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

by Erik Larson

  But Martha was perplexed. Contrary to what news reports had led her to expect, the building seemed intact. The towers still stood and the facades appeared unmarked. “Oh, I thought it was burned down!” she exclaimed as the car passed the building. “It looks all right to me. Tell me what happened.”

  After this and several other outbursts that Martha conceded were imprudent, the protocol officer leaned toward her and hissed, “Sssh! Young lady, you must learn to be seen and not heard. You mustn’t say so much and ask so many questions. This isn’t America and you can’t say all the things you think.”

  She stayed quiet for the rest of the drive.

  UPON REACHING THEIR HOTEL, the Esplanade, on the well-shaded and lovely Bellevuestrasse, Martha and her parents were shown the accommodations that Messersmith himself had arranged.

  Dodd was appalled, Martha enchanted.

  The hotel was one of Berlin’s finest, with gigantic chandeliers and fireplaces and two glass-roofed courtyards, one of which—the Palm Courtyard—was famous for its tea dances and as the place where Berliners had gotten their first opportunity to dance the Charleston. Greta Garbo had once been a guest, as had Charlie Chaplin. Messersmith had booked the Imperial Suite, a collection of rooms that included a large double-bedded room with private bath, two single bedrooms also with private baths, one drawing room, and one conference room, all arrayed along the even-numbered side of a hall, from room 116 through room 124. Two reception rooms had walls covered with satin brocade. The suite was suffused with a springlike scent imparted by flowers sent by well-wishers, so many flowers, Martha recalled, “that there was scarcely space to move in—orchids and rare scented lilies, flowers of all colors and descriptions.” Upon entering the suite, she wrote, “we gasped at its magnificence.”

  But such opulence abraded every principle of the Jeffersonian ideal that Dodd had embraced throughout his life. Dodd had made it known before his arrival that he wanted “modest quarters in a modest hotel,” Messersmith wrote. While Messersmith understood Dodd’s desire to live “most inconspicuously and modestly,” he also knew “that the German officials and German people would not understand it.”

  There was another factor. U.S. diplomats and State Department officials had always stayed at the Esplanade. To do otherwise would have constituted an egregious breach of protocol and tradition.

  THE FAMILY SETTLED IN. Bill Jr. and the Chevrolet were not expected to arrive for a while yet. Dodd retired to a bedroom with a book. Martha found it all hard to grasp. Cards from well-wishers continued to arrive, accompanied by still more flowers. She and her mother sat in awe of the luxury around them, “wondering desperately how all this was to be paid for without mortgaging our souls.”

  Later that evening the family rallied and went down to the hotel restaurant for dinner, where Dodd dusted off his decades-old German and in his dry manner tried to joke with the waiters. He was, Martha wrote, “in magnificent humor.” The waiters, more accustomed to the imperious behavior of world dignitaries and Nazi officials, were unsure how to respond and adopted a level of politeness that Martha found almost obsequious. The food was good, she judged, but heavy, classically German, and demanded an after-dinner walk.

  Outside, the Dodds turned left and walked along Bellevuestrasse through the shadows of trees and the penumbrae of streetlamps. The dim lighting evoked for Martha the somnolence of rural American towns very late at night. She saw no soldiers, no police. The night was soft and lovely; “everything,” she wrote, “was peaceful, romantic, strange, nostalgic.”

  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. Now it was 630 acres of trees, walkways, riding paths and statuary that spread west from the Brandenburg Gate to the wealthy residential and shopping district of Charlottenburg. The Spree ran along its northern boundary; the city’s famous zoo stood at its southwest corner. At night the park was especially alluring. “In the Tiergarten,” a British diplomat wrote, “the little lamps flicker among the little trees, and the grass is starred with the fireflies of a thousand cigarettes.”

  The Dodds entered the Siegesallee—Avenue of Victory—lined with ninety-six statues and busts of past Prussian leaders, among them Frederick the Great, various lesser Fredericks, and such once-bright stars as Albert the Bear, Henry the Child, and Otho the Lazy. Berliners called them Puppen—dolls. Dodd held forth on the history of each, revealing the detailed knowledge of Germany he had acquired in Leipzig three decades earlier. Martha could tell that his sense of foreboding had dissipated. “I am sure this was one of the happiest evenings we spent in Germany,” she wrote. “All of us were full of joy and peace.”

  Her father had loved Germany ever since his tenure in Leipzig, when each day a young woman brought fresh violets for his room. Now on this first night, as they walked along the Avenue of Victory, Martha too felt a rush of affection for the country. The city, the overall atmosphere, was nothing like what news reports back home had led her to expect. “I felt the press had badly maligned the country and I wanted to proclaim the warmth and friendliness of the people, the soft summer night with its fragrance of trees and flowers, the serenity of the streets.”

  This was July 13, 1933.

