In the Garden of Beasts

everywhere in a striking arrangement of colors: red background, white circle, and always a bold, black “broken cross,” or
Hakenkreuz
, at the center. The word “swastika” was not yet the term of choice within the embassy. Dodd learned the significance of the various colors worn by the men he encountered during his walks. Brown uniforms, seemingly omnipresent, were worn by the Storm Troopers of the SA; black, by a smaller, more elite force called the Schutzstaffel, or SS; blue, by the regular police. Dodd learned as well about the mounting power of the Gestapo and its young chief, Rudolf Diels. He was slender, dark, and considered handsome despite an array of facial scars accumulated when, as a university student, he had engaged in the bare-blade dueling once practiced by young German men seeking to prove their manhood. Although his appearance was as sinister as that of a villain in a campy film, Diels had proved thus far—according to Messersmith—to be a man of integrity, helpful and rational where his superiors, Hitler, Göring, and Goebbels, most decidedly were not.
    In many other ways, as well, this new world was proving to be far more nuanced and complex than Dodd had expected.
    Deep fault lines ran through Hitler’s government. Hitler had been chancellor since January 30, 1933, when he was appointed to the post by President Hindenburg as part of a deal crafted by senior conservative politicians who believed they could keep him under control, a notion that by the time of Dodd’s arrival had been proved delusional. Hindenburg—known widely as the Old Gentleman—remained the last counterbalance to Hitler’s power and several days before Dodd’s departure had made a public declaration of displeasure at Hitler’s attempts to suppress the Protestant Church. Declaring himself an “Evangelical Christian,” Hindenburg in a published letter to Hitler warned of growing “anxiety for the inner freedom of the church” and that if things continued as they had, “the gravest damage must result to our people and fatherland, as well as injury to national unity.” In addition to holding the constitutional authorityto appoint a new chancellor, Hindenburg commanded the loyalty of the regular army, the Reichswehr. Hitler understood that if the nation began falling back into chaos, Hindenburg might feel compelled to replace the government and declare martial law.He also recognized that the most likely source of future instability was the SA, commanded by his friend and longtime ally, Captain Ernst Röhm. Increasingly Hitler saw the SA as an undisciplined and radical force that had outlasted its purpose. Röhm thought otherwise: he and his Storm Troopers had been pivotal in bringing about the National Socialist revolution and now, for their reward, wanted control of all the nation’s military, including the Reichswehr. The army found this prospect loathsome. Fat, surly,admittedly homosexual, and thoroughly dissipated, Röhm had none of the soldierly bearing the army revered. He did, however, command a fast-growing legion of over one million men. The regular army was only one-tenth the size but far better trained and armed. The conflict simmered.
    Elsewhere in the government, Dodd thought he detected a new and decidedly moderate bent, at least by comparison to Hitler, Göring, and Goebbels, whom he described as “adolescents in the great game of international leadership.” It was in the next tier down, the ministries, that he found cause for hope. “These men wish to stop all Jewish persecution, to co-operate with remnants of German Liberalism,” he wrote, and added: “Since the day of our arrival here there has been a struggle between these groups.”
    Dodd’s assessment arose in large part from an early encounter with Germany’s minister of foreign affairs, Konstantin Freiherr von Neurath, whom Dodd—at least for now—perceived to be a member of the moderate camp.
    On Saturday, July 15, Dodd paid a visit to Neurath at his ministry on Wilhelmstrasse, a boulevard that paralleled the eastern edge of the Tiergarten. So many key Reich offices lined the street that Wilhelmstrasse became a shorthand means of referring to the German government.
    Neurath was a handsome man whose silver-gray hair, dark eyebrows, and close-trimmed gray mustache gave him the look of an actor who played fatherly roles. Martha would soon meet him as welland be struck by his ability to mask his interior emotions: “his face,” she