The Well-Read Read History: In the Garden of Beasts.

[thereadingwell]

I’m half-German, half-Czech. The German side of me came over in 1747, when Jacob took a leap of faith and left his native Hamburg. Since then there have been John, born 1773, Johann, 1794, another John, 1815, George Washington, my great-grandfather, in 1840, and finally Loren, 1895, Ferrell , 1932, and me in 1960.

After I named my two biological sons Truman and Jefferson, I learned that the second John had sired George Washington, Christopher Columbus, and Mary Magdalena. I surmise that it must have been a singularly German need to name their children after strong fellas and gals.

The Germans, it seems, have always had the need for strong leadership, mostly bad characters until after World War II. It might seem that Hitler’s rise to power was inevitable, since the Great War, the one that was supposed to end all subsequent man-made disasters, because Germany really received a poor deal with the reparations to the victors, and at extremely high interest rates.

Which brings me to Erik Larson’s 2011, highly acclaimed book In the Garden of Beasts. In this particularly good historical work, Larson traces the lives of William E. Dodd and his family in the early stages of the Third Reich. He was perhaps FDR’s sixth pick to be the American Ambassador to Germany, after many refusals by people who had other things to do or knew that living in Germany with children during this time was not a safe proposition.

As isolationism grew in the United States, the State Department believed that Dodd’s number one job was to keep pushing the Germans to pay back their reparation bonds. Dodd, a history professor at the University of Chicago, had no intention of paying anything but cursory attention to the high-interest bonds, and listened with impatience to the fat New York banker cats talking about them before Dodd left for Berlin. He was to assume the position just months after Hitler was named Chancellor in January, 1933.

Of course, Hitler was to pay less attention to reparations and had no intention of giving another Reichsmark to that obligation. He had an army to build and a hierarchy to construct. He paid lip service to the bonds, as he paid the same to peace while he bided his time building the most powerful war machine ever conceived and developed.

Feelings were running very high among Hitler’s brown-clad SA. In enthusiastic parades they marched nearly every day. It was inpolitic not to give the famous Third Reich salute as the parade passed, and many foreigners, including Americans, paid the price of a beating by not doing so. Dodd complained, to lesser figures, then Hitler. Lip service was paid, nothing done.

The State Department saw Dodd as a weak and ineffectual Ambassador, partially because of his failure to convince the Germans to pay the bonds. But FDR backed him and his prudent approach to the job. Dodd, his wife, daughter Martha, and son Bill Jr. settled in to a hotel, then was offered a mansion for a quarter of normal rent by an affluent Jew who would occupy to top, fourth floor. The owner thought that Dodd’s presence would prevent any SA mischief to him or his family. It worked.

A second reason the State Department was uneasy about Ambassador Dodd is that he didn’t have the piles of money others on his staff held. The staff members would have lavish parties until the morning hours, with much liquor consumed. Dodd complained unceasingly about this, to the chagrin of his staff and superiors in Washington.

Another ongoing cause for concern for the State department was daughter Martha Dodd, who got around in diplomatic circles, let us say. At 21, blond and pretty, she easily made friends and became lovers of many of the SA, SS, and surreptitious Russian spies, men in Berlin. Ambassador Dodd was totally unaware, but the eyes of the house’s head butler were very much aware, calling the Ambassador’s house “the Berlin house of ill repute.” Martha would carry on with her diplomatic friends until morning on the couch of the large study on the main floor. This included the to-be Gestapo head Rudolph Diels, a Luftwaffe officer, and one of Hitler’s closest aides, Ernst Hanfstaengl. On visits to Berlin, Martha “entertained” Thomas Wolfe and Carl Sandberg. Martha was an aspiring author herself, but if one writes from experience, her books would have been very interesting indeed.

In the end, she settled on a Boris Winogradov, a Russian spy living in Berlin under the guise of a diplomat. It was with Boris that Martha went to a remote lake outside of Berlin when Hitler made his first major move to take total control over Germany. In the end, hundreds if not thousands were killed, in what Hitler, Goring, and Himmler would call The Night of the Long Knives. The unfolding of this move I’ll leave up to you to revel in gory fascination.

In the end, it was the reaction by other countries which tells a shameful story, a story of appeasement which would mark European and American leadership through the rest of the decade.

The State Department stepped up their attack on Dodd, and FDR finally succumbed to them. Dodd was asked to resign in January, 1938. His talks at several university engagements of danger concerning Hitler after Dodd returned to the United States were noticed but unheeded.

It’s been strong men who have been the bane to the military men of my family. I guess we can blame the despotism of the South for the death of Christopher Columbus, my great, great uncle, who died in a Tennessee battle near Nashville in 1864. My Uncle Ardean died in a tin can at Guadalcanal in 1942, so we can blame the despots Hitler and the Japanese Generals for that.

The Ayatollah would be my bane. While his minions laid mines in the Persian Gulf in 1989, I served on a minesweeper there as its engineer. Fortunately for me, I’m the only person in my direct family line to have lived through a major conflict.

[StephenKingman]

I have moved the above to the authors forum

[Dana Lawrence Lohn]

This book is presently knocking my socks off, incredibly, as I drive around my town and listen to it on Audible. What this ambassador was able to pull of in 1933 - astounding!