In the Garden of Beasts

An American physician working in Berlin, Joseph Schachno, appears at the American consulate there in late June 1933, displaying signs of a severe beating: “The skin had been flayed from much of his body” (3).

American Consul General George Messersmith hears his story: Nine days earlier, “Schachno had been visited at his home by a squad of uniformed men responding to an anonymous denunciation of him as a potential enemy of the state" (4). Finding nothing, the men take Schachno to their headquarters and whip him thoroughly, then release him. He lies in bed for a week, then comes to the consulate.

Messersmith has Schachno taken to a hospital and given a new passport: “Soon afterward, Schachno and his wife fled to Sweden and then to America" (4). Messersmith believes the beating is a sign of German preparations for war, and “how definitely this martial spirit is being developed in Germany" (8). He resolves to warn America.

A new US ambassador will arrive soon; Messersmith hopes he’ll be a man of strong character who’s capable of standing up to the threat. Instead, Dodd is “an unassuming sort who had vowed to lead a modest life in Berlin" (8). 

Born in 1869 and raised on a poor North Carolina cotton farm, Dodd studies hard and by 1897 has his bachelor’s and master’s degrees. He studies in Berlin for his doctorate, noting “the atmosphere of militarism that pervaded Germany" (11-12). Returning to America, Dodd marries his childhood friend Mattie Johns, and they have a son and daughter.

Dodd teaches at Virginia’s Randolph-Macon College, where he gets into trouble for challenging the belief that the South was entirely right to secede from the Union. He decides to take a job as a professor and chairman of the history department at the University of Chicago. Dodd stays connected to his Southern roots by purchasing a small Virginia farm, “Stoneleigh,” that he tends every summer.

In 1916, Dodd meets President Wilson at the White House where they discuss possible American intervention in the war in Europe. Dodd is against it, but Wilson charms him into changing his mind. They become friends, and Dodd writes Wilson’s biography.

By 1933, Dodd is hoping to escape the increasing demands of his work in Chicago and wishes to complete his multi-volume opus on the history of the South. He contacts a friend in the new Roosevelt administration and offers his services as an ambassador. He knows that he is “not the sly, two-faced type so necessary to ‘lie abroad for the country’” (14); nonetheless, Dodd’s connections short-list his name. He becomes an ambassador to Germany in June 1933.

Berlin should be a plum job, but a spate of violence by Hitler’s Storm Troopers (SA) puts off any would-be competitors. Dodd is neither wealthy nor prominent in Washington, but his “firsthand understanding of Germany had obvious value” (19). Besides, “Hitler declared himself committed to peace" (19), and his very small army is no match for its neighbors. Dodd would be enough. Roosevelt calls him and makes the offer.

Though the appointment to Berlin will keep him too busy to write, it would be a crowning achievement in Dodd’s life, so he accepts. The Senate quickly confirms him. Dodd invites his two adult children to accompany him and Mrs. Dodd to Berlin for an extended, and perhaps final, family reunion. 

The Dodd children have good jobs during the Depression and will have to give them up to travel to Berlin. Bill teaches history but is lackadaisical about his career. Martha is an assistant editor at the Chicago Tribune; she is also pretty, vivacious, and flirtatious. Martha has already broken off two engagements and gotten entangled in a secret marriage to banker George Bassett Roberts. She has affairs with the poet Carl Sandburg and others, partly to torment her husband.

After receiving the offer to go to Berlin with her father, Martha admits to Bassett, “I had to choose between him and ‘adventure,’ and you. I couldn’t help making the choice I did” (26). 

Dodd meets with Roosevelt to discuss the Berlin posting. Roosevelt first asks Dodd to “do all you can to prevent a moratorium” (28) on Germany’s repayment of its war debts. The second issue is Germany’s poor treatment of its Jewish population. Roosevelt is reluctant to do anything about it for fear of causing “a vast influx of Jewish refugees at a time when America was reeling from the Depression" (28), and because most Americans hold anti-immigrant views. Another concern is that “noisy protests and boycotts would only make things worse for Jews still in Germany" (29).

Anti-Semitism holds sway with many high cabinet officials. Moreover, the State Department is under orders “to grant only a fraction of the visas allowed for each country" (31). Immigrants must provide references from their local police; one commentator notes that this amounts to asking Jews “to have to go to your enemy and ask for a character reference" (31).

Dodd insists he will live within his salary: “he did not think an ambassador should live extravagantly while the rest of the nation suffered" (32). Roosevelt tells him, “Aside from two or three general dinners and entertainments, you need not indulge in any expensive social affairs" (32).

Dodd then walks over to the State Department to read the recent cables from Consul General Messersmith in Berlin. He learns of “the increasing control the government exerted over all aspects of German society" (33), detentions and beatings, and the near-complete suppression of the free press.

The Dodds pack up in Chicago, stop for a brief visit with Dodd’s father in North Carolina, then arrive in New York. There, the new ambassador attends “a number of meetings with bank executives on the issue of Germany’s debt […] and with Jewish leaders" (37). He declares that he “would exert all possible personal influence against unjust treatment of German Jews" (38). Still, Dodd, like many Americans at the time, believes the Jews "shared responsibility for their plight" (39).

Finally, the family boards the Washington, a ship bound for Hamburg from Boston. A press photograph shows the family stiffly waving goodbye, their arms high and straight in an inadvertent Hitler salute. Martha recalls, among her family, “a disproportionate amount of sadness and foreboding" (39). 

At sea, Martha cries for two days: “[S]he wept for all she was leaving behind, the people and places, her friends and job, the familiar comfort of the house on Blackstone Avenue, her lovely Carl [Sandburg]” (40). Soon, she is in better spirits and is flirting with Roosevelt’s son Franklin Jr, ready "to begin a sojourn abroad" (39).

Martha, like many people, does not take Hitler seriously. At college, she "found herself absorbing a view that Jews, while generally brilliant, were rich and pushy" (41). Martha wants to write short stories and novels; Sandburg urges her to make notes in Berlin and “find out what this man Hitler is made of" (41). Her friend Thornton Wilder suggests “she keep a diary of “what things looked like—the rumors, and opinions of people during a political time" (41-42).

Prominent activist Rabbi Stephen Wise is a passenger; he and Dodd have several conversations about how the ambassador should raise America’s concerns over Germany’s treatment of the Jewish population. Dodd says, “[I]f I find I can do so, I will talk very frankly to him and tell him everything" (42). He believes that “through reason and example he ought to be able to exercise a moderating influence over Hitler” and “help nudge America from its isolationist course toward more international engagement" (43).

In Hamburg, the embassy second-in-command, George Gordon, greets them. Gordon is a stiff and unlikable snob, who, on the train to Berlin, warns Dodd that “his frugality and his resolve to live only within his State Department income would prove a barrier" (44).

At the Berlin station, the family meets the kinder Consul General Messersmith. They also meet German society columnist, Bella Fromm, and the slender and ethereal American, Mildred Harnack. Martha and Mildred take an immediate liking to one another.

The Dodds settle into sumptuous rooms at the Esplanade Hotel. The place appalls Dodd’s sensibilities, but by tradition US diplomats always must stay there. After a heavy German dinner downstairs, the family goes for a walk, finding their way to the Tiergarten—at one time a hunting preserve and now a city park—whose name means “garden of the beasts” (49).

The city seems lovely, a far cry from their worst fears. Martha writes of “the warmth and friendliness of the people, the soft summer night with its fragrance of trees and flowers, the serenity of the streets" (52).