"In the Garden of the Beasts" by Eric Larson

Reviewed by Rita Kramer ~

Those accounts we have of life in Germany during the twelve-year Reich have been written by the persecuted, the hunted, the hidden who managed to survive.  In this engrossing, sad, and sometimes infuriating book we learn what it was like to be a stranger, a neutral observer, in the early years of Hitler’s creation of the perfect tyranny.
Through the eyes of an American family we experience the unfolding of events “In the Garden of Beasts,” as told by author Eric Larson.  Drawing on correspondence, diaries, and memoirs by these innocents abroad, he transports his readers to the Berlin of 1933, where American Ambassador William E. Dodd is taking up his new post.
Dodd, a modest, unassuming professor and chairman of the History Department at the University of Chicago, had been appointed almost by accident to a post at least two others had refused.  Fluent in German, having studied for his doctorate at Leipzig University, Dodd was acquainted with Presidents Wilson and Roosevelt. When offered the job nobody else wanted, he saw it as an opportunity to have more time for his writing, a planned history of the antebellum South.
Traveling with him from Chicago to Berlin were Dodd’s wife as well as his son and his daughter, both in their twenties.  The family took up residence in the city, where Dodd assumed his ambassadorial duties and his daughter began a social life that included the handsome young Gestapo officers and Nazi Party officials, all of whom she found charming.  Dodd himself was under no such illusions.
As the months and years unfolded, Ambassador Dodd’s earlier neutrality and determination to foster relations between the Nazis and America gave way to awareness of the beastliness  of the regime. Even his promiscuous daughter found the charm of her companions wearing thin.  (Evidently drawn to the ideologically-inclined personality, she then took up with a Soviet Communist.)
As events revealed the nature of Nazi rule and its rulers, Dodd found his colleagues in the State Department, from the Secretary on down, did not share his apprehensions.  Only one, the United States Consul to Germany George S. Messersmith, saw the threat that Hitler’s Germany increasingly posed not only to its own citizens but to the rest of the world.
The story of the Dodds is an absorbing narrative, but the real value of this book lies in its well-documented account of the willful blindness of the members of the “club” of Secretary of State Cordell Hull’s State Department to the evil of Germany’s racist policies and the menace of its growing militarism.  Officials at the State Department were themselves too anti-Semitic to be troubled by the fate of the Jews.  And their main concern was Germany’s economic health, which would determine its ability to pay its huge debt to American creditors, who believed “one could do business with Hitler.”
Dodd stuck it out in Berlin until 1938, increasingly at odds with his employers and peers in the government, and on his return home he continued to warn of the danger posed by Nazism, Hitler’s plans, and America’s growing isolationism.  Only months before Kristallnacht he predicted Hitler’s intent to kill all Jews.
In September 1939 Dodd wrote to FDR that war could have been avoided if the democracies had acted together to stop Hitler.  “Now,” he mourned, “it is too late.”
A decent man politically and morally, Dodd never received the support of his own government when it might have done some good.  As Eric Larson demonstrates in this heartbreaking account, the U.S. officially held on to the last minute to “the fantasy that it could avoid involvement in the squabbles of Europe.”
Even as he warned of Hitler’s agenda Dodd maintained his affection for the “kind and gentle” German population. Dodd died before America entered the war and without knowing anything of World War II, its unbearable tragic toll, the genocide of European Jewry and the participation of the majority of Germany’s citizens.  One is left to wonder how history could have been altered had the West acted on Dodd’s warnings.
“In the Garden of Beasts” salvages the memory of an unknown and unlikely hero who, in the face of gathering darkness, stood fast for American ideals at a time when official U.S. policy was betraying those ideals.

Rita Kramer is the author of “Flames in the Field: The Story of Four SOE Agents in Occupied France.” This review originally appeared in OUTPOST, the publication of AFSI, Americans for a Safe Israel.