Erik Larson - In the Garden of Beasts

“Martha!” he wrote, indulging his passion for exclamation:

“I thank you for your letters and for ‘not forgetfulness.’ Your three monkeys have grown (they have become big) and want to be with you. I am sending them. I have to tell you very frankly: three monkeys have longed for you. And not only the three monkeys, I know another handsome, blond (aryan!!) young man, who has longed to be with you. This handsome boy (not older than 30)—is me .

“Martha! I want to see you, I need to tell you that I also have not forgotten my little adorable lovely Martha!

“I love you, Martha! What do I have to do to establish more confidence in you?

“Yours, Boris.”

In any era their relationship would have been likely to draw the attention of outsiders, but that June in Berlin everything took on added gravitas. Everyone watched everyone else. At the time, Martha gave little thought to the perceptions of others, but years later, in a letter to Agnes Knickerbocker, the wife of her correspondent friend Knick, she acknowledged how readily perception could distort reality. “I never plotted the overthrow nor even the subversion of the U.S. government, neither in Germany nor in the USA!” she wrote. “I think however that just knowing and loving Boris would be enough for some people to suspect the worst.”

At the time there was nothing to suspect, she insisted. “Instead it was one of those absorbing things that had no political base at all, except that through him I came to know something about the USSR.”

FRIDAY, JUNE 29, 1934, brought the same atmosphere of impending storm that had marked the preceding weeks. “It was the hottest day we had had that summer,” recalled Elisabetta Cerruti, wife of the Italian ambassador. “The air was so heavy with moisture that we could hardly breathe. Black clouds loomed on the horizon, but a merciless sun burned overhead.”

That day the Dodds held a lunch at their home, to which they had invited Vice-Chancellor Papen and other diplomatic and government figures, including the Cerrutis and Hans Luther, Germany’s ambassador to the United States, who at the time happened to be in Berlin.

Martha also attended and watched as her father and Papen stepped away from the other guests for a private conversation in the library, in front of the now-dormant fireplace. Papen, she wrote, “seemed self-confident and as suave as usual.”

At one point Dodd spotted Papen and Luther edging toward each other with a “rather tense attitude” between them. Dodd moved to intervene and steered them out to the lovely winter garden, where another guest joined them in conversation. Dodd, referring to the press photographs taken during the German Derby, said to Papen, “You and Dr. Goebbels seemed to be quite friendly at Hamburg the other day.”

Papen laughed.

At lunch, Mrs. Cerruti sat on Dodd’s right and Papen sat directly opposite, next to Mrs. Dodd. Mrs. Cerruti’s anxiety was palpable, even to Martha, watching from a distance. Martha wrote, “She sat by my father in a state of near-collapse, hardly speaking, pale, preoccupied, and jumpy.”

Mrs. Cerruti told Dodd, “Mr. Ambassador, something terrible is going to happen in Germany. I feel it in the air.”

A later rumor held that Mrs. Cerruti somehow knew in advance what was about to happen. She found this astonishing. Her remark to Dodd, she claimed years later, referred only to the weather.

IN AMERICA THAT FRIDAY the “great heat” worsened. In humid locales like Washington it became nearly impossible to work. Moffat noted in his diary: “Temperature 101 and ½ in the shade today.”

The heat and humidity were so unbearable that as evening approached Moffat and Phillips and a third official went to the home of a friend of Moffat’s to use his pool. The friend was away at the time. The three men undressed and climbed in. The water was warm and provided scant relief. No one swam. Instead the three simply sat there, talking quietly, only their heads showing above the water.

That Dodd was a subject of this conversation seems likely. Just a few days earlier Phillips had written in his diary about Dodd’s unrelenting assault on the wealth of diplomats and consular officials.

“Presumably the Ambassador has been complaining to the President,” Phillips groused in his diary. Dodd “always complains because of the fact that they are spending in Berlin more than their salaries. This he objects to strenuously, probably for the simple reason that he himself has not the money to spend beyond that of his salary. It is, of course, a small town attitude.”

ODDLY ENOUGH, MOFFAT’S MOTHER, Ellen Low Moffat, was in Berlin that Friday, to visit her daughter (Moffat’s sister), who was married to the embassy secretary, John C. White. That evening the mother attended a dinner party where she sat beside Papen. The vice-chancellor was, as she later told her son, “well and in extremely high spirits.”

That Friday evening, July 29, 1934, Hitler settled in at the Hotel Dreesen, a favorite of his, in the resort of Bad Godesberg, situated along the Rhine just outside central Bonn. He had traveled here from Essen, where he had received yet another dose of troubling news—that Vice-Chancellor Papen planned to make good on his threat and meet with President Hindenburg the next day, Saturday, June 30, to persuade the Old Gentleman to take steps to rein in Hitler’s government and the SA.

This news, atop the accumulation of reports from Himmler and Göring that Röhm was planning a coup, convinced Hitler that the time had come for action. Göring left for Berlin to make ready. Hitler ordered the Reichswehr on alert, though the forces he intended to deploy were mostly SS units. Hitler telephoned one of Röhm’s key deputies and ordered all SA leaders to attend a meeting Saturday morning in Bad Wiessee, near Munich, where Röhm was already comfortably ensconced in the Hotel Hanselbauer, taking his cure, which on that Friday night involved a good deal of drinking. His aide, Edmund Heines, bedded down with a handsome eighteen-year-old Storm Trooper.

Goebbels joined Hitler at Bad Godesberg. They spoke on the hotel terrace as a parade roared below. Blue flashes of lightning lit the sky over Bonn and thunder rumbled everywhere, amplified by the strange sonic physics of the Rhine Valley.

Goebbels later gave a melodramatic account of those heady moments before Hitler made his final decision. The air had grown still as the distant storm advanced. Suddenly, heavy rain began to fall. He and Hitler remained seated a few moments longer, enjoying the cleansing downpour. Hitler laughed. They went inside. Once the storm had passed, they returned to the terrace. “The Führer seemed in a thoughtful, serious mood,” Goebbels said. “He stared out at the clear darkness of the night, which after the purification of the storm stretched peacefully across a vast, harmonious landscape.”

The crowd on the street lingered despite the storm. “Not one of the many people standing below knows what is threatening to come,” Goebbels wrote. “Even among those around the Leader on the terrace only a few have been informed. In this hour he is more than ever to be admired by us. Not a quiver on his face reveals the slightest sign of what is going on within him. Yet we few, who stand by him in all difficult hours, know how deeply he is grieved, but also how determined he is to stamp out mercilessly the reactionary rebels who are breaking their oath of loyalty to him, under the slogan of carrying out a second revolution.”

It was after midnight when Himmler telephoned with more bad news. He told Hitler that Karl Ernst, commander of the Berlin division of the SA, had ordered his forces to go on alert. Hitler cried, “It’s a putsch!”—though in fact, as Himmler surely knew, Ernst had just recently gotten married and was headed to the port of Bremen for the start of a honeymoon cruise.