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

by Erik Larson

  On that Saturday in August when the Dodds moved in, the Panofskys graciously placed fresh flowers throughout the house, prompting Dodd to write a thank-you note. “We are convinced that, thanks to your kind efforts and thoughtfulness, we shall be very happy in your lovely house.”

  Among the diplomatic community, the house at Tiergartenstrasse 27a quickly became known as a haven where people could speak their minds without fear. “I love going there because of Dodd’s brilliant mind, his sharp gift of observation and trenchantly sarcastic tongue,” wrote Bella Fromm, the society columnist. “I like it also because there is no rigid ceremony as observed in other diplomatic houses.” One regular visitor was Prince Louis Ferdinand, who in a memoir described the house as his “second home.” He often joined the Dodds for dinner. “When the servants were out of sight we opened our hearts,” he wrote. Sometimes the prince’s candor was too much even for Ambassador Dodd, who warned him, “If you don’t try to be more careful with your talk, Prince Louis, they will hang you one of these days. I’ll come to your funeral all right, but that won’t do you much good, I am afraid.”

  As the family settled in, Martha and her father fell into an easy camaraderie. They traded jokes and wry observations. “We love each other,” she wrote in a letter to Thornton Wilder, “and I am told state secrets. We laugh at the Nazis and ask our sweet butler if he has Jewish blood.” The butler, named Fritz—“short, blond, obsequious, efficient”—had worked for Dodd’s predecessor. “We talk mostly politics at table,” she continued. “Father reads chapters of his Old South to the guests. They almost perish of chagrin and mystification.”

  She noted that her mother—whom she called “Her Excellency”—was in good health “but a bit nervous [and] rather enjoying it all.” Her father, she wrote, was “flourishing incredibly,” and seemed “slightly pro-German.” She added, “We sort of don’t like the Jews anyway.”

  Carl Sandburg sent her a maundering letter of greeting, typed on two very thin sheets of paper, with spaces instead of punctuation marks: “Now the hegira begins the wanderjahre the track over the sea and the zig-zag over the continent and the center and the home in berlin where are many ragged arithmetics and torn testaments thru the doors will pass all the garbs and tongues and tales of europe the jews the communists the atheists the non-aryans the proscribed will not always come as such but they will come in guises disguises disgeeses … some will arrive with strange songs and a few with lines we have known and loved correspondents casual and permanent international spies spindrift beach combers aviators heroes …”

  The Dodds soon learned they had a prominent and much-feared neighbor farther along Tiergartenstrasse, on a side street called Standartenstrasse: Captain Röhm himself, commander of the Storm Troopers. Every morning he could be seen riding a large black horse in the Tiergarten. Another nearby building, a lovely two-story mansion that housed Hitler’s personal chancellery, would soon become the home of a Nazi program to euthanize people with severe mental or physical disabilities, code-named Aktion (Action) T-4, for the address, Tiergartenstrasse 4.

  To the horror of Counselor Gordon, Ambassador Dodd continued his practice of walking to work, alone, unguarded, in his plain business suits.

  NOW, SUNDAY, AUGUST 13, 1933, with Hindenburg still convalescing on his estate, Dodd still an unofficial ambassador, and the matter of establishing a new household at last resolved, the family, accompanied by Martha’s new friend, correspondent Quentin Reynolds, set off to see a little of Germany. They traveled first by car—the Dodds’ Chevrolet—but planned to separate at Leipzig, about ninety miles south of Berlin, where Dodd and his wife planned to linger awhile and visit landmarks from his days at Leipzig University.

  Martha, Bill Jr., and Reynolds continued south, with the aim of eventually reaching Austria. Theirs would prove to be a journey laden with incident that would provide the first challenge to Martha’s rosy view of the new Germany.

