moffat wrote in his diary. The next day he and Messersmith had lunch, and several weeks later they met again. During one conversation, according to Moffat’s diary, Messersmith claimed to be “much concerned at letters received from Dodd indicating that he was turning against his staff.”

  Dodd’s recently departed counselor, George Gordon, happened to be on a lengthy leave in the United States at the same time as Messersmith. Though Gordon’s relationship with Dodd had begun badly, by now Dodd grudgingly had come to see Gordon as an asset. Gordon wrote to Dodd, “Our mutual friend G.S.M.”—meaning Messersmith—“has been staging a most active campaign in support of his candidacy for the Legation at Prague.” (Messersmith had long hoped to leave the Foreign Service behind and become a full-fledged diplomat; now, with the embassy in Prague available, he saw an opportunity.) Gordon noted that a torrent of letters and newspaper editorials testifying to Messersmith’s “sterling work” had begun flowing into the department. “A familiar touch was imparted to all this,” Gordon wrote, “when I heard that he had told one of the high officials that he really was a little embarrassed by all the press eulogies of himself because he did not like that kind of thing!!!!”

  Gordon added, in longhand: “O sancta virginitas simplicitasque,” Latin for “Such pious maidenly innocence!”

  ON DECEMBER 22, a Friday, Dodd got a visit from Louis Lochner, who brought troubling news. The visit itself was not unusual, for by now Dodd and the Associated Press bureau chief had become friends and met often to discuss events and exchange information. Lochner told Dodd that an official high in the Nazi hierarchy had informed him that the next morning the court in the Reichstag trial would declare its verdict, and that all but van der Lubbe would be acquitted. This was stunning news by itself and, if true, would constitute a serious blow to the prestige of Hitler’s government and in particular to Göring’s standing. It was precisely the “botch” Göring had feared. But Lochner’s informant also had learned that Göring, still incensed at Dimitrov’s impudence during their courtroom confrontation, now wanted Dimitrov dead. His death was to occur soon after the end of the trial. Lochner refused to identify his source but told Dodd that in conveying the information the source hoped to prevent further damage to Germany’s already poor international reputation. Dodd believed the informant to be Rudolf Diels.

  Lochner had come up with a plan to scuttle the assassination by publicizing it but wanted first to run the idea past Dodd, in case Dodd felt the diplomatic repercussions would be too great. Dodd approved but in turn consulted Sir Eric Phipps, the British ambassador, who also agreed that Lochner should go ahead.

  Lochner weighed precisely how to execute his plan. Oddly enough, the initial idea of publicizing the impending assassination had been brought to him by Göring’s own press adjutant, Martin Sommerfeldt, who also had learned of the imminent murder. His source, according to one account, was Putzi Hanfstaengl, though it is entirely possible that Hanfstaengl learned of it from Diels. Sommerfeldt told Lochner that he knew from experience that “there is one way of dissuading the general. When the foreign press claims one thing about him, he stubbornly does the opposite.” Sommerfeldt proposed that Lochner attribute the story to an “unimpeachable source” and stress that the murder would have “far reaching international consequences.” Lochner faced a quandary, however. If he published so inflammatory a report through the Associated Press, he risked enraging Göring to the point where Göring might shut down the AP’s Berlin bureau. It was far better, Lochner reasoned, to have the story break in a British newspaper. He, Sommerfeldt, and Hanfstaengl revised their plan.

  Lochner knew that a very green reporter had just joined the Berlin bureau of Reuters. He invited him out for drinks at the Adlon Hotel, where Hanfstaengl and Sommerfeldt soon joined them. The new reporter savored his luck at this apparently chance convergence of senior officials.

  After a few moments, Lochner mentioned to Sommerfeldt the rumor of a threat against Dimitrov. Sommerfeldt, as per plan, feigned surprise—surely Lochner had gotten it wrong, for Göring was a man of honor and Germany was a civilized land.

  The Reuters reporter knew this was a big story and asked Sommerfeldt for permission to quote his denial. With a great show of reluctance, Sommerfeldt agreed.

  The Reuters man raced off to file his story.

  Late that afternoon, the report made the papers in Britain, Lochner told Dodd. Lochner also showed Dodd a telegram to the foreign press from Goebbels, in which Goebbels, acting as spokesman for the government, denied the existence of any plot to murder Dimitrov. Göring issued his own denial, dismissing the allegation as a “horrid rumor.”

  On December 23, as Lochner had forecast, the presiding judge in the Reichstag trial announced the court’s verdict, acquitting Dimitrov, Torgler, Popov, and Tanev but finding van der Lubbe guilty of “high treason, insurrectionary arson and attempted common arson.” The court condemned him to death, while also stating—despite masses of testimony to the contrary—“that van der Lubbe’s accomplices must be sought in the ranks of the Communist Party, that communism is therefore guilty of the Reichstag fire, that the German people stood in the early part of the year 1933 on the brink of chaos into which the Communists sought to lead them, and that the German people were saved at the last moment.”

