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

by Erik Larson

  The deal was of incalculable value to Hitler, for now he could go forward without having to worry about where the army stood.

  Röhm, meanwhile, became increasingly insistent on winning control over the nation’s armed forces. In April, during one of his morning rides in the Tiergarten, he watched a group of senior Nazis pass by, then turned to a companion. “Look at those people over there,” he said. “The Party isn’t a political force anymore; it’s turning into an old-age home. People like that … We’ve got to get rid of them quickly.”

  He grew bolder about airing his displeasure. At a press conference on April 18, he said, “Reactionaries, bourgeois conformists, we feel like vomiting when we think of them.”

  He declared, “The SA is the National Socialist Revolution.”

  Two days later, however, a government announcement seemed to undercut Röhm’s declarations of self-importance: the entire SA had been ordered to go on leave for the month of July.

  ON APRIL 22, Heinrich Himmler appointed his young protégé Reinhard Heydrich, newly thirty, to fill Diels’s job as chief of the Gestapo. Heydrich was blond, tall, slim, and considered handsome, save for a head described as disproportionately narrow and eyes spaced too closely. He spoke in a near falsetto that was perversely out of step with his reputation for being coolly and utterly ruthless. Hitler dubbed him “the Man with the Iron Heart,” and yet Heydrich was said to play the violin with such passion that he would weep as he executed certain passages. Throughout his career he would battle rumors that he was in fact Jewish, despite an investigation by the Nazi Party that purported to find no truth to the allegation.

  With Diels gone, the last trace of civility left the Gestapo. Hans Gisevius, the Gestapo memoirist, recognized at once that under Himmler and Heydrich the organization would undergo a change of character. “I could very well venture combat with Diels, the unsteady playboy who, conscious of being a bourgeois renegade, had a good many inhibitions holding him back from foul play,” Gisevius wrote. “But as soon as Himmler and Heydrich entered the arena I should have prudently withdrawn.”

  TOWARD THE END OF APRIL the government at last revealed to the public the grave state of Hindenburg’s health. Suddenly the question of who would succeed him became a matter of pressing conversation everywhere. All who were aware of the deepening split between Röhm and Hitler understood that a new element of suspense now propelled the narrative.

  CHAPTER 37

  Watchers

  While all this was occurring, another nation’s spies became interested in the Dodds. By April, Martha’s relationship with Boris had caught the interest of his superiors in the NKVD. They sensed a rare opportunity. “Tell Boris Winogradov that we want to use him to carry out a project that interests us,” one wrote in a message to the agency’s Berlin chief.

  Somehow—possibly through Boris—Moscow had come to understand that Martha’s infatuation with the Nazi revolution was beginning to wane.

  The message continued: “It has to do with the fact that, according to our information, the sentiments of his acquaintance (Martha Dodd) have fully ripened for her to be recruited once and for all to work for us.”

  CHAPTER 38

  Humbugged

  What most troubled Dodd during his leave was his sense that his opponents in the State Department were growing more aggressive. He became concerned about what he saw as a pattern of disclosures of confidential information that seemed aimed at undermining his standing. A troubling incident occurred on the night of Saturday, April 14, as he was leaving the annual Gridiron Club dinner in Washington. A young State Department officer, whom he did not know, approached him and began a conversation in which he openly challenged Dodd’s appraisal of conditions in Germany, citing a confidential dispatch the ambassador had cabled from Berlin. The young man was much taller than Dodd and stood very close in a manner Dodd found physically intimidating. In an angry letter that Dodd planned to hand in person to Secretary Hull, he described the encounter as “an intentional affront.”

  Most distressing to Dodd, however, was the question of how the young man had gotten access to his dispatch. “It is my opinion,” Dodd wrote, “… that there is a group somewhere in the Department who think of themselves and not the country and who, upon the slightest effort of any ambassador or minister to economize and improve, begin consorting together to discredit and defeat him. This is the third or fourth time entirely confidential information I have given has been treated as gossip—or made gossip. I am not in the service for any personal or social gain and/or status; I am ready to do anything possible for better work and co-operation; but I do not wish to work alone or become the object of constant intrigue and maneuver. I shall not resign, however, in silence, if this sort of thing continues.”

