In the Garden of Beasts

that his embassy protocol experts disparaged as “ridiculously simple for an Ambassador.”
    DODD WAS ABLE to make one more visit to his farm, which cheered him but also made his final departure all the more painful. “This was a beautiful day,” he wrote in his diary on Sunday, May 6, 1934. “The budding trees and the apple blooms were most appealing, especially since I must leave.”
    Three days later, Dodd’s ship sailed from New York. He felt he had achieved a victory in getting Jewish leaders to agree to ease the intensity of their protests against Germany and hoped his efforts wouldbring further moderation on the part of Hitler’s government. These hopes were chilled, however, when on Saturday, May 12, while in midocean, he got word via wireless of a speech just delivered by Goebbels in which the propaganda minister called Jews “the syphilis of all European peoples.”
    Dodd felt betrayed. Despite Nazi promises about arrest warrants and closure of the Columbia House prison, clearly nothing had changed. He feared that now he appeared naive. He wrote to Roosevelt of his dismay, after all the work he had done with American Jewish leaders. Goebbels’s speech had rekindled “all the animosities of the preceding winter,” he wrote, “and I was put in the position of having been humbugged, as indeed I was.”
    He reached Berlin on Thursday, May 17, at 10:30 p.m. and found a changed city. During his two months away, drought had browned the landscape to a degree he had never seen before, but there was something else. “I was delighted to be home,” he wrote, “but the tense atmosphere was revealed at once.”

PART VI
Berlin at Dusk

    Göring’s bedroom at Carinhall
( photo credit p6.1 )

CHAPTER 39
Dangerous Dining
    T he city seemed to vibrate with a background thrum of danger, as if an immense power line had been laid through its center. Everyone in Dodd’s circle felt it. Partly this tension arose from the unusual May weather and the concomitant fears of a failed harvest, but the main engine of anxiety was the intensifying discord between Captain Röhm’s Storm Troopers and the regular army. A popular metaphor used at the time to describe the atmosphere in Berlin was that of an approaching thunderstorm—that sense of charged and suspended air.
    Dodd had little chance to settle back into the rhythms of work.
    The day after his return from America, he faced the prospect of hosting a giant good-bye banquet for Messersmith, who had at last managed to secure for himself a loftier post, though not in Prague, his original target. Competition for that job had been robust, and although Messersmith had lobbied hard and persuaded allies of all stripes to write letters to bolster his bid, in the end the job went to someone else. Instead, Undersecretary Phillips had offered Messersmith another vacant post: Uruguay. If Messersmith had been disappointed, he had not shown it. He had counted himself lucky simply to be leaving the consular service behind. But then his luck had gotten better still.The post of ambassador to Austria suddenly had become vacant, and Messersmith was the obvious choice for the job. Roosevelt agreed. Now Messersmith truly was delighted. So too was Dodd, just to have him gone, though he’d have preferred to have him at the other side of the world.
    There were many parties for Messersmith—for a time every dinner and luncheon in Berlin seemed to be in his honor—but the U.S. embassy’s banquet on May 18 was the biggest and most official.While Dodd was in America, Mrs. Dodd, with the assistance of embassy protocol experts, had overseen the creation of a four-page, single-spaced list of guests that seemed to include everyone of import, except Hitler. To anyone knowledgeable about Berlin society, the real fascination was not who attended, but who did not. Göring and Goebbels sent their regrets, as did Vice-Chancellor Papen and Rudolf Diels. Defense Minister Blomberg came, but not SA chief Röhm.
    Bella Fromm attended, and so did Sigrid Schultz and various of Martha’s friends, including Putzi Hanfstaengl, Armand Berard, and Prince Louis Ferdinand. This mixture by itself added to the aura of tension in the room, for Berard still loved Martha and Prince Louis mooned for her, though her adoration remained utterly fixed on Boris (absent, interestingly, from the invitation list). Martha’s handsome young Hitler liaison, Hans “Tommy” Thomsen, came, as did his ofttimes companion, the dark