In the Garden of Beasts (32 page)

But anything was possible. “
I often felt such terror,” she wrote, “that occasionally I would wake up my mother and ask her to come and sleep in my room.”

CHAPTER 32
Storm Warning

I
n February 1934 rumors reached Dodd that suggested the conflict between Hitler and Captain Röhm had attained a new level of intensity. The rumors were well founded.

Toward the end of the month, Hitler appeared before a gathering of the top officers of Röhm’s SA, Heinrich Himmler’s SS, and the regular army, the Reichswehr. Present with him on the dais were Röhm and Minister of Defense Blomberg. The atmosphere in the room was charged. All present knew of the simmering conflict between the SA and the army and expected Hitler to address the issue.

First Hitler spoke of broader matters. Germany, he declared, needed more room in which to expand, “
more living space for our surplus population.” And Germany, he said, must be ready to take it. “The Western powers will never yield this vital space to us,” Hitler said. “That is why a series of decisive blows may become necessary—first in the West, and then in the East.”

After further elaboration, he turned to Röhm. All in the room knew of Röhm’s ambitions. A few weeks earlier Röhm had made a formal proposal that the Reichswehr, SA, and SS be consolidated under a single ministry, leaving unsaid but implied that he himself should be the minister in charge. Now, looking directly at Röhm, Hitler said, “The SA must limit itself to its political task.”

Röhm maintained an expression of indifference. Hitler continued, “The Minister of War may call upon the SA for border control and for premilitary instruction.”

This too was a humiliation. Not only was Hitler consigning the
SA to the decidedly inglorious tasks of border control and training, but he was explicitly placing Röhm in an inferior position to Blomberg as the recipient of orders, not the originator. Röhm still did not react.

Hitler said, “I expect from the SA loyal execution of the work entrusted to it.”

After concluding his speech, Hitler turned to Röhm, took his arm, and grasped his hand. Each looked into the other’s eyes. It was an orchestrated moment, meant to convey reconciliation. Hitler left. Acting his part, Röhm now invited the gathered officers to lunch at his quarters. The banquet, in typical SA style, was lavish, accompanied by a torrent of champagne, but the atmosphere was anything but convivial. At an appropriate moment, Röhm and his SA men stood to signal that the luncheon had come to an end. Heels clicked, a forest of arms shot outward in the Hitler salute,
Heil
s were barked, and the army leaders made their exit.

Röhm and his men remained behind. They drank more champagne, but their mood was glum.

For Röhm, Hitler’s remarks constituted a betrayal of their long association. Hitler seemed to have forgotten the crucial role the Storm Troopers had played in bringing him to power.

Now, to no one in particular, Röhm said, “
That was a new Versailles Treaty.” A few moments later, he added, “Hitler? If only we could get rid of that limp rag.”

The SA men lingered a while longer, trading angry reactions to Hitler’s speech—all this witnessed by a senior SA officer named Viktor Lutze, who found it deeply troubling. A few days later, Lutze reported the episode to Rudolf Hess, at this point one of Hitler’s closest aides, who urged Lutze to see Hitler in person and tell him everything.

Upon hearing Lutze’s account, Hitler replied, “
We’ll have to let the thing ripen.”

CHAPTER 33
“Memorandum of a Conversation with Hitler”

D
odd’s happy anticipation of his upcoming leave was marred by two unexpected demands. The first came on Monday, March 5, 1934, when he was summoned to the office of Foreign Minister Neurath, who angrily demanded that he do something to halt a mock trial of Hitler set to take place two days later in New York’s Madison Square Garden. The trial was organized by the American Jewish Congress, with support from the American Federation of Labor and a couple of dozen other Jewish and anti-Nazi organizations. The plan so outraged Hitler that he ordered Neurath and his diplomats in Berlin and Washington to stop it.

One result was a sequence of official protests, replies, and memoranda that revealed both Germany’s sensitivity to outside opinion and the lengths U.S. officials felt compelled to go to avoid direct criticism of Hitler and his party. The degree of restraint would have been comical if the stakes had not been so high and raised a question: why were the State Department and President Roosevelt so hesitant to express in frank terms how they really felt about Hitler at a time when such expressions clearly could have had a powerful effect on his prestige in the world?

