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November 1, 2011 in Library Corner
By Robin Jacobson.
In March 1933, the position of the U.S. Ambassador to Germany fell vacant, and no one, it seemed, wanted the job. Hitler had been Chancellor of Germany for just five weeks, but Berlin already had lost its allure as a plum diplomatic post. President Roosevelt offered the position to at least four prominent men before turning, finally, to William Dodd, a 64-year-old professor of American history at the University of Chicago. To Roosevelt’s relief, Dodd agreed to go to Berlin, bringing with him his wife and two grown children.
Naïve and inexperienced, Dodd began by underestimating Hitler and his government and ended by trying desperately to warn the world about the Nazis. Erik Larson’s compelling In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and An American Family in Hitler’s Berlin reads like a suspense novel but is a non-fiction account of the Dodd family’s chilling experiences in Berlin, based on the diaries and writings of Dodd and his flamboyant 24-year-old daughter, Martha.
Before Roosevelt telephoned with his fateful offer, Dodd had been angling for a diplomatic post, but not to Berlin. He sought a lower-profile European city where the workload would be comparatively light, leaving him time to complete what he envisioned as the crowning work of his life, a four-volume epic history, The Rise and Fall of the Old South. Dodd had been making frustratingly slow progress on this magnum opus at the University of Chicago, especially given the university’s exasperating policy of shutting off the heat on Sundays.
Modest and frugal, Dodd horrified the wealthy, old boy network in the State Department by shipping his beat-up old Chevrolet to Berlin and vowing to limit formal embassy entertaining. Martha, in contrast, was entranced with Berlin’s glamorous social whirl and glittering nightlife. Unbeknownst to her parents, she had many lovers, including the Gestapo chief, Rudolph Diels, nicknamed the “Prince of Darkness” and a Soviet diplomat who recruited her to spy for the Soviet Union. One of Hitler’s associates even introduced Martha to Hitler, hoping that she would seduce the Chancellor and “change the whole destiny of Europe.” Alas, Hitler was not interested.
When they arrived in Berlin, the Dodds were ambivalent about German restrictions on Jews. As Martha said, “We sort of don’t like the Jews anyway.” Yet as German atrocities and oppressive decrees mounted, and as Hitler seized the powers of absolute dictator, the Dodds transformed into ardent Nazi foes.
A turning point was the infamous “Night of the Long Knives,” a 1934 blood purge in which Hitler consolidated his power by ordering the execution of scores of political opponents. Appalled, Dodd wrote that no one could have “imagined that such a terroristic performance . . . would have been permitted in modern times.” In Larson’s account, Dodd became “one of the few voices in U.S. government to warn of the true ambitions of Hitler and the dangers of America’s isolationist stance.”
Even after he returned to private life in 1937, Dodd continued to raise the alarm. He traversed the United States warning of Hitler’s determination to conquer Europe and declaring that the Nazi plan for the Jews was “to kill them all.” Called the “Cassandra of American diplomats,” Dodd, like the tormented prophetess, foresaw imminent death and destruction but was unable to persuade anyone to listen to him. He died, sad and disillusioned, in February 1940, while America continued to debate the need to fight Hitler. Perhaps most poignant, Dodd never completed his epic history of the Old South.
