In the Garden of Beasts

“a brilliant, attractive, dark man emanating the most amazing vitality and courage I have yet seen in a person under stress. He was alive, he was burning.”
    THE TRIAL SETTLED back into its previous bloodless state, but the damage had been done. The Swiss reporter, like dozens of other foreign correspondents in the room, recognized that Göring’s outburst had transformed the proceeding: “For the world had been told that, no matter whether the accused was sentenced or acquitted by the Court, his fate had already been sealed.”

CHAPTER 23
Boris Dies Again
    A s winter neared, Martha focused her romantic energies primarily on Boris. They logged hundreds of miles in his Ford convertible, with forays into the countryside all around Berlin.
    On one such drive Martha spotted an artifact of the old Germany, a roadside shrine to Jesus, and insisted they stop for a closer look. She found within a particularly graphic rendition of the Crucifixion. The face of Jesus was contorted in an expression of agony, his wounds garish with blood. After a few moments, she glanced back at Boris. Though she never would have described herself as terribly religious, she was shocked by what she saw.
    Boris stood with his arms stretched out, his ankles crossed, and his head drooping to his chest.
    “Boris, stop it,” she snapped. “What are you doing?”
    “I’m dying for you, darling. I am willing to, you know.”
    She declared his parody not funny and stepped away.
    Boris apologized. “I didn’t mean to offend you,” he said. “But I can’t understand why Christians adore the sight of a tortured man.”
    That wasn’t the point, she said. “They adore his sacrifice for his beliefs.”
    “Oh, do they really?” he said. “Do you believe that? Are there so many ready to die for their beliefs, following his example?”
    She cited Dimitrov and his bravery in standing up to Göring at the Reichstag trial.
    Boris gave her an angelic smile. “Yes,
liebes Fräulein
, but
he
was a communist.”

CHAPTER 24
Getting Out the Vote
    O n Sunday morning, November 12—cold, with drizzle and fog—the Dodds encountered a city that seemed uncannily quiet, given that this was the day Hitler had designated for the public referendum on his decision to leave the League of Nations and to seek equality of armaments. Everywhere the Dodds went they saw people wearing little badges that indicated not only that they had voted but that they had voted yes. By midday nearly everyone on the streets seemed to be wearing such insignia, suggesting that voters had arisen early in order to get the deed done and thereby avoid the danger almost certain to arise if they were perceived to have failed in their civic duty.
    Even the date of the election had been chosen with care. November 12 was the day after the fifteenth anniversary of the signing of the armistice that ended the Great War. Hitler, who flew around Germany campaigning for a positive vote, told one audience, “On an eleventh of November the German people formally lost its honor; fifteen years later came a twelfth of November and then the German people restored its honor to itself.” President Hindenburg too lobbied for a positive vote. “Show tomorrow your firm national unity and your solidarity with the government,” he said in a speech on November 11. “Support with me and the Reich Chancellor the principle of equal rights and of peace with honor.”
    The ballot had two main components. One asked Germans to elect delegates to a newly reconstituted Reichstag but offered only Nazi candidates and thus guaranteed that the resulting body would be a cheering section for Hitler’s decisions. The other, theforeign-policy question, had been composed to ensure maximum support.Every German could find a reason to justify voting yes—if he wanted peace, if he felt the Treaty of Versailles had wronged Germany, if he believed Germany ought to be treated as an equal by other nations, or if he simply wished to express his support for Hitler and his government.
    Hitler wanted a resounding endorsement. Throughout Germany, the Nazi Party apparatus took extraordinary measures to get people to vote.One report held that patients confined to hospital beds were transported to polling places on stretchers. Victor Klemperer, the Jewish philologist in Berlin, took note in his diary of the “extravagant propaganda” to win a yes vote. “On every commercial vehicle, post office van, mailman’s bicycle, on every