GERMANY’S EMBASSY IN WASHINGTON
had first gotten wind of the planned trial several weeks earlier, in February, through
advertisements in the
New York Times
. Germany’s ambassador to the United States, Hans Luther, promptly complained to Secretary of State Hull, whose response was careful: “
I stated that I was sorry to see these differences arise between persons in his country and in mine; that I would give the matter all due attention such as might be possible and justifiable in all of the circumstances.”

On March 1, 1934, the German embassy’s number-two man, Rudolf Leitner, met with a State Department official named John Hickerson and urged him to “
do something to prevent this trial because of its lamentable effect on German public opinion if it should take place.” Hickerson replied that owing to “our constitutional guarantees of freedom of expression” the federal government could do nothing to stop it.

Leitner found this difficult to fathom. He told Hickerson “
that if the circumstances were reversed the German Government would certainly find a way of ‘stopping such a proceeding.’ ”

On this point Hickerson had no doubt. “
I replied,” Hickerson wrote, “that it is my understanding that the German Government is not so limited in the action which it can take in such matters as the American government.”

The next day, Friday, March 2, Ambassador Luther had a second meeting with Secretary Hull to protest the trial.

Hull himself would have preferred that the mock trial not occur. It complicated things and had the potential of further reducing Germany’s willingness to pay its debts. At the same time, he disliked the Nazi regime. Although he avoided any direct statement of criticism, he took a certain pleasure in telling the German ambassador that the men slated to speak at the trial “were not in the slightest under the control of the Federal Government,” and therefore the State Department was powerless to intervene.

It was then that Foreign Minister Neurath summoned Dodd to his office. Neurath kept him waiting ten minutes, which Dodd “
noticed and resented.” The delay reminded him of Neurath’s snub the previous October after his Columbus Day speech about Gracchus and Caesar.

Neurath handed him an aide-mémoire—a written statement given by one diplomat to another, typically on a serious matter where verbal delivery might distort the intended message. This one was unexpectedly
intemperate and threatening. It called the planned mock trial a “
malicious demonstration” and cited a pattern of similarly “insulting expressions” that had taken place in the United States throughout the preceding year, describing these as “a combat tantamount to direct interference in the internal affairs of another country.” The document also attacked an ongoing Jewish American boycott of German goods promoted by the American Jewish Congress. Playing to America’s fears of a German bond default, it claimed the boycott had reduced Germany’s balance of payments with the United States to such an extent that “the fulfillment of the obligations of German companies to their American creditors has only been partially possible.”

Neurath ended the aide-mémoire by declaring that because of the mock trial “maintenance of friendly relations, sincerely desired by both Governments, is rendered extremely difficult thereby.”

After reading it, Dodd explained quietly that in America “
nobody could suppress a private or public meeting,” a point the Germans seemed utterly unable to grasp. Dodd also hinted that Germany had brought these public relations troubles upon itself. “
I reminded the Minister that many things still occur here shocking to foreign public opinion.”

After the meeting, Dodd cabled Secretary Hull and told him the mock trial had made “
an extraordinary impression” on the German government. Dodd ordered his staff to translate Neurath’s aide-mémoire and only then sent it to Hull, by mail.

On the morning before the mock trial, German ambassador Luther tried again to stop it. This time he called on Undersecretary William Phillips, who also told him nothing could be done. Luther demanded that the department announce immediately “
that nothing which was to be said at the meeting would represent the views of the Government.”

Here too Phillips demurred. Not enough time remained to prepare such a statement, he explained; he added that it would be inappropriate for the secretary of state to attempt to anticipate what the speakers would or would not say at the trial.

Luther made one last try and asked that the State Department at least issue such a disavowal on the morning after the trial.

Phillips said he could not commit the department but would “
take the matter under consideration.”