  PART II

  House Hunting in the Third Reich

  Ambassador Dodd at his desk (photo credit p2.1)

  CHAPTER 6

  Seduction

  In her first few days in Berlin, Martha fell ill with a cold. As she lay convalescing at the Esplanade she received a visitor, an American woman named Sigrid Schultz, who for the preceding fourteen years had been a correspondent in Berlin for Martha’s former employer, the Chicago Tribune, and was now its correspondent in chief for Central Europe. Schultz was forty years old, five foot three—the same height as Martha—with blond hair and blue eyes. “A little pudgy,” as Martha put it, with “an abundance of golden hair.” Despite her size and cherub’s gleam, Schultz was known to fellow correspondents and Nazi officials alike as being tenacious, outspoken, and utterly fearless. She made every diplomat’s invitation list and was a regular at parties thrown by Goebbels, Göring, and other Nazi leaders. Göring took a perverse delight in calling her “the dragon from Chicago.”

  Schultz and Martha chatted at first about innocuous things, but soon the conversation turned to the rapid transformation of Berlin during the six months since Hitler had become chancellor. Schultz told stories of violence against Jews, communists, and anyone the Nazis saw as unsympathetic to their revolution. In some cases the victims had been American citizens.

  Martha countered that Germany was in the midst of a historic rebirth. Those incidents that did occur surely were only inadvertent expressions of the wild enthusiasm that had gripped the country. In the few days since her arrival Martha had seen nothing at all to corroborate Schultz’s tales.

  But Schultz pressed on with stories of beatings and capricious imprisonments in the “wild” camps—ad hoc prisons that had sprung up throughout the country under the control of Nazi paramilitary forces—and in more formal prisons, known by now as concentration camps. The German word was Konzentrationslager, or KZ. The opening of one such camp had occurred on March 22, 1933, its existence revealed at a press conference held by a thirty-two-year-old former chicken farmer turned commander of the Munich police, Heinrich Himmler. The camp occupied an old munitions factory a brief train ride from Munich, just outside the charming village of Dachau, and now housed hundreds of prisoners, possibly thousands—no one knew—most arrested not on specific charges but rather for “protective custody.” These were not Jews, not yet, but communists and members of the liberal Social Democratic Party, all held in conditions of strict discipline.

  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.”

  When Martha left her hotel she witnessed no violence, saw no one cowering in fear, felt no oppression. The city was a delight. What Goebbels condemned she adored. A short walk from the hotel, to the right, away from the cool green of the Tiergarten, took her to Potsdamer Platz, one of the busiest intersections in the world, with its famous five-way streetlight, believed to have been the first-ever stoplight installed in Europe. Berlin had only 120,000 cars, but at any given moment all of them seemed to collect here, like bees to a hive. One could watch the whirl of cars and people from an outdoor table at the Josty Café. Here too stood Haus Vaterland, a five-story nightclub capable of serving six thousand diners in twelve restaurant milieus, including a Wild West bar, with waiters in immense cowboy hats, and the Rhineland Wine Terrace, where each hour guests experienced a brief indoor thunderstorm complete with lightning, thunder, and, to the chagrin of women wearing true silk, a sprinkling of rain. “What a youthful, carefree, won’t-go-home-till-morning, romantic, wonderful place!” one visitor wrote: “It is the jolliest place in Berlin.”

  For a twenty-four-year-old woman unencumbered by job and financial concern and soon to be freed of a dead marriage, Berlin was endlessly compelling. Within days she found herself going on an afternoon “tea date” with a famous American correspondent, H. R. Knickerbocker—“Knick” to his friends—who filed stories for the New York Evening Post. He took her to the Eden Hotel, the notorious Eden, where communist firebrand Rosa Luxemburg had been beaten nearly to death in 1919 before being driven into the adjacent Tiergarten and killed.

  Now, in the Eden’s tea room, Martha and Knick danced. He was skinny and short, with red hair and brown eyes, and led her across the floor with skill and grace. Inevitably, the conversation shifted to Germany. Like Sigrid Schultz, Knickerbocker tried to teach Martha a bit about the politics of the country and the character of its new leadership. Martha wasn’t interested, and the conversation drifted elsewhere. What enthralled her were the German men and women around her. She loved “their funny stiff dancing, listening to their incomprehensible and guttural tongue, and watching their simple gestures, natural behavior and childlike eagerness for life.”

  She liked the Germans she had met thus far—more, certainly, than the French she had encountered during her studies in Paris. Unlike the French, she wrote, the Germans “weren’t thieves, they weren’t selfish, they weren’t impatient or cold and hard.”

  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. The cigar peddler in front of the Hotel Adlon, at Unter den Linden 1, continued to sell cigars as always (and Hitler continued to shun the hotel, preferring instead the nearby Kaiserhof). Every morning Germans crowded the Tiergarten, many on horseback, as thousands of others commuted into the city center on trains and trams from such neighborhoods as Wedding and Onkel Toms Hütte. Nicely dressed men and women sat in the Romanisches Café, drinking coffee and wine, and smoking cigarettes and cigars, and exercising the sharp wit for which Berliners were famed—the Berliner Schnauze, or “Berlin snout.” At the Katakombe cabaret, Werner Finck continued poking fun at the new regime, despite the risk of arrest. During one show a member of the audience called him a “lousy yid,” to which he responded, “I’m not Jewish. I only look intelligent.” The audience laughed with gusto.

