In the Garden of Beasts (27 page)

Ten days earlier, Fromm and Poulette had gone for a drive through the Grunewald, an eleven-thousand-acre forest preserve west of Berlin. Like the Tiergarten, it had become a haven for diplomats and others seeking respite from Nazi surveillance. The act of driving in the forest provided Fromm one of the few moments when she felt truly safe. “
The louder the motor,” she wrote in her diary, “the more I feel at ease.”

There was nothing carefree about this latest drive, however. Their conversation centered on the law passed the preceding month that barred Jews from editing and writing for German newspapers and required members of the domestic press to present documentation from civil and church records to prove they were “Aryan.” Certain Jews could retain their jobs, namely those who had fought in the
past war or lost a son in battle or who wrote for Jewish newspapers, but only a small number qualified for these exemptions. Any unregistered journalist caught writing or editing faced up to one year in prison. The deadline was January 1, 1934.

Poulette sounded deeply troubled. Fromm found this perplexing. She herself knew about the requirement, of course. Being Jewish, she had resigned herself to the fact that she would be out of a job by the new year. But Poulette? “
Why should
you
worry?” Fromm asked.

“I have reason, Bella darling. I wrote for my papers, chased all over the place getting them. Finally I found out that my grandmother was Jewish.”

With that news her life had been abruptly, irrevocably altered. Come January she would join a wholly new social stratum consisting of thousands of people stunned to learn they had Jewish relatives somewhere in their past. Automatically, no matter how thoroughly they had identified themselves as Germans, they became reclassified as non-Aryan and found themselves consigned to new and meager lives on the margins of the Aryans-only world being constructed by Hitler’s government.

“Nobody knew anything about it,” Poulette told Fromm. “Now I lose my living.”

By itself the discovery was bad enough, but it also coincided with the anniversary of the death of Poulette’s husband. To Fromm’s surprise, Poulette decided not to attend the Little Press Ball; she was feeling too sad to go.

Fromm hated to leave her alone that night but went to the ball all the same after resolving that the next day she would visit Poulette and bring her back to her house, where Poulette loved to play with Fromm’s dogs.

Throughout the evening, in the moments when her mind wasn’t engaged by the antics of those around her, Fromm found herself haunted by thoughts of her friend’s uncharacteristic depression.

TO DODD, PAPEN’S REMARK
ranked as one of the most idiotic he had heard since his arrival in Berlin. And he had heard many. An odd kind of fanciful thinking seemed to have bedazzled Germany, to
the highest levels of government. Earlier in the year, for example,
Göring had claimed with utter sobriety that three hundred German Americans had been murdered in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia at the start of the past world war. Messersmith, in a dispatch, observed that even smart, well-traveled Germans will “
sit and calmly tell you the most extraordinary fairy tales.”

Now here was the nation’s vice-chancellor claiming not to understand why the United States had entered the world war against Germany.

Dodd looked at Papen. “
I can tell you that,” he said, his voice just as level and even as before. “It was through the sheer, consummate stupidity of German diplomats.”

Papen looked stunned. His wife, according to Sigrid Schultz, looked strangely pleased. A new silence filled the table—not one of anticipation, as before, but a charged emptiness—until suddenly everyone sought to fill the chasm with flecks of diverting conversation.

In another world, another context, it would have been a minor incident, a burst of caustic banter readily forgotten. Amid the oppression and
Gleichschaltung
of Nazi Germany, however, it was something far more important and symbolic. After the ball, as had become custom, a core group of guests retired to Schultz’s flat, where her mother had prepared piles of sandwiches and where the story of Dodd’s verbal swordplay was recounted with great and no doubt drunken flourish. Dodd himself was not present, inclined as he was to leave banquets as early as protocol allowed and head for home to close out the night with a glass of milk, a bowl of stewed peaches, and the comfort of a good book.

DESPITE HER MOMENTS
of upwelling anxiety, Bella Fromm found the ball delightful. Such a pleasure to see how Nazis behaved after a few drinks and to listen in as they julienned one another with lacerating commentary delivered in a whisper. At one point the dagger-carrying duke, Koburg, happened to strut past Fromm as she was conversing with Kurt Daluege, a police official whom she
described as “
brutal and ruthless.” The duke seemed to want to project arrogance, but the effect, Fromm noted, was comically undermined by “his stooped, dwarf-like figure.” Daluege told Fromm, “That Koburg walks as though he were on stilts,” then added with menace: “It might leak out that his grandmother deceived the Grand Duke with that Jewish court banker.”

At ten the next morning, Fromm telephoned Poulette but only reached her elderly maid, who said, “The Baroness has left a note in the kitchen that she is not to be disturbed.”

Poulette never slept this late. “Suddenly I understood,” Fromm wrote.

