In the Garden of Beasts (10 page)

“Coordination” occurred with astonishing speed, even in sectors of life not directly targeted by specific laws, as Germans willingly placed themselves under the sway of Nazi rule, a phenomenon that became known as
Selbstgleichschaltung
, or “
self-coordination.” Change came to Germany so quickly and across such a wide front that German citizens who left the country for business or travel returned to find everything around them altered, as if they were characters in a horror movie who come back to find that people who once were their friends, clients, patients, and customers have become different in
ways hard to discern.
Gerda Laufer, a socialist, wrote that she felt “deeply shaken that people whom one regarded as friends, who were known for a long time, from one hour to the next transformed themselves.”

Neighbors turned surly; petty jealousies flared into denunciations made to the SA—the Storm Troopers—or to the newly founded Geheime Staatspolizei, only just becoming known by its acronym, Gestapo (GEheime STAatsPOlizei),
coined by a post office clerk seeking a less cumbersome way of identifying the agency. The Gestapo’s reputation for omniscience and malevolence arose from a confluence of two phenomena: first, a political climate in which merely criticizing the government could get one arrested, and second, the existence of a populace eager not just to step in line and become coordinated but also to use Nazi sensitivities to satisfy individual needs and salve jealousies.
One study of Nazi records found that of a sample of 213 denunciations, 37 percent arose not from heartfelt political belief but from private conflicts, with the trigger often breathtakingly trivial.
In October 1933, for example, the clerk at a grocery store turned in a cranky customer who had stubbornly insisted on receiving three pfennigs in change. The clerk accused her of failure to pay taxes. Germans denounced one another with such gusto that senior Nazi officials urged the populace to be more discriminating as to what circumstances might justify a report to the police. Hitler himself acknowledged, in a remark to his minister of justice, “
we are living at present in a sea of denunciations and human meanness.”

A central element of Coordination was the insertion into Germany’s civil service law of the “Aryan clause,” which effectively banned Jews from government jobs. Additional regulations and local animosities severely restricted Jews from practicing medicine and becoming lawyers. As onerous and dramatic as these restrictions were for Jews, they made little impression on tourists and other casual observers, partly because so few Jews lived in Germany. As of January 1933
only about 1 percent of Germany’s sixty-five million people were Jewish, and most lived in major cities, leaving a negligible presence throughout the rest of the country. Nearly a third—just over 160,000—lived in Berlin alone, but they constituted less than
4 percent of the city’s overall population of 4.2 million, and many lived in close-knit neighborhoods not typically included on visitors’ itineraries.

Yet even many Jewish residents failed to grasp the true meaning of what was occurring. Fifty thousand did see, and left Germany within weeks of Hitler’s ascension to chancellor, but most stayed. “
Hardly anyone thought that the threats against the Jews were meant seriously,” wrote Carl Zuckmayer, a Jewish writer. “Even many Jews considered the savage anti-Semitic rantings of the Nazis merely a propaganda device, a line the Nazis would drop as soon as they won governmental power and were entrusted with public responsibilities.” Although a song popular among Storm Troopers bore the title “When Jewish Blood Spurts from My Knife,” by the time of the Dodds’ arrival violence against Jews had begun to wane. Incidents were sporadic, isolated. “
It was easy to be reassured,” wrote historian John Dippel in a study of why many Jews decided to stay in Germany. “On the surface, much of daily life remained as it had been before Hitler came to power. Nazi attacks on the Jews were like summer thunderstorms that came and went quickly, leaving an eerie calm.”

The most visible marker of the Coordination campaign was the sudden appearance of the Hitler salute, or
Hitlergruss
. It was sufficiently new to the outside world that Consul General Messersmith devoted an entire dispatch to the subject, dated August 8, 1933.
The salute, he wrote, had no modern precedent, save for the more narrowly required salute of soldiers in the presence of superior officers. What made the practice unique was that everyone was expected to salute, even in the most mundane of encounters. Shopkeepers saluted customers. Children were required to salute their teachers several times a day. At the close of theatrical performances, a newly established custom demanded that audiences stand and salute as they sang first the German national anthem, “Deutschland über Alles,” and second the Storm Trooper anthem, the “Horst Wessel Lied,” or “Horst Wessel Song,” named for its composer, an SA thug killed by communists but whom Nazi propaganda subsequently transformed into a hero. The German public had so avidly embraced the salute as to make the act of incessantly saluting almost comical, especially in the corridors of public buildings where everyone from the lowliest
messenger to the loftiest official saluted and
Heil
ed one another, turning a walk to the men’s room into an exhausting affair.

