In the Garden of Beasts

by Erik Larson

  HITLER’S CONTINUED PROTESTATIONS of peace constituted the most blatant official deception. Anyone who made an effort to travel the countryside outside Berlin knew it at once. Raymond Geist, acting consul general, routinely made such journeys, often on a bicycle. “Before the end of 1933, during my frequent excursions, I discovered outside of Berlin on nearly every road leaving from the city new large military establishments, including training fields, airports, barracks, proving grounds, anti-aircraft stations and the like.”

  Even the newly arrived Jack White recognized the true reality of what was occurring. “Any one motoring out in the country of a Sunday can see brown shirts drilling in the woods,” he told his brother-in-law, Moffat.

  White was astonished to learn that the young daughter of a friend was required to spend every Wednesday afternoon practicing the art of throwing hand grenades.

  THE SUPERFICIAL NORMALCY of Germany also masked the intensifying conflict between Hitler and Röhm. Dodd and others who had spent time in Germany knew full well that Hitler was intent on increasing the size of the regular army, the Reichswehr, despite the explicit prohibitions of the Treaty of Versailles, and that Captain Röhm of the SA wanted any increase to include the incorporation of entire SA units, part of his campaign to gain control of the nation’s military. Defense Minister Blomberg and the army’s top generals loathed Röhm and disdained his uncouth legions of brown-shirted Storm Troopers. Göring hated Röhm as well and saw his drive for power as a threat to Göring’s own control of Germany’s new air force, his pride and joy, which he was now quietly but energetically working to construct.

  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.

  President Hindenburg, the supposed last restraint against Hitler, seemed oblivious to the pressures building below. On January 30, 1934, Hindenburg issued a public statement congratulating Hitler on the “great progress” Germany had made in the year since his ascension to chancellor. “I am confident,” he wrote, “that in the coming year you and your fellow workers will successfully continue, and with God’s help complete, the great work of German reconstruction which you have so energetically begun, on the basis of the new happily attained national unity of the German people.”

  And so the year began, with an outward sense of better times ahead and, for the Dodds, a fresh round of parties and banquets. Formal invitations arrived on printed cards in envelopes, followed as always by seating diagrams. The Nazi leadership favored an awkward arrangement in which tables formed a large rectangular horseshoe with guests arrayed along the inside and outside of the configuration. Those seated along the inside flank spent the evening in an abyss of social discomfort, watched from behind by their fellow guests. One such invitation arrived for Dodd and his family from their neighbor Captain Röhm.

  Martha later would have cause to save a copy of the seating chart. Röhm, the Hausherr, or host, sat at the top of the horseshoe and had full view of everyone seated before him. Dodd sat on Röhm’s right, in a position of honor. Directly across the table from Röhm, in the most awkward seat of the horseshoe, was Heinrich Himmler, who loathed him.

  CHAPTER 29

  Sniping

  In Washington, Undersecretary Phillips called Jay Pierrepont Moffat into his office “to read a whole series of letters from Ambassador Dodd,” as Moffat noted in his diary. Among these were recent letters in which Dodd repeated his complaints about the wealth of Foreign Service officers and the number of Jews on his staff, and one that dared to suggest a foreign policy that America should pursue. The nation, Dodd had written, must discard its “righteous aloofness” because “another life and death struggle in Europe would bother us all—especially if it was paralleled by a similar conflict in the Far East (as I believe is the understanding in secret conclaves).” Dodd acknowledged Congress’s reluctance to become entangled abroad but added, “I do, however, think facts count; even if we hate them.”

  Although Phillips and Moffat were disenchanted with Dodd, they recognized that they had limited power over him because of his relationship with Roosevelt, which allowed Dodd to skirt the State Department and communicate directly with the president whenever he wished. Now, in Phillips’s office, they read Dodd’s letters and shook their heads. “As usual,” Moffat wrote in his diary, “he is dissatisfied with everything.” In one letter Dodd had described two of his embassy officers as “competent but unqualified”—prompting Moffat to snipe, “Whatever that may mean.”

  On Wednesday, January 3, Phillips, his tone remote and supercilious, wrote to Dodd to address some of Dodd’s complaints, one of which centered on the transfer of Phillips’s nephew, Orme Wilson, to Berlin. Wilson’s arrival the previous November had caused an upwelling of competitive angst within the embassy. Phillips now chided Dodd for not managing the situation better. “I hope it will not be difficult for you to discourage any further talk of an undesirable nature amongst the members of your staff.”

  As to Dodd’s repeated complaint about the work habits and qualifications of Foreign Service men, Phillips wrote, “I confess I am at a loss to understand your feeling that ‘somebody in the Department is encouraging people in mistaken attitudes and conduct.’”

  He cited Dodd’s past observation that there were too many Jews on the embassy’s clerical staff but professed to be “somewhat confused” as to how to resolve the issue. Dodd previously had told him he did not want to transfer anyone out, but now it appeared he did. “Do you desire any transfers?” Phillips asked. He added, “If… the racial question is one that needs correction in view of the special conditions in Germany, it will be perfectly possible for the Department to do this upon definite recommendation from you.”

