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

by Erik Larson

  DODD’S BIGGEST COMPLAINT about the diplomatic parties thrown by other embassies was how much money was wasted in the process, even by those countries laid low by the Depression.

  “To illustrate,” he wrote to Secretary Hull, “last night we went at 8:30 to dine at the 53-room house of the Belgian minister (whose country is supposed to be unable to meet its lawful obligations).” Two servants in uniform met his car. “Four lackeys stood on the stairways, dressed in the style of Louis XIV servants. Three other servants in knee breeches took charge of our wraps. Twenty-nine people sat down in a more expensively furnished dining room than any room in the White House that I have seen. Eight courses were served by four uniformed waiters on silver dishes and platters. There were three wine glasses at every plate and when we rose, I noticed that many glass[es] were half full of wine which was to be wasted. The people at the party were agreeable enough, but there was no conversation of any value at all at my part of the table (this I have noted at all other large parties).… Nor was there any serious, informative or even witty talk after dinner.” Martha attended as well and described how “all the women were covered with diamonds or other precious stones—I had never seen such a lavish display of wealth.” She noted also that she and her parents left at ten thirty, and in so doing caused a minor scandal. “There was a good deal of genteel raising of eyebrows, but we braved the storm and went home.” It was bad form, she discovered later, to leave a diplomatic function before eleven.

  Dodd was shocked to learn that his independently wealthy predecessors in Berlin had spent up to one hundred thousand dollars a year on entertaining, more than five times Dodd’s total salary. On some occasions they had tipped their servants more than what Dodd paid in rent each month. “But,” he vowed to Hull, “we shall not return these hospitalities in larger than ten or twelve-guest parties, with four servants at most and they modestly clad”—meaning, presumably, that they would be fully clothed but forgo the knee breeches of the Belgians. The Dodds kept three servants, had a chauffeur, and hired an extra servant or two for parties attended by more than ten guests.

  The embassy’s cupboard, according to a formal inventory of government-owned property made for its annual “Post Report,” contained:

  Dinner plates 10½″ 4 doz.

  Soup plates 9½″ 2 doz.

  Entree plates 9½″ 2 doz.

  Dessert plates 2 doz.

  Salad plates 5 5/16″ 2 doz.

  Bread/butter plates 6 3/16″ 2 doz.

  Teacups 3½″ 2 doz.

  Saucers 5 11/16″ 2 doz.

  Bouillon cups 3½″ 2 doz.

  Saucers 5 11/16″ 2 doz.

  After-dinner cups 2½″ 2 doz.

  Saucers 4¾″ 2 doz.

  Chop dishes 2 doz.

  Platters, various sizes 4 doz.

  Goblets 3 doz.

  Tall sherbert 3 doz.

  Low sherbert 3 doz.

  Small tumblers 3 doz.

  Tall tumblers 3 doz.

  Finger bowls 3 doz.

  Finger bowl plates 3 doz.

  “We shall not use silver platters nor floods of wines nor will there be card tables all about the place,” Dodd told Hull. “There will always be an effort to have some scholar or scientist or literary person present and some informatory talk; and it is understood that we retire at 10:30 to 11:00. We make no advertisement of these things but it is known that we shall not remain here when we find that we can not make both ends meet on the salary allowed.”

  In a letter to Carl Sandburg he wrote, “I can never adapt myself to the usual habit of eating too much, drinking five varieties of wine and saying nothing, yet talking, for three long hours.” He feared he was a disappointment to his wealthier junior men, who threw lavish parties at their own expense. “They can not understand me,” he wrote, “and I am sorry for them.” He wished Sandburg all speed in completing his book on Lincoln, then lamented, “My half-completed Old South will probably be buried with me.”

  He closed the letter ruefully, “Once more: Greetings from Berlin!”

