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

by Erik Larson

  Messersmith was shocked. He had no doubt that Kaltenborn was sincere but attributed the commentator’s view to the fact that he “was a German by origin and he couldn’t believe that Germans could carry on and do things that were happening every day and every hour in Berlin and all over the country.”

  It was a problem Messersmith had noticed time and again. Those who lived in Germany and who paid attention understood that something fundamental had changed and that a darkness had settled over the landscape. Visitors failed to see it. In part, Messersmith wrote in a dispatch, this was because the German government had begun a campaign “to influence Americans coming to Germany in forming a favorable opinion concerning happenings in the country.” He saw evidence of this in the curious behavior of Samuel Bossard, an American attacked on August 31 by members of the Hitler Youth. Bossard had promptly filed an affidavit with the U.S. consulate and had spoken angrily about the incident to a number of correspondents in Berlin. Then, suddenly, he stopped speaking. Messersmith called him just before his return to America to ask how he was doing and found him unwilling to discuss the incident. Suspicious, Messersmith made inquiries and learned that the Ministry of Propaganda had toured Bossard through Berlin and Potsdam and otherwise showered him with courtesy and attention. The effort appeared to have paid off, Messersmith noted. Upon Bossard’s arrival in New York, according to a news report, Bossard declared “that if Americans in Germany are subject to any kind of attacks, it can only be due to misunderstandings.… Many Americans do not seem to understand the changes which have taken place in Germany and through their awkwardness [have] acted in such a way as to invite attacks.” He vowed to return to Germany the following year.

  Messersmith sensed an especially deft hand behind the government’s decision to cancel a ban on Rotary Clubs in Germany. Not only could the clubs continue; more remarkably, they were allowed to retain their Jewish members. Messersmith himself belonged to the Berlin Rotary. “The fact that Jews are permitted to continue membership in Rotary is being used as propaganda among the Rotary clubs throughout the world,” he wrote. The underlying reality was that many of those Jewish members had lost their jobs or were finding their ability to practice within their professions severely limited. 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.”

  Messersmith urged Kaltenborn to get in touch with some of the American correspondents in Berlin, who would provide ample confirmation of his dispatches.

  Kaltenborn dismissed the idea. He knew a lot of these correspondents. They were prejudiced, he claimed, and so was Messersmith.

  He continued his journey, though in short order he would be forced in a most compelling way to reevaluate his views.

  CHAPTER 8

  Meeting Putzi

  With the help of Sigrid Schultz and Quentin Reynolds, Martha inserted herself readily into the social fabric of Berlin. Smart, flirtatious, and good-looking, she became a favorite among the younger officers of the foreign diplomatic corps and a sought-after guest at the informal parties, the so-called bean parties and beer evenings, held after the obligatory functions of the day had concluded. She also became a regular at a nightly gathering of twenty or so correspondents who convened in an Italian restaurant, Die Taverne, owned by a German and his Belgian wife. The restaurant always set aside a big, round table in a corner for the group—a Stammtisch, meaning a table for regulars—whose members, including Schultz, typically began to arrive at about ten in the evening and might linger until as late as four the next morning. The group had achieved a kind of fame. “Everybody else in the restaurant is watching them and trying to overhear what they are saying,” wrote Christopher Isherwood in Goodbye to Berlin. “If you have a piece of news to bring them—the details of an arrest, or the address of a victim whose relatives might be interviewed—then one of the journalists leaves the table and walks up and down with you outside, in the street.” The table often drew cameo visits from the first and second secretaries of foreign embassies and various Nazi press officials, and on occasion even Gestapo chief Rudolf Diels. William Shirer, a later member of the group, saw Martha as a worthy participant: “pretty, vivacious, a mighty arguer.”

