In the Garden of Beasts

but here was concrete evidence,” Reynolds wrote. “No other correspondent,” he claimed, “had witnessed any atrocities.”
    His editor agreed it was an important story but feared that if Reynolds tried to send it by cable it would be intercepted by Nazi censors. He told Reynolds to send it by mail and recommended that he omit any reference to the Dodd children in order to avoid causing difficulties for the new ambassador.
    Martha begged him not to write the story at all. “It was an isolated case,” she argued. “It was not really important, would create a bad impression, did not reveal actually what was going on in Germany, overshadowed the constructive work they were doing.”
    Martha, Bill, and Reynolds continued south into Austria, where they spent another week before returning to Germany and making their way back along the Rhine. When Reynolds returned to his office, he found an urgent summons from foreign-press chief Ernst Hanfstaengl.
    Hanfstaengl was furious, unaware as yet that Martha and Bill also had witnessed the incident.
    “There isn’t one damned word of truth in your story!” he raged. “I’ve talked with our people in Nuremberg and they say nothing of the sort happened there.”
    Reynolds quietly informed Hanfstaengl that he had watched the parade in the company of two important witnesses whom he hadomitted from the story but whose testimony was unassailable. Reynolds named them.
    Hanfstaengl sank into his chair and held his head. He complained that Reynolds should have told him sooner. Reynolds invited him to call the Dodds to confirm their presence, but Hanfstaengl waved away the suggestion.
    At a press conference soon afterward, Goebbels, the propaganda minister, did not wait for a reporter to raise the issue of abuse against Jews but did so himself. He assured the forty or so reporters in the room that such incidents were rare, committed by “irresponsible” men.
    One correspondent, Norman Ebbutt, chief of the London
Times
’s bureau in Berlin, interrupted. “But, Herr Minister, you must surely have heard of the Aryan girl, Anna Rath, who was paraded through Nuremberg just for wanting to marry a Jew?”
    Goebbels smiled. It utterly transformed his face, though the result was neither pleasant nor engaging. Many in the room had encountered this effect before. There was something freakish about the extent to which the muscles of the bottom half of his face became engaged in the production of his smile and how abruptly his expressions could shift.
    “Let me explain how such a thing might occasionally happen,” Goebbels said. “All during the twelve years of the Weimar Republic our people were virtually in jail. Now our party is in charge and they are free again. When a man has been in jail for twelve years and he is suddenly freed, in his joy he may do something irrational, perhaps even brutal. Is that not a possibility in your country also?”
    Ebbutt, his voice even, noted a fundamental difference in how England might approach such a scenario. “If it should happen,” he said, “we would throw the man right back in jail.”
    Goebbels’s smile disappeared, then just as quickly returned. He looked around the room. “Are there any more questions?”
    The United States made no formal protest of the incident. Nonetheless, an official of the German foreign office apologized to Martha. He dismissed the incident as isolated and one that would be severely punished.
    Martha was inclined to accept his view. She remained enthralledwith life in the new Germany. In a letter to Thornton Wilder, she gushed, “The youth are bright faced and hopeful, they sing to the noble ghost of Horst Wessel with shining eyes and unerring tongues. Wholesome and beautiful lads these Germans, good, sincere, healthy, mystic brutal, fine, hopeful, capable of death and love, deep, rich wondrous and strange beings—these youths of modern
Hakenkreuz
Germany.”
    IN THE MEANTIME , Dodd received an invitation from the German foreign office to attend the upcoming party rally in Nuremberg, set to begin in earnest on September 1. The invitation troubled him.
    He had read of the Nazi Party’s penchant for staging these elaborate displays of party force and energy, and saw them not as official events sponsored by the state but as party affairs that had nothing to do with international relations. He could not imagine himself attending such a rally any more than he could envision the German ambassador to America