Poulette wouldn’t be the first Jew or newly classified non-Aryan to try suicide in the wake of Hitler’s rise.
Rumors of suicides were common, and indeed a study by the Berlin Jewish Community found that in 1932–34 there were 70.2 suicides per 100,000 Jews in Berlin, up sharply from 50.4 in 1924–26.

Fromm raced to her garage and drove as quickly as possible to Poulette’s home.

At the door the servant told her Poulette was still asleep. Fromm brushed past and continued on until she reached Poulette’s bedroom. The room was dark. Fromm opened the curtains. She found Poulette lying in bed, breathing, but with difficulty. Beside the bed, on a night table, were two empty tubes of a barbiturate, Veronal.

Fromm also found a note addressed to her. “I can’t live anymore because I know I will be forced to give up my work. You have been my best friend, Bella. Please take all my files and use them. I thank you for all the love you gave me. I know you are brave, braver than I am, and you must live because you have a child to think of, and I am sure that you will bear the struggle far better than I could.”

The household came alive. Doctors arrived but could do nothing.

The next day an official of the foreign office called Fromm to convey his sorrow and an oblique message. “Frau Bella,” he said, “I am deeply shocked. I know how terrible your loss is. Frau von Huhn died of pneumonia.”

“Nonsense!” Fromm snapped. “Who told you that? She committed—”

“Frau Bella, please understand, our friend had pneumonia. Further explanations are undesirable. In your interest, as well.”

MOST GUESTS HAD FOUND
the ball to be a lovely diversion. “
We all had a really good time,” wrote Louis Lochner in a letter to his daughter at school in America, “and the party was a jolly one.” Ambassador Dodd, predictably, had a different assessment: “
The dinner was a bore, though the company present might under other circumstances have been most informing.”

One result was unexpected. Instead of embittered estrangement between Dodd and Papen, there grew instead a warm and lasting association. “
From that day on,” Sigrid Schultz observed, “Papen himself cultivated the friendship of Ambassador Dodd with the greatest assiduity.” Papen’s behavior toward Schultz also improved. He seemed to have decided, she wrote, that “it was better to display his Sunday manners toward me.” This, she found, was typical of a certain kind of German. “Whenever they come up against someone who will not stand for their arrogance, they climb down from their perch and behave,” she wrote. “They respect character when they meet it, and if more people had shown firmness to Hitler’s handyman Papen and his acolytes in small every day contacts, as well as in big affairs of state, the Nazi growth could have been slowed up.”

RUMOR SPREAD ABOUT THE
true cause of Poulette’s death. After the funeral, Fromm was accompanied home by a good friend to whom she felt a daughterly bond—“Mammi” von Carnap, wife of a former chamberlain to the kaiser and long an excellent source of information for Fromm’s column. Although loyal to the old Germany, the Carnaps were sympathetic to Hitler and his campaign to restore the nation’s strength.

Mammi seemed to have something on her mind. After a few moments, she said, “
Bellachen, we are all so shocked that the new regulations should have this effect!”

Fromm was startled. “But Mammi,” Fromm said, “don’t you realize?
This is only the beginning. This thing will turn against all of you who helped to create it.”

Mammi ignored the remark. “Frau von Neurath advises you to hurry up and get baptized,” she said. “They are very anxious at the foreign office to avoid a second
casus
Poulette.”

Fromm found this astonishing—that someone could be so ignorant of the new realities of Germany as to think that mere baptism could restore one’s status as an Aryan.

“Poor old fool!” Fromm wrote in her diary.

CHAPTER 27
O Tannenbaum

I
t was almost Christmas. The winter sun, when it shone at all, climbed only partway into the southern sky and cast evening shadows at midday. Frigid winds came in off the plains. “
Berlin is a skeleton which aches in the cold,” wrote Christopher Isherwood, describing the winters he experienced during his tenure in 1930s Berlin: “It is my own skeleton aching. I feel in my bones the sharp ache of the frost in the girders of the overhead railway, in the ironwork of balconies, in bridges, tramlines, lamp-standards, latrines. The iron throbs and shrinks, the stone and the bricks ache dully, the plaster is numb.”

The gloom was leavened somewhat by the play of lights on wet streets—sidewalk lamps, storefronts, headlights, the warmly lit interiors of countless streetcars—and by the city’s habitual embrace of Christmas. Candles appeared in every window and large trees lit with electric lights graced squares and parks and the busiest street corners, reflecting a passion for the season that even the Storm Troopers could not suppress and in fact used to their financial advantage.
The SA monopolized the sale of Christmas trees, selling them from rail yards, ostensibly for the benefit of the Winterhilfe—literally, Winter Help—the SA’s charity for the poor and jobless, widely believed by cynical Berliners to fund the Storm Troopers’ parties and banquets, which had become legendary for their opulence, their debauchery, and the volume of champagne consumed. Troopers went door-to-door carrying red donation boxes. Donors received little badges to pin on their clothing to show they had given money, and they made sure to wear them, thereby putting oblique pressure on those brave or foolhardy souls who failed to contribute.

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.