  In this new world, the calling card was the crucial currency. The character of an individual’s card reflected the character of the individual, his perception of himself, or how he wanted the world to perceive him. The Nazi leadership invariably had the largest cards with the most imposing titles, usually printed in some bold Teutonic font. Prince Louis Ferdinand, son of Germany’s crown prince, a sweet-tempered young man who had worked in a Ford assembly plant in America, had the tiniest of cards, with only his name and title. His father, on the other hand, had a large card with a photograph of himself on one side, in full princely regalia, the other side blank. Cards were versatile. Notes scrawled on cards served as invitations to dinner or cocktails or more compelling assignations. By simply crossing out the last name, a man or woman conveyed friendship, interest, even intimacy.

  Martha accumulated dozens of cards, and saved them. Cards from Prince Louis, soon to become a suitor and friend; from Sigrid Schultz, of course; and from Mildred Fish Harnack, who had been present on the station platform when Martha and her parents arrived in Berlin. A correspondent for the United Press, Webb Miller, wrote on his card, “If you have nothing more important to do why not have dinner with me.” He provided his hotel and room number.

  AT LAST SHE MET her first senior Nazi. As promised, Reynolds took her to the party of his English friend, “a lavish and fairly drunken affair.” Well after their arrival, an immense man with a brick of coal-black hair slammed into the room—“in a sensational manner,” Martha later recalled—passing his card left and right, with a decided emphasis on recipients who were young and pretty. At six feet four inches in height, he was a head taller than most men in the room and weighed easily 250 pounds. A female observer once described him as “supremely awkward-looking—an enormous puppet on slack strings.” Even amid the din of the party his voice stood out like thunder over rain.

  This, Reynolds told Martha, was Ernst Hanfstaengl. Officially, as stated on his card, he was Auslandspressechef—foreign press chief—of the National Socialist Party, though in fact this was largely a made-up job with little real authority, a sop granted by Hitler to acknowledge Hanfstaengl’s friendship ever since the early days, when Hitler often came to Hanfstaengl’s home.

  Upon being introduced, Hanfstaengl told Martha, “Call me Putzi.” It was his childhood nickname, used universally by his friends and acquaintances and by all the city’s correspondents.

  This was the giant that Martha by now had heard so much about—he of the unpronounceable, unspellable last name, adored by many correspondents and diplomats, loathed and distrusted by many others, this latter camp including George Messersmith, who claimed “an instinctive dislike” for the man. “He is totally insincere, and one cannot believe a word he says,” Messersmith wrote. “He pretends the closest friendship with those whom he is at the same time trying to undermine or whom he may be directly attacking.”

  Martha’s friend Reynolds at first liked Hanfstaengl. In contrast with other Nazis, the man “went out of his way to be cordial to Americans,” Reynolds recalled. Hanfstaengl offered to arrange interviews that otherwise might be impossible to get and sought to present himself to the city’s correspondents as one of the boys, “informal, hail-fellow-well-met, charming.” Reynolds’s affection for Hanfstaengl eventually cooled, however. “You had to know Putzi to really dislike him. That,” he noted, “came later.”

  Hanfstaengl spoke English beautifully. At Harvard he had been a member of the Hasty Pudding Club, a theatrical group, and forever bent the minds o
f his audience when for one performance he dressed as a Dutch girl named Gretchen Spootsfeiffer. He had come to know classmate Theodore Roosevelt Jr., eldest son of Teddy Roosevelt, and had become a regular visitor to the White House. One story held that Hanfstaengl had played a piano in the White House basement with such verve that he broke seven strings. As an adult he had run his family’s art gallery in New York, where he had met his wife-to-be. After moving to Germany, the couple had grown close to Hitler and made him godfather of their newborn son, Egon. The boy called him “Uncle Dolf.” Sometimes when Hanfstaengl played for Hitler, the dictator wept.

