In the Garden of Beasts

causing the eventual attendance to rise to over two hundred. “So today the show began at five o’clock,” Dodd wrote in his diary. “The Embassy rooms had been prepared; flowers abounded everywhere; a great punch bowl was filled with the accustomed liquors.” Foreign Minister Neurath came, as did Reichsbank president Schacht, one of the few other men in Hitler’s government whom Dodd saw as reasonable and rational. Schacht would become a frequent visitor to the Dodds’ home, well liked by Mrs. Dodd, who often used him to avoid the awkward social moments that occurred when an expected guest suddenly canceled. She was fond of saying, “Well, if at the last minute another guest can’t come, we can always invite Dr. Schacht.” Overall, Dodd decided, “It was not a bad affair, and”—a point of special satisfaction—“cost 700 marks.”
    But now a flood of return invitations, both diplomatic and social, arrived on Dodd’s desk and at his home. Depending on the importance of the event, these were often followed by an exchange of seating charts, given to protocol officers to ensure that no unfortunateerror of propinquity would mar the evening. The number of supposedly must-go banquets and receptions reached a point where even veteran diplomats complained that attendance had become onerous and exhausting. A senior official in the German foreign office said to Dodd, “You people in the Diplomatic Corps will have to limit social doings or we shall have to quit accepting invitations.” And a British official complained, “We simply cannot stand the pace.”
    It was not all drudgery, of course. These parties and banquets yielded moments of fun and humor. Goebbels was known for his wit; Martha, for a time, considered him charming. “Infectious and delightful, eyes sparkling, voice soft, his speech witty and light, it is difficult to remember his cruelty, his cunning destructive talents.” Her mother, Mattie, always enjoyed being seated next to Goebbels at banquets; Dodd considered him “one of the few men with a sense of humor in Germany” and often engaged him in a brisk repartee of quips and ironic comment.An extraordinary newspaper photograph shows Dodd, Goebbels, and Sigrid Schultz at a formal banquet during a moment of what appears to be animated, carefree bonhomie. Though doubtless useful for Nazi propaganda, the scene as played out in the banquet hall was rather more complex than was captured on film. In fact, as Schultz later explained in an oral-history interview, she was trying
not
to speak to Goebbels but in the process “certainly looked flirtatious.” She explained (deploying the third person): “In this picture Sigrid won’t give him the time of day, you see. He’s turning on a thousand watts of charm, but he knows and she knows that she has no use for him.” When Dodd saw the resulting photograph, she said, he “laughed his head off.”
    Göring too seemed a relatively benign character, at least as compared with Hitler. Sigrid Schultz found him the most tolerable of the senior Nazis because at least “you felt you could be in the same room with the man,” whereas Hitler, she said, “kind of turned my stomach.” One of the American embassy’s officers, John C. White, said years later, “I was always rather favorably impressed by Göring.… If any Nazi was likeable, I suppose he came nearest to it.”
    At this early stage, diplomats and others found Göring hard to take seriously. He was like an immense, if exceedingly dangerous,little boy who delighted in creating and wearing new uniforms. His great size made him the brunt of jokes, although such jokes were told only well out of his hearing.
    One night Ambassador Dodd and his wife went to a concert at the Italian embassy, which Göring also attended. In a vast white uniform of his own design, he looked especially huge—“three times the size of an ordinary man,” as daughter Martha told the story. The chairs set out for the concert were tiny gilded antiques that seemed far too fragile for Göring. With fascination and no small degree of anxiety, Mrs. Dodd watched Göring choose the chair directly in front of hers. She immediately found herself transfixed as Göring attempted to fit his gigantic “heart-shaped” rump onto the little chair. Throughout the concert she feared that at any moment the chair would collapse and Göring’s great bulk would come crashing into her lap. Martha wrote, “She was so distracted at the