In the Garden of Beasts (24 page)

Phillips in particular took umbrage and commissioned a study by the State Department’s communications division to compare the volume of cables from Berlin with that of other embassies. The chief of the division, one D. A. Salmon, found that Berlin had sent three fewer telegrams than Mexico City and only four more messages than the tiny legation at Panama. Salmon wrote, “
It would seem that in view of the acute situation existing in Germany the telegraphing from the American Embassy at Berlin had been very light since Ambassador Dodd assumed charge.”

Phillips sent the report to Dodd with a three-sentence cover letter in which, with an aristocratic sniff, he cited Dodd’s recent mention of “
the extravagance in the telegraphic business in the Embassy at Berlin.” Phillips wrote: “Thinking it would be of interest to you, I enclose a copy of it herewith.”

Dodd replied, “
Do not think that Mr. Salmon’s comparison of my work with that of my friend Mr. Daniels in Mexico in any sense affects me. Mr. Daniels and I have been friends since I was 18 years old; but I know that he does not know how to condense reports!”

DODD BELIEVED THAT
one artifact of past excess—“
another curious hangover,” he told Phillips—was that his embassy had too many personnel, in particular, too many who were Jewish. “We have six or eight members of the ‘chosen race’ here who serve in most useful but conspicuous positions,” he wrote. Several were his best workers, he acknowledged, but he feared that their presence on his staff impaired the embassy’s relationship with Hitler’s government and
thus impeded the day-to-day operation of the embassy. “I would not for a moment consider transfer. However, the number is too great and one of them”—he meant Julia Swope Lewin, the embassy receptionist—“is so ardent and in evidence every day that I hear echoes from semi-official circles.” He also cited the example of the embassy’s bookkeeper, who, while “very competent,” was also “one of the ‘Chosen People’ and that puts him at some disadvantage with the Banks here.”

In this respect, oddly enough, Dodd also had concerns about George Messersmith. “
His office is important and he is very able,” Dodd wrote to Hull, “but German officials have said to one of the staff here: ‘he is also a Hebrew.’ I am no race antagonist, but we have a large number here and it affects the service and adds to my load.”

For the moment, at least, Dodd seemed unaware that Messersmith was not in fact Jewish.
He had fallen, apparently, for a rumor launched by Putzi Hanfstaengl after Messersmith had publicly chastised him during an embassy function for making an unwelcome advance on a female guest.

Dodd’s assumption would have outraged Messersmith, who found it hard enough to listen to the speculation of Nazi officials as to who was or was not Jewish. On Friday, October 27, Messersmith held a lunch at his house at which he introduced Dodd to a number of especially rabid Nazis, to help Dodd gain a sense of the true character of the party. One seemingly sober and intelligent Nazi stated as fact a belief common among party members that President Roosevelt and his wife had nothing but Jewish advisers. Messersmith wrote the next day to Undersecretary Phillips: “
They seem to believe that because we have Jews in official positions or that important people at home have Jewish friends, our policy is being dictated by the Jews alone and that particularly the President and Mrs. Roosevelt are conducting anti-German propaganda under the influence of Jewish friends and advisers.” Messersmith reported how this had caused him to bristle. “I told them that they must not think that because there is an anti-Semitic movement in Germany, well-thinking and well-meaning people in the United States were going to give up associating with Jews. I said that the arrogance of some of the party leaders here was their greatest defect, and the feeling that they had
that they could impose their views on the rest of the world, was one of their greatest weaknesses.”

He cited such thinking as an example of the “extraordinary mentality” that prevailed in Germany. “It will be hard for you to believe that such notions actually exist among worthwhile people in the German Government,” he told Phillips, “but that they do was made clear to me and I took the opportunity in no uncertain language to make clear how wrong they were and how much such arrogance injured them.”

Given Phillips’s own dislike of Jews, it is tantalizing to imagine what he really thought of Messersmith’s observations, but on this the historical record is silent.

What is known, however, is that among the population of Americans who expressed anti-Semitic leanings, a common jibe described the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt as the “
Rosenberg administration.”

