Erik Larson - In the Garden of Beasts

He told a friend, Assistant Secretary of State R. Walton Moore, that he would rather resign than “simply to remain a protocol and social figurehead.”

THE DODDS REACHED GERMANY on Thursday, July 13, 1933. Dodd had assumed erroneously that all arrangements for the family’s arrival were in place, but after a slow and tedious passage up the Elbe they disembarked in Hamburg to find that no one from the embassy had booked a train, let alone the customary private railcar, to take them to Berlin. An official, George Gordon, counselor of embassy, met them at the dock and hastily secured compartments on an old, conventional train, a far cry from the famous “Flying Hamburger,” which made the run to Berlin in just over two hours. The family Chevrolet posed another problem. Bill Jr. had planned to drive it to Berlin but had failed to fill out the advance paperwork needed to get it off the ship and onto Germany’s roads. Once this was resolved, Bill set off. Meanwhile, Dodd fielded questions from a group of reporters that included a writer for a Jewish newspaper, the Hamburger Israelitisches Familienblatt , which subsequently published an article implying that Dodd’s primary mission was to stop Nazi persecution of Jews—exactly the kind of distortion Dodd had hoped to avoid.

As the afternoon progressed, the Dodds developed a dislike for Counselor Gordon. He was second in command of the embassy and oversaw a cadre of first and second secretaries, stenographers, file and code clerks, and assorted other employees, about two dozen in all. He was stiff and arrogant and dressed like an aristocrat from the prior century. He carried a walking stick. His mustache was curled, his complexion ruddy and inflamed, a marker of what one official called his “very choleric temperament.” He spoke in a manner that Martha described as “clipped, polite, and definitely condescending.” He made no attempt to hide his disdain for the family’s simple appearance or his displeasure at the fact that they arrived alone, without a battalion of valets, maids, and chauffeurs. The previous ambassador, Sackett, had been much more Gordon’s kind of man, rich, with ten servants at his Berlin residence. Martha sensed that to Gordon her family represented a class of human being “the like of which he had not permitted himself to mingle with for perhaps most of his adult life.”

Martha and her mother rode in one compartment, among bouquets of flowers given to them in welcome at the dock. Mrs. Dodd—Mattie—was uneasy and downhearted, anticipating “the duties and change in life-patterns” that lay ahead, Martha recalled. Martha rested her head on her mother’s shoulder and soon fell asleep.

Dodd and Gordon sat together in a separate compartment discussing embassy matters and German politics. Gordon warned Dodd that his frugality and his resolve to live only within his State Department income would prove a barrier to establishing a relationship with Hitler’s government. Dodd was no longer a mere professor, Gordon reminded him. He was an important diplomat up against an arrogant regime that respected only strength. Dodd’s approach to daily life would have to change.

The train raced through pretty towns and forested glens bladed with afternoon light and in about three hours reached greater Berlin. At last it steamed into Berlin’s Lehrter Bahnhof, at a bend in the Spree where the river flowed through the heart of the city. One of Berlin’s five major rail portals, the station rose above its surroundings like a cathedral, with a barrel-vaulted ceiling and banks of arched windows.

On the platform, the Dodds encountered a crowd of Americans and Germans waiting to meet them, including officials from the German foreign office and reporters armed with cameras and flash apparatus known then as “flashlights.” An energetic-seeming man, midsized, about five feet six inches tall—“a dry, drawling, peppery man,” as historian and diplomat George Kennan later described him—stepped forward and introduced himself. This was George Messersmith, consul general, the Foreign Service officer whose lengthy dispatches Dodd had read while in Washington. Martha and her father liked him immediately, judging him to be a man of principle and candor and a likely friend, though this appraisal was destined for significant revision.

Messersmith returned this initial goodwill. “I liked Dodd from the outset,” Messersmith wrote. “He was a very simple man in his manner and in his approach.” He noted, however, that Dodd “gave the impression of being rather fragile.”