  PART III

  Lucifer in the Garden

  Rudolf Diels (photo credit p3.1)

  Martha Dodd (photo credit p3.2)

  CHAPTER 11

  Strange Beings

  They drove south through lovely countryside and small, neat villages, everything looking very much the same as it had thirty-five years earlier when Dodd previously had passed this way, with the salient exception that in town after town the facades of public buildings were hung with banners bearing the red, white, and black insignia of the Nazi Party, with the inevitable broken cross at the center. At eleven o’clock they arrived at their first stop, the Schlosskirche, or Castle Church, in Wittenberg, where Martin Luther nailed his “95 Theses” to the door and launched the Reformation. As a student Dodd had traveled to Wittenberg from Leipzig and had sat in on services within the church; now he found its doors locked. A Nazi parade moved through the city’s streets.

  The group paused in Wittenberg for only an hour, then continued to Leipzig, where they arrived at one o’clock, and made their way directly to one of the most famous restaurants in Germany, Auerbachs Keller, a favorite haunt of Goethe, who used the restaurant as a setting for an encounter between Mephistopheles and Faust, during which Mephisto’s wine turned to fire. Dodd gauged the meal excellent, especially its price: three marks. He drank neither wine nor beer. Martha, Bill, and Reynolds, on the other hand, consumed stein after stein.

  Now the party split into two groups. The young ones headed off by car toward Nuremberg; Dodd and his wife checked into a hotel, rested for several hours, then went out for supper, another good meal at an even better price: two marks. They continued touring the next day, then caught a train back to Berlin, where they arrived at five o’clock and took a taxi back to their new home at Tiergartenstrasse 27a.

  DODD HAD BEEN HOME little more than twenty-four hours when another attack occurred against an American. The victim this time was a thirty-year-old surgeon named Daniel Mulvihill, who lived in Manhattan but practiced at a hospital on Long Island and was in Berlin to study the techniques of a famed German surgeon. Messersmith, in a dispatch on the incident, said Mulvihill was “an American citizen of a fine type and is not a Jew.”

  The attack followed a pattern that would become all too familiar: On the evening of Tuesday, August 15, Mulvihill was walking along Unter den Linden on his way to a drugstore when he stopped to watch the approach of a parade of uniformed SA members. The Storm Troopers were reenacting for a propaganda film the great march through the Brandenburg Gate that took place on the night of Hitler’s appointment as chancellor. Mulvihill looked on, unaware that one SA man had left the parade and was headed his way. The trooper, without preamble, struck Mulvihill hard on the left side of his head, then calmly rejoined the parade. Bystanders told the stunned surgeon that the assault likely had occurred because of Mulvihill’s failure to offer the Hitler salute as the parade passed. This was the twelfth violent attack on an American since March 4.

  The U.S. consulate immediately protested, and by Friday evening the Gestapo claimed to have arrested the assailant. The next day, Saturday, August 19, a senior government official notified Vice Consul Raymond Geist that an order had been issued to the SA and SS stating that foreigners were not expected to give or return the Hitler salute. The official also said that the head of the Berlin division of the SA, a young officer named Karl Ernst, would personally call on Dodd early the next week to apologize for the incident. Consul General Messersmith, who had met Ernst before, wrote that he was “very young, very energetic, direct, enthusiastic” but exuded “an atmosphere of brutality and force which is characteristic of the SA.”

  Ernst arrived as promised. He clicked his heels and saluted and barked “Heil Hitler.” Dodd acknowledged the salute but did not return it. He listened to Ernst’s “confessions of regret” and heard him promise that no such attack would occur again. Ernst appeared to think he had done all he needed to do, but Dodd now sat him down and, lapsing into his familiar roles as both father and professor, gave Ernst a severe lecture on the
bad behavior of his men and its potential consequences.

  Ernst, discomfited, insisted that he really did intend to try to stop the attacks. He then rose, snapped to rigid attention, saluted again, “made a Prussian bow,” and left.

  “I was not a little amused,” Dodd wrote.

  That afternoon he told Messersmith that Ernst had delivered an appropriate apology.

  Messersmith said: “The incidents will go on.”