The trial took place as planned, guarded by 320 uniformed New York City policemen. Inside Madison Square Garden, forty plain-clothes detectives circulated among the twenty thousand people in attendance. The twenty “witnesses” who testified during the trial included Rabbi Stephen Wise, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, and a former secretary of state, Bainbridge Colby, who delivered the opening remarks. The trial found Hitler guilty: “
We declare that the Hitler government is compelling the German people to turn back from civilization to an antiquated and barbarous despotism which menaces the progress of mankind toward peace and freedom, and is a present threat against civilized life throughout the world.”

At a press conference the next day Phillips stated that he had “
no comment other than to re-emphasize the private nature of the gathering and that no member of the Administration was present.”

Phillips and fellow officials turned their attention to other matters. As would soon become apparent, however, Germany was not yet willing to let the matter drop.

THE SECOND DISTASTEFUL TASK
that Dodd had to complete before his departure was to meet with Hitler. He had received an order from Secretary Hull directing him to convey to the chancellor America’s dismay at a burst of Nazi propaganda recently unleashed within the United States. Putzi Hanfstaengl arranged the meeting, which was to be private and secret—just Hitler and Dodd—and so, on Wednesday, March 7, shortly before one o’clock in the afternoon, Dodd once again found himself in the Reich chancellery making his way to Hitler’s office past the usual cadre of guards clicking and saluting.

First Dodd asked Hitler whether he had a personal message for Roosevelt that Dodd might deliver in person when he met with the president in Washington.

Hitler paused. He looked at Dodd a moment.

“I am very much obliged to you,” he said, “but this takes me by
surprise and I wish you would give me time to think the subject over and let me talk with you again.”

Dodd and Hitler conversed a few moments about innocuous things before Dodd turned to the matter at hand—“the unfortunate propaganda which has been made in the United States,” as Dodd recounted in a memorandum he composed after the meeting.

Hitler “pretended astonishment,” Dodd wrote, and then asked for details.

Within the last ten days, Dodd told him, a Nazi pamphlet had begun circulating in the United States that contained what Dodd described as “an appeal to Germans in other countries to think themselves always as Germans and owing moral, if not political, allegiance to the fatherland.” Dodd likened it to similar propaganda distributed in the United States in 1913, well before America entered the past war.

Hitler flared.
“Ach,”
he snapped, “that is all Jewish lies; if I find out who does that, I will put him out of the country at once.”

With this the conversation veered into a broader, more venomous discussion of the “Jewish problem.” Hitler condemned all Jews and blamed them for whatever bad feeling had arisen in America toward Germany. He became enraged and exclaimed, “Damn the Jews!”

Given Hitler’s fury, Dodd thought it prudent to refrain from raising the subject of the mock trial, which would take place later that day, New York time. Hitler didn’t mention it either.

Instead, Dodd turned to how the Jewish situation might be resolved peacefully and humanely. “You know there is a Jewish problem in other countries,” Dodd told Hitler. Dodd proceeded to describe how the State Department was providing unofficial encouragement to a new organization established by the League of Nations under the direction of James G. McDonald, newly appointed high commissioner for refugees from Germany, to relocate Jews, as Dodd put it, “without too much suffering.”

Hitler dismissed it out of hand. The effort would fail, he said, no matter how much money the commission raised. The Jews, he said, would turn it into a weapon to “attack Germany and make endless trouble.”

Dodd countered that Germany’s current approach was doing great damage to the country’s reputation in America. Oddly, Dodd now sought to find a kind of middle ground with the dictator. He told Hitler, “You know a number of high positions in our country are at present occupied by Jews, both in New York and Illinois.” He named several “eminent fair-minded Hebrews,” including Henry Morgenthau Jr., Roosevelt’s secretary of the Treasury since January. Dodd explained to Hitler “that where the question of over-activity of Jews in university or official life made trouble, we had managed to redistribute the offices in such a way as not to give great offense, and that wealthy Jews continued to support institutions which had limited the number of Jews who held high positions.” Dodd cited one such example in Chicago and added, “The Jews in Illinois constituted no serious problem.”