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

by Erik Larson

  Until now.

  Göring was due at any moment. Famously volatile and outspoken, given to flamboyant dress and always seeking attention, Göring was expected to add spark to the trial. The chamber filled with the wheeze of shifting flannel and mohair as people turned to look back toward the entrance.

  A half hour passed, and still Göring did not appear. Diels too was nowhere in sight.

  To pass the time, Martha watched the defendants. There was Ernst Torgler, a Communist Party deputy to the Reichstag before Hitler’s ascension, looking pale and tired. Three were Bulgarian communists—Georgi Dimitrov, Simon Popov, and Vassili Tanev—who “looked wiry, tough, indifferent.” The key defendant, van der Lubbe, presented “one of the most awful sights I have yet seen in human form. Big, bulky, sub-human face and body, he was so repulsive and degenerate that I could scarcely bear to look at him.”

  An hour elapsed. The tension in the room grew still greater as impatience and expectation merged.

  A clamor arose at the back of the room—boots and commands, as Göring and Diels entered amid a spearhead of uniformed men. Göring, forty years old, 250 pounds or more, strode confidently to the front of the room in a brown hunting jacket, jodhpurs, and gleaming brown boots that came to his knees. None of it could mask his great girth or the resemblance he bore to “the hind end of an elephant,” as one U.S. diplomat described him. Diels, in a handsome dark suit, was like a slender shadow.

  “Everyone jumped up as if electrified,” a Swiss reporter observed, “and all Germans, including the judges, raised their arms to give the Hitler salute.”

  Diels and Göring stood together at the front of the chamber, very near Martha. The two men spoke quietly.

  The presiding judge invited Göring to speak. Göring stepped forward. He appeared pompous and arrogant, Martha recalled, but she sensed also a subcurrent of unease.

  Göring launched into a prepared harangue that lasted nearly three hours. In a voice hard and coarse, rising now and then to a shout, he raged against communism, the defendants, and the act of arson they had perpetrated against Germany. Cries of “Bravo!” and loud applause filled the chamber.

  “With one hand he gestured wildly,” wrote Hans Gisevius in his Gestapo memoir; “with the perfumed handkerchief in his other hand he wiped the perspiration from his brow.” Attempting to capture a sense of the moment, Gisevius described the faces of the three most important actors in the room—“Dimitrov’s full of scorn, Göring’s contorted with rage, Presiding Judge Bünger’s pale with fright.”

  And there was Diels, sleek, dark, his expression unreadable. Diels had helped interrogate van der Lubbe on the night of the fire and concluded that the suspect was a “madman” who had indeed set the fire all by himself. Hitler and Göring, however, had immediately decided that the Communist Party was behind it and that the fire was the opening blow of a larger uprising. On that first night Diels had watched Hitler’s face grow purple with rage as he cried that every communist official and deputy was to be shot. The order was rescinded, replaced by mass arrests and impromptu acts of Storm Trooper violence.

  Now Diels stood with one elbow against the judge’s bench. From time to time he changed position as if to get a better view of Göring. Martha became convinced that Diels had planned Göring’s performance, perhaps even written his speech. She recalled that Diels had been “especially anxious to have me present on this day, almost as if he were showing off his own craftsmanship.”

  Diels had warned against holding a trial of anyone other than van der Lubbe and had predicted the acquittal of the other defendants. Göring had failed to listen, although he did recognize what lay at stake. “A botch,” Göring had acknowledged, “could have intolerable consequences.”

  NOW DIMITROV ROSE TO SPEAK. Wielding sarcasm and quiet logic, he clearly hoped to ignite Göring’s famed temper. He charged that the police investigation of the fire and the initial court review of the evidence had been influenced by political directives from Göring, “thus preventing the apprehension of the real incendiaries.”

  “If the police were allowed to be influenced in a particular direction,” Göring said, “then, in any case, they were only influenced in the proper direction.”

