Erik Larson: In the Garden of Beasts

By the club’s standards, Dodd was about as poor a fit as could be imagined.

HE RETURNED TO CHICAGO to pack and attend various good-bye functions, after which he and his wife and Martha and Bill all set out by train for Virginia and a last stay at the Round Hill farm. His eighty-six-year-old father, John, lived relatively near, in North Carolina, but Dodd, despite his wish that his own children remain close at hand, did not at first plan to visit him, given that Roosevelt wanted his new ambassador in Berlin as soon as possible. Dodd had written to his father to tell him of his appointment and that he would not have a chance to visit before his departure. He enclosed a little money and wrote, “I am sorry to be so far away all my life.” His father immediately replied how proud he was that Dodd had received “this great honor from D.C.,” but added that tincture of vinegar that only parents seem to know how to apply—that little something that causes guilt to flare and plans to change. The elder Dodd wrote, “If I never see you any more while I live it will be alright I shall be proud of you to the last hours I live.”

Dodd changed his plans. On July 1, a Saturday, he and his wife boarded a sleeper car bound for North Carolina. During their visit with Dodd’s father, they made time for a tour of local landmarks. Dodd and his wife touched old ground, as if saying good-bye for the last time. They visited the family cemetery, where Dodd stood before the grave of his mother, who had died in 1909. As he walked the grass he came upon the plots of ancestors caught up in the Civil War, including two who surrendered with General Robert E. Lee at Appomattox. It was a visit filled with reminders of “family misfortune” and the precariousness of life. “A rather sorrowful day,” he wrote.

He and his wife returned to Virginia and the farm, then proceeded by train to New York. Martha and Bill drove the family’s Chevrolet, intending to drop it off at the wharf for transit to Berlin.

DODD WOULD HAVE PREFERRED to spend the next couple of days with his family, but the department had insisted that once he got to New York he attend a number of meetings with bank executives on the issue of Germany’s debt—a subject in which Dodd had little interest—and with Jewish leaders. Dodd feared that both the American and German press could twist these meetings to taint the appearance of objectivity that he hoped to present in Berlin. He complied, however, and the result was a day of encounters that evoked the serial visits of ghosts in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol . A letter from a prominent Jewish relief activist told Dodd that he would be visited on the night of Monday, July 3, by two groups of men, the first to arrive by eight thirty, the second at nine o’clock. The meetings were to take place at the Century Club, Dodd’s base while in New York.

First, however, Dodd met the bankers, and did so at the offices of the National City Bank of New York, which years later would be called Citibank. Dodd was startled to learn that National City Bank and Chase National Bank held over one hundred million dollars in German bonds, which Germany at this point was proposing to pay back at a rate of thirty cents on the dollar. “There was much talk but no agreement other than that I should do all I possibly could to prevent Germany’s defaulting openly,” Dodd wrote. He had little sympathy for the bankers. The prospect of high interest rates on German bonds had blinded them to the all-too-obvious risk that a war-crushed, politically volatile country might default.

That evening the Jewish leaders arrived as scheduled, among them Felix M. Warburg, a leading financier who tended to favor the quieter tactics of the American Jewish Committee, and Rabbi Wise of the noisier American Jewish Congress. Dodd wrote in his diary: “For an hour and a half the discussion went on: The Germans are killing Jews all the time; they are being persecuted to the point where suicide is common (the Warburg family is reported to have had cases of this kind); and all Jewish property is being confiscated.”

During this meeting, Warburg appears to have mentioned the suicide of two elderly relatives, Moritz and Käthie Oppenheim, in Frankfurt some three weeks earlier. Warburg wrote later, “No doubt the Hitler Regime made life for them a plague and they were yearning for the end of their days.”

Dodd’s visitors urged him to press Roosevelt for official intervention, but he demurred. “I insisted that the government could not intervene officially but assured the members of the conference that I would exert all possible personal influence against unjust treatment of German Jews and of course protest against maltreatment of American Jews.”

Afterward, Dodd caught an 11:00 p.m. train to Boston and, upon his arrival early the next morning, July 4, was driven by chauffeured car to the home of Colonel Edward M. House, a friend who was a close adviser to Roosevelt, for a meeting over breakfast.

In the course of a wide-ranging conversation, Dodd learned for the first time how far he had been from being Roosevelt’s first choice. The news was humbling. Dodd noted in his diary that it tamped any inclination on his part to be “over-egotistical” about his appointment.

When the conversation turned to Germany’s persecution of Jews, Colonel House urged Dodd to do all he could “to ameliorate Jewish sufferings” but added a caveat: “the Jews should not be allowed to dominate economic or intellectual life in Berlin as they have done for a long time.”

In this, Colonel House expressed a sentiment pervasive in America, that Germany’s Jews were at least partly responsible for their own troubles. Dodd encountered a more rabid form of it later that same day after returning to New York, when he and his family went to dinner at the Park Avenue apartment of Charles R. Crane, seventy-five, a philanthropist whose family had grown wealthy selling plumbing supplies. Crane was an Arabist said to be influential in certain Middle Eastern and Balkan nations and was a generous supporter of Dodd’s department at the University of Chicago, where he had endowed a chair for the study of Russian history and institutions.

Dodd already knew that Crane was no friend of Jews. When Crane earlier had written to congratulate Dodd on his appointment, he had offered some advice: “The Jews, after winning the war, galloping along at a swift pace, getting Russia, England and Palestine, being caught in the act of trying to seize Germany, too, and meeting their first real rebuff have gone plumb crazy and are deluging the world—particularly easy America—with anti-German propaganda—I strongly advise you to resist every social invitation.”

Dodd partly embraced Crane’s notion that the Jews shared responsibility for their plight. He wrote to Crane later, after arriving in Berlin, that while he did not “approve of the ruthlessness that is being applied to the Jews here,” he did think the Germans had a valid grievance. “When I have occasion to speak unofficially to eminent Germans, I have said very frankly that they had a very serious problem but that they did not seem to know how to solve it,” he wrote. “The Jews had held a great many more of the key positions in Germany than their numbers or their talents entitled them to.”

Over dinner, Dodd heard Crane express great admiration for Hitler and learned as well that Crane himself had no objection to how the Nazis were treating Germany’s Jews.

As the Dodds left that evening, Crane gave the ambassador one more bit of advice: “Let Hitler have his way.”

AT ELEVEN O’CLOCK the next morning, July 5, 1933, the Dodds took a taxi to the wharf and boarded their ship, the Washington , bound for Hamburg. They ran into Eleanor Roosevelt just after she had bid bon voyage to son Franklin Jr., who was sailing to Europe to begin a sojourn abroad.