  ALL ALONG THE ROUTE to Nuremberg, Martha and her companions encountered groups of men in the brown uniform of the SA, young and old, fat and skinny, parading and singing and holding Nazi banners aloft. Often, as the car slowed to pass through narrow village streets, onlookers turned toward them and made the Hitler salute, shouting “Heil Hitler,” apparently interpreting the low number on the license plate—traditionally America’s ambassador to Germany had number 13—as proof that those within must be the family of some senior Nazi official from Berlin. “The excitement of the people was contagious and I ‘Heiled’ as vigorously as any Nazi,” Martha wrote in her memoir. Her behavior dismayed her brother and Reynolds, but she ignored their sarcastic jibes. “I felt like a child, ebullient and careless, the intoxication of the new regime working like wine in me.”

  At about midnight they pulled to a stop in front of their hotel in Nuremberg. Reynolds had been to Nuremberg before and knew it to be a sleepy place this late at night, but now, he wrote, they found the street “filled with an excited, happy crowd.” His first thought was that these revelers were participants in a festival of the city’s legendary toy industry.

  Inside the hotel Reynolds asked the registration clerk, “Is there going to be a parade?”

  The clerk, cheerful and pleasant, laughed with such delight that the tips of his mustache shook, Reynolds recalled. “It will be a kind of a parade,” the clerk said. “They are teaching someone a lesson.”

  The three took their bags to their rooms, then set out for a walk to see the city and find something to eat.

  The crowd outside had grown larger and was infused with good cheer. “Everyone was keyed up, laughing, talking,” Reynolds saw. What struck him was how friendly everyone was—far more friendly, certainly, than an equivalent crowd of Berliners would have been. Here, he noted, if you bumped into someone by accident, you got a polite smile and cheerful forgiveness.

  From a distance they heard the coarse, intensifying clamor of a still larger and more raucous crowd approaching on the street. They heard distant music, a street band, all brass and noise. The crowd pressed inward in happy anticipation, Reynolds wrote. “We could hear the roar of the crowd three blocks away, a laughing roar that swelled toward us with the music.”

  The noise grew, accompanied by a shimmery tangerine glow that fluttered on the facades of buildings. Moments later the marchers came into view, a column of SA men in brown uniforms carrying torches and banners. “Storm Troopers,” Reynolds noted. “Not doll makers.”

  Immediately behind the first squad there followed two very large troopers, and between them a much smaller human captive, though Reynolds could not at first tell whether it was a man or a woman. The troopers were “half-supporting, half-dragging” the figure along the street. “Its head had been clipped bald,” Reynolds wrote, “and face and head had been coated with white powder.” Martha described the face as having “the color of diluted absinthe.”

  They edged closer, as did the crowd around them, and now Reynolds and Martha saw that the figure was a young woman—though Reynolds still was not completely certain. “Even though the figure wore a skirt, it might have been a man dressed as a clown,” Reynolds wrote. “The crowd around me roared at the spectacle of this figure being dragged along.”

  The genial Nurembergers around them became transformed and taunted and insulted the woman. The troopers at her sides abruptly lifted her to her full height, revealing a placard hung around her neck. Coarse laughter rose from all around. Martha, Bill, and Reynolds deployed their halting German to ask other bystanders what was happening and learned in fragments that the girl had been associating with a Jewish man. As best Martha could garner, the placard said, “I HAVE OFFERED MYSELF TO A JEW.”

  As the Storm Troopers went past, the crowd surged from the sidewalks into the street behind and followed. A two-decker bus became stranded in the mass of people. Its driver held up his hands in mock surrender. Passengers on the top deck pointed at the girl and laughed. The troopers again lifted the girl—“their toy,” as Reynolds put it—so that the riders could have a better view. “Then someone got the idea of marching the thing into the lobby of our hotel,” Reynolds wrote. He learned that the “thing” had a name: Anna Rath.

  The band stayed out on the street, where it continued to play in a loud, caustic manner. The Storm Troopers emerged from the lobby and dragged the woman away toward another hotel. The band struck up the “Horst Wessel Song,” and suddenly in all directions along the street the crowd came to attention, right arms extended in the Hitler salute, all singing with vigor.

  When the song ended, the procession moved on. “I wanted to follow,” Martha wrote, “but my two companions were so repelled that they pulled me away.” She too had been shaken by the episode, but she did not let it tarnish her overall view of the country and the revival of spirit caused by the Nazi revolution. “I tried in a self-conscious way to justify the action of the Nazis, to insist that we should not condemn without knowing the whole story.”

