In the Garden of Beasts

by Erik Larson

  Dodd wrote: “These instances and others of lesser importance reveal a different method in the treatment of the Jews—a method perhaps less calculated to bring repercussions from abroad, but reflecting nonetheless the Nazis’ determination to force the Jews out of the country.”

  Germany’s Aryan population also experienced a new tightening of control. In another dispatch written the same day, Dodd described how the Ministry of Education had announced that the school week would be divided in such a way that Saturdays and Wednesday evenings would be devoted to the demands of the Hitler Youth.

  Henceforth Saturday was to be called the Staatsjugendtag, the State’s Day for Youth.

  THE WEATHER REMAINED WARM, with scant rain. On Saturday, June 2, 1934, with temperatures in the eighties, Ambassador Dodd wrote in his diary: “Germany looks dry for the first time; trees and fields are yellow. The papers are full of accounts of the drought in Bavaria and in the United States as well.”

  In Washington, Moffat also took note of the weather. In his diary he called it “the great heat” and cited Sunday, May 20, as the day it had begun, with a high of ninety-three degrees. In his office.

  No one knew it yet, of course, but America had entered the second of a series of cataclysmic droughts that soon would transform the Great Plains into the Dust Bowl.

  CHAPTER 41

  Trouble at the Neighbor’s

  As summer neared, the sense of unease in Berlin became acute. The mood was “tense and electric,” Martha wrote. “Everyone felt there was something in the air but did not know what it was.”

  The strange atmosphere and the fragile condition of Germany were topics of conversation at a late-afternoon Tee-Empfang—a tea party—hosted by Putzi Hanfstaengl on Friday, June 8, 1934, which the Dodd family attended.

  On their way home from the tea, the Dodds could not help but notice that something unusual was happening in Bendlerstrasse, the last side street they passed before reaching their house. There, in easy view, stood the buildings of the Bendler Block, army headquarters. Indeed, the Dodds and the army were almost back-fence neighbors—a man with a strong arm could throw a stone from the family’s yard and expect to break one of the army’s windows.

  The change was obvious. Soldiers stood on the roofs of headquarters buildings. Heavily armed patrols moved along the sidewalks. Army trucks and Gestapo cars clogged the street.

  These forces remained throughout Friday night and Saturday. Then, Sunday morning, June 10, the troops and trucks were gone.

  At the Dodds’ house a coolness spread outward from the forested ground of the Tiergarten. There were riders in the park, as always, and the thud of hooves was audible in the Sunday-morning quiet.

  CHAPTER 42

  Hermann’s Toys

  A mid 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 drought grew steadily more severe. The economy showed little sign of improvement, other than the illusory decline in unemployment. The rift between Röhm and Hitler seemed to have deepened. And there continued to be moments—strange, ludicrous moments—that suggested that Germany was merely the stage set for some grotesque comedy, not a serious country in a serious time.

  Sunday, June 10, 1934, provided one such episode, when Dodd, French ambassador François-Poncet, and Britain’s Sir Eric Phipps, along with three dozen other guests, attended a kind of open house at Göring’s vast estate an hour’s drive north of Berlin. He had named it Carinhall for his dead Swedish wife, Carin, whom he revered; later in the month he planned to exhume her body from its resting place in Sweden, transport it to Germany, and entomb it in a mausoleum on the estate grounds. Today, however, Göring wanted merely to show off his forests and his new bison enclosure, where he hoped to breed the creatures and then turn them loose on his grounds.

  The Dodds arrived late in their new Buick, which had betrayed them along the way with a minor mechanical failure, but they still managed to arrive before Göring himself. Their instructions called for them to drive to a particular point on the estate. To keep guests from getting lost, Göring had stationed men at each crossroads to provide directions. Dodd and his wife found the other guests gathered around a speaker who held forth on some aspect of the grounds. The Dodds learned they were at the edge of the bison enclosure.