  THAT SAME WEDNESDAY, in Berlin, Dodd wrote a letter to Roosevelt that he deemed so sensitive he not only wrote it in longhand but also sent it first to his friend Colonel House, so that House could give it to the president in person. Dodd urged that Phillips be removed from his position as undersecretary and given a different sort of posting, perhaps as an ambassador somewhere. He suggested Paris and added that Phillips’s departure from Washington “would limit a little the favoritisms that prevail there.”

  He wrote, “Do not think I have any personal axe to grind or any personal grievances about anything. I hope”—hope—“it is the public service alone that motivates [this] letter.”

  CHAPTER 30

  Premonition

  Martha became consumed with Boris. Her French lover, Armand Berard, upon finding himself consigned to the background, grieved. Diels too receded, though he remained a frequent companion.

  Early in January, Boris arranged a tryst with Martha that yielded one of the most unusual romantic encounters she had ever experienced, though she had no advance warning of what was to occur other than Boris’s plea that she wear his favorite dress—gold silk, off the shoulders, deep and revealing neckline, close fitted at the waist. She added a necklace of amber and a corsage that Boris had provided, of gardenias.

  Fritz, the butler, greeted Boris at the front door, but before he could announce the Russian’s presence, Boris went bounding up the stairway to the main floor. Fritz followed. Martha was just then walking along the hall toward the stairs, as she wrote in a detailed recollection of the evening. Upon seeing her, Boris dropped to one knee.

  “Oh my darling!” he said, in English. Then, in German: “You look wonderful.”

  She was delighted and m
ildly embarrassed. Fritz grinned. Boris led her out to his Ford—the top raised, mercifully, against the cold—and drove them to Horcher’s restaurant on Lutherstrasse, a few blocks south of the Tiergarten. It was one of Berlin’s finest restaurants, specializing in game, and was said to be Göring’s favorite place to dine. It was identified also, in a 1929 short story by then-popular writer Gina Kaus, as the place to go if your goal was seduction. You could be seated on one of its leather banquettes and a few tables over, there would be Göring, resplendent in his uniform of the moment. In another time there might have been famous writers, artists, and musicians and prominent Jewish financiers and scientists, but by this point most had fled or else had found themselves suddenly isolated in circumstances that did not permit costly nights on the town. The restaurant endured, however, as if unmindful that anything had changed in the world outside.

  Boris had reserved a private room, where he and Martha dined lavishly on smoked salmon, caviar, turtle soup, and chicken in the style coming to be known as “Kievsky.” For dessert they had brandied Bavarian cream. They drank champagne and vodka. Martha loved the food, the drink, the lofty setting, but was perplexed. “Why all this, Boris?” she asked him. “What are we celebrating?”

  In answer he gave only a smile. After dinner, they drove north and turned onto Tiergartenstrasse as if heading for the Dodds’ house, but instead of stopping there, Boris kept driving. They tooled along the darkly forested boundary of the park until they reached the Brandenburg Gate and Unter den Linden, its two-hundred-foot width clogged with automobiles whose headlights transformed it into a sluiceway of platinum. One block east of the gate, Boris pulled to a stop at the Soviet embassy, at Unter den Linden 7. He led Martha into the building and along several corridors, then up a flight of stairs, until they stood before an unmarked door.

  He smiled and opened the door, then stepped aside to let her pass. He switched on a table lamp and lit two red candles. The room reminded her at first of a student’s residence in a dormitory, though Boris had done what he could to make it something more. She saw a straight-backed chair, two armchairs, and a bed. Over the pillow he had spread an embroidered cloth that he identified as coming from the Caucasus. A samovar for making tea occupied a table by the window.

  In one corner of the room, in a bookcase, Martha found a collection of photographs of Vladimir Lenin centered around a single large portrait that showed him in a manner Martha had not seen before, like a friend captured in a snapshot, not the stern-visaged Lenin of Soviet propaganda. Here too lay a number of pamphlets in Russian, one with the scintillating title, as translated by Boris, “Workers and Peasant Inspection Teams.” Boris identified all this as his “Lenin corner,” his Soviet equivalent of the religious images that Orthodox Russians traditionally hung high in one corner of a room. “My people, as you may have read in the Russian novels you love, used to have, and still have, icon corners,” he told her. “But I am a modern Russian, a communist!”

  In another corner she found a second shrine, but the centerpiece of this one, she saw, was herself. Boris called it his “Martha corner.” A photograph of her stood on a small table, shimmying in the red flicker of one of Boris’s candles. He also had set out several of her letters and more photographs. An enthusiastic amateur photographer, he had taken many pictures during their travels around Berlin. There were keepsakes as well—a linen handkerchief she had given him and that stalk of wild mint from their picnic in September 1933, now dried but still exuding a faint tang. And here too was the carved wooden statue of a nun that she had sent to him as a reply to his three “see no evil” monkeys—except Boris had accessorized the nun by adding a tiny halo fashioned out of fine gold wire.

  More recently he had added pinecones and freshly cut evergreen boughs to his Martha shrine, and these filled the room with the scent of forest. He included these, he told her, to symbolize that his love for her was “ever green.”

