In the Garden of Beasts (20 page)

“There was too much noise and disturbance, especially since the duties of my office required frequent entertainments,” Dodd wrote in a memorandum. “I think anyone would have said it was an act of bad faith.”

Dodd consulted a lawyer.

His landlord troubles and the mounting demands of his post made it increasingly difficult for Dodd to find time to work on his
Old South
. He was able to write only for brief intervals in the evening and on weekends. He struggled to acquire books and documents that would have been simple to locate in America.

The thing that weighed on him most, however, was the irrationality of the world in which he now found himself. To some extent he was a prisoner of his own training. As a historian, he had come to
view the world as the product of historical forces and the decisions of more or less rational people, and he expected the men around him to behave in a civil and coherent manner. But Hitler’s government was neither civil nor coherent, and the nation lurched from one inexplicable moment to another.

Even the language used by Hitler and party officials was weirdly inverted. The term “fanatical” became a positive trait. Suddenly it connoted what philologist Victor Klemperer, a Jewish resident of Berlin, described as a “
happy mix of courage and fervent devotion.” Nazi-controlled newspapers reported an endless succession of “fanatical vows” and “fanatical declarations” and “fanatical beliefs,” all good things. Göring was described as a “fanatical animal lover.”
Fanatischer Tierfreund
.

Certain very old words were coming into darkly robust modern use, Klemperer found.
Übermensch:
superman.
Untermensch:
sub-human, meaning “Jew.” Wholly new words were emerging as well, among them
Strafexpedition
—“punitive expedition”—the term Storm Troopers applied to their forays into Jewish and communist neighborhoods.

Klemperer detected a certain “hysteria of language” in the new flood of decrees, alarms, and intimidation—“This perpetual threatening with the death penalty!”—and in strange, inexplicable episodes of paranoid excess, like the recent nationwide search. In all this Klemperer saw a deliberate effort to generate a kind of daily suspense, “copied from American cinema and thrillers,” that helped keep people in line. He also gauged it to be a manifestation of insecurity among those in power. In late July 1933 Klemperer saw a newsreel in which Hitler, with fists clenched and face contorted, shrieked, “On 30 January they”—and here Klemperer presumed he meant the Jews—“laughed at me—that smile will be wiped off their faces!” Klemperer was struck by the fact that although Hitler was trying to convey omnipotence, he appeared to be in a wild, uncontrolled rage, which paradoxically had the effect of undermining his boasts that the new Reich would last a thousand years and that all his enemies would be annihilated. Klemperer wondered, Do you talk with such blind rage “if you are so sure of this endurance and this annihilation”?

He left the theater that day “with what almost amounted to a glimmer of hope.”

IN THE WORLD OUTSIDE
Dodd’s windows, however, the shadows steadily deepened.
Another attack occurred against an American, a representative of the Woolworth dime-store chain named Roland Velz, who was assaulted in Düsseldorf on Sunday, October 8, 1933, as he and his wife strolled along one of the city’s main streets. Like so many victims before them, they had committed the sin of failing to acknowledge an SA parade. An incensed Storm Trooper struck Velz twice, hard, in the face, and moved on. When Velz tried to get a policeman to arrest the man, the officer declined. Velz then complained to a police lieutenant standing nearby, but he also refused to act. Instead, the officer provided a brief lesson on how and when to salute.

Dodd sent two notes of protest to the foreign office in which he demanded immediate action to arrest the attacker. He received no reply. Once again Dodd weighed the idea of asking the State Department to “announce to the world that Americans are not safe in Germany and that travelers had best not go there,” but he ultimately demurred.

Persecution of Jews continued in ever more subtle and wideranging form as the process of
Gleichschaltung
advanced. In September the government established the Reich Chamber of Culture, under the control of Goebbels, to bring musicians, actors, painters, writers, reporters, and filmmakers into ideological and, especially, racial alignment. In early October the government enacted the Editorial Law, which banned Jews from employment by newspapers and publishers and was to take effect on January 1, 1934. No realm was too petty:
The Ministry of Posts ruled that henceforth when trying to spell a word over the telephone a caller could no longer say “D as in David,” because “David” was a Jewish name. The caller had to use “Dora.” “Samuel” became “Siegfried.” And so forth. “
There has been nothing in social history more implacable, more heartless and more devastating than the present policy in Germany against the Jews,” Consul General Messersmith told Undersecretary Phillips in a long
letter dated September 29, 1933. He wrote, “It is definitely the aim of the Government, no matter what it may say to the outside or in Germany, to eliminate the Jews from German life.”

