In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin
Erik Larson
Language: English
Pages: 448
ISBN: 030740885X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Erik Larson, New York Times bestselling author of Devil in the White City, delivers a remarkable story set during Hitler’s rise to power.
The time is 1933, the place, Berlin, when William E. Dodd becomes America’s first ambassador to Hitler’s Nazi Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history.
A mild-mannered professor from Chicago, Dodd brings along his wife, son, and flamboyant daughter, Martha. At first Martha is entranced by the parties and pomp, and the handsome young men of the Third Reich with their infectious enthusiasm for restoring Germany to a position of world prominence. Enamored of the “New Germany,” she has one affair after another, including with the suprisingly honorable first chief of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels. But as evidence of Jewish persecution mounts, confirmed by chilling first-person testimony, her father telegraphs his concerns to a largely indifferent State Department back home. Dodd watches with alarm as Jews are attacked, the press is censored, and drafts of frightening new laws begin to circulate. As that first year unfolds and the shadows deepen, the Dodds experience days full of excitement, intrigue, romance—and ultimately, horror, when a climactic spasm of violence and murder reveals Hitler’s true character and ruthless ambition.
Suffused with the tense atmosphere of the period, and with unforgettable portraits of the bizarre Göring and the expectedly charming--yet wholly sinister--Goebbels, In the Garden of Beasts lends a stunning, eyewitness perspective on events as they unfold in real time, revealing an era of surprising nuance and complexity. The result is a dazzling, addictively readable work that speaks volumes about why the world did not recognize the grave threat posed by Hitler until Berlin, and Europe, were awash in blood and terror.
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Him through his children. Old Dodd, who was an imbecile, we’d have got him through his daughter.” One of Hitler’s dinner companions asked, “Was she pretty at least?” Another guest snorted, “Hideous.” “But one must rise above that, my dear fellow,” Hitler said. “It’s one of the qualifications. Otherwise, I ask you, why should our diplomats be paid? In that case, diplomacy would no longer be a service, but a pleasure. And it might end in marriage!” SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The.
Landmarks, such as the Romanisches Café at Kurfürstendamm 238 and the Hotel Adlon at Unter den Linden 1. I read as many memoirs of the era as I could, mining them for insights into daily life in Berlin while keeping in mind that memoirs of the Nazi era tend to contain a good deal of self-engineering to make the author seem less complicit in the rise and rule of the Nazi Party than perhaps he or she truly was. The most glaring example of this must surely be Franz von Papen’s Memoirs, published in.
Me”: Diels to Himmler, Oct. 10, 1933, vol. 11, p. 142, Archives of the Holocaust. Chapter 21: The Trouble with George 1 “For the first time, therefore”: Henry P. Leverich, “The Prussian Ministry of Justice Presents a Draft for a New German Penal Code,” Dec. 21, 1933, GRC 862.0441/5, State/Decimal. 2 “to permit killing incurables”: Dodd, Memorandum, Oct. 26, 1933, 862.0441/3, State/Decimal. 3 “could remember neither the name”: Enclosed with Dodd to Hull, Nov. 13, 1933, GRC 362.1113.
Troubles. In a letter to a friend he described his ambassadorship as “this disagreeable and difficult business.” On top of it all came the quotidian troubles that even ambassadors had to cope with. In mid-September the Dodds became aware of a good deal of noise coming from the fourth floor of their house on Tiergartenstrasse, which supposedly was occupied only by Panofsky and his mother. With no advance notice to Dodd, a team of carpenters arrived and, starting at seven o’clock each day, began.
Question is one that needs correction in view of the special conditions in Germany, it will be perfectly possible for the Department to do this upon definite recommendation from you.” THAT SAME WEDNESDAY, in Berlin, Dodd wrote a letter to Roosevelt that he deemed so sensitive he not only wrote it in longhand but also sent it first to his friend Colonel House, so that House could give it to the president in person. Dodd urged that Phillips be removed from his position as undersecretary and given.