In the Garden of Beasts

exile to Czechoslovakia. Himmler had not only apologized for the raid on Diels’s home; he had promised to make Diels a
Standartenführer
, or colonel, in the SS.
    Diels sent him a fawning thank-you: “By promoting me to the
Obersturmbannführer der SS
, you have brought so much joy to me that it cannot be expressed in these short words of thanks.”
    Safe at least for the time being, Diels invited Martha to attend an upcoming session of the Reichstag arson trial, which had been under way in the Supreme Court in Leipzig for nearly a month but was about to reconvene in Berlin, at the scene of the crime. The trial was supposed to have been a short one and to conclude with convictions and, ideally, death sentences for all five defendants, but it was not proceeding as Hitler had hoped.
    Now a special “witness” was scheduled to appear.

CHAPTER 21
The Trouble with George
    W ith in Germany, a great flywheel had been set in motion that drove the country inexorably toward some dark place alien to Dodd’s recollection of the old Germany he had known as a student. As the autumn advanced and color filled the Tiergarten, he came more and more to realize just how correct he had been back in Chicago, in the spring, when he had observed that his temperament was ill suited to “high diplomacy” and playing the liar on bended knee. He wanted to have an effect: to awaken Germany to the dangers of its current path and to nudge Hitler’s government onto a more humane and rational course. He was fast realizing, however, that he possessed little power to do so. Especially strange to him was the Nazi fixation on racial purity. A draft of a new penal code had begun to circulate that proposed to make it a key buttress of German law. The American vice consul in Leipzig, Henry Leverich, found the draft an extraordinary document and wrote an analysis: “For the first time, therefore, in German legal history the draft code contains definite suggestions for protection of the German Race from what is considered the disintegration caused by an intermixture of Jewish and colored blood.” If the code became law—and he had no doubt it would—then henceforth “it shall be considered as a crime for a gentile man or woman to marry a Jewish or colored man or woman.” He noted also that the code made paramount the protection of the family and thus outlawed abortion, with the exception that a court could authorize the procedure when the expected offspring was a mix of German and Jewish or colored blood. Vice Consul Leverich wrote, “Judging fromnewspaper comment, this portion of the draft will almost certainly be transacted into law.”
    Another newly proposed law caught Dodd’s particular attention—a law “to permit killing incurables,” as he described it in a memorandum to the State Department dated October 26, 1933. Seriously ill patients could ask to be euthanized, but if unable to make the request, their families could do so for them. This proposal, “together with legislation already enacted governing the sterilization of persons affected by hereditary imbecility and other similar defects, is in line with Hitler’s aim to raise the physical standard of the German people,” Dodd wrote. “According to Nazi philosophy only Germans who are physically fit belong in the Third Reich, and they are the ones who are expected to raise large families.”
    Attacks against Americans continued, despite Dodd’s protests, and the prosecution of past cases seemed languid at best. On November 8 Dodd received notice from the German foreign office that no arrest would be made in the assault on H. V. Kaltenborn’s son, because the senior Kaltenborn “could remember neither the name nor the number of the Party identification card of the culprit, and as no other clues which might be useful in the investigation could be found.”
    Perhaps because of his mounting sense of futility, Dodd shifted his focus from the realm of international affairs to the state of affairs within his own embassy. Dodd found himself—his frugal, Jeffersonian self—drawn more and more to concentrate on the failings of his staff and the extravagance of embassy business.
    He intensified his campaign against the cost of telegrams and the length and redundancy of dispatches, all of which he believed to be consequences of having so many rich men in the department. “Wealthy staff people want to have cocktail parties in the afternoon, card parties in the evening and get up