For a time Messersmith had been convinced that Germany’s economic crisis would unseat Hitler. No longer. He saw now that Hitler, Göring, and Goebbels were firmly in power. They “know practically nothing concerning the outside world,” he wrote. “They know only that in Germany they can do as they will. They feel their power within the country and are to that extent drunk with it.”

Messersmith proposed that one solution might be “
forcible intervention from the outside.” But he warned that such an action would have to come soon. “If there were intervention by other powers now, probably about half of the population would still look upon it as deliverance,” he wrote. “If it is delayed too long, such intervention might meet a practically united Germany.”

One fact was certain, Messersmith believed: Germany now posed a real and grave threat to the world. He called it “the sore spot which may disturb our peace for years to come.”

DODD BEGAN TO EXHIBIT
the first signs of discouragement and a deep weariness.

“
There is nothing here that seems to offer much promise,” he wrote to his friend Colonel Edward M. House, “and I am, between us again, not a little doubtful of the wisdom of my having intimated last spring that I might be of service in Germany. I have one volume of
The Old South
ready or nearly ready for publication. There are to be three more. I have worked twenty years on the subject and dislike to run too great a risk of never finishing it.” He closed: “Now I am here, sixty-four years old, and engaged ten to fifteen hours a day! Getting nowhere. Yet, if I resigned, that fact would complicate matters.” To his friend Jane Addams, the reformer who founded Hull House in Chicago, he wrote, “
It defeats my history work and I am far from sure I was right in my choice last June.”

On October 4, 1933, barely three months into his stay, Dodd sent Secretary Hull a letter marked “confidential and for you alone.”
Citing the dampness of Berlin’s autumn and winter climate and his lack of a vacation since March, Dodd requested permission to take a lengthy leave early in the coming year so that he could spend time on his farm and do some teaching in Chicago. He hoped to depart Berlin at the end of February and return three months later.

He asked Hull to keep his request secret. “
Please do not refer to others if you have doubts yourself.”

Hull granted Dodd’s leave request, suggesting that at this time Washington did not share Messersmith’s assessment of Germany as a serious and growing threat. The diaries of Undersecretary Phillips and Western European affairs chief Moffat make clear that the State Department’s main concern about Germany remained its huge debt to American creditors.

CHAPTER 17
Lucifer’s Run

W
ith the approach of autumn, the challenge for Martha of juggling the suitors in her life became a bit less daunting, albeit for a disturbing reason. Diels disappeared.

One night in early October, Diels was working late at his office at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8 when, around midnight, he received a telephone call from his wife, Hilde, who sounded deeply distressed. As he recounted in a later memoir,
Lucifer Ante Portas—Lucifer at the Gate
—his wife told him that “a horde” of armed men in black uniforms had broken into their apartment, locked her in a bedroom, and then conducted an aggressive search, collecting diaries, letters, and various other files that Diels kept at home. Diels raced to his apartment and managed to piece together enough information to identify the intruders as a squad of SS under the command of one Captain Herbert Packebusch. Packebusch was only thirty-one years old, Diels wrote, but already had a “
harshness and callousness written deep into his face.” Diels called him “the very prototype and image of the later concentration-camp commandants.”

Although the brazen nature of Packebusch’s raid surprised Diels, he understood the forces at work behind it. The regime seethed with conflict and conspiracy. Diels stood primarily in Göring’s camp, with Göring holding all police power in Berlin and the surrounding territory of Prussia, the largest of the German states. But Heinrich Himmler, in charge of the SS, was rapidly gaining control over secret police agencies throughout the rest of Germany. Göring and Himmler loathed each other and competed for influence.

