In the Garden of Beasts

thus allowing the manufacture of plentiful, cheap fertilizer—and, of course, gunpowder.
    Despite a prewar conversion to Protestantism, Haber was classified under the new Nazi laws as non-Aryan, but an exception granted to Jewish war veterans allowed him to remain director of the institute. Many Jewish scientists on his staff did not qualify for the exemption, however, and on April 21, 1933, Haber was ordered to dismiss them. He fought the decision but found few allies. Even his friend Max Planck offered tepid consolation. “In this profound dejection,” Planck wrote, “my sole solace is that we live in a time of catastrophe such as attends every revolution, and that we must endure much of what happens as a phenomenon of nature, without agonizing over whether things could have turned out differently.”
    Haber didn’t see it that way. Rather than preside over the dismissal of his friends and colleagues, he resigned.
    Now—Friday, July 28, 1933—with few choices remaining, he came to Dodd’s office for help, bearing a letter from Henry Morgenthau Jr., head of Roosevelt’s Federal Farm Board (and future Treasury secretary). Morgenthau was Jewish and an advocate for Jewish refugees.
    As Haber told his story he “trembled from head to foot,” Doddwrote in his diary, calling Haber’s account “the saddest story of Jewish persecution I have yet heard.” Haber was sixty-five years old, with a failing heart, and was now being denied the pension that had been guaranteed him under the laws of the Weimar Republic, which immediately preceded Hitler’s Third Reich. “He wished to know the possibilities in America for emigrants with distinguished records here in science,” Dodd wrote. “I could only say that the law allowed none now, the quota being filled.” Dodd promised to write to the Labor Department, which administered immigration quotas, to ask “if any favorable ruling might be made for such people.”
    They shook hands. Haber warned Dodd to be careful about talking of his case to others, “as the consequences might be bad.” And then Haber left, a small gray chemist who once had been one of Germany’s most important scientific assets.
    “Poor old man,” Dodd recalled thinking—then caught himself, for Haber was in fact only one year older than he was. “Such treatment,” Dodd wrote in his diary, “can only bring evil to the government which practices such terrible cruelty.”
    Dodd discovered, too late, that what he had told Haber was simply incorrect. The next week, on August 5, Dodd wrote to Isador Lubin, chief of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: “You know the quota is already full and you probably realize that a large number of very excellent people would like to migrate to the United States, even though they have to sacrifice their property in doing so.” In light of this, Dodd wanted to know whether the Labor Department had discovered any means through which “the most deserving of these people can be admitted.”
    Lubin forwarded Dodd’s letter to Colonel D. W. MacCormack, commissioner of immigration and naturalization, who on August 23 wrote back to Lubin and told him, “The Ambassador appears to have been misinformed in this connection.” In fact only a small fraction of the visas allotted under the German quota had been issued, and the fault, MacCormack made clear, lay with the State Department and Foreign Service, and their enthusiastic enforcement of the clause that barred entry to people “likely to become a public charge.”Nothing in Dodd’s papers explains how he came to believe the quota was full.
    All this came too late for Haber.He left for England to teach at Cambridge University, a seemingly happy resolution, but he found himself adrift in an alien culture, torn from his past, and suffering the effects of an inhospitable climate. Within six months of leaving Dodd’s office, during a convalescence in Switzerland, he suffered a fatal heart attack, his passing unlamented in the new Germany. Within a decade, however, the Third Reich would find a new use for Haber’s rule, and for an insecticide that Haber had invented at his institute, composed in part of cyanide gas and typically deployed to fumigate structures used for the storage of grain. At first called Zyklon A, it would be transformed by German chemists into a more lethal variant:Zyklon B.
    DESPITE THIS ENCOUNTER , Dodd remained convinced that the government was growing more moderate and that Nazi