In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin

Larson specializes in the "nonfiction novel" genre pioneered by Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood." He does a tremendous amount of research that allows him to write a true story in a way that reads like a novel. This is by far his best book, in part because of the gravity of the subject matter and in part because everyone can identify with an American family that moves wholesale over to Germany at the very moment that Hitler consolidates his power in 1933-34. Dodd is a Jimmy Stewart type figure -- an everyman, thoughtful professor who is unexpectedly appointed ambassador to Germany because no one else wants the job and because he knows the country and the language (and, of course, is an old supporter and friend of Wilson and Roosevelt). He decides to bring his whole family along to experience the adventure -- including his two adult children. His daughter, Martha, is a charismatic and sexually adventurous free spirit who ends up having affairs with some Nazis and even a Soviet diplomat. One Nazi actually introduces her to Hitler in attempt to set up the sexually hapless dictator -- to no avail. There are compelling lessons to this tale. First and foremost is Larson's ability to capture the heady spirit of the times. When we think about the Nazis we know the evil and tragic result of their regime -- but the people in 1933 didn't know. Instead of shaking our heads and saying how could they be so stupid as to follow Hitler, we have to put aside our knowledge of what happened next and think like those who lived the early years. The intoxication of power and the feeling that the Nazis were reinvigorating a dead society go a long way toward explaining the Nazis' success. But Larson also captures the growing unease and tensions created by the new regime -- and the ability of the regime to grow too strong before any meaningful resistance could be mounted. Even the Nazi lords who interact with the Dodds are haunted by the insecurity of their position. In a regime premised on survival-of-the-fittest, continued rivalries for power, and pressure to demonstrate more and more harshness and party orthodoxy, all the participants saw the path before them as either keeping intoxicating power by becoming more ruthless or accepting purge and death. Some, like Diehls (the early head of the Gestapo), refuse to take steps toward greater and greater ruthlessness, and pay with loss of position and threats to life. Dodd himself immediately appreciates the evil of the regime, though initially deludes himself into thinking that it can be moderated or persuaded by rationality. His daughter is at first taken with the regime, but witnessing public humiliation and oppression of Jews and the growing repression and tensions of the regime persuade her otherwise. Dodd is ultimately powerless to either change the regime or to persuade Americans to pay attention to it and to do something before it's too late. Dodd did suffer from some of the easy anti-semitism of the day, but to his credit refused to blame the Jews for their own predicament or to tolerate inhumane treatment. He became a hero to me in one fantastic meeting he had with Hitler in 1933. Hitler does his usual rant about the injustice of the Versailles Treaty imposed on Germany after World War I. Hitler's embrace of victimhood for Germany allowed him to stoke hate at home, demand appeasement, and ultimately to justify any kind of evil/aggressive action (when you are a victim, all is permitted). Dodd said the one thing to Hitler that no one else did and that everyone else (German and non-German) should have: the peace of the victors is always unjust, that's why we have to work to avoid future wars. He told Hitler, in essence, to grow up and to get beyond this victimhood. Hitler just sat and looked at Dodd and was briefly at a loss for words. Unfortunately, nothing was going to sink in or persuade him rationally. But it's a beautiful scene. Dodd is a tragic figure in the end. But he really could have done nothing differently. The USA was not ready to see the evil of the Nazis or the necessity of intervening in European affairs. This is an extraordinary book that recreates the lost world of 1933-34 Berlin. I read virtually all of the book in one sitting because it's impossible to put down.

Very well documented history of Nazi Germany. This should be a must-read book for young students as well as old. Many episodes in this book tell us how brutal Hitler and his colleagues were. A story tells about a German young woman exposed to public and beaten by SA just because she had been engaged to a Jewish man. We cannot say this type of atrocity would not happen here. Just think about what our government did and sent Japanese-Americans and German-Americans to concentration camps during the world war ll. (see The Train To Crystal City by Jan Russell).

