In the Garden of Beasts

service.”
    After some additional conversation about trade tariffs and arms reductions, the lunch came to an end.
    It was two o’clock. Dodd left the White House and walked to the State Department, where he planned to meet with various officials and to read dispatches filed from Berlin, namely the lengthy reports written by Consul General George S. Messersmith. The reports were disconcerting.
    Hitler had been chancellor for six months, having received the appointment through a political deal, but he did not yet possess absolute power. Germany’s eighty-five-year-old president, Field Marshal Paul von Beneckendorff und von Hindenburg, still held the constitutional authority to appoint and remove chancellors and their cabinets and, equally important, commanded the loyalty of the regular army, the Reichswehr. By contrast to Hindenburg, Hitler and his deputies were surprisingly young—Hitler only forty-four, Hermann Göring forty, and Joseph Goebbels thirty-six.
    It was one thing to read newspaper stories about Hitler’s erratic behavior and his government’s brutality toward Jews, communists, and other opponents, for throughout America there was a widely held belief that such reports must be exaggerated, that surely no modern state could behave in such a manner.Here at the State Department, however, Dodd read dispatch after dispatch in which Messersmith described Germany’s rapid descent from democratic republic to brutal dictatorship. Messersmith spared no detail—his tendency to write long had early on saddled him with the nickname “Forty-Page George.” He wrote of the widespread violence that had occurred in the several months that immediately followed Hitler’s appointment and of the increasing control the government exerted over all aspects of German society. On March 31, three U.S. citizens had been kidnapped and dragged to one of the Storm Troopers’ beating stations, where they had been stripped of their clothing and left to spend the night in the cold. Come morning, they had been beaten until they lost consciousness, then discarded on the street. A correspondent for United Press International had disappeared but after inquiries by Messersmith had been released unharmed. Hitler’s government had declared a one-day boycott of all Jewish businessesin Germany—stores, law firms, doctors’ offices. And there were the book burnings, the firings of Jews from businesses, the seemingly endless marches of Storm Troopers, and the suppression of Germany’s once-vibrant free press, which according to Messersmith had been placed under government control to a degree greater than “has probably ever existed in any country. The press censorship may be considered an absolute.”
    In one of his latest dispatches, however, Messersmith took a markedly more positive tone, which Dodd doubtless found heartening. With uncharacteristic optimism Messersmith now reported seeing signs that Germany was growing more stable and attributed this to the growing confidence of Hitler, Göring, and Goebbels. “Responsibility has already changed the primary leaders of the Party very considerably,” he wrote. “There is every evidence that they are becoming constantly more moderate.”
    Dodd, however, never got the chance to read a letter that Messersmith wrote soon afterward in which he retracted this cheerier assessment. Marked “Personal & Confidential,” he sent it to Undersecretary Phillips. The letter, dated June 26, 1933, reached Phillips just as the Dodds were about to leave for Berlin.
    “I have tried to point out in my dispatches that the higher leaders of the party are growing more moderate, while the intermediary leaders and the masses are just as radical as ever, and that the question is whether the higher leaders will be able to impose their moderate will on the masses,” Messersmith wrote. “It begins to look pretty definitely that they will not be able to do so, but that the pressure from the bottom is becoming stronger all the time.” Göring and Goebbels in particular no longer seemed so moderate, he wrote. “Dr. Goebbels is daily preaching that the revolution has just begun and what has so far been done is just an overture.”
    Priests were being arrested. A former president of Lower Silesia, whom Messersmith knew personally, had been placed in a concentration camp. He sensed a rising “hysteria” among midlevel leaders of the Nazi Party, expressed as a belief “that the only safety lies in getting