Messersmith refused to salute and merely stood at attention, but he understood that for ordinary Germans that would not have sufficed. At times even he felt real pressure to conform. At the close of a luncheon he attended in the port city of Kiel, all the guests stood and with right arms extended sang the national anthem and the “Horst Wessel Song.” Messersmith stood respectfully, as he would have in America for the “Star-Spangled Banner.” Many of the other guests, including a number of Storm Troopers, glared at him and whispered among themselves as if trying to divine his identity. “
I felt really quite fortunate that the incident took place within doors and among on the whole intelligent people,” he wrote, “for if it had been in a street gathering or in an outdoor demonstration, no questions would have been asked as to who I was, and that I would have been mishandled is almost unquestionable.” Messersmith recommended that American visitors try to anticipate when the songs and salute would be required and leave early.

He did not think it funny when now and then Ambassador
Dodd threw him a mock salute.

DURING HER SECOND WEEK
in Berlin, Martha discovered that she had not shed her past as completely as she had hoped.

Bassett, her husband, arrived in the city on what he privately called his “Mission to Berlin,” hoping to win Martha back.

He checked in at the Hotel Adlon. They saw each other several times, but Bassett did not get the tear-filled rapprochement he had hoped for. Rather, he found a cordial indifference. “
You remember our bicycle ride through the park,” he wrote later. “You were friendly, but I sensed a difference between us.”

To make matters worse, toward the end of his stay Bassett caught a severe cold. It laid him flat, just in time for Martha’s last visit before his departure.

He knew that his Mission to Berlin had failed the moment Martha arrived in his room. She had brought her brother, Bill.

It was a moment of casual cruelty. She knew Bassett would interpret
it correctly. She was tired. She had loved him once, but their relationship had been too fraught with misunderstandings and conflicting imperatives. Where there had been love, as Martha later put it, there were now only “embers,” and these were not enough.

Bassett understood. “
You had had it,” he wrote. “And who could blame you!”

He sent her flowers, acknowledging defeat. The card that accompanied them began, “
To my charming and lovely ex-wife.”

He left for America, for Larchmont, New York, and a suburban life of lawn mowing and tending the copper beech in his backyard and evening drinks and potlucks and a train commute to his job at the bank. He wrote later, “
I’m not at all sure you would have been happy as the wife of a bank economist, preoccupied with the Bank Letter, bringing up a family of children, PTA, and all that.”

MARTHA’S CONNECTION WITH
Sigrid Schultz soon began to pay off. Schultz threw a welcome party for Martha on July 23, 1933, and invited a number of her closest friends, among them still another correspondent, Quentin Reynolds, who wrote for the Hearst News Service. Martha and Reynolds hit it off instantly. He was big and cheerful, with curly hair and eyes that always seemed to convey a sense of impending laughter—though he had a reputation, as well, for being hard-nosed, skeptical, and smart.

They met again five days later in the bar at the Esplanade, along with her brother, Bill. Like Schultz, Reynolds knew everyone and had managed to befriend a number of Nazi officials, including a confidant of Hitler with the tongue-twisting name Ernst Franz Sedgwick Hanfstaengl.
A Harvard graduate with an American-born mother, Hanfstaengl was known to play piano for Hitler late at night to soothe the dictator’s nerves. No Mozart or Bach. Mostly Wagner and Verdi, Liszt and Grieg, some Strauss and Chopin.

Martha wanted to meet him; Reynolds knew of a party to be thrown by a fellow correspondent where Hanfstaengl was expected to be a guest and offered to bring her along.

CHAPTER 7
Hidden Conflict

D
odd walked from the Esplanade to his office each morning, a fifteen-minute stroll along Tiergartenstrasse, the street that formed the southern boundary of the park. On the south side stood mansions with lush grounds and wrought-iron fences, many belonging to embassies and consulates; on the north sprawled the park itself, dense with trees and statuary, its paths inked with morning shade. Dodd called it “
the most beautiful park I have ever seen,” and the walk quickly became his favorite part of the day. His office was in the embassy chancery on a street just off the park called Bendlerstrasse, which also contained the “Bendler Block,” a collection of squat, pale, rectangular buildings that served as the headquarters of the regular German army, the Reichswehr.