DODD’S WILLINGNESS TO BELIEVE
that Messersmith was Jewish had little do with his own rudimental anti-Semitism but seemed rather to be a symptom of deeper misgivings that he had begun to harbor with regard to the consul general. Increasingly he wondered whether Messersmith was wholly on his side.

He never questioned Messersmith’s competence or his courage in speaking out when American citizens and interests were harmed, and he acknowledged that Messersmith “
has many sources of information which I do not have.” But in two letters to Undersecretary Phillips, composed two days apart, Dodd suggested that Messersmith had outstayed his assignment in Berlin. “
I must add that he has been here three or four years in the midst of very exciting and troublous times,” Dodd wrote in one of the letters, “and I think he has developed a sensitiveness, and perhaps even an ambition, which tend to make him restless and discontented. This may be too strong, but I think not.”

Dodd gave little evidence for his appraisal. He isolated only one flaw with any clarity, and that was Messersmith’s penchant for writing dispatches of great length on all things, grave or mundane. Dodd
told Phillips that the size of Messersmith’s dispatches could be halved “
without the slightest injury” and that the man needed to be more judicious in his choice of subject. “Hitler could not have left his hat in a flying machine without an account of it.”

The reports, however, were for Dodd merely a target of convenience, a proxy for sources of displeasure that were harder for him to isolate. By mid-November, his dissatisfaction with Messersmith had begun to veer toward distrust. He sensed that Messersmith coveted his own job, and he saw his unceasing production of reports as a manifestation of his ambitions. “
It occurs to me,” Dodd told Phillips, “that he feels that a promotion is due and I think that his services demand it; but I am not sure but that the most useful period of his work here has passed. You know as well as I do that circumstances and conditions and sometimes disappointments make it wise to transfer even the ablest of Government officials.” He urged Phillips to discuss the matter with consular-service chief Wilbur Carr “and see whether some such thing can not be done.”

He closed, “I need hardly say that I hope all this will be kept entirely confidential.”

That Dodd imagined Phillips would retain this confidence suggests he was unaware that Phillips and Messersmith maintained a regular and frequent exchange of correspondence outside the stream of official reportage. When Phillips replied to Dodd in late November, he added his usual dash of irony, the tone light and agreeable to an extent that suggested he was merely humoring Dodd, responsive yet at the same time dismissive. “
The letters and dispatches of your Consul General are full of interest, but should be cut in half—as you say. More strength to your elbow! I look to you to spread this much needed reform.”

ON SUNDAY, OCTOBER
29, at about noon, Dodd was walking along Tiergartenstrasse, on his way to the Hotel Esplanade. He spotted a large procession of Storm Troopers in their telltale brown shirts marching toward him. Pedestrians stopped and shouted the Hitler salute.

Dodd turned and walked into the park.

CHAPTER 22
The Witness Wore Jackboots

T
he weather chilled and with each day the northern dusk seemed to make a noticeable advance. There was wind, rain, and fog. That November the weather station at Tempelhof Airport would record periods of fog on fourteen of thirty days. The library at Tiergartenstrasse 27a became irresistibly cozy, the books and damask walls turned amber by the flames in the great hearth. On November 4, a Saturday at the end of an especially dreary weak of rain and wind, Martha set out for the Reichstag building, where a makeshift courtroom had been constructed for the Berlin session of the great arson trial. She carried a ticket provided by Rudolf Diels.

Police with carbines and swords ringed the building—“swarms” of them, according to one observer. Everyone who tried to enter was stopped and checked. Eighty-two foreign correspondents crammed the press gallery at the back of the chamber. The five judges, led by presiding judge Wilhelm Bünger, wore scarlet robes. Throughout the audience were men in SS black and SA brown, as well as civilians, government officials, and diplomats. Martha was startled to find that her ticket placed her not just on the main floor but at the front of the courtroom among various dignitaries. “
I walked in, my heart in my throat, as I was seated much too close to the front,” she recalled.