  “That is your opinion,” Dimitrov countered. “My opinion is quite different.”

  Göring snapped, “But mine is the one that counts.”

  Dimitrov pointed out that communism, which Göring had called a “criminal mentality,” controlled the Soviet Union, which “has diplomatic, political and economic contacts with Germany. Her orders provide work for hundreds of thousands of German workers. Does the Minister know that?”

  “Yes I do,” Göring said. But such debate, he said, was beside the point. “Here, I am only concerned with the Communist Party of Germany and with the foreign communist crooks who come here to set the Reichstag on fire.”

  The two continued sparring, with the presiding judge now and then interceding to warn Dimitrov against “making communist propaganda.”

  Göring, unaccustomed to challenge from anyone he deemed an inferior, grew angrier by the moment.

  Dimitrov calmly observed, “You are greatly afraid of my questions, are you not, Herr Minister?”

  At this Göring lost control. He shouted, “You will be afraid when I catch you. You wait till I get you out of the power of the court, you crook!”

  The judge ordered Dimitrov expelled; the audience erupted in applause; but it was Göring’s closing threat that made headlines. The moment was revealing in two ways—first, because it betrayed Göring’s fear that Dimitrov might indeed be acquitted, and second, because it provided a knife-slash glimpse into the irrational, lethal heart of Göring and the Hitler regime.

  The day also caused a further erosion of Martha’s sympathy for the Nazi revolution. Göring had been arrogant and threatening, Dimitrov cool and charismatic. Martha was impressed. Dimitrov, she wrote, was “a brilliant, attractive, dark man emanating the most amazing vitality and courage I have yet seen in a person under stress. He was alive, he was burning.”

  THE TRIAL SETTLED back into its previous bloodless state, but the damage had been done. The Swiss reporter, like dozens of other foreign correspondents in the room, recognized that Göring’s outburst had transformed the proceeding: “For the world had been told that, no matter whether the accused was sentenced or acquitted by the Court, his fate had already been sealed.”

  CHAPTER 23

  Boris Dies Again

  As winter neared, Martha focused her romantic energies primarily on Boris. They logged hundreds of miles in his Ford convertible, with forays into the countryside all around Berlin.

  On one such drive Martha spotted an artifact of the old Germany, a roadside shrine to Jesus, and insisted they stop for a closer look. She found within a particularly graphic rendition of the Crucifixion. The face of Jesus was contorted in an expression of agony, his wounds garish with blood. After a few moments, she glanced back at Boris. Though she never would have described herself as terribly religious, she was shocked by what she saw.

  Boris stood with his arms stretched out, his ankles crossed, and his head drooping to his chest.

  “Boris, stop it,” she snapped. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m dying for you, darling. I am willing to, you know.”

  She declared his parody not funny and stepped away.

  Boris apologized. “I didn’t mean to offend you,” he said. “But I can’t understand why Christians adore the sight of a tortured man.”

  That wasn’t the point, she said. “They adore his sacrifice for his beliefs.”

  “Oh, do they really?” he said. “Do you believe that? Are there so many ready to die for their beliefs, following his example?”

  She cited Dimitrov and his bravery in standing up to Göring at the Reichstag trial.

  Boris gave her an angelic smile. “Yes, liebes Fräulein, but he was a communist.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Getting Out th
e Vote

  On Sunday morning, November 12—cold, with drizzle and fog—the Dodds encountered a city that seemed uncannily quiet, given that this was the day Hitler had designated for the public referendum on his decision to leave the League of Nations and to seek equality of armaments. Everywhere the Dodds went they saw people wearing little badges that indicated not only that they had voted but that they had voted yes. By midday nearly everyone on the streets seemed to be wearing such insignia, suggesting that voters had arisen early in order to get the deed done and thereby avoid the danger almost certain to arise if they were perceived to have failed in their civic duty.