  The three retreated to the bar of their hotel, Reynolds vowing to get savagely drunk. He asked the bartender, quietly, about what had just occurred. The bartender told the story in a whisper: In defiance of Nazi warnings against marriage between Jews and Aryans, the young woman had planned to marry her Jewish fiancé. This would have been risky anywhere in Germany, he explained, but nowhere more so than in Nuremberg. “You have heard of Herr S., whose home is here?” the bartender said.

  Reynolds understood. The bartender was referring to Julius Streicher, whom Reynolds described as “Hitler’s circus master of anti-Semitism.” Streicher, according to Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw, was “a short, squat, shaven-headed bully … utterly possessed by demonic images of Jews.” He had founded the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Der Stürmer.

  Reynolds recognized that what he, Martha, and Bill had just witnessed was an event that had far more significance than its particular details. Foreign correspondents in Germany had reported on abuses of Jews, but so far their stories had been based on after-the-fact investigation that relied on the accounts of witnesses. Here was an act of anti-Jewish brutality that a correspondent had witnessed firsthand. “The Nazis had all along been denying the atrocities that were occasionally reported abroad, but here was concrete evidence,” Reynolds wrote. “No other correspondent,” he claimed, “had witnessed any atrocities.”

  His editor agreed it was an important story but feared that if Reynolds tried to send it by cable it would be intercepted by Nazi censors. He told Reynolds to send it by mail and recommended that he omit any reference to the Dodd children in order to avoid causing difficulties for the new ambassador.

  Martha begged him not to write the story at all. “It was an isolated case,” she argued. “It was not really important, would create a bad impression, did not reveal actually what was going on in Germany, overshadowed the constructive work they were doing.”

  Martha, Bill, and Reynolds continued south into Austria, where they spent another week before returning to Germany and making their way back along the Rhine. When Reynolds returned to his office, he found an urgent summons from foreign-press chief Ernst Hanfstaengl.

  Hanfstaengl was furious, unaware as yet that Martha and Bill also had witnessed the incident.

  “There isn’t one damned word of truth in your story!” he raged. “I’ve talked with our people in Nuremberg and they say nothing of the sort happened there.”

  Reynolds quietly informed Hanfstaengl that he had watched the parade in the company of two important witnesses wh
om he had omitted from the story but whose testimony was unassailable. Reynolds named them.

  Hanfstaengl sank into his chair and held his head. He complained that Reynolds should have told him sooner. Reynolds invited him to call the Dodds to confirm their presence, but Hanfstaengl waved away the suggestion.

  At a press conference soon afterward, Goebbels, the propaganda minister, did not wait for a reporter to raise the issue of abuse against Jews but did so himself. He assured the forty or so reporters in the room that such incidents were rare, committed by “irresponsible” men.

  One correspondent, Norman Ebbutt, chief of the London Times’s bureau in Berlin, interrupted. “But, Herr Minister, you must surely have heard of the Aryan girl, Anna Rath, who was paraded through Nuremberg just for wanting to marry a Jew?”

  Goebbels smiled. It utterly transformed his face, though the result was neither pleasant nor engaging. Many in the room had encountered this effect before. There was something freakish about the extent to which the muscles of the bottom half of his face became engaged in the production of his smile and how abruptly his expressions could shift.

  “Let me explain how such a thing might occasionally happen,” Goebbels said. “All during the twelve years of the Weimar Republic our people were virtually in jail. Now our party is in charge and they are free again. When a man has been in jail for twelve years and he is suddenly freed, in his joy he may do something irrational, perhaps even brutal. Is that not a possibility in your country also?”

  Ebbutt, his voice even, noted a fundamental difference in how England might approach such a scenario. “If it should happen,” he said, “we would throw the man right back in jail.”

  Goebbels’s smile disappeared, then just as quickly returned. He looked around the room. “Are there any more questions?”

  The United States made no formal protest of the incident. Nonetheless, an official of the German foreign office apologized to Martha. He dismissed the incident as isolated and one that would be severely punished.