  Dodd decided not to give the letter to Hull after all. It ended up filed among papers he identified as “undelivered.”

  What Dodd apparently did not yet know was that he and fifteen other ambassadors had been the subject of a major article in the April 1934 issue of Fortune magazine. Despite the article’s prominence and the fact that it must surely have been a topic of rabid conversation within the State Department, Dodd only learned of its existence much later, after his return to Berlin, when Martha brought home a copy she had received during an appointment with her Berlin dentist.

  Entitled “Their Excellencies, Our Ambassadors,” the article identified the appointees and indicated their personal wealth by placing dollar signs next to their names. Jesse Isidor Straus—ambassador to France and former president of R. H. Macy & Company—was identified as “$$$$ Straus.” Dodd had a single “¢” next to his name. The article poked fun at his cheapskate approach to diplomacy and suggested that in renting his Berlin house at a discount from a Jewish banker he was seeking to profit from the plight of Germany’s Jews. “So,” the article stated, “the Dodds got a nice little house very cheap and managed to run it with only a few servants.” The article noted that Dodd had brought his weary old Chevrolet to Berlin. “His son was supposed to run it for him evenings,” the writer said. “But the son wanted to go the places and do the things sons have a habit of doing, and that left Mr. Dodd chauffeurless (though top-hatted) in his Chevrolet.” Dodd, the article claimed, was left having to cadge rides from junior embassy officers, “the luckier of them in their chauffeured limousines.”

  The writer called Dodd “a square academic peg in a round diplomatic hole” who was hampered by his relative poverty and lack of diplomatic aplomb. “Morally a very courageous person, he is so intellectual, so divorced from run-of-mine human beings, that he talks in parables, as one gentleman and scholar to another; and the brown-shirted brethren of blood and steel can’t understand him even when they care to. So Dodd boils inwardly, and when he tries to get tough, nobody pays much attention.”

  It was immediately clear to Dodd that one or more officials within the State Department and perhaps even his office in Berlin had revealed fine-grained details of his life in Germany. Dodd complained to Undersecretary Phillips. The article, he wrote, “reveals a strange and even unpatriotic attitude, so far as my record and efforts here are concerned. In my letter of acceptance I said to the president that it must be understood I was to live on my salary income. How and why so much discussion of this simple and obvious fact for me?” He cited diplomats from history who had lived modestly. “Why all this condemnation of my following such examples?” He told Phillips that he suspected people within his own embassy were leaking information and cited other news accounts that had carried distorted reports. “How all these false stories and no reference to real services I have attempted to render?”

  Phillips waited nearly a month to respond. “With regard to that article in Fortune,” he wrote, “I would not give it another thought. I cannot imagine where the information to which you refer came from any more than I can imagine how the Press gets hold of gossip (usually erroneous) in regard to myself and other colleagues of yours.” He urged Dodd, “Don’t let this part
icular item disturb you in the least.”

  DODD DID GET to spend a little time in the Library of Congress doing research for his Old South and managed to carve out two weeks on his farm, where he wrote and tended farm matters, and he was able to travel to Chicago as planned, but this did not yield the pleasant reencounter he had anticipated. “Once there,” he wrote to Martha, “everybody wanted to see me: telephones, letters, visits, luncheons, dinners all the time.” He fielded many inquiries about her and her brother, he wrote, “but only one about your problem in New York,” meaning her divorce. A friend wanted to show him examples of “how decently Chicago papers treated it,” but, he wrote, “I did not care to read clippings.” He gave speeches and resolved faculty squabbles. In his diary he noted that he also met with two Jewish leaders whom he had contacted previously in fulfilling Roosevelt’s directive to damp Jewish protest. The two men described “how they and their friends had calmed their fellows and prevented any violent demonstrations in Chicago as planned.”