  Martha liked Hanfstaengl. He was not at all what she expected a senior Nazi official to be, “so blatantly proclaiming his charm and talent.” He was big and full of energy, with giant, long-fingered hands—hands that Martha’s friend Bella Fromm would describe as being “of almost frightening dimensions”—and a personality that bounded readily from one extreme to another. Martha wrote, “He had a soft, ingratiating manner, a beautiful voice which he used with conscious artistry, sometimes whispering low and soft, the next minute bellowing and shattering the room.” He dominated any social milieu. “He could exhaust anyone and, from sheer perseverance, out-shout or out-whisper the strongest man in Berlin.”

  Hanfstaengl took a liking to Martha as well but did not think much of her father. “He was a modest little Southern history professor, who ran his embassy on a shoestring and was probably trying to save money out of his pay,” Hanfstaengl wrote in a memoir. “At a time when it needed a robust millionaire to compete with the flamboyance of the Nazis, he teetered round self-effacingly as if he were still on his college campus.” Hanfstaengl dismissively referred to him as “Papa” Dodd.

  “The best thing about Dodd,” Hanfstaengl wrote, “was his attractive blond daughter, Martha, whom I got to know very well.” Hanfstaengl found her charming, vibrant, and clearly a woman of sexual appetite.

  Which gave him an idea.

  CHAPTER 9

  Death Is Death

  Dodd sought to maintain his objective stance despite early encounters with visitors who had experienced a Germany very different from the cheery, sun-dappled realm he walked through each morning. One such visitor was Edgar A. Mowrer, at the time the most famous correspondent in Berlin and the center of a maelstrom of controversy. In addition to reporting for the Chicago Daily News, Mowrer had written a best-selling book, Germany Puts the Clock Back, which had angered Nazi officials to the point where Mowrer’s friends believed he faced mortal danger. Hitler’s government wanted him out of the country. Mowrer wanted to stay and came to Dodd to ask him to intercede.

  Mowrer had long been a target of Nazi ire. In his dispatches from Germany he had managed to cut below the patina of normalcy to capture events that challenged belief, and he used novel reporting techniques to do it. One of his foremost sources of information was his doctor, a Jew who was the son of the grand rabbi of Berlin. Every two weeks or so Mowrer would make an appointment to see him, ostensibly for a persistent throat complaint. Each time the doctor would give him a typed report of the latest Nazi excesses, a method that worked until the doctor came to suspect that Mowrer was being followed. The two arranged a new rendezvous point: every Wednesday at 11:45 a.m. they met in the public restroom underneath Potsdamer Platz. They stood at adjacent urinals. The doctor would drop the latest report, and Mowrer would pick it up.

  Putzi Hanfstaengl tried to undermine Mowrer’s credibility by spreading a false rumor that the reason his reports were so aggressively critical was that he was a “secret” Jew. In fact, the same thought had occurred to Martha. “I was inclined to think him Jewish,” she wrote; she “considered his animus to be prompted only by his racial self-consciousness.”

  Mowrer was appalled at the failure of the outside world to grasp what was really happening in Germany. He found that even his own brother had come to doubt the truth of his reports.

  Mowrer invited Dodd to dinner at his apartment overlooking the Tiergarten and tried to clue him in to certain hidden realities. “To no purpose,” Mowrer wrote. “He knew better.” Even the periodic assaults against Americans appeared not to have moved the ambassador, Mowrer recalled: “Dodd announced he had no wish to mix in Germany’s affairs.”

  Dodd for his part assessed Mowrer as being “almost as vehement, in his way, as the Nazis.”

  Threats against Mowrer increased. Within the Nazi hierarchy there was talk of inflicting physical harm on the correspondent. Gestapo chief Rudolf Diels felt compelled to warn the U.S. embassy that Hitler became enraged whenever Mowrer’s name was mentioned. Diels worried that some fanatic might kill Mowrer or otherwise “eliminate him from the picture,” and claimed to have assigned certain Gestapo men “of responsibility” to stand discreet watch over the correspondent and his family.

