In the Garden of
Beasts: Innocents in Nazi
Germany
I picked up Erik Larson's book, In
the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin, with great trepidation. The book describes the
experiences of U.S. ambassador William Dodd and his family in Nazi Germany. The
other book at the library available from Erik Larson was The
Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed
America, a book about 19th
century Chicago serial killer H.H Holmes. Since I don't want to give serial
killers the attention they crave, even posthumously, I picked In the Garden
of the Beasts instead. Still, I worried about selecting a book written by
an author who chooses morbid and depressing topics to write about. I was pleasantly
surprised to find Erik Larson's book was informative and engaging, while not
being sensationalistic.
William Dodd came from a very atypical
background for a diplomat of that period. An obscure history professor from The
University of Chicago, he had no background in diplomacy, and came from humble
roots in rural North Carolina. He wasn't Franklin D. Roosevelt's first choice,
but due to the violence and chaos in Germany at that time, Roosevelt's
preferred choices declined the position. Like most outsiders, Dodd didn't think
much of Hitler. The conventional wisdom held that, although the Nazis were
quite unsavory, their bark was worse than their bite and they would be gone
from power soon enough. Dodd quickly found out that the conventional wisdom was
wrong. In spite of their absurd appearance, the Nazis were quickly solidifying
their hold on power along with their popularity. Dodd, along with other
Americans who spent time in Nazi Germany, quickly discovered that reports of
Nazi violence were not exaggerated. Thuggish storm troopers patrolled the
streets beating up anyone who refused to give the Nazi salute. He personally
witnessed the persecution of Jews and anyone associated with Jews. He also
became alarmed at the signs that the Hitler was preparing the country
for war, becoming convinced that the Nazis intended to launch a war of
aggression.
Unlike her father, who disliked the Nazis from
the very start, Martha Dodd initially sympathized with the Nazi revolution. The
enthusiasm of Nazi party supporters following Hitler's ascension to power
exerted a istrong nfluence on her. This enthusiasm made her feel that
Germany was about to be reborn; a great nation humiliated in war and ravaged by
economic depression was going to be restored to greatness. Her hopes for the
revolution inclined her to overlook Nazi brutality, since she saw it as a net
positive. During her time in Berlin she became romantically involved with a
Soviet diplomat named Boris Vinogradov. The most serious of a series of
romantic partners she had while in Berlin, Boris helped to recruit her as a
Soviet spy. The most unsympathetic of the major American characters, Martha
demonstrated how ordinary people could sympathize with the vilest regimes in
history. (Following WW II, Martha Dodd defected to the Soviets and spent much
of her later life in communist-run Czechoslovakia.)
The book devotes considerable wordage
to one of the more disturbing aspects of the period, what the author
described in an interview as the "ambient anti-Semitism" of the time.
It was a commonly held belief that the disproportionate success enjoyed by
German Jews constituted a "problem" to be rectified by government
intervention. This belief was voiced even by those otherwise sympathetic toward
German Jews, including ambassador Dodd himself. Others within the State
Department expressed comparatively mild hostility toward Jews, such as
Undersecretary of State William Phillips, who complained that his favorite
vacation spot was "overrun" with Jews.
Still, it deserves to be pointed out that there
was almost no sympathy within the American State Department for the extreme
anti-Semitic attitudes of various high ranking Nazis. Roosevelt, Dodd, and
others were horrified by the violent pogroms carried out by Nazi street thugs,
and the deranged laws passed by the Nazi government; however, the State
Department, along with Roosevelt, insisted on prioritizing the repayment
of debts owed to American creditors over human rights issues. With the benefit
of hindsight this decision seems exceedingly amoral, but in all fairness, few
people at that time understood how fanatical the Nazis really were.
This book will provide
food for thought for people of all ideological stripes. Conservatives,
confronted by the ugliness of 1930s era casual racism, will have to admit that
political correctness isn't all bad. Liberals will find the similarity between
arguments in favor of anti-Jewish quotas and arguments in favor of affirmative
action disturbing. Within the book, people evincing little if any personal
animus toward Jews still subscribed to the idea that the German's had a
legitimate complaint about the overrepresentation of Jews in certain areas of
life. As economist Thomas Sowell has explained, the worst examples of racial
violence are typically directed against successful groups, not unsuccessful
ones.
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