  At least his health was good, though he had his usual bouts of hay fever, indigestion, and bowel upsets. But as if foreshadowing what was to come, his doctor in Chicago, Wilber E. Post—with an office, appropriately enough, in the People’s Gas Building—sent Dodd a memorandum that he had written after his last thorough examination a decade earlier, for Dodd to use as a baseline against which to compare the results of future examinations. Dodd had a history of migraines, Post wrote, “with attacks of headaches, dizziness, fatigue, low spirits, and irritability of intestinal tract,” the latter condition being best treated “by physical exercise in the open air and freedom from nervous strain and fatigue.” His blood pressure was excellent, 100 systolic, 60 diastolic, more what one would expect from an athlete than from a man in late middle age. “The outstanding clinical feature has been that Mr. Dodd’s health has been good when he has had the opportunity to get plenty of open air exercise and a comparatively bland non-irritating diet without too much meat.”

  In a letter appended to the report, Dr. Post wrote, “I trust that you will have no occasion to use it but it might be helpful in case you do.”

  THAT FRIDAY EVENING a special train, a Sonderzug, made its way from Berlin through the night landscape toward Nuremberg. The train carried the ambassadors of an array of minor nations, among them the ministers to Haiti, Siam, and Persia. It also carried protocol officers, stenographers, a doctor, and a cadre of armed Storm Troopers. This was the train that was to have carried Dodd and the ambassadors of France, Spain, and Britain. Originally the Germans had planned on fourteen railcars, but as the regrets came in, they scaled back to nine.

  Hitler was already in Nuremberg. He had arrived the night before for a welcome ceremony, his every moment choreographed, right down to the gift presented to him by the city’s mayor—a famous print by Albrecht Dürer entitled Knight, Death and the Devil.

  CHAPTER 13

  My Dark Secret

  Martha delighted in the very entertainments that so wore on her father. As the daughter of the American ambassador she possessed instant cachet and in short order found herself sought after by men of all ranks, ages, and nationalities. Her divorce from her banker husband, Bassett, was still pending, but all that remained were the legal formalities. She considered herself free to behave as she wished and to disclose or not disclose the legal reality of her marriage. She found secrecy a useful and engaging tool: outwardly she looked the part of a young American virgin, but she knew sex and liked it, and especially liked the effect when a man learned the truth. “I suppose I practiced a great deception on the diplomatic corps by not indicating that I was a married woman at that time,” she wrote. “But I must admit I rather enjoyed being treated like a maiden of eighteen knowing all the while my dark secret.”

  She had ample opportunity to meet new men. The house on Tiergartenstrasse was always full of students, German officials, embassy secretaries, correspondents, and men from the Reichswehr, the SA, and the SS. The Reichswehr officers carried themselves with aristocratic élan and confessed to her their secret hopes for a restoration of the German monarchy. She found them “extremely pleasant, handsome, courteous, and uninteresting.”

  She caught the attention of Ernst Udet, a flying ace from the Great War, who in the years since had become famous throughout Germany as an aerial adventurer, explorer, and stunt pilot. She went falcon hunting with Udet’s fellow ace, Göring, at his vast estate, Carinhall, named for his dead Swedish wife. Martha had a brief affair with Putzi Hanfstaengl, or so his son, Egon, later claimed. She was frankly sexual and put the house to good use, taking full advantage of her parents’ habit of going to bed early. Eventually she would have an affair with Thomas Wolfe when the writer visited Berlin; Wolfe would tell a friend later that she was “like a butterfly hovering around my penis.”

  One of her lovers was Armand Berard, third secretary of the French embassy—six and a half feet tall and “incredibly handsome,�
� Martha recalled. Before Berard asked her out on their first date, he asked Ambassador Dodd for permission, an act that Martha found both charming and amusing. She did not tell him of her marriage, and as a consequence, much to her secret delight, he treated her at first as a sexual ingenue. She knew that she possessed great power over him and that even some casual act or comment could drive him to despair. In their estranged periods she would see other men—and make sure he knew it.

  “You are the only person on earth who can break me,” he wrote at one point, “but how well you know it and how you seem to rejoice in doing so.” He begged her not to be so hard. “I can’t stand it,” he wrote. “If you realized how unhappy I am, you would probably pity me.”

  For one suitor, Max Delbrück, a young biophysicist, the recollection of her skill at manipulation remained fresh even four decades later. He was slender and had a cleanly sculpted chin and masses of dark, neatly combed hair, for a look that evoked a young Gregory Peck. He was destined for great things, including a Nobel Prize that would be awarded in 1969.