  Even the date of the election had been chosen with care. November 12 was the day after the fifteenth anniversary of the signing of the armistice that ended the Great War. Hitler, who flew around Germany campaigning for a positive vote, told one audience, “On an eleventh of November the German people formally lost its honor; fifteen years later came a twelfth of November and then the German people restored its honor to itself.” President Hindenburg too lobbied for a positive vote. “Show tomorrow your firm national unity and your solidarity with the government,” he said in a speech on November 11. “Support with me and the Reich Chancellor the principle of equal rights and of peace with honor.”

  The ballot had two main components. One asked Germans to elect delegates to a newly reconstituted Reichstag but offered only Nazi candidates and thus guaranteed that the resulting body would be a cheering section for Hitler’s decisions. The other, the foreign-policy question, had been composed to ensure maximum support. Every German could find a reason to justify voting yes—if he wanted peace, if he felt the Treaty of Versailles had wronged Germany, if he believed Germany ought to be treated as an equal by other nations, or if he simply wished to express his support for Hitler and his government.

  Hitler wanted a resounding endorsement. Throughout Germany, the Nazi Party apparatus took extraordinary measures to get people to vote. One report held that patients confined to hospital beds were transported to polling places on stretchers. Victor Klemperer, the Jewish philologist in Berlin, took note in his diary of the “extravagant propaganda” to win a yes vote. “On every commercial vehicle, post office van, mailman’s bicycle, on every house and shopwindow, on broad banners, which are stretched across the street—quotations from Hitler are everywhere and always ‘Yes’ for peace! It is the most monstrous of hypocrisies.”

  Party men and the SA monitored who voted and who did not; laggards got a visit from a squad of Storm Troopers who emphasized the desirability of an immediate trip to the polls. For anyone dense enough to miss the point, there was this item in the Sunday-morning edition of the official Nazi newspaper, Völkischer Beobachter: “In order to bring about clarity it must be repeated again. He who does not attach himself to us today, he who does not vote and vote ‘yes’ today, shows that he is, if not our bloody enemy, at least a product of destruction and that he is no more to be helped.”

  Here was the kicker: “It would be better for him and it would be better for us if he no longer existed.”

  Some 45.1 million Germans were qualified to vote, and 96.5 percent did so. Of these, 95.1 percent voted in favor of Hitler’s foreign policy. More interesting, however, was the fact that 2.1 million Germans—just shy of 5 percent of the registered electorate—made the dangerous decision to vote no.

  Hitler issued a proclamation afterward thanking the German people for the “historically unique acknowledgment they have made in favor of real love of peace, at the same time also their claim to our honor and to our eternal equal rights.”

  The outcome was clear to Dodd well before the votes were counted. He wrote to Roosevelt, “The election here is a farce.”

  Nothing indicated this more clearly than the vote within the camp at Dachau: 2,154 of 2,242 prisoners—96 percent—voted in favor of Hitler’s government. On the fate of the 88 souls who either failed to vote or voted no, history is silent.

  ON MONDAY, NOVEMBER 13, President Roosevelt took a few moments to compose a letter to Dodd. He complimented him on his letters thus far and, in an apparent allusion to Dodd’s concerns after his interview with Hitler, told Dodd, “I am glad you have been frank with certain people. I think that is a good thing.”

  He mused on an observation by columnist Walter Lippmann that a mere 8 percent of the world’s population, meaning Germany and Japan, was able “because of imperialistic attitude” to prevent peace and disarmament for the rest of the world.

  “I sometimes feel,” the president wrote, “that the world problems are getting worse instead of better. In our own country, however, in spite of sniping, ‘chiseling’ and growling by the extreme right and by the extreme left, we are actually putting people back to work and raising values.”

  He closed with a jovial “Keep up the good work!”