  A personal crisis intruded. While in Chicago Dodd received a telegram relaying a message from his wife. After enduring the inevitable spasm of anxiety that telegrams from loved ones sparked, Dodd read that his old Chevy, icon of his ambassadorship, had been totaled by his chauffeur. The kicker: “THEREFORE HOPE YOU CAN BRING NEW CAR.”

  So now Dodd, while on his supposedly restorative leave, was being asked in the matter-of-fact language of telegraphy to buy a new car and arrange for its shipping to Berlin.

  He wrote to Martha later, “I fear Mueller was driving carelessly, as I noted several times before I came away.” Dodd could not understand it. He himself had driven between his farm and Washington, D.C., many times and had driven all over the city without ever having an accident. “While this may prove nothing, it suggests something. People who do not own the car are far less careful than those who do.” In light of what was to happen a few years hence, Dodd’s crowing about his own driving prowess can only raise a chill. He wanted a Buick but deemed the price—$1,350—too much to spend given the limited time his family expected to stay in Berlin. He also worried about the $100 he would have to pay to ship the car to Germany.

  Ultimately he got his Buick. He instructed his wife to buy it from a dealer in Berlin. The car, he wrote, was a basic model that his embassy protocol experts disparaged as “ridiculously simple for an Ambassador.”

  DODD WAS ABLE to make one more visit to his farm, which cheered him but also made his final departure all the more painful. “This was a beautiful day,” he wrote in his diary on Sunday, May 6, 1934. “The budding trees and the apple blooms were most appealing, especially since I must leave.”

  Three days later, Dodd’s ship sailed from New York. He felt he had achieved a victory in getting Jewish leaders to agree to ease the intensity of their protests against Germany and hoped his efforts would bring further moderation on the part of Hitler’s government. These hopes were chilled, however, when on Saturday, May 12, while in midocean, he got word via wireless of a speech just delivered by Goebbels in which the propaganda minister called Jews “the syphilis of all European peoples.”

  Dodd felt betrayed. Despite Nazi promises about arrest warrants and closure of the Columbia House prison, clearly nothing had changed. He feared that now he appeared naive. He wrote to Roosevelt of his dismay, after all the work he had done with American Jewish leaders. Goebbels’s speech had rekindled “all the animosities of the preceding winter,” he wrote, “and I was put in the position of having been humbugged, as indeed I was.”

  He reached Berlin on Thursday, May 17, at 10:30 p.m. and found a changed city. During his two months away, drought had browned the landscape to a degree he had never seen before, but there was something else. “I was delighted to be home,” he wrote, “but the tense atmosphere was revealed at once.”

  PART VI

  Berlin at Dusk

  Göring’s bedroom at Carinhall (photo credit p6.1)

  CHAPTER 39

  Dangerous Dining

  The city seemed to vibrate with a background thrum of danger, as if an immense power line had been laid through its center. Everyone in Dodd’s circle felt it. Partly this tension arose from the unusual May weather and the concomitant fears of a failed harvest, but the main engine of anxiety was the intensifying discord between Captain Röhm’s Storm Troopers and the regular army. A popular metaphor used at the time to describe the atmosphere in Berlin was that of an approaching thunderstorm—that sense of charged and suspended air.

  Dodd had little chance to settle back into the rhythms of work.

  The day after his return from America, he faced the prospect of hosting a giant good-bye banquet for Messersmith, who had at last managed to secure for himself a loftier post, though not in Prague, his original target. Competition for that job had been robust, and although Messersmith had lobbied hard and persuaded allies of all stripes to write letters to bolster his bid, in the end the job went to someone else. Instead, Undersecretary Phillips had offered Messersmith another vacant post: Uruguay. If Messersmith had been disappointed, he had not shown it. He had counted himself lucky simply to be leaving the consular service behind. But then his luck had gotten better still. The post of ambassador to Austria suddenly had become vacant, and Messersmith was the obvious choice for the job. Roosevelt agreed. Now Messersmith truly was delighted. So too was Dodd, just to have him gone, though he’d have preferred to have him at the other side of the world.