  In a late-life exchange of letters, Martha and Delbrück reminisced about their time together in Berlin. She recalled their innocence as they sat together in one of the reception rooms and wondered if he did as well.

  “Of course I remember the green damask room off the dining room in the Tiergartenstrasse,” he wrote. But his recollection diverged a bit from hers: “We did not only sit there modestly.”

  With a bit of dusty pique he reminded her of one rendezvous at the Romanisches Café. “You came terribly late and then yawned away, and explained that you did that because you felt relaxed in my company, and that it was a compliment to me.”

  With no small degree of irony, he added, “I became quite enthusiastic about this idea (after first getting upset), and have been yawning at my friends ever since.”

  Martha’s parents gave her full independence, with no restrictions on her comings or goings. It was not uncommon for her to stay out until early in the morning with all manner of escorts, yet family correspondence is surprisingly free of censorious comment.

  Others noticed, however, and disapproved, among them Consul General George Messersmith, who communicated his distaste to the State Department, thereby adding fuel to the quietly growing campaign against Dodd. Messersmith knew of Martha’s affair with Udet, the flying ace, and believed she had been involved in romantic affairs with other ranking Nazis, including Hanfstaengl. In a “personal and confidential” letter to Jay Pierrepont Moffat, the Western European affairs chief, Messersmith wrote that these affairs had become grist for gossip. He assessed them as mostly harmless—except in the case of Hanfstaengl. He feared that Martha’s relationship with Hanfstaengl and her seeming lack of discretion caused diplomats and other informants to be more reticent about what they told Dodd, fearing that their confidences would make their way back to Hanfstaengl. “I often felt like saying something to the Ambassador about it,” Messersmith told Moffat, “but as it was rather a delicate matter, I confined myself to making it clear as to what kind of a person Hanfstaengl really is.”

  Messersmith’s view of Martha’s behavior hardened over time. In an unpublished memoir he wrote that “she had behaved so badly in so many ways, especially in view of the position held by her father.”

  The Dodds’ butler, Fritz, framed his own criticism succinctly: “That was not a house, but a house of ill repute.”

  MARTHA’S LOVE LIFE took a dark turn when she was introduced to Rudolf Diels, the young chief of the Gestapo. He moved with ease and confidence, yet unlike Putzi Hanfstaengl, who invaded a room, he entered unobtrusively, seeping in like a malevolent fog. His arrival at a party, she wrote, “created a nervousness and tension that no other man possibly could, even when people did not know his identity.”

  What most drew her attention was the tortured landscape of his face, which she described as “the most sinister, scar-torn face I have ever seen.” One long scar in the shape of a shallow “V” marked his right cheek; others arced below his mouth and across his chin; an especially deep scar formed a crescent at the bottom of his left cheek. His overall appearance was striking, that of a damaged Ray Milland—a “cruel, broken beauty,” as Martha put it. His was the opposite of the bland handsomeness of the young Reichswehr officers, and she was drawn to him immediately, his “lovely” lips, his “jet-black luxuriant hair,” and his penetrating eyes.

  She was hardly alone in feeling this attraction. Diels was said to have great charm and to be sexually talented and experienced. As a student he had gained a reputation as a drinker and philanderer, according to Hans Bernd Gisevius, a Gestapo man who had been a student at the same university. “Involved affairs with women were a regular thing with him,” Gisevius wrote in a memoir. Men also acknowledged Diels’s charm and manner. When Kurt Ludecke, an early associate of Hitler’s, found himself under arrest and summoned to Diels’s office, he found the Gestapo chief unexpectedly cordial. “I felt at ease with this tall, slender, and polished young man, and found his consideration instantly comforting,” Ludecke wrote. “It was an occasion when good manners were doubly welcome.” He noted, “I went back to my cell feeling I’d rather be shot by a gentleman than drubbed by a churl.” Nonetheless, Ludecke ultimately wound up imprisoned, under “protective custody,” at a concentration camp in Brandenburg an der Havel.

  What Martha also found compelling about Diels was the fact that everyone else was afraid of him. He was often referred to as the “Prince of Darkness,” and, as Martha learned, he did not mind at all. “He took a vicious joy in his Mephistophelian manners and always wanted to create a hush by his melodramatic entrance.”