  When Mowrer’s boss, Frank Knox, owner of the Chicago Daily News, learned of these threats, he resolved to transfer Mowrer out of Berlin. He offered him the paper’s bureau in Tokyo. Mowrer accepted, grudgingly, aware that sooner or later he would be expelled from Germany, but he insisted on staying until October, partly just to demonstrate that he would not bow to intimidation, but mainly because he wanted to cover the annual Nazi Party spectacle in Nuremberg set to begin September 1. This next rally, the “Party Day of Victory,” promised to be the biggest yet.

  The Nazis wanted him gone immediately. Storm Troopers appeared outside his office. They followed his friends and made threats against his bureau staff. In Washington, Germany’s ambassador to the United States notified the State Department that because of the “people’s righteous indignation” the government could no longer hope to keep Mowrer free from harm.

  At this point even his fellow correspondents became concerned. H. R. Knickerbocker and another reporter went to see Consul General Messersmith to ask him to persuade Mowrer to leave. Messersmith was reluctant. He knew Mowrer well and respected his courage in facing down Nazi threats. He feared that Mowrer might view his intercession as a betrayal. Nonetheless, he agreed to try.

  It was “one of the most difficult conversations I ever had,” Messersmith wrote later. “When he saw that I was joining his other friends in trying to persuade him to leave, tears came into his eyes and he looked at me reproachfully.” Nonetheless, Messersmith felt it was his duty to convince Mowrer to leave.

  Mowrer gave up “with a gesture of despair” and left Messersmith’s office.

  Now Mowrer took his case directly to Ambassador Dodd, but Dodd too believed he should leave, not just for his safety but because his reporting imparted an extra layer of strain to what was already a very challenging diplomatic environment.

  Dodd told him, “If you were not being moved by your paper anyway, I would go to the mat on this issue.… Won’t you do this to avoid complications?”

  Mowrer gave in. He agreed to leave on September 1, the first full day of the Nuremberg rally he so wanted to cover.

  Martha wrote later that Mowrer “never quite forgave my father for this advice.”

  ANOTHER OF DODD’S EARLY visitors was, as Dodd wrote, “perhaps the foremost chemist in Germany,” but he did not look it. He was smallish in size and egg bald, with a narrow gray mustache above full lips. His complexion was sallow, his air that of a much older man.

  He was Fritz Haber. To any German the name was well known and revered, or had been until the advent of Hitler. Until recently, Haber had been director of the famed Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry. He was a war hero and a Nobel laureate. Hoping to break the stalemate in the trenches during the Great War, Haber had invented poison chlorine gas. He had devised what became known as Haber’s rule, a formula, C × t = k, elegant in its lethality: a low exposure to gas over a long period will have the same result as a high exposure over a short period. He also invented a means to distribute his poison gas at the front and was himself present in 1915 for its first use against French forces at Ypres. On a personal level, that day at Ypres cost him dearly. His wife of thirt
y-two years, Clara, had long condemned his work as inhumane and immoral and demanded he stop, but to such concerns he gave a stock reply: death was death, no matter the cause. Nine days after the gas attack at Ypres, she committed suicide. Despite international outcry over his poison-gas research, Haber was awarded the 1918 Nobel Prize for chemistry for discovering a means of mining nitrogen from air and thus allowing the manufacture of plentiful, cheap fertilizer—and, of course, gunpowder.

  Despite a prewar conversion to Protestantism, Haber was classified under the new Nazi laws as non-Aryan, but an exception granted to Jewish war veterans allowed him to remain director of the institute. Many Jewish scientists on his staff did not qualify for the exemption, however, and on April 21, 1933, Haber was ordered to dismiss them. He fought the decision but found few allies. Even his friend Max Planck offered tepid consolation. “In this profound dejection,” Planck wrote, “my sole solace is that we live in a time of catastrophe such as attends every revolution, and that we must endure much of what happens as a phenomenon of nature, without agonizing over whether things could have turned out differently.”