- Larson, Erik.
In the Garden of Beasts.
New York: Crown Publishers, 2011.
ISBN 978-0-307-40884-6.
-
Ambassadors to high-profile postings are usually chosen from
political patrons and contributors to the president
who appoints them, depending upon career Foreign Service officers
to provide the in-country expertise needed to carry out their
mandate. Newly-elected Franklin Roosevelt intended to follow
this tradition in choosing his ambassador to Germany, where Hitler
had just taken power, but discovered that none of the candidates
he approached were interested in being sent to represent the
U.S. in Nazi Germany. William E. Dodd, a professor of history
and chairman of the department of history at the University of
Chicago, growing increasingly frustrated with his administrative
duties preventing him from completing his life's work: a comprehensive
history of the ante-bellum American South, mentioned to a friend
in Roosevelt's inner circle that he'd be interested in an
appointment as ambassador to a country like Belgium or the
Netherlands, where he thought his ceremonial obligations would be
sufficiently undemanding that he could concentrate on his
scholarly work.
Dodd was astonished when Roosevelt contacted him directly and
offered him the ambassadorship to Germany. Roosevelt appealed
to Dodd's fervent New Deal sympathies, and argued that in such a
position he could be an exemplar of American liberal values in
a regime hostile to them. Dodd realised from the outset that
a mission to Berlin would doom his history project, but accepted
because he agreed with Roosevelt's goal and also because FDR was
a very persuasive person. His nomination was sent to the Senate
and confirmed the very same day.
Dodd brought his whole family along on the adventure: wife Mattie
and adult son and daughter Bill and Martha. Dodd arrived in Berlin
with an open mind toward the recently-installed Nazi regime. He was
inclined to dismiss the dark view of the career embassy staff and
instead adopt what might be called today “smart diplomacy”,
deceiving himself into believing that by setting an example and
scolding the Nazi slavers he could shame them into civilised behaviour.
He immediately found himself at odds not only with the Nazis but also his
own embassy staff: he railed against the excesses of diplomatic
expense, personally edited the verbose dispatches composed by his
staff to save telegraph charges, and drove his own aged Chevrolet,
shipped from the U.S., to diplomatic functions where all of
the other ambassadors arrived in stately black limousines.
Meanwhile, daughter Martha
embarked upon her own version of
Girl Gone Wild—Third Reich Edition. Initially
exhilarated by the New Germany and swept into its social whirl,
before long she was carrying on simultaneous affairs with
the
head of the Gestapo
and a Soviet NKVD agent operating under diplomatic cover in
Berlin, among others.
Those others included
Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl,
who tried to set her up with Hitler (nothing came of it; they met at lunch and that
was it).
Martha's trajectory through life was extraordinary. After affairs with the
head of the Gestapo and one of Hitler's inner circle, she
was recruited by the
NKVD and spied on behalf
of the Soviet Union in Berlin and after her return to the U.S. It is not
clear that she provided anything of value to the Soviets, as she had
no access to state secrets during this period. With investigations of
her Soviet affiliations intensifying in the early 1950s, in 1956 she fled
with her American husband and son to Prague, Czechoslovakia where they lived
until her death in 1990 (they may have spent some time in Cuba, and
apparently applied for Soviet citizenship and were denied it).
Dodd père was much quicker to figure out the true nature of the
Nazi regime. Following Roosevelt's charge to represent American values,
he spoke out against the ever-increasing Nazi domination of every aspect
of German society, and found himself at odds with the patrician
“Pretty Good Club” at the State Department who wished to
avoid making waves, regardless of how malevolent and brutal the adversary
might be. Today, we'd call them the “reset button crowd”. Even
Dodd found the daily influence of immersion in
gleichschaltung
difficult to resist. On several occasions he complained of the influence
of Jewish members of his staff and the difficulties they posed in dealing
with the Nazi regime.
This book focuses upon the first two years of Dodd's tenure as ambassador
in Berlin, as that was the time in which the true nature of the regime
became apparent to him and he decided upon his policy of distancing
himself from it: for example, refusing to attend any Nazi party-related
events such as the Nuremberg rallies. It provides an insightful view of
how seductive a totalitarian regime can be to outsiders who see only
its bright-eyed marching supporters, while ignoring the violence which
sustains it, and how utterly futile “constructive engagement” is
with barbarians that share no common values with civilisation.
Thanks to
James Lileks
for
suggesting this book.
December 2011 