  “My God, Boris,” she laughed, “you are a romantic! Is this a proper thing for a tough communist like you to do?”

  Next to Lenin, he told her, “I love you most.” He kissed her bare shoulder and suddenly became very serious. “But in case you don’t understand yet,” he said, “my party and country must always come first.”

  The sudden shift, the look on his face—again Martha laughed. She told Boris she understood. “My father thinks of Thomas Jefferson almost the way you do about Lenin,” she said.

  They were getting cozy, when suddenly, quietly, the door opened and in stepped a blond girl whom Martha guessed to be about nine years old. She knew at once this had to be Boris’s daughter. Her eyes were just like her father’s—“extraordinary, luminous eyes,” Martha wrote—though in most other ways she seemed very unlike him. Her face was plain and she lacked her father’s irrepressible mirth. She looked somber. Boris rose and went to her.

  “Why is it so dark in here?” his daughter said. “I don’t like it.”

  She spoke in Russian, with Boris translating. Martha suspected the girl knew German, given her schooling in Berlin, but that she spoke Russian now out of petulance.

  Boris turned on an overhead light, a bare bulb. Its harsh glow instantly dispersed the romantic air he had managed to create with his candles and shrines. He told his daughter to shake Martha’s hand, and the girl did so, though with obvious reluctance. Martha found the girl’s hostility unpleasant but understandable.

  The girl asked her, in Russian, “Why are you so dressed up?”

  Boris explained that this was the Martha he had told her about. She was dressed so nicely, he said, because this was her very first visit to the Soviet embassy and thus a special occasion.

  The girl appraised Martha. A hint of a smile appeared. “She is very pretty,” the girl said. “But she’s too thin.”

  Boris explained that nonetheless Martha was healthy.

  He checked his watch. The time was almost ten o’clock. He sat his daughter in his lap, held her close, and gently ran his hand through her hair. He and Martha spoke of trivial matters as the girl stared at Martha. After a few moments Boris stopped stroking her hair and gave her a hug, his signal that it was time for her to go to bed. She curtsied and in grudging, quiet German said, “Auf Wiedersehen, Fräulein Marta.”

  Boris took the girl’s hand and walked her from the room.

  In his absence, Martha gave his quarters a closer examination, and she continued doing so after his return. Now and then she glanced in his direction.

  “Lenin was very human,” he said, smiling. “He would have understood your corner.”

  They lay on the bed and held each other. He told her of his life—how his father had abandoned his family, and how at sixteen he had joined the Red Guard. “I want my daughter to have an easier life,” he said. He wanted the same for his country. “We’ve had nothing but tyranny, war, revolution, terror, civil war, starvation. If we aren’t attacked again, we may have a chance to build something new and unique in human history. You understand?”

  At times as he told his story tears slipped down his cheeks. She was used to it now. He told her his dreams for the future.

  “Then he held me close to his body,” she wrote. “From below his collarbone to his navel, his honey-colored hair covered him, as soft as down…. Truly, it was beautiful to me, and gave me a deep feeling of warmth, comfort and closeness.”

  As the evening came to an end, he made tea and poured it into the traditional cup—clear glass in a metal frame.

  “Now, my darling,” he said, “in the last few hours you have had a small taste of a Russian evening.”

  “HOW COULD I TELL HIM,” she wrote later, “that it was one of the strangest evenings I had ever spent in my life?” A sense of foreboding tempered her enjoyment. She wondered whether Boris, by becoming so involved with her—establishing his Martha corner in the embassy and daring to bring her to his private quarters—had somehow transgressed an unwritten prohibition. She sensed that some “malevolent eye” had taken note. “
It was,” she recalled, “as if a dark wind had entered the room.”

  Late that night Boris drove her home.

  CHAPTER 31

  Night Terrors

  The lives of the Dodds underwent a subtle change. Where once they had felt free to say anything they wished within their own home, now they experienced a new and unfamiliar constraint. In this their lives reflected the broader miasma suffusing the city beyond their garden wall. 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.”

  Jews, of course, experienced it most acutely. A survey of those who fled Germany, conducted from 1993 through 2001 by social historians Eric A. Johnson and Karl-Heinz Reuband, found that 33 percent had felt “constant fear of arrest.” Among those who had lived in small towns, more than half recalled feeling such fear. Most non-Jewish citizens, however, claimed to have experienced little fear—in Berlin, for example, only 3 percent described their fear of arrest as constant—but they did not feel wholly at ease. Rather, most Germans experienced a kind of echo of normality. There arose among them a recognition that their ability to lead normal lives “depended on their acceptance of the Nazi regime and their keeping their heads down and not acting conspicuously.” If they fell into line, allowed themselves to be “coordinated,” they would be safe—though the survey also found a surprising tendency among non-Jewish Berliners to occasionally step out of line. Some 32 percent recalled telling anti-Nazi jokes, and 49 percent claimed to have listened to illegal radio broadcasts from Britain and elsewhere. However, they only dared to commit such infractions in private or among trusted friends, for they understood that the consequences could be lethal.