In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin, by Erik Larson

February 1st, 2012

By Jill Silos-Rooney

Historian William E. Dodd's bookish and retiring nature made him a most unlikely choice for high-profile diplomatic service, and Erik Larson's entertaining but sobering account of Dodd's tenure as the American ambassador to Nazi Germany shows just how difficult it could be for "ordinary men" to fully recognize the dark night that fell across Europe in 1933 until it was too late. Larson's account of Dodd and his family — and the relationships they had with foreign ambassadors and leaders, politicians back home, and Nazi leaders such as Goering and Goebbels — reveals that diplomacy is a not only a dangerous game, it is one to which only a rare few are suited in terms of temperament, imagination, and conviction — especially in times of international threat.

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin (Crown Publishing, 2011) tells the story of Dodd's surprising selection as ambassador, his family's experience in an increasingly dangerous situation in Berlin, and the struggles he had with the diplomatic corps back in the United States, where he was considered an outsider. Larson also provides plenty of juicy details about the scandalous romantic activities of Dodd's daughter Martha, who later became a Soviet spy. The strength of this narrative is that Larson uses this domestic drama to keep the casual reader interested while he sneaks in some of the more complex scholarly analysis necessary to a greater understanding of the era.

What Larson makes clear for popular audiences, which is so crucial to understanding what happened in the Nazi era, is that Adolph Hitler's Germany was hardly a place in which speaking or acting out against the new regime would be tolerated — but not for reasons traditionally believed. Rather than the totalitarian state that was described in some of the earliest post-war histories of the Third Reich, Larson makes understandable more recent historical explanations of the feudal and sinister complex of competing relationships that Hitler used to control the party. As has been documented by historians Robert Gellately and Richard J. Evans, Hitler ruled through a system of patronage and manipulation, in which constantly changing definitions of loyalty and interpretation of the Fuhrer's will created an unstable regime rife with internal conflict, threats, and the desperate currying of favors to ensure political survival. This same dynamic created an oppressive air of uncertainty and terror that permeated every layer of society, to a frightening and sadly paralyzing extent. It also helped the Nazis exploit fair-minded Germans, generating a fierce devotion to the party that undercut even the most cherished commitments to humanitarianism that had once caused Germany to be considered the most enlightened state in Europe.

And then there's the Dodd family itself. William Dodd accepted the ambassadorship thinking that diplomacy would require few demands and that he would have time to work on his own scholarship in the delightful country where he had studied as a young man. Instead, Dodd found himself in a viper's nest of intrigue that required constant vigilance, an arena of intimidation in which he was increasingly forced to respond to anti-American and anti-Jewish violence in Germany. While Dodd himself was something of an anti-Semite who quite comfortably discussed the "Jewish problem" with Nazi officials, including Hitler (a problem that Dodd believed also existed in the United States), he also took seriously Franklin Delano Roosevelt's mandate that he represent American democracy in the midst of growing fascism in Europe. His years in Berlin were therefore a precarious balance of accommodation and appeasement along with a slow realization of the horrors occurring around him, especially following the tremendous violence of the ruthless Nazi Party purge known as the "Night of the Long Knives" and increasing restrictions on German Jews. This led Dodd to make more frequent criticisms of the regime and ultimately refuse to cooperate with many Nazi Party requests, such as attendance at the annual Nuremberg rallies.

Even in a recounting of such horrors, it is the ambassador's daughter, Martha, who provides most of the drama in the story. She had multiple affairs (which may have been simultaneous) with Gestapo head Rudolph Diehls, French diplomat Armand Berard, and Soviet spy Boris Winogradov, who actually was ordered to cultivate a sexual relationship with Martha in the hope that she would be a valuable asset to Soviet intelligence. Larson notes that all of this made the family's Tiergarten home, in the words of one observer, "not a house, but a house of ill repute."

It's maybe appropriate, therefore, that Larson expends a considerable number of pages cataloguing Martha's sexual liaisons, but it would have been more historically valuable if there was more exploration of how Martha was ideologically affected by these relationships, since she later became a Soviet spy convicted of espionage in the United States. While recognizing that this is the story of William Dodd, it is his daughter's story that is more compelling, and it makes one want to know more about how an all-American girl — the daughter of a history professor, raised in comparative comfort and gentility — could so radically diverge from those values to become an ardent early admirer of the Nazis, refuse for too long to see the suffering going on around her, and ultimately commit herself to serving the equally oppressive regime of the Soviet Union under Stalin and Khrushchev. Larson relies extensively on Martha Dodd's own memoirs, and that may be a limitation in truly capturing the complexity of Martha's psyche, because political memoirs are generally self-serving and in her case may have been significantly tainted by a desire to cover up the extent of her espionage.

For professional historians, In the Garden of Beasts does not add much to our understanding of the Nazi era, though Larson's extensive footnotes expand upon many of the instances that are briefly mentioned in the narrative. But for popular audiences, Larson's work fills in some gaps in the story of American-Nazi Germany relations before the war and, more importantly, explains in very clear terms the complexities of the Nazi regime that before this work were largely the province of academics. This makes it a valuable addition to the literature on the Nazi era.

Jill SIlos-Rooney, Ph.D., earned a doctorate in History from the University of New Hampshire, where she taught for several years.  She currently teaches American History and Western Civilization courses at MassBay Community College in Massachusetts and Manchester Community College in New Hampshire. A recipient of awards from the American Historical Association, the American Society for Legal History, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, her specialization is the history of civil rights and civil liberties in the United States. Her monograph, "Everybody Get Together: The Politics of the Counterculture," will be published by the University of New Mexico Press.

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