In the Garden of Beasts

François-Poncet at his Dahlem home, had managed to escape Berlin on the day of the purge and make his way safely to London. He feared now, however, that he could never return. Worse, his wife was still in Berlin and his adult son, Alex, who also had been present at the dinner, had been arrested by the Gestapo. On July 3 Regendanz wrote to Mrs. Dodd to ask if she would go to Dahlem to check on his wife and younger children and “to bring her my heartiest greetings.” He wrote, “It seems that I am suspect now, because so many diplomats have been in my house and because I was also a friend of General von Schleicher.”
    Mrs. Dodd and Martha drove to Dahlem to see Mrs. Regendanz. A servant girl met them at the door, her eyes red. Soon Mrs. Regendanz herself appeared, looking dark and thin, her eyes deeply shadowed and her mannerisms halting and nervous. She knew Martha and Mattie and was perplexed to see them there in her home. She led them inside. After a few moments of conversation, the Dodds told Mrs. Regendanz about the message from her husband. She put her hands to her face and wept softly.
    Mrs. Regendanz recounted how her house had been searched and her passport confiscated. “When she spoke of her son,” Martha wrote, “her self-control collapsed and she became hysterical with fear.” She had no idea where Alex was, whether he was alive or dead.
    She pleaded with Martha and her mother to locate Alex and visit him, bring him cigarettes, anything to demonstrate to his captors that he had drawn the attention of the U.S. embassy. The Dodds promised to try. Mrs. Dodd and Mrs. Regendanz agreed that henceforth Mrs. Regendanz would use a code name, Carrie, in any contact with the Dodds or the embassy.
    Over the next few days the Dodds spoke with influential friends, diplomats, and friendly government officials about the situation. Whether their intercession helped or not can’t be known, but Alex was freed after about a month of incarceration. He left Germany immediately, by night train, and joined his father in London.
    Through connections, Mrs. Regendanz managed to acquire another passport and to secure passage out of Germany by air. Once she and her children were also in London, she sent a postcard to Mrs. Dodd: “Arrived safe and sound. Deepest gratitude. Love. Carrie.”
    IN WASHINGTON, WESTERN EUROPEAN affairs chief Jay Pierrepont Moffat noted a surge of inquiries from American travelers asking whether it was still safe to visit Germany. “We have replied to them,” he wrote, “that in all the trouble to date no foreigner has been molested and we see no cause for worry if they mind their own business and keep out of trouble’s way.”
    His mother, for one, had survived the purge unscathed and professed to have found it “quite exciting,” Moffat wrote in a later entry.
    His sister’s home was in the Tiergarten district, where it “was blocked off by soldiers and they had to make quite a detour to get in or out.” Nonetheless, mother, daughter, and granddaughter set off by car, with chauffeur, for their previously planned tour of Germany.
    What most occupied the attention of the State Department was the outstanding German debt to American creditors. It was a strange juxtaposition. In Germany, there was blood, viscera, and gunfire; at the State Department in Washington, there were white shirts, Hull’s red pencils, and mounting frustration with Dodd for failing to press America’s case. In a telegram from Berlin dated Friday, July 6, Dodd reported that he had met with Foreign Minister Neurath on the bond issue and that Neurath had said he would do what he could to ensure that interest was paid but that “this would be extremely difficult.” When Dodd asked Neurath whether the United States could at least expect the same treatment as other international creditors, Neurath “merely expressed the hope that this might be possible.”
    The telegram infuriated Secretary Hull and the elders of the Pretty Good Club. “By his own showing,” Moffat wrote in his diary, Dodd “put up very little fight and rather let von Neurath walk away with the situation. The Secretary knows that [Dodd] has scant sympathy with our financial interests but even so was pretty fed up with the Dodd telegram.”
    Hull angrily ordered Moffat to compose a harsh response to Dodd to compel him “not only to take but to create every opportunity to drive home the justice of our complaints.”
    The result was a cable