  Dimitrov’s ultimate fate, however, remained unclear.

  AT LAST CAME CHRISTMAS DAY. Hitler was in Munich; Göring, Neurath, and other senior officials likewise had left Berlin. The city was quiet, truly at peace. Streetcars evoked toys under a tree.

  At midday all the Dodds set out in the family Chevrolet and paid a surprise visit to the Lochners. Louis Lochner wrote in a round-robin letter to his daughter in America, “We were sitting together drinking our coffee, when suddenly the whole Dodd family—the Ambassador, Mrs. Dodd, Martha, and young Mr. Dodd—snowed in on us just to wish us Merry Christmas. That was awfully nice of them, wasn’t it? I like Mr. Dodd the more I work with him; he’s a man of profound culture and endowed with one of the keenest minds I have come in contact with.” Lochner described Mrs. Dodd as “a sweet, womanly woman who… like her husband far rather visits with a family of friends than go through all the diplomatic shallow stuff. The Dodds don’t pretend to be social lions, and I admire them for it.”

  Dodd spent a few moments admiring the Lochners’ tree and other decorations, then took Lochner aside and asked for the latest news of the Dimitrov affair.

  Dimitrov thus far appeared to have escaped harm, Lochner said. He also reported that his highly placed source—whose identity he still would not reveal to Dodd—had thanked him for handling the matter so deftly.

  Dodd feared further repercussions, however. He remained convinced that Diels had played a key role in revealing the plot. Dodd continued to be surprised by Diels. He knew his reputation as a cynic and opportunist of the first order, but he found him time and again to be a man of integrity and worthy of respect. 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. Diels’s precise motives cannot be known, but he considered that time, as he went from camp to camp selecting prisoners to be freed, one of the best moments of his career.

  Dodd feared that Diels might have gone too far. In his diary entry for Christmas Day, Dodd wrote, “The Secret Police Chief did a most dangerous thing and I shall not be surprised later to hear that he has been sent to prison.”

  In traveling about the city that day, Dodd was struck anew by the “extraordinary” German penchant for Christmas display. He saw Christmas trees everywhere, in every public square and every window.

  “One might think,” he wrote, “the Germans believed in Jesus or practiced his teachings!”

  1934

  PART V

&nbs
p; Disquiet

  Hitler and Röhm (photo credit p5.1)

  CHAPTER 28

  January 1934

  On January 9 the primary defendant in the Reichstag trial, Marinus van der Lubbe, received word from the public prosecutor that he was to be beheaded the next day.

  “Thank you for telling me,” van der Lubbe said. “I shall see you tomorrow.”

  The executioner wore top hat and tails and, in a particularly fastidious touch, white gloves. He used a guillotine.

  Van der Lubbe’s execution provided a clear if gory punctuation point to the Reichstag fire saga and thereby quelled a source of turbulence that had roiled Germany since the preceding February. Now anyone who felt the need for an ending could point to an official act of state: van der Lubbe had set the fire, and now van der Lubbe was dead. Dimitrov, still alive, was to be flown to Moscow. The way was clear for the restoration of Germany.

  As the year opened, Germany did seem on a superficial level to have grown more stable, much to the disappointment of foreign observers and diplomats who still nurtured the belief that economic pressures would cause the collapse of the Hitler regime. At the end of his first year as chancellor, Hitler seemed more rational, almost conciliatory, and went so far as to hint that he might support some form of nonaggression pact with France and Britain. Anthony Eden, Britain’s Lord Privy Seal, traveled to Germany to meet with him and, like Dodd, came away impressed with Hitler’s sincerity in wanting peace. Sir Eric Phipps, Britain’s ambassador to Germany, wrote in his diary, “Herr Hitler seemed to feel a genuine sympathy for Mr. Eden, who certainly succeeded in bringing to the surface of that strange being certain human qualities which for me had hitherto remained obstinately dormant.” In a letter to Thornton Wilder, Martha wrote: “Hitler is improving definitely.”

  This sense of looming normalcy was apparent in other spheres as well. The official tally of unemployed workers showed a rapid decline, from 4.8 million in 1933 to 2.7 million in 1934, although a good deal of this was due to such measures as assigning one-man jobs to two men and an aggressive propaganda campaign that sought to discourage women from working. The “wild” concentration camps had been closed, thanks in part to Gestapo chief Rudolf Diels. Within the Reich Ministry of the Interior there was talk of doing away with protective custody and concentration camps altogether.

  Even Dachau seemed to have become civilized. On February 12, 1934, a representative of the Quakers, Gilbert L. MacMaster, set out to visit the camp, after having been granted permission to see an inmate, a sixty-two-year-old former deputy of the Reichstag named George Simon, who had been arrested because he was a socialist. MacMaster caught a train in Munich and half an hour later got off in the village of Dachau, which he described as an “artists village.” From there he walked another half hour to reach the camp.

