Erik Larson - In the Garden of Beasts

Even more systemic persecution was on the way, Messersmith wrote. He had learned that a draft existed of a new law that would effectively deprive Jews of their citizenship and all civil rights. Germany’s Jews, he wrote, “look upon this proposed law as the most serious moral blow which could be delivered to them. They have and are being deprived of practically all means of making a livelihood and understand that the new citizenship law is to practically deprive them of all civil rights.”

The only reason it hadn’t become law already, Messersmith had learned, was that for the moment the men behind it feared “the unfavorable public sentiment it would arouse abroad.” The draft had been circulating for nine weeks, and this prompted Messersmith to end his dispatch with a bit of wishful thinking. “The fact that the law has been under consideration for such a long time,” he wrote, “may be an indication that in its final form it will be less radical than that still contemplated.”

DODD REITERATED HIS COMMITMENT to objectivity and understanding in an August 12 letter to Roosevelt, in which he wrote that while he did not approve of Germany’s treatment of Jews or Hitler’s drive to restore the country’s military power, “fundamentally, I believe a people has a right to govern itself and that other peoples must exercise patience even when cruelties and injustices are done. Give men a chance to try their schemes.”

Martha and her mother set out to find the family a house to lease, so that they could move out of the Esplanade—escape its opulence, in Dodd’s view—and lead a more settled life. Bill Jr., meanwhile, enrolled in a doctoral program at the University of Berlin. To improve his German as speedily as possible, he arranged to live during the school week with the family of a professor.

The matter of housing the U.S. ambassador in Berlin had long been an embarrassment. Some years earlier the State Department had acquired and renovated a large and lavish building, the Blücher Palace, on Pariser Platz behind the Brandenburg Gate, to provide an ambassador’s residence and consolidate in one location all the other diplomatic and consular offices spread throughout the city, and also to raise America’s physical presence nearer to that of Britain and France, whose embassies had long been ensconced in majestic palaces on the plaza. However, just before Dodd’s predecessor, Frederic Sackett, was to move in, fire had gutted the building. It had stood as a forlorn wreck ever since, forcing Sackett and now Dodd to find alternative lodging. On a personal level, Dodd was not unhappy about this. Though he reviled the waste of all the money thus far expended on the palace—the government, he wrote, had paid an “exorbitant” price for the building, but “you know it was in 1928 or 1929, when everybody was crazy”—he liked the idea of having a home outside the embassy itself. “Personally, I would rather have my residence a half-hour’s walk away than to have it in the Palais,” he wrote. He acknowledged that having a building large enough to house junior officials would be a good thing, “but any of us who have to see people would find that the residence alongside of our offices would deprive us practically of all privacy—which is sometimes very essential.”

Martha and her mother toured greater Berlin’s lovely residential neighborhoods and discovered the city to be full of parks and gardens, with planters and flowers seemingly on every balcony. In the farthest districts they saw what appeared to be tiny farms, possibly just the thing for Martha’s father. They encountered squads of uniformed young people happily marching and singing, and more threatening formations of Storm Troopers with men of all sizes in ill-fitting uniforms, the centerpiece of which was a brown shirt of spectacularly unflattering cut. More rarely they spotted the leaner, better-tailored men of the SS, in night black accented with red, like some species of oversized blackbird.

The Dodds found many properties to choose from, though at first they failed to ask themselves why so many grand old mansions were available for lease so fully and luxuriously furnished, with ornate tables and chairs, gleaming pianos, and rare vases, maps, and books still in place. One area they particularly liked was the district immediately south of the Tiergarten along Dodd’s route to work, where they found gardens, plentiful shade, a quiet atmosphere, and an array of handsome houses. A property in the district had become available, which they learned of through the embassy’s military attaché, who had been told of its availability directly by the owner, Alfred Panofsky, the wealthy Jewish proprietor of a private bank and one of the many Jews—some sixteen thousand, or about 9 percent of Berlin’s Jews—who lived within the district. Even though Jews were being evicted from their jobs throughout Germany, Panofsky’s bank continued in operation and, surprisingly, with official indulgence.

Panofsky promised the rent would be very reasonable. Dodd, by now ruing but still adhering to his vow to live within his salary, was interested and toward the end of July went to take a look.

THE HOUSE, AT TIERGARTENSTRASSE 27a, was a four-story mansion of stone that had been built for Ferdinand Warburg of the famed Warburg dynasty. The park was across the street. Panofsky and his mother showed the Dodds the property, and now Dodd learned that in fact Panofsky was not offering the whole house, only the first three floors. The banker and his mother planned to occupy the top floor and reserved as well the use of the mansion’s electric elevator.

Panofsky was sufficiently wealthy that he did not need the income from the lease, but he had seen enough since Hitler’s appointment as chancellor to know that no Jew, no matter how prominent, was safe from Nazi persecution. He offered 27a to the new ambassador with the express intention of gaining for himself and his mother an enhanced level of physical protection, calculating that surely even the Storm Troopers would not risk the international outcry likely to arise from an attack on the house shared by the American ambassador. The Dodds, for their part, would gain all the amenities of a freestanding house, yet for a fraction of the cost, in a structure whose street presence was sufficiently impressive to communicate American power and prestige and whose interior spaces were grand enough to allow the entertainment of government and diplomatic guests without embarrassment. In a letter to President Roosevelt, Dodd exulted, “We have one of the best residences in Berlin at $150 a month—due to the fact the owner is a wealthy Jew, most willing to let us have it.”

Panofsky and Dodd signed a one-page “gentleman’s agreement,” though Dodd still had a few qualms about the place. While he loved the quiet, the trees, the garden, and the prospect of continuing to walk to work each morning, he judged the house too opulent and called it, derisively, “our new mansion.”

A plaque bearing the image of an American eagle was affixed to the iron gate at the entrance to the property, and on Saturday, August 5, 1933, Dodd and his family left the Esplanade behind and moved into their new home.

Dodd conceded later that if he had known Panofsky’s actual intentions for the use of the fourth floor, beyond simply lodging himself and his mother, he never would have agreed to the lease.

TREES AND GARDENS FILLED the yard, which was surrounded with a high iron fence set in a knee-high wall of brick. Anyone arriving on foot reached the front entrance through doorlike gates built of vertical bars of iron; by car, through a tall master gate topped with an elaborate ironwork arch with a translucent orb at its center. The front doorway of the house was invariably in shadow and formed a black rectangle at the base of a rounded, towerlike facade that rose the full height of the building. The mansion’s most peculiar architectural feature was an imposing protrusion about one and a half stories tall that jutted from the front of the house to form a porte cochere over the entry driveway and served as a gallery for the display of paintings.