  At last Göring arrived, driving fast, alone, in what Phipps described as a racing car. He climbed out wearing a uniform that was partly the costume of an aviator, partly that of a medieval hunter. He wore boots of India rubber and in his belt had tucked a very large hunting knife.

  Göring took the place of the first speaker. He used a microphone but spoke loudly into it, producing a jarring effect in the otherwise sylvan locale. He described his plan to create a forest preserve that would reproduce the conditions of primeval Germany, complete with primeval animals like the bison that now stood indolently in the near distance. Three photographers and a “cinematograph” operator captured the affair on film.

  Elisabetta Cerruti, the beautiful Hungarian and Jewish wife of the Italian ambassador, recalled what happened next.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Göring said, “in a few minutes you will witness a unique display of nature at work.” He gestured toward an iron cage. “In this cage is a powerful male bison, an animal almost unheard of on the Continent…. He will meet here, before your very eyes, the female of his species. Please be quiet and don’t be afraid.”

  Göring’s keepers opened the cage.

  “Ivan the Terrible,” Göring commanded, “I order you to leave the cage.”

  The bull did not move.

  Göring repeated his command. Once again the bull ignored him.

  The keepers now attempted to prod Ivan into action. The photographers readied themselves for the lustful charge certain to ensue.

  Britain’s Ambassador Phipps wrote in his diary that the bull emerged from the cage “with the utmost reluctance, and, after eyeing the cows somewhat sadly, tried to return to it.” Phipps also described the affair in a later memorandum to London that became famous within the British foreign office as “the bison dispatch.”

  Next, Dodd and Mattie and the other guests climbed aboard thirty small, two-passenger carriages driven by peasants and set off on a long, meandering ride through forests and across meadows. Göring was in the lead in a carriage pulled by two great horses, with Mrs. Cerruti seated to his right. An hour later, the procession halted near a swamp. Göring climbed from his carriage and gave another speech, this on the glories of birds.

  Once again the guests climbed into their carriages and, after another lengthy ride, came to a glade where their cars stood waiting. Göring levered his massive self into his car and raced off at high speed. The other guests followed at a slower pace and after twenty minutes came to a lake beside which stood an immense, newly constructed lodge that seemed meant to evoke the home of a medieval lord. Göring was waiting for them, dressed in a wholly new outfit, “a wonderful new white summer garb,” Dodd wrote—white tennis shoes, white duck trousers, white shirt, and a hunting jacket of green leather, in whose belt the same hunting knife appeared. In one hand he held a long implement that seemed a cross between a shepherd’s staff and a harpoon.

  It was now about six o’clock, and the afternoon sun had turned the landscape a pleasing amber. Staff in hand, Göring led his guests into the house. A collection of swords hung just inside the main door. He showed off his “gold” and “silver” rooms, his card room, library, gym, and movie theater. One hallway was barbed with dozens of sets of antlers. In the main sitting room they found a live tree, a bronze image of Hitler, and an as-yet-unoccupied space in which Göring planned to install a statue of Wotan, the Teutonic god of war. Göring “displayed his vanity at every turn,” Dodd observed. He n
oted that a number of guests traded amused but discreet glances.

  Then Göring drew the party outside, where all were directed to sit at tables set in the open air for a meal orchestrated by the actress Emmy Sonnemann, whom Göring identified as his “private secretary,” though it was common knowledge that she and Göring were romantically involved. (Mrs. Dodd liked Sonnemann and in coming months would become, as Martha noted, “rather attached to her.”) Ambassador Dodd found himself seated at a table with Vice-Chancellor Papen, Phipps, and François-Poncet, among others. He was disappointed in the result. “The conversation had no value,” he wrote—though he found himself briefly engaged when the discussion turned to a new book about the German navy in World War I, during which far-too-enthusiastic talk of war led Dodd to say, “If people knew the truth of history there would never be another great war.”

  Phipps and François-Poncet laughed uncomfortably.

  Then came silence.

  A few moments later, talk resumed: “we turned,” Dodd wrote, “to other and less risky subjects.”