  He was surprised by what he found. “More atrocity reports have come from this camp than any other one in Germany,” he wrote. “The outward appearance though is better than any camp I have seen.” The former gunpowder plant in which the camp was located had been built during the past world war. “There were good houses for the chemists and the officers; the barracks for the workers were more stable, and the whole plant was steam heated,” MacMaster saw. “This makes Dachau seem better equipped for the comfort of the prisoners, especially in cold weather, than the provisional camp in an old factory or farm house. In fact the appearance of the whole is more that of a permanent institution than that of a camp.”

  The inmate, Simon, was soon brought to the guardhouse to meet with MacMaster. He wore a gray prison suit and seemed well. “He had no complaint,” MacMaster wrote, “except that he was suffering a great deal from acute rheumatism.”

  Later that day MacMaster spoke to a police official who told him the camp housed two thousand prisoners. Only twenty-five were Jews, and these, the official insisted, were held for political offenses, not because of their religion. MacMaster, however, had heard reports that at least five thousand prisoners were housed within and that forty to fifty were Jews, of whom only “one or two” had been arrested for political offenses; others had been arrested following denunciations by people “who wanted to injure them in business and others because they were accused of associating with non-Jewish girls.” He was surprised to hear the official say that he saw the camps “as temporary and would welcome the day when they could be done away with.”

  MacMaster found Dachau even had a certain beauty. “It was a very cold morning,” he wrote. “There had been such a dense fog the night before that I had had a hard time finding my hotel. This morning there was a perfect blue sky, Bavarian colors were white, for the clouds, and blue for the Bavarian sky, and the fog of the night before covered the trees with a thick hoar-frost.” Everything was coated with a glistening lace of ice crystals that gave the camp an ethereal look, like something from a fable. In the sun the birches of the surrounding moor became spires of diamond.

  But as in so many situations in the new Germany, the outward appearance of Dachau was misleading. The cleanliness and efficiency of the camp had little to do with a desire to treat the inmates in a humane fashion. The preceding June an SS officer named Theodor Eicke had taken command of Dachau and composed a set of regulations that later became the model for all camps. Issued on October 1, 1933, the new rules codified the relationship between guards and prisoners and in so doing removed the act of punishment from the realm of impulse and caprice to a plane where discipline became systematic, dispassionate, and predictable. Now everyone at least knew the rules, but the rules were harsh and explicitly left no room for pity.

  “Tolerance means weakness,” Eicke wrote in the introduction to his rules. “In the light of this conception, punishment will be mercilessly handed out whenever the interests of the fatherland warrant it.” Minor offenses drew beatings with a cane and stints in solitary confinement. Even irony was costly. Eight days’ solitary and “twenty-five strokes” were meted out to “anyone making depreciatory or ironical remarks to a member of the SS, deliberately omitting the prescribed marks of respect, or in any other way demonstrating unwillingness to submit himself to disciplinary measures.” A catchall clause, 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.

  AT FIRST GLANCE, persecution of Jews seemed also to have eased. “Outwardly Berlin presented during my recent stay there a normal appearance,” wrote David J. Schweitzer, a senior official with the American Joint Distribution Committee, nicknamed the Joint, a Jewish relief organization. “The air is not charged, general courtesy prevails.” Jews who had fled during the previous year now actually had begun returning, he wrote. Some ten thousand Jews who had left in early 1933 had returned by the start of 1934, though outbound emigration—four thousand Jews in 1934—continued as well. “So much is this the actual situation or so well masked is it that I heard an American, one who has just spent a week passing on to a neighboring country, re
mark that he could not see that anything has actually happened that so stirred the outside world.”

  But Schweitzer understood this was in large part an illusion. Overt violence against Jews did appear to have receded, but a more subtle oppression had settled in its place. “What our friend had failed to see from outward appearances is the tragedy that is befalling daily the job holders who are gradually losing their positions,” Schweitzer wrote. He gave the example of Berlin’s department stores, typically owned and staffed by Jews. “While on the one hand one can observe a Jewish department store crowded as usual with non-Jews and Jews alike, one can observe in the very next department store the total absence of a single Jewish employee.” Likewise the situation varied from community to community. One town might banish Jews, while in the next town over Jews and non-Jews continued “to live side by side with their neighbors and pursue their occupations as best they can unmolested.”

  Likewise Schweitzer detected divergent outlooks among Berlin’s Jewish leaders. “The one tendency is that there is nothing to hope for, that things are bound to get worse,” he wrote. “The other tendency, however, is quite the opposite but just as definite, namely a tendency resulting from thinking in terms of March 1934 instead of March 1933, reconciling themselves to the present situation, accepting the status of the inevitable, adjusting themselves to move in their own restricted circles and hoping that just as things have changed from March 1933 to March 1934 they will continue to improve in a favorable manner.”