  Nice days were still nice. “The sun shines,” wrote Christopher Isherwood in his Berlin Stories, “and Hitler is the master of this city. The sun shines, and dozens of my friends … are in prison, possibly dead.” The prevailing normalcy was seductive. “I catch sight of my face in the mirror of a shop, and am shocked to see that I am smiling,” Isherwood wrote. “You can’t help smiling, in such beautiful weather.” The trams moved as usual, as did the pedestrians passing on the street; everything around him had “an air of curious familiarity, of striking resemblance to something one remembers as normal and pleasant in the past—like a very good photograph.”

  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.

  “Coordination” occurred with astonishing speed, even in sectors of life not directly targeted by specific laws, as Germans willingly placed themselves under the sway of Nazi rule, a phenomenon that became known as Selbstgleichschaltung, or “self-coordination.” Change came to Germany so quickly and across such a wide front that German citizens who left the country for business or travel returned to find everything around them altered, as if they were characters in a horror movie who come back to find that people who once were their friends, clients, patients, and customers have become different in ways hard to discern. Gerda Laufer, a socialist, wrote that she felt “deeply shaken that people whom one regarded as friends, who were known for a long time, from one hour to the next transformed themselves.”

  Neighbors turned surly; petty jealousies flared into denunciations made to the SA—the Storm Troopers—or to the newly founded Geheime Staatspolizei, only just becoming known by its acronym, Gestapo (GEheime STAatsPOlizei), coined by a post office clerk seeking a less cumbersome way of identifying the agency. 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. One study of Nazi records found that of a sample of 213 denunciations, 37 percent arose not from heartfelt political belief but from private conflicts, with the trigger often breathtakingly trivial. In October 1933, for example, the clerk at a grocery store turned in a cranky customer who had stubbornly insisted on receiving three pfennigs in change. The clerk accused her of failure to pay taxes. Germans denounced one another with such gusto that senior Nazi officials urged the populace to be more discriminating as to what circumstances might justify a report to the police. Hitler himself acknowledged, in a remark to his minister of justice, “we are living at present in a sea of denunciations and human meanness.”

  A central element of Coordination was the insertion into Germany’s civil service law of the “Aryan clause,” which effectively banned Jews from government jobs. Additional regulations and local animosities severely restricted Jews from practicing medicine and becoming lawyers. As onerous and dramatic as these restrictions were for Jews, they made little impression on tourists and other casual observers, partly because so few Jews lived in Germany. As of January 1933 only about 1 percent of Germany’s sixty-five million people were Jewish, and most lived in major cities, leaving a negligible presence throughout the rest of the country. Nearly a third—just over 160,000—lived in Berlin alone, but they constituted less than 4 percent of the city’s overall population of 4.2 million, and many lived in close-knit neighborhoods not typically included on visitors’ itineraries.

  Yet even many Jewish residents failed to grasp the true meaning of what was occurring. Fifty thousand did see, and left Germany within weeks of Hitler’s ascension to chancellor, but most stayed. “Hardly anyone thought that the threats against the Jews were meant seriously,” wrote Carl Zuckmayer, a Jewish writer. “Even many Jews considered the savage anti-Semitic rantings of the Nazis merely a prop
aganda device, a line the Nazis would drop as soon as they won governmental power and were entrusted with public responsibilities.” Although a song popular among Storm Troopers bore the title “When Jewish Blood Spurts from My Knife,” by the time of the Dodds’ arrival violence against Jews had begun to wane. Incidents were sporadic, isolated. “It was easy to be reassured,” wrote historian John Dippel in a study of why many Jews decided to stay in Germany. “On the surface, much of daily life remained as it had been before Hitler came to power. Nazi attacks on the Jews were like summer thunderstorms that came and went quickly, leaving an eerie calm.”

  The most visible marker of the Coordination campaign was the sudden appearance of the Hitler salute, or Hitlergruss. It was sufficiently new to the outside world that Consul General Messersmith devoted an entire dispatch to the subject, dated August 8, 1933. The salute, he wrote, had no modern precedent, save for the more narrowly required salute of soldiers in the presence of superior officers. What made the practice unique was that everyone was expected to salute, even in the most mundane of encounters. Shopkeepers saluted customers. Children were required to salute their teachers several times a day. At the close of theatrical performances, a newly established custom demanded that audiences stand and salute as they sang first the German national anthem, “Deutschland über Alles,” and second the Storm Trooper anthem, the “Horst Wessel Lied,” or “Horst Wessel Song,” named for its composer, an SA thug killed by communists but whom Nazi propaganda subsequently transformed into a hero. The German public had so avidly embraced the salute as to make the act of incessantly saluting almost comical, especially in the corridors of public buildings where everyone from the lowliest messenger to the loftiest official saluted and Heiled one another, turning a walk to the men’s room into an exhausting affair.