  Dodd and Phipps assumed—hoped—that once the meal was over they would be able to excuse themselves and begin their journey back to Berlin, where both had an evening function to attend, but Göring now informed all that the climax of the outing—“this strange comedy,” Phipps called it—was yet to come.

  Göring led his guests to another portion of the lake shore some five hundred yards away, where he stopped before a tomb erected at the water’s edge. Here Dodd found what he termed “the most elaborate structure of its kind I ever saw.” The mausoleum was centered between two great oak trees and six large sarsen stones reminiscent of those at Stonehenge. Göring walked to one of the oaks and planted himself before it, legs apart, like some gargantuan wood sprite. The hunting knife was still in his belt, and again he wielded his medieval staff. He held forth on the virtues of his dead wife, the idyllic setting of her tomb, and his plans for her exhumation and reinterment, which was to occur ten days hence, on the summer solstice, a day that the pagan ideology of the National Socialists had freighted with symbolic importance. Hitler was to attend, as were legions of men from the army, SS, and SA.

  At last, “weary of the curious display,” Dodd and Phipps in tandem moved to say their good-byes to Göring. Mrs. Cerruti, clearly awaiting her own chance to bolt, acted with more speed. “Lady Cerruti saw our move,” Dodd wrote, “and she arose quickly so as not to allow anybody to trespass upon her fight to lead on every possible occasion.”

  The next day Phipps wrote about Göring’s open house in his diary. “The whole proceedings were so strange as at times to convey a feeling of unreality,” he wrote, but the episode had provided him a valuable if unsettling insight into the nature of Nazi rule. “The chief impression was that of the most pathetic naïveté of General Göring, who showed us his toys like a big, fat, spoilt child: his primeval woods, his bison and birds, his shooting-box and lake and bathing beach, his blond ‘private secretary,’ his wife’s mausoleum and swans and sarsen stones…. And then I remembered there were other toys, less innocent though winged, and these might some day be launched on their murderous mission in the same childlike spirit and with the same childlike glee.”

  CHAPTER 43

  A Pygmy Speaks

  Wherever Martha and her father now went they heard rumors and speculation that the collapse of Hitler’s regime might be imminent. With each hot June day the rumors gained detail. In bars and cafés, patrons engaged in the decidedly dangerous pastime of composing and comparing lists of who would comprise the new government. The names of two former chancellors came up often: General Kurt von Schleicher and Heinrich Brüning. One rumor held that Hitler would remain chancellor but be kept under control by a new, stronger cabinet, with Schleicher as vice-chancellor, Brüning as foreign minister, and Captain Röhm as defense minister. On June 16, 1934, a month shy of the one-year anniversary of his arrival in Berlin, Dodd wrote to Secretary of State Hull, “Everywhere I go men talk of resistance, of possible putsches in big cities.”

  And then something occurred that until that spring would have seemed impossible given the potent barriers to dissent established under Hitler’s rule.

  On Sunday, June 17, Vice-Chancellor Papen was scheduled to deliver a speech in Marburg at the city’s namesake university, a brief rail journey southwest of Berlin. He did not see the text until he was aboard his train, this owing to a quiet conspiracy between his speechwriter, Edgar Jung, and his secretary, Fritz Gunther von Tschirschky und Boegendorff. Jung was a leading conservative who had become so deeply opposed to the Nazi Party that he briefly considered assassinating Hitler. Until now he had kept his anti-Nazi views out of Papen’s speeches, but he sensed that the growing conflict within the government offered a unique opportunity. If Papen himself spoke out against the regime, Jung reasoned, his remarks might at last prompt President Hindenburg and the army to eject the Nazis from power and quash the Storm Troopers, in the interest of restoring order to the nation. Jung had gone over the speech carefully with Tschirschky, but both men had deliberately kept it from Papen until the last moment so that he would have no choice but to deliver it. “The speech took months of preparation,” Tschirschky later said. “It was necessary to find the proper occasion for its delivery, and then everything had to be prepared with the greatest possible care.”

