In the Garden of Beasts

it.”
    Mammi ignored the remark. “Frau von Neurath advises you to hurry up and get baptized,” she said. “They are very anxious at the foreign office to avoid a second
casus
Poulette.”
    Fromm found this astonishing—that someone could be so ignorant of the new realities of Germany as to think that mere baptism could restore one’s status as an Aryan.
    “Poor old fool!” Fromm wrote in her diary.

CHAPTER 27
O Tannenbaum
    I t was almost Christmas. The winter sun, when it shone at all, climbed only partway into the southern sky and cast evening shadows at midday. Frigid winds came in off the plains. “Berlin is a skeleton which aches in the cold,” wrote Christopher Isherwood, describing the winters he experienced during his tenure in 1930s Berlin: “It is my own skeleton aching. I feel in my bones the sharp ache of the frost in the girders of the overhead railway, in the ironwork of balconies, in bridges, tramlines, lamp-standards, latrines. The iron throbs and shrinks, the stone and the bricks ache dully, the plaster is numb.”
    The gloom was leavened somewhat by the play of lights on wet streets—sidewalk lamps, storefronts, headlights, the warmly lit interiors of countless streetcars—and by the city’s habitual embrace of Christmas. Candles appeared in every window and large trees lit with electric lights graced squares and parks and the busiest street corners, reflecting a passion for the season that even the Storm Troopers could not suppress and in fact used to their financial advantage.The SA monopolized the sale of Christmas trees, selling them from rail yards, ostensibly for the benefit of the Winterhilfe—literally, Winter Help—the SA’s charity for the poor and jobless, widely believed by cynical Berliners to fund the Storm Troopers’ parties and banquets, which had become legendary for their opulence, their debauchery, and the volume of champagne consumed. Troopers went door-to-door carrying red donation boxes. Donors received little badges to pin on their clothing to show they had given money, and they made sure to wear them, thereby putting oblique pressure on those brave or foolhardy souls who failed to contribute.
    Another American ran afoul of the government, due to a false denunciation by “persons who had a grudge against him,” according to a consulate report. It was the kind of moment that decades hence would become a repeated motif in films about the Nazi era.
    At about four thirty in the morning on Tuesday, December 12, 1933, an American citizen named Erwin Wollstein stood on a train platform in Breslau waiting for a train to Oppeln in Upper Silesia, where he planned to conduct some business. He was leaving so early because he hoped to return later that same day. In Breslau he shared an apartment with his father, who was a German citizen.
    Two men in suits approached and called him by name. They identified themselves as officers of the Gestapo and asked him to accompany them to a police post located in the train station.
    “I was ordered to remove my overcoat, coat, shoes, spats, collar and necktie,” Wollstein wrote in an affidavit. The agents then searched him and his belongings. This took nearly half an hour. They found his passport and quizzed him on his citizenship. He confirmed that he was an American citizen and asked that they notify the American consulate in Breslau of his arrest.
    The agents then took him by car to the Breslau Central Police Station, where he was placed in a cell. He was given “a frugal breakfast.” He remained in his cell for the next nine hours. In the meantime, his father was arrested and their apartment searched. The Gestapo confiscated personal and business correspondence and other documents, including two expired and canceled American passports.
    At five fifteen that afternoon the two Gestapo agents took Wollstein upstairs and at last read him the charges filed against him, citing denunciations by three people whom Wollstein knew: his landlady, a second woman, and a male servant who cleaned the apartment. His landlady, Miss Bleicher, had charged that two months earlier he had said, “All Germans are dogs.” His servant, Richard Kuhne, charged that Wollstein had declared that if another world war occurred, he would join the fight against Germany. The third, a Miss Strausz, charged that Wollstein had loaned her husband “a communistic book.” The book, as it happened, was
Oil!
by Upton Sinclair.
    Wollstein spent the night in