In the Garden of Beasts

the freedom of a man who has nothing before him and therefore nothing to lose, and he told me many things.”
    The rhetoric of the regime grew more menacing. In a radio address on Monday, June 25, Rudolf Hess warned, “Woe to him who breaks faith, in the belief that through a revolt he can serve the revolution.” The party, he said, would meet rebellion with absolute force, guided by the principle “If you strike, strike hard!”
    The next morning, Tuesday, June 26, Edgar Jung’s housekeeper arrived at his home to find it ransacked, with furniture upended and clothing and papers scattered throughout.On the medicine chest in his bathroom Jung had scrawled a single word: GESTAPO.
    DIELS READIED HIMSELF to be sworn in as regional commissioner of Cologne. Göring flew to the city for the occasion. His white planeemerged from a clear cerulean sky on what Diels described as a “beautiful Rhineland summer day.” At the ceremony Diels wore his black SS uniform; Göring wore a white uniform of his own design. Afterward, Göring took Diels aside and told him, “Watch yourself in the next few days.”
    Diels took it to heart. Adept now at timely exits, he left the city for a sojourn in the nearby Eifel Mountains.

CHAPTER 45
Mrs. Cerruti’s Distress
    I n his diary entry for Thursday, June 28, 1934, Ambassador Dodd wrote, “During the last five days, stories of many kinds have tended to make the Berlin atmosphere more tense than at any time since I have been in Germany.” Papen’s speech continued to be a topic of daily conversation. With rising ferocity, Hitler, Göring, and Goebbels warned of dire consequences for anyone who dared to oppose the government. In a cable to the State Department, Dodd likened the atmosphere of threat to that of the French Revolution—“the situation was much as it was in Paris in 1792 when the Girondins and Jacobins were struggling for supremacy.”
    In his own household, there was an extra layer of strain that had nothing to do with weather or political upheaval. Against her parents’ wishes, Martha continued planning her trip to Russia. She insisted that her interest had nothing to do with communism per se but rather arose out of her love for Boris and her mounting distaste for the Nazi revolution. She recognized that Boris was indeed a loyal communist, but she claimed he exerted influence over her political perspective only “by the example of his magnetism and simplicity, and his love of country.” She confessed to feeling a gnawing ambivalence “regarding him, his beliefs, the political system in his country, our future together.” She insisted on taking the trip without him.
    She wanted to see as much of Russia as she could and ignored his advice to concentrate on only a few cities. He wanted her to gain a deep understanding of his homeland, not some glancing tourist’s appreciation. He recognized also that travel in his country was not asquick or comfortable as in Western Europe, nor did its cities and towns have the obvious charm of the picturesque villages of Germany and France. Indeed, the Soviet Union was anything but the workers’ paradise many left-leaning outsiders imagined it to be.Under Stalin, peasants had been forced into vast collectives. Many resisted, and an estimated five million people—men, women, and children—simply disappeared, many shipped off to far-flung work camps. Housing was primitive, consumer goods virtually nonexistent. Famine scoured the Ukraine. Livestock suffered a drastic decline. From 1929 to 1933 the total number of cattle fell from 68.1 million to 38.6 million; of horses, from 34 million to 16.6 million. Boris knew full well that to a casual visitor, the physical and social scenery and especially the drab workers’ fashion of Russia could seem less than captivating, especially if that visitor happened to be exhausted by difficult travel and the mandatory presence of an Intourist guide.
    Nonetheless, Martha choseTour No. 9, the Volga-Caucasus-Crimea tour, set to begin on July 6 with a flight—her first ever—from Berlin to Leningrad. After two days in Leningrad, she would set out by train for Moscow, spend four days there, then proceed by overnight train to Gorki and, two hours after her 10:04 arrival, catch a Volga steamer for a four-day cruise with stops at Kazan, Samara, Saratov, and Stalingrad, where she was to make the obligatory visit to a tractor works; from Stalingrad, she would take a train to Rostov-on-Don, where she