  Now, in the train, as Papen read the text for the first time, Tschirschky saw a look of fear cross his face. It is a measure of the altered mood in Germany—the widespread perception that dramatic change might be imminent—that Papen, an unheroic personality, felt he could go ahead and deliver it and still survive. Not that he had much choice. “We more or less forced him to make that speech,” Tschirschky said. Copies already had been distributed to foreign correspondents. Even if Papen balked at the last minute, the speech would continue to circulate. Clearly hints of its content already had leaked out, for when Papen arrived at the hall the place hummed with anticipation. His anxiety surely spiked when he saw that a number of seats were occupied by men wearing brown shirts and swastika armbands.

  Papen walked to the podium.

  “I am told,” he began, “that my share in events in Prussia, and in the formation of the present Government”—an allusion to his role in engineering Hitler’s appointment as chancellor—“has had such an important effect on developments in Germany that I am under an obligation to view them more critically than most people.”

  The remarks that followed would have earned any man of lesser stature a trip to the gallows. “The Government,” Papen said, “is well aware of the selfishness, the lack of principle, the insincerity, the unchivalrous behavior, the arrogance which is on the increase under the guise of the German revolution.” If the government hoped to establish “an intimate and friendly relationship with the people,” he warned, “then their intelligence must not be underestimated, their trust must be reciprocated and there must be no continual attempt to browbeat them.”

  The German people, he said, would follow Hitler with absolute loyalty “provided they are allowed to have a share in the making and carrying out of decisions, provided every word of criticism is not immediately interpreted as malicious, and provided that despairing patriots are not branded as traitors.”

  The time had come, he proclaimed, “to silence doctrinaire fanatics.”

  The audience reacted as if its members had been waiting a very long time to hear such remarks. As Papen concluded his speech, the crowd leapt to its feet. “The thunder of applause,” Papen noted, drowned out “the furious protests” of the uniformed Nazis in the crowd. Historian John Wheeler-Bennett, at the time a Berlin resident, wrote, “It is difficult to describe the joy with which it was received in Germany. It was as if a load had suddenly been lifted from the German soul. The sense of relief could almost be felt in the air. Papen had put into words what thousands upon thousands of his countrymen had locked up in their hearts for fear of the awful penalties of speech.”

  THAT SAM
E DAY, Hitler was scheduled to speak elsewhere in Germany on the subject of a visit he had just made to Italy to meet with Mussolini. Hitler turned the opportunity into an attack on Papen and his conservative allies, without mentioning Papen directly. “All these little dwarfs who think they have something to say against our idea will be swept away by its collective strength,” Hitler shouted. He railed against “this ridiculous little worm,” this “pygmy who imagines he can stop, with a few phrases, the gigantic renewal of a people’s life.”

  He issued a warning to the Papen camp: “If they should at any time attempt, even in a small way, to move from their criticism to a new act of perjury, they can be sure that what confronts them today is not the cowardly and corrupt bourgeoisie of 1918 but the fist of the entire people. It is the fist of the nation that is clenched and will smash down anyone who dares to undertake even the slightest attempt at sabotage.”

  Goebbels acted immediately to suppress Papen’s speech. He banned its broadcast and ordered the destruction of the gramophone records onto which it had been cast. He banned newspapers from publishing its text or reporting on its contents, though at least one newspaper, the Frankfurter Zeitung, did manage to publish extracts. So intent was Goebbels on stopping dissemination of the speech that copies of the paper “were snatched from the hands of the guests of restaurants and coffee houses,” Dodd reported.

  Papen’s allies used the presses of Papen’s own newspaper, Germania, to produce copies of the speech for quiet distribution to diplomats, foreign correspondents, and others. The speech caused a stir throughout the world. The New York Times requested that Dodd’s embassy provide the full text by telegraph. Newspapers in London and Paris made the speech a sensation.