  IN WASHINGTON, SECRETARY HULL and other senior officials, including Undersecretary Phillips, spent the first half of the month consumed by planning for the impending visit of Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet commissar for foreign affairs, who was to begin discussions with Roosevelt aimed at U.S. recognition of the Soviet Union. The idea was deeply unpopular with America’s isolationists, but Roosevelt saw important strategic benefits, such as opening Russia to American investment and helping check Japanese ambitions in Asia. The “Roosevelt-Litvinov conversations,” often difficult and frustrating for both parties, ultimately resulted in Roosevelt’s asserting formal recognition on November 16, 1933.

  Seven days later, Dodd once again put on his cutaway and stovepipe and paid his first official visit to the Soviet embassy. An Associated Press photographer asked for a picture of Dodd standing beside his Soviet counterpart. The Russian was willing, but Dodd begged off, fearing “that certain reactionary papers in America would exaggerate the fact of my call and repeat their attacks upon Roosevelt for his recognition.”

  CHAPTER 25

  The Secret Boris

  Now Martha and Boris felt freer about revealing their relationship to the world, though both recognized that discretion was still necessary given the continuing disapproval of Boris’s superiors and Martha’s parents. Their affair grew steadily more serious, despite Martha’s efforts to keep things light and noncommittal. She continued to see Armand Berard of the French embassy, and possibly Diels, and to accept dates from potential new suitors, and this drove Boris wild with jealousy. He sent a blizzard of notes, flowers, and music and telephoned her repeatedly. “I wanted to love him only lightly,” Martha wrote, in an unpublished account; “I tried to treat him as casually as I did other friends. I forced myself to be indifferent to him one week; then the next, I became stupidly jealous. I was forgetful of him, then absorbed in him. It was an unbearable contradiction, grievous and frustrating to us both.”

  Martha was still committed to seeing the best in the Nazi revolution, but Boris had no illusions about what was occurring around them. To Martha’s irritation, he was always looking for the underlying motives that governed the actions of Nazi leaders and the various figures who visited the U.S. embassy.

  “You always see the bad things,” she said angrily. “You should try to see the positive things in Germany, and in our visitors, not always suspect them of ulterior motives.”

  She suggested that at times he too was guilty of hiding his motives—“I think you’re jealous of Armand,” she said, “or anyone else who takes me out.”

  The next day, she received a package from Boris. Inside she found three ceramic monkeys and a card that read, “See no Evil, Hear no Evil, Speak no Evil.” Boris closed the note: “I love you.”

  Martha laughed. In return, she sent him a small carved-wood figure of a nun, along with a note that assured him she was following the monkeys’ orders.

  Behind it all was that looming question: where could their relationship possibly go? “I could not bear to think of the future, either with or without him,” she wrote. “I loved my family, my country, and did not want to face the possibility of sepa
ration from either.”

  This tension led to misunderstandings and grief. Boris suffered.

  “Martha!” he wrote in one pain-flushed letter. “I am so sad that I cannot find the right words for everything that happened. Forgive me if I have done something mean or bad to you. I did not mean or wish to do so. I understand you, but not completely, and I do not know what I ought to do. What shall I do?

  “Farewell, Martha, be happy without me, and do not think bad about me.”

  Always they came back together. Each separation seemed to intensify their attraction all the more but also amplified the moments of misunderstanding and anger—until one Sunday afternoon in late November their relationship underwent a material change. She recalled it all in fine-grained detail.

  A bleak day, the sky like smudged charcoal, the air cold, but not so cold as to prompt Boris to raise the top on his Ford. They set out for a cozy restaurant they both loved that was housed in a boathouse on pilings over a lake in the Wannsee district. A fragrant pine forest walled the shoreline.

  They found the restaurant to be almost empty but still charming. Wood tables surrounded a small dance floor. When the jukebox wasn’t playing, the sound of water gently smacking the pilings outside was clearly audible.

  Martha ordered onion soup, salad, and beer; Boris chose vodka, shashlik, and herring immersed in sour cream and onions. And more vodka. Boris loved food, Martha noted, but never seemed to gain ein Pfund.