In the Garden of Beasts

it.”
    Dodd spent a few moments admiring the Lochners’ tree and other decorations, then took Lochner aside and asked for the latest news of the Dimitrov affair.
    Dimitrov thus far appeared to have escaped harm, Lochner said.He also reported that his highly placed source—whose identity he still would not reveal to Dodd—had thanked him for handling the matter so deftly.
    Dodd feared further repercussions, however. He remained convinced that Diels had played a key role in revealing the plot. Dodd continued to be surprised by Diels. He knew his reputation as a cynic and opportunist of the first order, but he found him time and again to be a man of integrity and worthy of respect. It was Diels, indeed, who earlier in the month had persuaded Göring and Hitler to decree a Christmas amnesty for inmates of concentration camps who were not hardened criminals or clearly dangerous to state security.Diels’s precise motives cannot be known, but he considered that time, as he went from camp to camp selecting prisoners to be freed, one of the best moments of his career.
    Dodd feared that Diels might have gone too far. In his diary entry for Christmas Day, Dodd wrote, “The Secret Police Chief did a most dangerous thing and I shall not be surprised later to hear that he has been sent to prison.”
    In traveling about the city that day, Dodd was struck anew by the “extraordinary” German penchant for Christmas display. He saw Christmas trees everywhere, in every public square and every window.
    “One might think,” he wrote, “the Germans believed in Jesus or practiced his teachings!”

1934

PART V
Disquiet

    Hitler and Röhm
( photo credit p5.1 )

CHAPTER 28
January 1934
    O n January 9 the primary defendant in the Reichstag trial, Marinus van der Lubbe, received word from the public prosecutor that he was to be beheaded the next day.
    “Thank you for telling me,” van der Lubbe said. “I shall see you tomorrow.”
    The executioner wore top hat and tails and, in a particularly fastidious touch, white gloves. He used a guillotine.
    Van der Lubbe’s execution provided a clear if gory punctuation point to the Reichstag fire saga and thereby quelled a source of turbulence that had roiled Germany since the preceding February. Now anyone who felt the need for an ending could point to an official act of state: van der Lubbe had set the fire, and now van der Lubbe was dead. Dimitrov, still alive, was to be flown to Moscow. The way was clear for the restoration of Germany.
    As the year opened, Germany did seem on a superficial level to have grown more stable, much to the disappointment of foreign observers and diplomats who still nurtured the belief that economic pressures would cause the collapse of the Hitler regime. At the end of his first year as chancellor, Hitler seemed more rational, almost conciliatory, and went so far as to hint that he might support some form of nonaggression pact with France and Britain. Anthony Eden, Britain’s Lord Privy Seal, traveled to Germany to meet with him and, like Dodd, came away impressed with Hitler’s sincerity in wanting peace. Sir Eric Phipps, Britain’s ambassador to Germany, wrote in his diary, “Herr Hitler seemed to feel a genuine sympathy for Mr. Eden,who certainly succeeded in bringing to the surface of that strange being certain human qualities which for me had hitherto remained obstinately dormant.” In a letter to Thornton Wilder, Martha wrote: “Hitler is improving definitely.”
    This sense of looming normalcy was apparent in other spheres as well.The official tally of unemployed workers showed a rapid decline, from 4.8 million in 1933 to 2.7 million in 1934, although a good deal of this was due to such measures as assigning one-man jobs to two men and an aggressive propaganda campaign that sought to discourage women from working. The “wild” concentration camps had been closed, thanks in part to Gestapo chief Rudolf Diels.Within the Reich Ministry of the Interior there was talk of doing away with protective custody and concentration camps altogether.
    Even Dachau seemed to have become civilized. On February 12, 1934, a representative of the Quakers, Gilbert L. MacMaster, set out to visit the camp, after having been granted permission to see an inmate, a sixty-two-year-old former deputy of the Reichstag named George Simon, who had been arrested because he was a socialist. MacMaster caught a train in Munich and half an hour later got off in the village of