Not as good as devil in the white city

Those familiar with the history of Nazism and Hitler’s ascension to the post of Fuhrer will not be surprised by the specific “climactic spasm of violence and murder” that occurs near the end of the text; the event is an indelible part of the history of Nazi Germany, which I won’t reveal here. For my part, I was expecting a different, perhaps less well known event would serve as the ghastly denouement for the story, but it is a credit to Larson’s writing style and novelistic detail that I found myself propelled through the book even after I came to realize late in the text that the climax involved a tale I’d already heard and read about a dozen times if not more. This book’s strength and its value isn’t so much in how it portrays a single atrocious event in a string of atrocities that were to become Nazi Germany but rather in the way it provides a glimpse of life in pre-war Nazi Germany. We see the Nazi hierarchy for what it was: a rabble of psychopathic connivers plotting against each other, scrambling and scraping to retain Hitler’s favor. The picture is age-old and yet new when cast through Larson’s lens. And yet, I did not find much to be admired in the American cast of characters, either. Ambassador Dodd, his wife, son and daughter arrived in Germany in 1933 so that Mr. Dodd could assume the position of U.S. ambassador to Germany and while I found Mr. Dodd to be a basically sympathetic sort, I’m a bit confused by Larsen’s apparent admiration for Dodd’s daughter Martha, whose liaisons and indiscretions play a major part in the narrative. I liked this book – I didn’t LOVE it. I found it very compelling and interesting enough that I looked forward to reading it each day and would spend a good deal of time at a setting reading the book. The story does, truly read like a novel and would be of interest to folks who aren’t necessarily knowledgeable regarding the history of Nazism or World War II and for those who may know a great deal about that era, I think you’d still enjoy it for the glimpse of what came to pass as “normal life” in Germany during the years immediately before the outbreak of World War II. If you’re like me, having finished this book you will likely find yourself asking, “Why didn’t we recognize the Hitler regime for what it was?” Heaven knows we had plenty of warnings, but alas, we continue ignore the outrages perpetrated by today’s raft of dictators and despots, too.

This is an extremely well written book -- the first I've selected from Erik Larson. I will be sure to look for other books by this author because he writes so well and knows how to develop a good story. Readers will find this book covers the life and times of Ambassador Dodd while in Germany in the years ~1933 - 1934; roughly a one year span of time. People that love history and the stories behind the stories will enjoy this book because it covers the personalities of many in the German leadership and some of the issues involved with diplomacy. It also shows Dodd's observations during the lead up to Hitler's rise to power. Dodd is portrayed as a bit of a fumbling or innocent ambassador for the position -- several others had refused such an appointment by FDR prior to his own appointment. However, when taking into account Dodd's background (a deep knowledge and respect for President Wilson coupled with being steeped in Jeffersonian democracy) one can see why Dodd responded in ways that many others would not have. Thus, others outside of Dodd's pov moved into making an assessment that he was too innocent for the job as ambassador. By the end of the book, one can understand how Dodd made prescient assertions about where Germany and Hitler were headed -- years before others were willing to speak up about ahead of time. Take note that a great deal of the book winds up covering Dodd's daughter Martha. She had quite a colorful and adventurous time while in Germany and left behind her own rich record which is integrated well into the book. She begins as a rather innocent observer who admired how Germany was being revived at the time but, ultimately, could not reconcile such a view after experiencing the horrid events that were taking place in Germany at the time -- particularly against the Jews. Be prepared for some rather dark material to read. While most will recognize that some bad things happened in Germany in the years leading up to WW II the author peels back the covers and gives you the story straight up and, in some cases, in rich detail. The distrust amongst the German leadership, the brutal approach towards reaching power and the lawless atmosphere that prevailed at the time all combine for some disturbing material to read through. Anyone that wishes to illustrate to a younger person the value of learning history in order to make the world a better place in the future would find this book instructive in many ways. One can apply many lessons from this book to situations that exist today. I consider this book at great 'bus book' because I could read chapters in short spurts of time while riding the bus to work. The stories are weaved together well and keep your interest throughout. And I really liked the tremendous vocabulary that was used in the book -- not only from the author but as quotes from original sources as well. Having a Kindle edition it was easy for me to highlight vocabulary that was of interest. In fact, I have not found such a rich use of the language since reading the biography of Churchill by Roy Jenkins. It is a joy to read a book from someone so skilled at the craft of writing. I look forward to getting another book from this author. Would recommend this book to those interested in history and/or this particular time period in Germany.

