In the Garden of Beasts (7 page)

Dodd, however, never got the chance to read a letter that Messersmith wrote soon afterward in which he retracted this cheerier assessment. Marked “Personal & Confidential,” he sent it to Undersecretary Phillips. The letter, dated June 26, 1933, reached Phillips just as the Dodds were about to leave for Berlin.

“
I have tried to point out in my dispatches that the higher leaders of the party are growing more moderate, while the intermediary leaders and the masses are just as radical as ever, and that the question is whether the higher leaders will be able to impose their moderate will on the masses,” Messersmith wrote. “It begins to look pretty definitely that they will not be able to do so, but that the pressure from the bottom is becoming stronger all the time.” Göring and Goebbels in particular no longer seemed so moderate, he wrote. “Dr. Goebbels is daily preaching that the revolution has just begun and what has so far been done is just an overture.”

Priests were being arrested. A former president of Lower Silesia, whom Messersmith knew personally, had been placed in a concentration camp. He sensed a rising “hysteria” among midlevel leaders of the Nazi Party, expressed as a belief “that the only safety lies in getting everybody in jail.” The nation was quietly but aggressively readying itself for war, deploying propaganda to conjure the
perception “that the whole world is against Germany and that it lies defenseless before the world.” Hitler’s vows of peaceful intent were illusory, meant only to buy time for Germany to rearm, Messersmith warned. “What they most want to do, however, definitely is to make Germany the most capable instrument of war that there has ever existed.”

WHILE IN WASHINGTON
, Dodd attended a reception thrown for him by the German embassy, and there he met Wilbur Carr for the first time. Later, Carr jotted a quick description of Dodd in his diary: “
Pleasing, interesting person with fine sense of humor and simple modesty.”

Dodd also paid a call on the State Department’s chief of Western European affairs, Jay Pierrepont Moffat, who shared Carr’s and Phillips’s
distaste for Jews as well as their hard-line attitude toward immigration. Moffat recorded his own impression of the new ambassador: “
He is extremely sure of his opinion, expresses himself forcibly and didactically and tends to dramatize the points he makes. The only fly in the ointment is that he is going to try and run the Embassy with a family of four persons on his salary, and how he is going to do it in Berlin, where prices are high, is something beyond me.”

What neither Carr nor Moffat expressed in these entries was the surprise and displeasure they and many of their peers had felt at Dodd’s appointment. Theirs was an elite realm to which only men of a certain pedigree could expect ready admission. Many had gone to the same prep schools, mainly St. Paul’s and Groton, and from there to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.
Undersecretary Phillips grew up in Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood in a giant Victorian pile of a house. He was independently wealthy from the age of twenty-one and later in life became a regent of Harvard College. Most of his peers in the State Department also had money and while abroad spent heavily from their own funds with no expectation of reimbursement. One such official, Hugh Wilson, in praise of his fellow diplomats wrote, “
They have all felt that they belonged to a pretty good club. That feeling has fostered a healthy esprit de corps.”

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.

A dozen or so reporters also swarmed aboard and cornered Dodd on deck as he stood with his wife and Bill. At that moment Martha was elsewhere on the ship. The reporters threw out questions and prodded the Dodds to pose as if waving good-bye. With reluctance they did so, Dodd wrote, “and unaware of the similarity of the Hitler salute, then unknown to us, we raised our hands.”

The resulting photographs caused a minor outcry, for they seemed to capture Dodd, his wife, and son in mid-Heil.

Dodd’s misgivings flared.
By this point he had begun to dread leaving Chicago and his old life. As the ship eased from its moorage the family experienced what Martha described later as “
a disproportionate amount of sadness and foreboding.”

Martha wept.

CHAPTER 5
First Night

M
artha continued to cry off and on for the better part of the next two days—“copiously and sentimentally,” as she put it. Not out of anxiety, for she had given little thought to what life in Hitler’s Germany might really be like. Rather she wept for all she was leaving behind, the people and places, her friends and job, the familiar comfort of the house on Blackstone Avenue, her lovely Carl, all of which composed the “inestimably precious” life she had led in Chicago. If she needed a reminder of what she stood to lose, the seating at her going-away party provided it. She sat between Sandburg and another close friend, Thornton Wilder.

Gradually her sorrow eased. The seas were calm, the days bright. She and Roosevelt’s son chummed around and danced and drank champagne. They examined each other’s passports—his identifying him succinctly as “son of the President of the United States,” hers a tad more pretentious: “daughter of William E. Dodd, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the United States to Germany.” Her father required that she and her brother come to his stateroom, number A-10, for at least an hour a day and listen to him read aloud in German so that they would gain a sense of how the language sounded. He seemed unusually solemn, and Martha sensed an unaccustomed nervousness.

For her, however, the prospect of the adventure ahead soon pushed aside her anxiety. She knew little of international politics and by her own admission did not appreciate the gravity of what was occurring in Germany.
She saw Hitler as “a clown who looked like Charlie
Chaplin.” Like many others in America at this time and elsewhere in the world, she could not imagine him lasting very long or being taken seriously. She was ambivalent about the Jewish situation.
As a student at the University of Chicago she had experienced a “subtle and undercurrent propaganda among the undergraduates” that promulgated hostility toward Jews. Martha found “that even many of the college professors resented the brilliance of Jewish colleagues and students.” As for herself: “
I was slightly anti-Semitic in this sense: I accepted the attitude that Jews were not as physically attractive as Gentiles and were less socially desirable.” She also found herself absorbing a view that Jews, while generally brilliant, were rich and pushy. In this she reflected the attitude of a surprising proportion of other Americans, as captured in the 1930s by practitioners of the then-emerging art of public-opinion polling.
One poll found that 41 percent of those contacted believed Jews had “too much power in the United States”; another found that one-fifth wanted to “drive Jews out of the United States.” (
A poll taken decades in the future, in 2009, would find that the total of Americans who believed Jews had too much power had shrunk to 13 percent.)