In the crowd of greeters the Dodds also encountered two women who over the next several years would play important roles in the family’s life, one a German, the other an American from Wisconsin who was married to a member of one of Germany’s loftiest scholarly dynasties.

The German woman was Bella Fromm—“Auntie Voss,” society columnist for a highly respected newspaper, the Vossische Zeitung , one of two hundred newspapers then still operating in Berlin and, unlike most of them, still capable of independent reportage. Fromm was full figured and handsome, with striking eyes—onyx under black gull-wing brows, her pupils partially curtained by upper lids in a manner that conveyed both intellect and skepticism. She was trusted by virtually all members of the city’s diplomatic community as well as by senior members of the Nazi Party, no small achievement considering that she was Jewish. She claimed to have a source high in Hitler’s government who gave her advance warning of future Reich actions. She was a close friend of Messersmith’s; her daughter, Gonny, called him “uncle.”

Fromm in her diary recorded her initial observations of the Dodds. Martha, she wrote, seemed “a perfect example of the intelligent young American female.” As for the ambassador, he “looks like a scholar. His dry humor attracted me. He is observant and precise. He learned to love Germany when he was a student in Leipzig, he said, and will dedicate his strength to build a sincere friendship between his country and Germany.”

She added: “I hope he and the President of the United States will not be too disappointed in their efforts.”

The second woman, the American, was Mildred Fish Harnack, a representative of the American Women’s Club in Berlin. She was Fromm’s physical opposite in every way—slender, blonde, ethereal, reserved. Martha and Mildred liked each other at once. Mildred wrote later that Martha “is clear and capable and has a real desire to understand the world. Therefore our interests touch.” She sensed that she had found a soul mate, “a woman who is seriously interested in writing. It’s a hindrance to be lonely and isolated in one’s work. Ideas stimulate ideas, and the love of writing is contagious.”

Martha in turn was impressed by Mildred. “I was drawn to her immediately,” she wrote. Mildred exhibited an appealing combination of strength and delicacy. “She was slow to speak and express opinions; she listened quietly, her large grey blue eyes serious… weighing, evaluating, trying to understand.”

COUNSELOR GORDON PLACED MARTHA in a car with a young protocol secretary assigned to accompany her to the hotel where the Dodds were to live until they could find a suitable house to lease. Her parents traveled separately with Gordon, Messersmith, and Messersmith’s wife. Martha’s car proceeded south over the Spree into the city.

She found long, straight boulevards that evoked the rigid grid of Chicago, but the similarity ended there. Unlike the skyscraper-forested landscape she had walked through every workday in Chicago, here most buildings were rather short, typically five stories or so, and these amplified the low, flat feel of the city. Most looked to be very old, but a few were jarringly new, with walls of glass, flat roofs, and curved facades, the offspring of Walter Gropius, Bruno Taut, and Erich Mendelsohn, all condemned by the Nazis as decadent, communist, and, inevitably, Jewish. The city was full of color and energy. There were double-decked omnibuses, S-Bahn trains, and brightly colored trams whose catenaries fired off brilliant blue sparks. Low-slung automobiles thrummed past, most painted black, but others red, cream, and deep blue, many of unfamiliar design: the adorable Opel 4/16 PS, the Horch with its lethal arrow-in-bow hood ornament, and the ubiquitous Mercedes, black, low, edged with chrome. Joseph Goebbels himself was moved to capture in prose the energy of the city as exhibited in one of its most popular shopping avenues, the Kurfürstendamm, albeit in an essay meant not to praise but to condemn, calling the street “the abscess” of the city. “The bells on the streetcars ring, buses clatter by honking their horns, stuffed full with people and more people; taxis and fancy private automobiles hum over the glassy asphalt,” he wrote. “The fragrance of heavy perfume floats by. Harlots smile from the artful pastels of fashionable women’s faces; so-called men stroll to and fro, monocles glinting; fake and precious stones sparkle.” Berlin was, he wrote, a “stone desert” filled with sin and corruption and inhabited by a populace “borne to the grave with a smile.”