The Fascinating Martha Dodd And the Men She Slept With would be a more accurate title to this book. While about the entire family of US Ambassador to Germany, William Dodd, who served from 1933 to 1937, Martha steals the show. She was twenty-four years old when she accompanied her father, mother, and older brother to Berlin in 1933. (The book is only about the family's first year in Berlin.) She had been secretly married and was now getting secretly divorced. She seemed as innocent as a preacher's daughter but she had taken an early interest in sex and was quite talented in its delights. She especially enjoyed being "seduced" by worldly men only for them to discover when the clothes came off that Martha was no blushing young girl. "I rather enjoyed being treated like a maiden of eighteen knowing all the while my dark secret." Martha was first engaged at age twenty-one although she broke that off after a few months and took up with a local novelist whom she threw over for a Chicago businessman, James Burnham. No sooner had she become engaged to said gentleman, then she met a banker from New York, Mr Roberts, at a social occasion at the home of her parents. Martha found Mr Roberts irresistible. But Martha was one smart person. Although she carried on with Mr Roberts in New York, she remained engaged to Mr Burnham in Chicago. Finally she married Mr Roberts. However, being a trifle uncertain about their marriage, the two kept it a secret from everyone. I think you might predict what the result of this early ambivalence was. When she went to Germany in 1933, she and Mr Roberts were getting an amicable divorce. This was good because in Berlin she seduced the head of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels, or he seduced her. Either way, they both had a talent for the sensual and it didn't take long for them to disrobe. Along with him, Martha carried on with a French diplomat, with a senior general in the Luftwaffe, with the heir to the Prussian throne, with various newsmen, diplomats, visitors from the US, and different men high in the German government and Nazi Party. As the author of a An Honorable German, a World War Two naval epic told from the point of view of a German U-Boat commander, I have read several thousand books on the Third Reich. I can say that this one captures a slice of life which is relatively unknown. An Honorable German + Martha Dodd "This was not a house, but a house of ill-repute" said the Dodd's stuffy German butler. (He was on the payroll of the Gestapo but so clumsy at spying everyone knew it.) Martha didn't slink around to cheap hotels to have affairs. If your place wasn't convenient, then her place was fine. It is a measure of the sexual repression of the era and the fear of uninhibited female sexuality that what she did caused various small scandals. Finally, Martha became infatuated with a Russian diplomat and by all accounts they fell in love. This wasn't good since Boris was an agent of the NKVD (later KGB). And this is where I began to have some doubts about the facts of this book. Erik Larson is a talented writer and thorough researcher. I've read several of his other books, Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History and The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America, both of which I give three stars or even 3.5. But he skips over something which countless authors and historians have written about: Martha Dodd spied on the US for the Soviets at the behest of her lover, Boris. While Larson certainly mentions this as a possibility he doesn't make an effort to reconcile what he is writing with the vast number of historians who insist Martha Dodd was an out and out agent of the Soviet NKVD who spied on her father. In fairness, the book isn't about Martha. It's about her father and her family and the first year of their life together in Berlin. Yet the author depicts her as just a naughty girl. Although she could be vapid, mildly anti-Semitic, selfish, vain, and annoying, Martha was also fascinating, artistic, clever, and a keen observer. Martha came to see the true nature of the Hitler régime and of the terrible nature of anti-Semitism. She later married a wealthy Jewish businessman, Alfred Stern. Because of their sympathy and work for the Soviet Union, both were under surveillance by the FBI and in 1957 a Soviet defector accused them both of espionage against the US. They were indicted and fled the country living variously in the USSR, Cuba, and Czechoslovakia. Martha settled in Prague for the last decades of her life and died there in 1990. Espionage charges against her were finally dropped in 1979. Martha Dodd was a sexually liberated woman in an oppressive time and certainly a woman who had an independent mind and an independent life. This is still threatening to people today, including it seems, the author of the book in question. Unfortunately, Martha Dodd somehow missed the similarity between the Third Reich and the Soviet Union, which is just as replete with unspeakable atrocities. It's hard to understand. But she was a very unusual woman and it's worth reading the book just to get to know her. This is her obituary from: New York Times 29 August 1990 Martha Dodd Stern Is Dead at 82; Author and an Accused Soviet Spy by Glenn Fowler Martha Dodd Stern, an American author who in the 1930's and 1940's wrote popular books about Nazi Germany and later fled behind the Iron