Erik Larson's thought-provoking non-fiction work IN THE GARDEN OF BEASTS reads like a novel. It tells the story of William E Dodd, appointed by President Franklin D Roosevelt as the American ambassador to Berlin in 1933 - at the time when Hitler was consolidating his powers and the Nazi menace was just beginning to get its stranglehold on Germany. Above, the enforced boycotting of Jewish businesses - here the famous Tietz Department Store in Berlin - was an early portent of things to come.
One of the main problems facing an American ambassador in Germany at the time was the need to get the German government to start paying back $1.2 billion in loans that the US had extended to them. That's one of the reasons that some of Roosevelt's choices for the job had turned it down.
Roosevelt reportedly joked: "It would serve Hitler right if I sent a Jew to Berlin." The pro-Jewish FDR presidency was sometimes referred to as 'the Rosenberg administration'. Anti-Semitism was widespread in the USA at the time, though rarely publicly expressed. 40% of the population felt that the Jews "had too much power in the USA" while 20% actually wanted them driven out of the country. The majority of Americans were against raising immigration quotas to accommodate Jews fleeing the signs of impending danger in Europe. 95% of Americans were also opposed to any US involvement in another foreign war.
William Dodd had no diplomatic experience; he was a scholar writing a four-volume book about the Old South when the President - having ticked preferred names off his list - offered Dodd the Berlin post. Dodd had lived and studied in Leipzig and it was thought that his German-language skills would be a plus. Dodd reluctantly accepted Roosevelt's urgent plea and he embarked for Germany on July 5, 1933 with his wife and his two grown children.
Arriving in Berlin, Dodd and his family installed themselves in rather modest quarters eschewing the more grandiose life style favored by most emissaries to Berlin. They found the city charming, and on the surface saw no signs of the rumored violence and thuggery of the rising Nazi movement.
Martha, Dodd's daughter (above), was something of a beauty. Her circle of friends in the US included Thornton Wilder and Carl Sandburg; she continued to correspond with them from Berlin. She entered enthusiastically into the city's social whirl and was soon meeting and even dating prominent Nazis; she had an on-going affair with Rudolf Diels, head of the Gestapo.
But one day, on an holiday excursion to Nuremberg, Martha and her friends observed the upsetting humiliation of a young woman, Anna Rath, being dragged nearly naked and head-shaven, thru the streets by a gang of brown-shirted SA troopers. Around her neck was hung a sign: "I wanted to marry a Jew!"
As an increasing number of such incidents developed, some involving even Americans who were either Jewish or mistaken for Jews, Dodd found himself slowly becoming disillusioned. There were beatings, arrests, people removed into "protective custody" in the dead of night. The rights, privileges and property of Jews were being systematically taken away. If Dodd lodged formal protests, they were met with apologies and promises from government officials that the culprits would be punished. But the downward spiral continued.
Martha meanwhile became more aware of the machinations and graspings for power among the Nazi leaders when her lover Diels was briefly exiled over a conflict with Heinrich Himmler. One prominent Nazi went so far as to suggest that Martha would be "the perfect woman for Hitler" but then went on to say that the Fuhrer was "an absolute neuter, not a man..."
It was finally the Night of Long Knives in July 1934 that made Dodd realize there was no stopping the Nazi behemoth. The US government was as unhappy with Dodd's work in Berlin as he was in being so far from his beloved farm in Virginia and his languishing writing project. Twice Dodd had returned to his farm for sabbaticals; as 1937 came to a close it was mutually agreed between him and Roosevelt that the ambassadorship was ill-suited to Dodd. He suddenly 'retired', vanishing from the Berlin scene with little fanfare.
Upon hearing of Dodd's departure, a Nazi official chided "the retiring ambassador's habitual lack of comprehension of the new Germany."
In 1938, Dodd summarized his view of the Germany he had experienced as being of a time and place where "all the people who might oppose the regime have been absolutely silenced. The central idea behind it is to make the rising generation worship their chief and get ready to 'save civilization' from the Jews, from Communism and from democracy -- thus preparing the way for a Nazified world where all freedom of the individual, of education, and of the churches is to be totally suppressed."
Dodd died in 1940 having finished only one volume of his book, Old South.