In the Garden of Beasts

student of history, Dodd had come to believe in the inherent rationality of men and that reason and persuasion would prevail, particularly with regard to halting Nazi persecution of Jews.
    He told a friend, Assistant Secretary of State R. Walton Moore, that he would rather resign than “simply to remain a protocol and social figurehead.”
    THE DODDS REACHED GERMANY on Thursday, July 13, 1933.Dodd had assumed erroneously that all arrangements for the family’s arrival were in place, but after a slow and tedious passage up the Elbe they disembarked in Hamburg to find that no one from the embassy had booked a train, let alone the customary private railcar, to take them to Berlin. An official, George Gordon, counselor of embassy, met them at the dock and hastily secured compartments on an old, conventional train, a far cry from the famous “Flying Hamburger,” which made the run to Berlin in just over two hours. The family Chevrolet posed another problem. Bill Jr. had planned to drive it to Berlin but had failed to fill out the advance paperwork needed to get it off the ship and onto Germany’s roads. Once this was resolved, Bill set off.Meanwhile, Dodd fielded questions from a group of reporters that included a writer for a Jewish newspaper, the
Hamburger Israelitisches Familienblatt
, which subsequently published an article implying that Dodd’s primary mission was to stop Nazi persecution of Jews—exactly the kind of distortion Dodd had hoped to avoid.
    As the afternoon progressed, the Dodds developed a dislike forCounselor Gordon. He was second in command of the embassy and oversaw a cadre of first and second secretaries, stenographers, file and code clerks, and assorted other employees, about two dozen in all.He was stiff and arrogant and dressed like an aristocrat from the prior century. He carried a walking stick. His mustache was curled, his complexion ruddy and inflamed, a marker of what one official called his “very choleric temperament.” He spoke in a manner that Martha described as “clipped, polite, and definitely condescending.” He made no attempt to hide his disdain for the family’s simple appearance or his displeasure at the fact that they arrived alone, without a battalion of valets, maids, and chauffeurs. The previous ambassador, Sackett, had been much more Gordon’s kind of man, rich, with ten servants at his Berlin residence. Martha sensed that to Gordon her family represented a class of human being “the like of which he had not permitted himself to mingle with for perhaps most of his adult life.”
    Martha and her mother rode in one compartment, among bouquets of flowers given to them in welcome at the dock.Mrs. Dodd—Mattie—was uneasy and downhearted, anticipating “the duties and change in life-patterns” that lay ahead, Martha recalled. Martha rested her head on her mother’s shoulder and soon fell asleep.
    Dodd and Gordon sat together in a separate compartment discussing embassy matters and German politics. Gordon warned Dodd that his frugality and his resolve to live only within his State Department income would prove a barrier to establishing a relationship with Hitler’s government. Dodd was no longer a mere professor, Gordon reminded him. He was an important diplomat up against an arrogant regime that respected only strength. Dodd’s approach to daily life would have to change.
    The train raced through pretty towns and forested glens bladed with afternoon light and in about three hours reached greater Berlin. At last it steamed into Berlin’s Lehrter Bahnhof, at a bend in the Spree where the river flowed through the heart of the city. One of Berlin’s five major rail portals, the station rose above its surroundings like a cathedral, with a barrel-vaulted ceiling and banks of arched windows.
    On the platform, the Dodds encountered a crowd of Americans and Germans waiting to meet them, including officials from the German foreign office and reporters armed with cameras and flash apparatus known then as “flashlights.” An energetic-seeming man, midsized, about five feet six inches tall—“a dry, drawling, peppery man,” as historian and diplomat George Kennan later described him—stepped forward and introduced himself. This was George Messersmith, consul general, the Foreign Service officer whose lengthy dispatches Dodd had read while in Washington. Martha and her father liked him immediately, judging him to be a man of principle and candor and a likely