Curtain when she and her wealthy husband, Alfred K. Stern, were accused of being Soviet spies, died on Aug. 10 in Prague, friends reported. She was 82 years old and had lived in the Czechoslovak capital for more than three decades. Victor Rabinowitz, a New York lawyer who received word of Mrs. Stern's death, said that although the cause of her death was not reported, she had recently suffered an intestinal blockage. Martha Dodd came to public attention in 1939 when her first book, Through Embassy Eyes, was published. It told of her four years in Berlin beginning in 1933 when her father, William E. Dodd, was appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as Ambassador to Germany after Adolf Hitler's rise to power. Then in her 20's, she was at first favorably impressed by the new leaders of Nazi Germany but her later disillusionment was reflected in her book. In 1938, a year after her return to the United States, she married Mr. Stern, a former chairman of the Citizens Housing and Planning Council of New York who had inherited through an earlier marriage part of the fortune of Julius Rosenwald, the Chicago philanthropist. In 1941, after her father's death and nine months before the United States entered World War II, Mrs. Stern and her brother, William E. Dodd Jr., published the Ambassador's diaries. Critics said that by failing to edit the comments of Germans who were opposed to Hitler they endangered the anti-Nazi underground. Subject of McCarthy Investigation In the last days of the war Mrs. Stern published Sowing the Wind, a novel that dealt with the moral degradation of Germans under the Nazi hierarchy. In the early 1950's she and Mr. Stern became persistent targets of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy in his anti-Communist investigations. The couple moved to Mexico City in 1953, and four years later Boris Morros, an American counterspy, testified to the House Committee on Un-American Activities that the Sternses were part of a Soviet spy network. When they were indicted on espionage charges in 1957, the couple fled to Prague, where they settled. They later traveled to the Soviet Union and other Eastern European countries and to Cuba but never returned to the United States. Mrs. Stern did translations of books and articles. Mr. Stern died four years ago at the age of 88. Mrs. Stern is survived by a son, Robert, who lives in Prague.

I think legions of us have always wondered how a man like Hitler ever got a foothold in the German government and rose to become its dictator. With seemingly little or no resistance from the German people (so little that he was able to crush any serious opposition like a foot on an ant), no outrage from nearby countries or the superpowers at the time, the US and Great Britain - or Russia, Larson shows us in chronological order how it was done. The US was trying to decide whether it wanted to be an isolationist and stay out of foreign "squabbles". "Appeasement" was the cry of the day - surely Hitler was a human being our diplomacy could deal with - and the last thing our administration wanted to do was come out loudly in criticism of Hitler's cruel and inhumane tactics. If the German people weren't staging a serious protest, how could we? It's a bit scary to see how easily Hitler pulled off his takeover of Germany - and, rallied the population to stand with him as he attempted to take over the rest of Europe. Seems unbelivable, doesn't it - when we look back on it. This is a thoroughly captivating book - because it is true. And, it is a living testimony to what happens when good people see an obvious wrong and do nothing to confront it. There is never a dull moment for the Dodd family (Dodd is appointed ambassador to Germany in 1933, just as Hitler is gaining strength with his plan for a "New Germany"). Ambassador and Mrs. Dodd are quiet, rather inconspicuous types who will make you question the wisdom of Roosevelt's choice for Berlin's already bubbling political cauldron. On the other hand, their two children, Martha and Bill seem to flourish in the originally upbeat German atmosphere - Bill spends much of his time zipping around the countryside in fast cars, while Martha is cutting a wide swath in diplomatic circles - both Germany's and those of France and Russia. In their mid-20's, the "kids" are fascinated by most everything Nazi at first. What is fascinating in the beginning quickly turns frightening, as Hitler's policies affect more and more of their new friends and acquaintances. The Dodds rub elbows with Goering ("strange") and Goebbels ("charming") and members of the Gestapo. As news of the increase in Nazi atrocities is relayed home to Roosevelt, the responses remain the same. Watch, maintain, and do nothing. We cannot interfere in the workings of foreigh goverments. We all know how this is going turn out, but the page-turning is intense, nonetheless. Now I know why we had to wait so long for another Larsen book after Thunderstruck. The amount of meticulous research Larsen had to do for this book is obvious - and is evidenced by the over 50 pages of notes that follow the end of the book. But it is all worth it, as what Larsen has created is a monumental chronology of one of the most terrible yet enthralling times in world history - and he has told us about it through the eyes of a family who experienced it. Bravo, Erik Larson - another absolutely entertaining, unforgettable read!