A photograph of Dodd at work in his office during his first week or so in Berlin shows him seated at a large, elaborately carved desk before a soaring tapestry hung on the wall behind him, with a large and complicated phone to his left at a reach of maybe five feet. There is something comical about the image: Dodd, slight of frame, his collar stiff and white, hair pomaded and severely parted, stares with a stern expression into the camera, utterly dwarfed by the opulence that surrounds him. The photograph caused a good deal of mirth back at the State Department among those who disapproved of Dodd’s appointment. Undersecretary Phillips closed a letter to Dodd: “
A photograph of you seated at your desk in front of a gorgeous tapestry has had quite a wide circulation and looks most impressive.”

At every turn Dodd seemed to violate some aspect of embassy
custom, at least in the eyes of his counselor of embassy, George Gordon. Dodd insisted on walking to meetings with government officials. Once, in paying a call on the nearby Spanish embassy, he made Gordon walk with him, both men dressed in morning coats and silk hats. In a letter to Thornton Wilder evoking the scene, Martha wrote that Gordon had “
rolled in the gutter in an apoplectic fit.” When Dodd drove anywhere, he took the family’s Chevrolet, no match for the Opels and Mercedeses favored by senior Reich officials. He wore plain suits. He cracked wry jokes. On Monday, July 24, he committed a particularly egregious sin. Consul General Messersmith had invited him and Gordon to a meeting with a visiting U.S. congressman, to be held in Messersmith’s office at the American consulate, which occupied the first two floors of a building across the street from the Esplanade Hotel. Dodd arrived at Messersmith’s office before Gordon; a few minutes later the telephone rang. What Dodd gleaned from Messersmith’s end of the conversation was that Gordon was now refusing to come. The reason: pure pique. In Gordon’s view Dodd had “degraded” himself and his post by stooping to attend a meeting in the office of a man of inferior rank. Dodd observed in his diary, “
Gordon is an industrious career man with punctilio developed to the nth degree.”

Dodd could not immediately present his credentials—his “Letters of Credence”—to President Hindenburg, as demanded by diplomatic protocol, for Hindenburg was unwell and had retreated to his estate at Neudeck in East Prussia to convalesce; he was not expected to return until the end of the summer. Dodd, therefore, was not yet officially recognized as ambassador and used this period of quiet to familiarize himself with such basic functions as the operation of the embassy phones, its telegraphic codes, and the typical departure times of diplomatic pouches. He met with a group of American correspondents and then with some twenty German reporters, who—as Dodd feared—had seen the report in the Jewish
Hamburger Israelitisches Familienblatt
claiming that he had “
come to Germany to rectify the wrongs to the Jews.” Dodd read them what he described as a “brief disavowal.”

He quickly got a taste of life in the new Germany. On his first
full day in Berlin, Hitler’s cabinet enacted a new law, to take effect January 1, 1934, called the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases, which authorized the sterilization of individuals suffering various physical and mental handicaps.
He also learned that staff at the embassy and at Messersmith’s consulate had become convinced that German authorities were intercepting incoming and outgoing mail and that this had prompted Messersmith to take extraordinary measures to ensure that the most sensitive correspondence reached America unopened.
The consul general now dispatched messengers to hand such mail directly to the captains of ships bound for America, who would be met dockside by U.S. agents.

ONE OF THE EARLIEST TASKS
that Dodd assigned himself was to gain a grasp of the talents and deficits of the embassy’s officers, known as first and second secretaries, and the various clerks, stenographers, and other employees who worked out of the chancery. From the start Dodd found their work habits to be less than desirable. His more senior people came in each day at whatever hour seemed to please them and periodically disappeared to hunt or play golf. Almost all, he found, were members of a golf club in the Wannsee district southwest of central Berlin. Many were independently wealthy, in keeping with the traditions of the Foreign Service, and spent money with abandon, their own and the embassy’s. Dodd was particularly appalled at how much they spent on international cables. The messages were long and rambling and thus needlessly expensive.