In the Garden of Beasts

executives on the issue of Germany’s debt—a subject in which Dodd had little interest—and with Jewish leaders.Dodd feared that both the American and German press could twist these meetings to taint the appearance of objectivity that he hoped to present in Berlin. He complied, however, and the result was a day of encounters that evoked the serial visits of ghosts in Dickens’s
A Christmas Carol
.A letter from a prominent Jewish relief activist told Dodd that he would be visited on the night of Monday, July 3, by two groups of men, the first to arrive by eight thirty, the second at nine o’clock. The meetings were to take place at the Century Club, Dodd’s base while in New York.
    First, however, Dodd met the bankers, and did so at the offices of the National City Bank of New York, which years later would be called Citibank. Dodd was startled to learn that National City Bank and Chase National Bank held over one hundred million dollars in German bonds, which Germany at this point was proposing to pay back at a rate of thirty cents on the dollar. “There was much talk but no agreement other than that I should do all I possibly could to prevent Germany’s defaulting openly,” Dodd wrote. He had little sympathy for the bankers. The prospect of high interest rates on German bonds had blinded them to the all-too-obvious risk that a war-crushed, politically volatile country might default.
    That evening the Jewish leaders arrived as scheduled, among them Felix M. Warburg, a leading financier who tended to favor the quieter tactics of the American Jewish Committee, and Rabbi Wise of the noisier American Jewish Congress. Dodd wrote in his diary: “For an hour and a half the discussion went on: The Germans are killing Jews all the time; they are being persecuted to the point where suicide is common (the Warburg family is reported to have had cases of this kind); and all Jewish property is being confiscated.”
    During this meeting, Warburg appears to have mentioned the suicide of two elderly relatives, Moritz and Käthie Oppenheim, in Frankfurt some three weeks earlier. Warburg wrote later, “No doubt the Hitler Regime made life for them a plague and they were yearning for the end of their days.”
    Dodd’s visitors urged him to press Roosevelt for official intervention, but he demurred. “I insisted that the government could notintervene officially but assured the members of the conference that I would exert all possible personal influence against unjust treatment of German Jews and of course protest against maltreatment of American Jews.”
    Afterward, Dodd caught an 11:00 p.m. train to Boston and, upon his arrival early the next morning, July 4, was driven by chauffeured car to the home of Colonel Edward M. House, a friend who was a close adviser to Roosevelt, for a meeting over breakfast.
    In the course of a wide-ranging conversation, Dodd learned for the first time how far he had been from being Roosevelt’s first choice.The news was humbling. Dodd noted in his diary that it tamped any inclination on his part to be “over-egotistical” about his appointment.
    When the conversation turned to Germany’s persecution of Jews, Colonel House urged Dodd to do all he could “to ameliorate Jewish sufferings” but added a caveat: “the Jews should not be allowed to dominate economic or intellectual life in Berlin as they have done for a long time.”
    In this, Colonel House expressed a sentiment pervasive in America, that Germany’s Jews were at least partly responsible for their own troubles. Dodd encountered a more rabid form of it later that same day after returning to New York, when he and his family went to dinner at the Park Avenue apartment of Charles R. Crane, seventy-five, a philanthropist whose family had grown wealthy selling plumbing supplies. Crane was an Arabist said to be influential in certain Middle Eastern and Balkan nations and was a generous supporter of Dodd’s department at the University of Chicago, where he had endowed a chair for the study of Russian history and institutions.
    Dodd already knew that Crane was no friend of Jews. When Crane earlier had written to congratulate Dodd on his appointment, he had offered some advice: “The Jews, after winning the war, galloping along at a swift pace, getting Russia, England and Palestine, being caught in the act of trying to seize Germany, too, and meeting their first real rebuff have gone plumb crazy and are deluging the