I got early on that this wasn't going to be "The Definitive History of the Rise of Nazi Germany" which seems to have been an expectation of many reviewers. I'd not read any of Erik Larson's efforts, so what I got & liked were the reconstituted glimpses of an American family with no political or journalistic skills nor pockets full of wealth, set down in the middle of the seething cauldron that was Hitler's Berlin; what they had to deal with from the ground up: a paltry budget with which to pay for spying servants; insidious eavesdropping devices - all absorbing trivia of what it might have been like living as strangers (babes) in a strange land (woods). Who the movers & shakers in FDR's administration chose to fill the vacancy in the Berlin embassy is damning indication of how minor they thought were the changes roiling in Germany, & what was happening to its Jewry (anti-Semitism was something America & Germany had in common, as did Britain, where I came up until I emigrated to the USA), & how American men in the streets were being preyed upon by the thugs of marching SA - Storm Troopers. Oh yeah, let's not overlook those glimpses of how the wealthy Good Old Boys Club (Harvard & Yale, et al) ran just about everything, especially America's interests overseas. Ambassador Dodd was not a Good Old Boy, & therein lies both his ineffectuality & destruction cuz noone listened to this professorial Southern gentleman who was of the same cut as Calvin Coolidge & Harry Truman, with a touch of Woodrow Wilson. His nostalgia about the time he'd spent in Leipzig as a student before the turn of the century ill-prepared him for the Germany he landed in in 1933 with his wife, son & daughter & used Chevrolet, although out in the countryside it still existed. I object to the many reviewers who've cast stones at Martha Dodd, without having met her. I expect they don't realize how their word choices define the quality of their minds, rather than who she was: a spoiled Midwest American princess who, along with millions of other girls, had come to maturity from the Flapper Days, The 19th Amendment, Prohibition, The Crash of '29 that turned into The Depression. Obviously, she had charm, although not the kind that titilated Hitler. Who she met, who she loved & who she wrote about were of interest, & her attitudes about Nazism & Communism par for the course; remember, Mrs. Simpson, a much-married contemporary, was a Nazi sympathizer, as was her last husband. While men conquer the world by killing each other, women conquer the world by seducing men: 'nough said! This is a readable "domestic history" about a man & his family, the lives they touched & were touched by; what drove them, how they reacted to what was happening around them & what were their hopes & regrets. If parts of it were boring, that's life. If, in the beginning, there was much beauty to behold, so be it, & if there was the stuff that makes us fearful or weep, that too is life. It all reminds me of the time my adoptive parents survived less than a decade before I came into the world; of why & how few people outside Germany took the cult of Hitler seriously. My Daddy, who'd fought in The Great War, would bellow at the wireless that the ONLY thing Prime Minister Churchill got right was how evil Hitler & his henchman were! In the Garden of Beasts there were, of course, not nearly enough photos, & I even relished the Sources & Recommendations & Notes.