Erik Larson - In the Garden of Beasts

Another American ran afoul of the government, due to a false denunciation by “persons who had a grudge against him,” according to a consulate report. It was the kind of moment that decades hence would become a repeated motif in films about the Nazi era.

At about four thirty in the morning on Tuesday, December 12, 1933, an American citizen named Erwin Wollstein stood on a train platform in Breslau waiting for a train to Oppeln in Upper Silesia, where he planned to conduct some business. He was leaving so early because he hoped to return later that same day. In Breslau he shared an apartment with his father, who was a German citizen.

Two men in suits approached and called him by name. They identified themselves as officers of the Gestapo and asked him to accompany them to a police post located in the train station.

“I was ordered to remove my overcoat, coat, shoes, spats, collar and necktie,” Wollstein wrote in an affidavit. The agents then searched him and his belongings. This took nearly half an hour. They found his passport and quizzed him on his citizenship. He confirmed that he was an American citizen and asked that they notify the American consulate in Breslau of his arrest.

The agents then took him by car to the Breslau Central Police Station, where he was placed in a cell. He was given “a frugal breakfast.” He remained in his cell for the next nine hours. In the meantime, his father was arrested and their apartment searched. The Gestapo confiscated personal and business correspondence and other documents, including two expired and canceled American passports.

At five fifteen that afternoon the two Gestapo agents took Wollstein upstairs and at last read him the charges filed against him, citing denunciations by three people whom Wollstein knew: his landlady, a second woman, and a male servant who cleaned the apartment. His landlady, Miss Bleicher, had charged that two months earlier he had said, “All Germans are dogs.” His servant, Richard Kuhne, charged that Wollstein had declared that if another world war occurred, he would join the fight against Germany. The third, a Miss Strausz, charged that Wollstein had loaned her husband “a communistic book.” The book, as it happened, was Oil! by Upton Sinclair.

Wollstein spent the night in jail. The next morning he was permitted to confront his denouncers face-to-face. He accused them of having lied. Now, unprotected by the veil of anonymity, the witnesses wavered. “The witnesses themselves appeared to be confused and not sure of their ground,” Wollstein recalled in his affidavit.

Meanwhile, the U.S. consul in Breslau reported the arrest to the consulate in Berlin. Vice Consul Raymond Geist in turn complained to Gestapo chief Rudolf Diels and requested a full report on Wollstein’s arrest. That evening, Diels telephoned and told Geist that on his orders Wollstein would be released.

Back in Breslau, the two Gestapo men ordered Wollstein to sign a statement declaring that he would never “be an enemy to the German State.” The document included a magnanimous offer: that if he ever felt his safety endangered, he could report for arrest under protective custody.

He was released.

MARTHA ASSIGNED HERSELF the task of trimming the family tree, an enormous fir placed in the ballroom on the second floor of the house. She enlisted the help of Boris, Bill, butler Fritz, the family chauffeur, and various friends who stopped by to help. She resolved to have a tree that was entirely white and silver and so bought silver balls, silver tinsel, a large silver star, and white candles, eschewing electric lights for the more traditional and infinitely more lethal approach. “In those days,” she wrote, “it was heresy to think of electric lights for a tree.” She and her helpers kept pails of water nearby.

Her father, she wrote, was “bored with all this foolishness” and avoided the project, as did her mother, who was busy with myriad other holiday preparations. Bill was helpful to a point but had a tendency to drift away in search of more engaging pursuits. The project took two days and two evenings.

Martha found it funny that Boris was willing to help, given that he claimed not to believe in the existence of God. She smiled as she watched him at work atop a stepladder dutifully helping her trim a symbol of the foremost holy day of the Christian faith.

“My darling atheist,” she recalled telling him, “why do you help me decorate a Christmas tree to celebrate the birth of Christ?”

He laughed. “This isn’t for Christians or for Christ, liebes Kind ,” he said, “only for pagans like you and me. Anyway, it is very beautiful. What would you like?” He sat at the apex of the ladder. “Do you want me to put my white orchids on top? Or would you prefer a handsome red star?”

She insisted on white.

He protested. “But red is a more beautiful color than white, darling.”

Despite the tree and Boris and the overall cheer of the season, Martha felt that a fundamental element was absent from her life in Berlin. She missed her friends—Sandburg and Wilder and her colleagues at the Tribune —and her comfortable house in Hyde Park. By now her friends and neighbors would be gathering for cozy parties, caroling sessions, and mulled wine.

On Thursday, December 14, she wrote a long letter to Wilder. She felt keenly the withering of her connection to him. Just knowing him gave her a sense of credibility, as if by refraction she too possessed literary cachet. But she had sent him a short story of hers, and he had said nothing. “Have you lost even your literary interest in me or shall I say your interest in the literary me (what there is left of it, if there was anything to begin with). And your trip to Germany. Has it been definitely passed up. Gosh, you have certainly given me the slip, to lapse back into Berlin slang for a moment!”

She had done little other writing, she told him, though she had found a certain satisfaction in talking and writing about books, thanks to her new friendship with Arvid and Mildred Harnack. Together, she told Wilder, “we have concluded we are the only people in Berlin genuinely interested in writers.” Mildred and she had begun their book column. “She is tall and beautiful with a heavy burden of honey colored hair—dark honey in some lights…. Very poor and real and fine and not much in favor though the family is old and respected. An oasis really to me mad with thirst.”

She alluded to her father’s sense that a conspiracy was mounting against him from within the State Department. “Mazes of hate and intrigue in our Embassy have as yet failed to trap us,” she wrote.

Hatreds of a more personal kind had touched her as well. In America her secret marriage to Bassett and her equally secret effort to divorce him had become public knowledge. “Nasty what my enemies cooked up about me in Chicago,” she told Wilder. One woman in particular, whom Martha identified as Fanny, had begun spreading especially unpleasant rumors out of what Martha believed to be jealousy over Martha’s publication of a short story. “She insists that you and I have had an affair and it has come back to me from two people. I wrote to her the other day pointing out the dangers of slander unfounded and indicated the mess she might get into.” She added, “I feel sorry for her, but it does not alter the fact that she is a rather slimy mouthed bitch.”

She sought to capture for Wilder a sense of the wintry city outside her windows, this new world in which she found herself. “The snow is soft and deep lying here—a copper smoke mist over Berlin by day and the brilliance of the falling moon by night. The gravel squeaks under my window at night—the sinister faced, lovely lipped and gaunt Diels of the Prussian Secret Police must be watching and the gravel spits from under his soft shoes to warn me. He wears his deep scars as proudly as I would fling about in a wreath of edelweiss.”