Diels acted quickly. He called a friend in charge of the Tiergarten station of the Berlin police and marshaled a force of uniformed officers armed with machine guns and hand grenades. He led them to an SS stronghold on Potsdamer Strasse and directed the men to surround the building. The SS guarding the door were unaware of what had taken place and helpfully led Diels and a contingent of police to Packebusch’s office.

The surprise was total. As Diels entered he saw Packebusch at his desk in shirtsleeves, the black jacket of his uniform hanging on an adjacent wall, along with his belt and holstered pistol. “He sat there, brooding over the papers on his desk like a scholar working into the night,” Diels wrote. Diels was outraged. “They were my papers he was working on, and defacing, as I soon discovered, with inept annotations.” Diels found that Packebusch even saw evil in the way Diels and his wife had decorated their apartment. In one note Packebusch had scrawled the phrase “furnishing style a la Stresemann,” a reference to the late Gustav Stresemann, a Weimar-era opponent of Hitler.

“You’re under arrest,” Diels said.

Packebusch looked up abruptly. One instant he had been reading Diels’s personal papers, and the next, Diels was standing before him. “Packebusch had no time to recover from his surprise,” Diels wrote. “He stared at me as if I were an apparition.”

Diels’s men seized Packebusch. One officer took the SS captain’s pistol from his gun belt on the wall, but apparently no one bothered to conduct a more thorough search of Packebusch himself. Police officers moved through the building to arrest other men whom Diels believed had taken part in the raid on his apartment. All the suspects were transported to Gestapo headquarters; Packebusch was brought to Diels’s office.

There, in the early hours of morning, Diels and Packebusch sat facing each other, both livid. Diels’s Alsatian wolf dog—in that time the official name for German shepherds—stood nearby, watchful.

Diels vowed to put Packebusch in prison.

Packebusch accused Diels of treason.

Infuriated by Packebusch’s insolence, Diels rocketed from his chair
in a flare of anger. Packebusch loosed his own freshet of obscenities and pulled a hidden pistol from a back pocket of his pants. He aimed it at Diels, finger on the trigger.

Diels’s dog hurtled into the scene, leaping toward Packebusch, according to Diels’s account. Two uniformed officers grabbed Packebusch and wrenched the gun from his hand. Diels ordered him placed in the Gestapo’s house prison, in the basement.

In short order, Göring and Himmler got involved and struck a compromise. Göring removed Diels as head of the Gestapo and made him assistant police commissioner in Berlin. Diels recognized that the new job was a demotion to a post with no real power—at least not the kind of power he would need to hold his own against Himmler if the SS chief chose to seek further revenge. Nonetheless he accepted the arrangement, and so things stood until one morning later that month, when two loyal employees flagged him down as he drove to work. They told him that agents of the SS were waiting for him in his office with an arrest order.

Diels fled. In his memoir he claims that his wife recommended he bring along a friend, an American woman, “who could be helpful when crossing borders.” She lived in “a flat on Tiergartenstrasse,” he wrote, and she liked risk: “I knew her enthusiasm for danger and adventure.”

His clues bring Martha immediately to mind, but she made no mention of such a journey in her memoir or in any of her other writings.

Diels and his companion drove to Potsdam, then south to the border, where he left his car in a garage. He carried a false passport. They crossed the border into Czechoslovakia and proceeded to the spa city of Carlsbad, where they checked into a hotel. Diels also took along some of his more sensitive files, as insurance.

“
From his retreat in Bohemia,” wrote Hans Gisevius, the Gestapo memoirist, “he threatened embarrassing revelations, and asked a high price for keeping his mouth shut.”

WITH DIELS GONE
, many in Martha’s growing circle of friends doubtless breathed a little more easily, especially those who harbored
sympathy for communists or mourned the lost freedoms of the Weimar past. Her social life continued to blossom.

Of all her new friends, the one she found most compelling was Mildred Fish Harnack, whom she had first encountered on the train platform upon arriving in Berlin. Mildred spoke flawless German and by most accounts was a beauty, tall and slender, with long blond hair that she wore in a thick coil and large, serious blue eyes. She shunned all makeup. Later, after a certain secret of hers was revealed, a description of her would surface in Soviet intelligence files that sketched her as “
very much the German Frau, an intensely Nordic type and very useful.”