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

I’ve ventured off-genre to this nonfiction work about one of the great crimes of all times, the ascension of Hitler to power during 1933 and 1934. Eric Larsen, author of The Devil in the White City, wrote a story about the first U.S. Ambassador to Nazi Germany, William E. Dodd and his daughter Martha. William Dodd was the chairman of the history department at the University of Chicago when he was offered the post of Ambassador to Germany. He was not FDR’s first choice for the position, nor the second, and he had never previously served as a diplomat. In Chicago, Dodd had a rich intellectual life and was surrounded by such people as Carl Sandburg and Thornton Wilder, and Dodd was in the midst of writing a definitive history of the American South. But, Dodd was frustrated that his own career had stalled and he was ready for a bigger adventure.

Hitler had already ascended to the position of Chancellor, but with President Hindenburg still alive, Hitler had yet to consolidate his power – but that occurred early in Dodd’s four-year tenure in the post. Dodd was not from the wealthy elite types who were usually given such posts. Rather, he was stodgy, frugal and professorial, and he was looked askance by many in the State Department. Meanwhile, 24-year-old Martha, who was escaping from a dead marriage, had significant sexual appetites which she exercised indiscriminately, scandalously. As the result of one of her trysts with a Russian, at the same time her father was serving as the ambassador, it appears she became a minor agent with the NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB.

There were some remarkable accounts of the face-to-face contacts between Dodd and Hitler, and even one between Martha and Hitler. While the book spanned the life of the Dodd family, the primary focus was just one year leading up to Hitler’s first major purge known as “The Night of the Long Knives” on July 13, 1934, which was only a few weeks before Hindenburg’s death. When Hitler triumphantly accepted responsibility for the purge of what must have been hundreds of people, all killed or sentenced to die within a 24-hour period, Larsen wrote that Hitler was received with resounding cheers from the populace of Germany. Over the years, I had come to the opinion that through the mid 1930s, Germans were largely ignorant of Hitler’s evil doings, but Larsen would have us believe otherwise. And, even after the deadly purge, there was little condemnation that came towards Germany from the rest of the world. Larsen wrote that this purge was “one of the most important episodes in his ascent, the first act in the great tragedy of appeasement. Initially, however, its significant was lost. No government recalled its ambassador or filed a protest; the populace did not rise in revulsion.”

One of the themes that Larsen put forward was that the U.S. was more concerned about not offending Germany so that the country would continue to repay it’s WWI debts to many U.S. creditors. But Dodd knew that repayment would not happen since Germany did not have the money to do so. Larsen asked what was so terrifying that Roosevelt and other world leaders did not stand up to Hitler sooner, and he suggests that the behind-the-scene bankers had much to do with that. This was a good read, as well written as Larsen’s wonderful book about the Chicago World’s Fair, and it consolidated my own understanding of the events in Europe in the pre-WWII years.