  Diels early on had allied himself closely with Göring, and when Hitler became chancellor, Göring, as the new Prussian minister of the interior, rewarded Diels’s loyalty by making him head of the newly created Gestapo, despite the fact that Diels was not a member of the Nazi Party. Göring installed the agency in an old art school at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8, roughly two blocks from the U.S. consulate on Bellevuestrasse. By the time of the Dodds’ arrival in Berlin, the Gestapo had become a terrifying presence, though it was hardly the all-knowing, all-seeing entity that people imagined it to be. Its roster of employees was “remarkably small,” according to historian Robert Gellately. He cites the example of the agency’s Düsseldorf branch, one of the few for which detailed records survive. It had 291 employees responsible for a territory encompassing four million people. Its agents, or “specialists,” were not the sociopaths of popular depiction, Gellately found. “Most of them were neither crazed, demented, nor superhuman, but terribly ordinary.”

  The Gestapo enhanced its dark image by keeping its operations and its sources of information secret. Out of the blue people received postcards requesting that they appear for questioning. These were uniquely terrifying. Despite their prosaic form, such summonses could not be discarded or ignored. They put citizens in the position of having to turn themselves in at that most terrifying of buildings to respond to charges of offenses about which they likely had no inkling, with the potential—often imagined but in many cases quite real—that by day’s end they would find themselves in a concentration camp, under “protective custody.” It was this accumulation of unknowns that made the Gestapo so fearsome. “One can evade a danger that one recognizes,” wrote historian Friedrich Zipfel, “but a police working in the dark becomes uncanny. Nowhere does one feel safe from it. While not omnipresent, it could appear, search, arrest. The worried citizen no longer knows whom he ought to trust.”

  Yet under Diels the Gestapo played a complex role. In the weeks following Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, Diels’s Gestapo acted as a curb against a wave of violence by the SA, during which Storm Troopers dragged thousands of victims to their makeshift prisons. Diels led raids to close them and found prisoners in appalling conditions, beaten and garishly bruised, limbs broken, near starvation, “like a mass of inanimate clay,” he wrote, “absurd puppets with lifeless eyes,
burning with fever, their bodies sagging.”

  Martha’s father liked Diels. To his surprise, he found the Gestapo chief to be a helpful intermediary for extracting foreign nationals and others from concentration camps and for exerting pressure on police authorities outside Berlin to find and punish the SA men responsible for attacks against Americans.

  Diels was no saint, however. During his tenure as chief, thousands of men and women were arrested, many tortured, some murdered. On Diels’s watch, for example, a German communist named Ernst Thälmann was imprisoned and interrogated at Gestapo headquarters. Thälmann left a vivid account. “They ordered me to take off my pants and then two men grabbed me by the back of the neck and placed me across a footstool. A uniformed Gestapo officer with a whip of hippopotamus hide in his hand then beat my buttocks with measured strokes. Driven wild with pain I repeatedly screamed at the top of my voice.”

  In Diels’s view, violence and terror were valuable tools for the preservation of political power. During a gathering of foreign correspondents at Putzi Hanfstaengl’s home, Diels told the reporters, “The value of the SA and the SS, seen from my viewpoint of inspector-general responsible for the suppression of subversive tendencies and activities, lies in the fact that they spread terror. That is a wholesome thing.”

  MARTHA AND DIELS TOOK walks together in the Tiergarten, which was fast becoming recognized as the one place in central Berlin where a person could feel at ease. Martha especially loved strolling through the park in autumn, amid what she termed “the golden death of the Tiergarten.” They went to movies and nightclubs and drove for hours through the countryside. That they became lovers seems likely, despite the fact that both were married, Martha in technical terms only, Diels in name only, given his penchant for adultery. Martha loved being known as the woman who slept with the devil—and that she did sleep with him seems beyond doubt, though it is equally likely that Dodd, like naive fathers everywhere and in every time, had no idea. Messersmith suspected it, and so did Raymond Geist, his second in command. Geist complained to Wilbur Carr, head of consular services in Washington, that Martha was a “most indiscreet” young lady who had been “in the habit of constantly going about at night with the head of the Nazi Secret Police, a married man.” Geist himself had heard her call Diels, in public, a variety of affectionate names, among them “dearie.”