In the Garden of Beasts

blow which could be delivered to them. They have and are being deprived of practically all means of making a livelihood and understand that the new citizenship law is to practically deprive them of all civil rights.”
    The only reason it hadn’t become law already, Messersmith had learned, was that for the moment the men behind it feared “the unfavorable public sentiment it would arouse abroad.” The draft had been circulating for nine weeks, and this prompted Messersmith to end his dispatch with a bit of wishful thinking. “The fact that the law has been under consideration for such a long time,” he wrote, “may be an indication that in its final form it will be less radical than that still contemplated.”
    DODD REITERATED HIS COMMITMENT to objectivity and understanding in an August 12 letter to Roosevelt, in which he wrote thatwhile he did not approve of Germany’s treatment of Jews or Hitler’s drive to restore the country’s military power, “fundamentally, I believe a people has a right to govern itself and that other peoples must exercise patience even when cruelties and injustices are done. Give men a chance to try their schemes.”

CHAPTER 10
Tiergartenstrasse 27a
    M artha and her mother set out to find the family a house to lease, so that they could move out of the Esplanade—escape its opulence, in Dodd’s view—and lead a more settled life. Bill Jr., meanwhile, enrolled in a doctoral program at the University of Berlin. To improve his German as speedily as possible, he arranged to live during the school week with the family of a professor.
    The matter of housing the U.S. ambassador in Berlin had long been an embarrassment. Some years earlier the State Department had acquired and renovated a large and lavish building, the Blücher Palace, on Pariser Platz behind the Brandenburg Gate, to provide an ambassador’s residence and consolidate in one location all the other diplomatic and consular offices spread throughout the city, and also to raise America’s physical presence nearer to that of Britain and France, whose embassies had long been ensconced in majestic palaces on the plaza. However, just before Dodd’s predecessor, Frederic Sackett, was to move in, fire had gutted the building. It had stood as a forlorn wreck ever since, forcing Sackett and now Dodd to find alternative lodging. On a personal level, Dodd was not unhappy about this.Though he reviled the waste of all the money thus far expended on the palace—the government, he wrote, had paid an “exorbitant” price for the building, but “you know it was in 1928 or 1929, when everybody was crazy”—he liked the idea of having a home outside the embassy itself. “Personally, I would rather have my residence a half-hour’s walk away than to have it in the Palais,” he wrote. He acknowledged that having a building large enough to house juniorofficials would be a good thing, “but any of us who have to see people would find that the residence alongside of our offices would deprive us practically of all privacy—which is sometimes very essential.”
    Martha and her mother toured greater Berlin’s lovely residential neighborhoods and discovered the city to be full of parks and gardens, with planters and flowers seemingly on every balcony. In the farthest districts they saw what appeared to be tiny farms, possibly just the thing for Martha’s father. They encountered squads of uniformed young people happily marching and singing, and more threatening formations of Storm Troopers with men of all sizes in ill-fitting uniforms, the centerpiece of which was a brown shirt of spectacularly unflattering cut. More rarely they spotted the leaner, better-tailored men of the SS, in night black accented with red, like some species of oversized blackbird.
    The Dodds found many properties to choose from, though at first they failed to ask themselves why so many grand old mansions were available for lease so fully and luxuriously furnished, with ornate tables and chairs, gleaming pianos, and rare vases, maps, and books still in place. One area they particularly liked was the district immediately south of the Tiergarten along Dodd’s route to work, where they found gardens, plentiful shade, a quiet atmosphere, and an array of handsome houses. A property in the district had become available, which they learned of through the embassy’s military attaché, who had been told of its availability directly by the owner, Alfred Panofsky, the