  There were many parties for Messersmith—for a time every dinner and luncheon in Berlin seemed to be in his honor—but the U.S. embassy’s banquet on May 18 was the biggest and most official. While Dodd was in America, Mrs. Dodd, with the assistance of embassy protocol experts, had overseen the creation of a four-page, single-spaced list of guests that seemed to include everyone of import, except Hitler. To anyone knowledgeable about Berlin society, the real fascination was not who attended, but who did not. Göring and Goebbels sent their regrets, as did Vice-Chancellor Papen and Rudolf Diels. Defense Minister Blomberg came, but not SA chief Röhm.

  Bella Fromm attended, and so did Sigrid Schultz and various of Martha’s friends, including Putzi Hanfstaengl, Armand Berard, and Prince Louis Ferdinand. This mixture by itself added to the aura of tension in the room, for Berard still loved Martha and Prince Louis mooned for her, though her adoration remained utterly fixed on Boris (absent, interestingly, from the invitation list). Martha’s handsome young Hitler liaison, Hans “Tommy” Thomsen, came, as did his ofttimes companion, the dark and lushly beautiful Elmina Rangabe, but there was a hitch this night—Tommy brought his wife. There was heat, champagne, passion, jealousy, and that background sense of something unpleasant building just over the horizon.

  Bella Fromm chatted briefly with Hanfstaengl and recorded the encounter in her diary.

  “I wonder why we were asked today,” Hanfstaengl said. “All this excitement about Jews. Messersmith is one. So is Roosevelt. The party detests them.”

  “Dr. Hanfstaengl,” Fromm said, “we’ve discussed this before. You don’t have to put on that kind of an act with me.”

  “All right. Even if they are Aryan, you’d never know it from their actions.”

  At the moment Fromm was not feeling particularly solicitous of Nazi goodwill. Two weeks earlier her daughter, Gonny, had left for America, with Messersmith’s help, leaving Fromm saddened but relieved. A week before that, the newspaper Vossische Zeitung—“Auntie Voss,” where she had worked for years—had closed. She felt more and more that an epoch in which she once had thrived was coming to an end.

  She said to Hanfstaengl, “Of course if you’re going to do away with right and wrong, and make it Aryan and non-Aryan, it leaves people who happen to have rather old-fashioned notions about what is right and wrong, what is decent and what is obscene, without much ground to stand on.”

  She turned the conversation back to the subject of Messersmith, whom she described as being so revered by his colleagues “that he is practically regarded as
having ambassadorial rank,” a remark that would have irritated Dodd no end.

  Hanfstaengl softened his voice. “All right, all right,” he said. “I have lots of friends in the United States, and all of them side with the Jews, too. But since it is insisted on in the party program—” He stopped there in a kind of verbal shrug. He reached into his pocket, and pulled out a small bag of candy fruit drops. Lutschbonbons. Bella had loved them as a child.

  “Have one,” Hanfstaengl said. “They are made especially for the Führer.”

  She chose one. Just before she popped it into her mouth she saw that it was embossed with a swastika. Even fruit drops had been “coordinated.”

  The conversation turned to the political warfare that was causing so much unease. Hanfstaengl told her that Röhm coveted control not only of the German army but also of Göring’s air force. “Hermann is in a rage!” Hanfstaengl said. “You can do anything to him except fool around with his Luftwaffe, and he could murder Röhm in cold blood.” He asked: “Do you know Himmler?”

  Fromm nodded.

  Hanfstaengl said, “He was a chicken farmer, when he wasn’t on duty spying for the Reichswehr. He kicked Diels out of the Gestapo. Himmler can’t stand anybody, but Röhm least of all. Now they’re all ganged up against Röhm: Rosenberg, Goebbels, and the chicken farmer.” The Rosenberg he mentioned was Alfred Rosenberg, an ardent anti-Semite and head of the Nazi Party’s foreign bureau.

  After recounting the conversation in her diary, Fromm added, “There is nobody among the officials of the National Socialist party who would not cheerfully cut the throat of every other official in order to further his own advancement.”