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September 29, 2011

"In The Garden Of Beasts"

I've recently read In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin by Erik Larson, author of The Devil in the White City.

In the Garden of Beasts is the completely non-fictionalized story of William Dodd who was FDR's first ambassador to then-Nazi Germany. Dodd, a southerner and a professor of history at the University of Chicago, was far from being Roosevelt's first choice for ambassador to Germany, but nobody else seemed to want the job. Dodd, much more of an ordinary American than experienced statesman, a small "d" democrat, a close friend and great admirer of Woodrow Wilson, was thrust right into the opening months of Hitler's chancellorship.

Today our 20/20 hindsight is remarkably keen, but in 1933 Dodd was one of only a very small number of non-Jewish Americans who foresaw the horror of what was being built in Germany. His views did not carry much weight in either the State Department (which was mostly concerned with recovering the German debt) or with Roosevelt himself.

The "night of the long knives," which solidified the army's support for Hitler, occurred while Dodd was ambassador. He left his position as ambassador at the end of 1937 and participated in a nationwide campaign to alert Americans to the racial and religious persecution that was underway in Germany. Dodd died in 1940.

The fascinating side story is that Dodd's adult, divorced daughter carried on socially with several political and diplomatic figures in Berlin. She must have bumped elbows with Christopher Ishwerwood at some point. She dated not only the first head of the Gestapo (who actually managed to survive the war), but also an NKVD agent from Moscow, who she tried to marry, but Stalin denied permission. The agent was later killed in one of Stalin's purges, but Dodd's daughter continued to have friendly feelings for the Soviet Union. She got caught up in the HUAC hearings in the 1950s and left the U.S., eventually settling in Prague. Her illusions about communism were shattered when the Russian tanks rolled into Prague in 1968.

Filed under Books,History | permalink | September 29, 2011 at 12:25 PM

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