In the Garden of Beasts

evoking the scene, Martha wrote that Gordon had “rolled in the gutter in an apoplectic fit.” When Dodd drove anywhere, he took the family’s Chevrolet, no match for the Opels and Mercedeses favored by senior Reich officials. He wore plain suits. He cracked wry jokes. On Monday, July 24, he committed a particularly egregious sin. Consul General Messersmith had invited him and Gordon to a meeting with a visiting U.S. congressman, to be held in Messersmith’s office at the American consulate, which occupied the first two floors of a building across the street from the Esplanade Hotel. Dodd arrived at Messersmith’s office before Gordon; a few minutes later the telephone rang. What Dodd gleaned from Messersmith’s end of the conversation was that Gordon was now refusing to come. The reason: pure pique. In Gordon’s view Dodd had “degraded” himself and his post by stooping to attend a meeting in the office of a man of inferior rank. Dodd observed in his diary, “Gordon is an industrious career man with punctilio developed to the nth degree.”
    Dodd could not immediately present his credentials—his “Letters of Credence”—to President Hindenburg, as demanded by diplomatic protocol, for Hindenburg was unwell and had retreated to his estate at Neudeck in East Prussia to convalesce; he was not expected to return until the end of the summer. Dodd, therefore, was not yet officially recognized as ambassador and used this period of quiet to familiarize himself with such basic functions as the operation of the embassy phones, its telegraphic codes, and the typical departure times of diplomatic pouches. He met with a group of American correspondents and then with some twenty German reporters, who—as Dodd feared—had seen the report in the Jewish
Hamburger Israelitisches Familienblatt
claiming that he had “come to Germany to rectify the wrongs to the Jews.” Dodd read them what he described as a “brief disavowal.”
    He quickly got a taste of life in the new Germany. On his firstfull day in Berlin, Hitler’s cabinet enacted a new law, to take effect January 1, 1934, called the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases, which authorized the sterilization of individuals suffering various physical and mental handicaps.He also learned that staff at the embassy and at Messersmith’s consulate had become convinced that German authorities were intercepting incoming and outgoing mail and that this had prompted Messersmith to take extraordinary measures to ensure that the most sensitive correspondence reached America unopened.The consul general now dispatched messengers to hand such mail directly to the captains of ships bound for America, who would be met dockside by U.S. agents.
    ONE OF THE EARLIEST TASKS that Dodd assigned himself was to gain a grasp of the talents and deficits of the embassy’s officers, known as first and second secretaries, and the various clerks, stenographers, and other employees who worked out of the chancery. From the start Dodd found their work habits to be less than desirable. His more senior people came in each day at whatever hour seemed to please them and periodically disappeared to hunt or play golf. Almost all, he found, were members of a golf club in the Wannsee district southwest of central Berlin. Many were independently wealthy, in keeping with the traditions of the Foreign Service, and spent money with abandon, their own and the embassy’s. Dodd was particularly appalled at how much they spent on international cables. The messages were long and rambling and thus needlessly expensive.
    In notes for a personnel report, he wrote brief descriptions of key people. He observed that Counselor Gordon’s wife had a “large income” and that Gordon tended to be temperamental. “Emotional. Too hostile to Germans … his irritations have been many and exasperating.” In his sketch of one of the embassy’s first secretaries, also wealthy, Dodd jotted the shorthand observation that he “loves to pass upon [the] color of men’s socks.” Dodd noted that the woman who ran the embassy reception room, Julia Swope Lewin, was ill suited to the task, as she was “very anti-German” and this was “not good for receiving German callers.”
    Dodd also learned the contours of the political landscape beyond the embassy’s walls. The world of Messersmith’s dispatches now came alive outside his windows under the bright sky of a summer’s day. There were banners