The day’s installment was scheduled to begin at nine fifteen, but the star witness, Hermann Göring, was late. For possibly the first time since testimony had begun in September there was real suspense in the room. The trial was supposed to have been short and to have provided the Nazis with a world stage upon which they could
condemn the evils of communism and at the same time challenge the widely held belief that they themselves had set the fire. Instead, despite clear evidence that the presiding judge favored the prosecution, the trial had proceeded like a real trial, with both sides presenting great masses of evidence. The state hoped to prove that all five defendants had played a role in the arson, despite Marinus van der Lubbe’s insistence that he alone was responsible. Prosecutors brought forth innumerable experts in an attempt to demonstrate that the damage to the building was far too extensive, with too many small fires in too many places, to have been the work of a single arsonist. In the process, according to Fritz Tobias, author of the seminal account of the fire and its aftermath, what was to have been an exciting, revealing trial instead became “
a yawning abyss of boredom.”

Until now.

Göring was due at any moment. Famously volatile and outspoken, given to flamboyant dress and always seeking attention, Göring was expected to add spark to the trial. The chamber filled with the wheeze of shifting flannel and mohair as people turned to look back toward the entrance.

A half hour passed, and still Göring did not appear. Diels too was nowhere in sight.

To pass the time, Martha watched the defendants. There was Ernst Torgler, a Communist Party deputy to the Reichstag before Hitler’s ascension, looking pale and tired. Three were Bulgarian communists—Georgi Dimitrov, Simon Popov, and Vassili Tanev—who “
looked wiry, tough, indifferent.” The key defendant, van der Lubbe, presented “one of the most awful sights I have yet seen in human form. Big, bulky, sub-human face and body, he was so repulsive and degenerate that I could scarcely bear to look at him.”

An hour elapsed. The tension in the room grew still greater as impatience and expectation merged.

A clamor arose at the back of the room—boots and commands, as Göring and Diels entered amid a spearhead of uniformed men. Göring, forty years old, 250 pounds or more, strode confidently to the front of the room in a brown hunting jacket, jodhpurs, and gleaming brown boots that came to his knees. None of it could mask his great
girth or the resemblance he bore to “
the hind end of an elephant,” as one U.S. diplomat described him. Diels, in a handsome dark suit, was like a slender shadow.

“
Everyone jumped up as if electrified,” a Swiss reporter observed, “and all Germans, including the judges, raised their arms to give the Hitler salute.”

Diels and Göring stood together at the front of the chamber, very near Martha. The two men spoke quietly.

The presiding judge invited Göring to speak. Göring stepped forward. He appeared pompous and arrogant, Martha recalled, but she sensed also a subcurrent of unease.

Göring launched into a prepared harangue that lasted nearly three hours. In a voice hard and coarse, rising now and then to a shout, he raged against communism, the defendants, and the act of arson they had perpetrated against Germany. Cries of “Bravo!” and loud applause filled the chamber.

“
With one hand he gestured wildly,” wrote Hans Gisevius in his Gestapo memoir; “with the perfumed handkerchief in his other hand he wiped the perspiration from his brow.” Attempting to capture a sense of the moment, Gisevius described the faces of the three most important actors in the room—“Dimitrov’s full of scorn, Göring’s contorted with rage, Presiding Judge Bünger’s pale with fright.”

And there was Diels, sleek, dark, his expression unreadable. Diels had helped interrogate van der Lubbe on the night of the fire and concluded that the suspect was a “madman” who had indeed set the fire all by himself. Hitler and Göring, however, had immediately decided that the Communist Party was behind it and that the fire was the opening blow of a larger uprising. On that first night Diels had watched Hitler’s face grow purple with rage as he cried that every communist official and deputy was to be shot. The order was rescinded, replaced by mass arrests and impromptu acts of Storm Trooper violence.

Now Diels stood with one elbow against the judge’s bench. From time to time he changed position as if to get a better view of Göring. Martha became convinced that Diels had planned Göring’s performance, perhaps even written his speech. She recalled that Diels had
been “
especially anxious to have me present on this day, almost as if he were showing off his own craftsmanship.”

Diels had warned against holding a trial of anyone other than van der Lubbe and had predicted the acquittal of the other defendants. Göring had failed to listen, although he did recognize what lay at stake. “
A botch,” Göring had acknowledged, “could have intolerable consequences.”