Book Review: In the Garden of Beasts

“Every morning they moved through a city hung with immense banners of red, white, and black; they sat at the same outdoor cafés as did the lean, black-suited members of Hitler’s SS, and now and then they caught sight of Hitler himself, a smallish man in a large, open Mercedes.” —Erik Larson, In the Garden of Beasts

In the Garden of Beasts, by Erik Larson, is a political thriller that spans one year in Berlin, beginning in the summer of 1933. Larson places readers in a world that most cannot imagine: a world that precedes the horror of the Holocaust, yet one where Nazis stroll down streets.

After writing The Devil in the White City, Larson haunted libraries and bookstores, looking for the topic of his next book. He read William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and sought other personal histories of people living in Germany at that time. Larson discovered the diary of Ambassador William Dodd and daughter Martha’s memoir; their stories of initial naiveté and gradual awakening propel Garden forward. They form a fascinating duo because while Dodd was in Berlin to perform a job, his daughter pursued pleasure.

Hitler became chancellor seven months before the Dodd family arrived. The U.S. State Department expected Hitler to be a short-term phenomenon; it certainly didn’t perceive him as a threat.  In the months immediately following Hitler’s rise to chancellor, violence against perceived enemies—socialists, communists, Jews—erupted at the hands of the Sturmabteilung (SA), street thugs better known as the Brownshirts or Storm Troopers. But by July, when a hopeful Dodd arrived in Berlin, the brutality had diminished.

The first part of Garden introduces Ambassador Dodd and the comical oddness of his posting to Germany at that critical moment in history. A 64-year-old university professor, Dodd feared that his best years lay behind him. Any hope of a lasting legacy rested on his completing a four-volume treatise called The Old South. He wasn’t the first choice for ambassador to Germany, but he was the first to accept. He hoped Berlin would provide him with the time to complete the remaining three volumes.

President Franklin Roosevelt informed Dodd he wanted a model of American values in Berlin. Dodd took that request to heart. He assured FDR that he, his wife, and their adult son and daughter, could live frugally on his ambassador’s salary. He hoped to find a modest house to rent and, out of solidarity with his countrymen suffering through the Great Depression, shipped his battered Chevy to Berlin. At a time when power and image defined destiny, this thrifty academic appeared as a joke.

Dodd enjoyed his daily walks through the Tiergarten, a massive park and former hunting preserve that gives this book its title. He eschewed the trappings of diplomatic protocol and confounded the members of the diplomatic corps both in Berlin and Washington. They belonged to a private club—independently wealthy, ivy-league elites—who mocked his cost-saving measures.

Daughter Martha, 24, embraced a glittering Berlin and Nazi propaganda. She juggled a series of lovers, including the first head of the Gestapo and a Soviet spy. A month after the Dodds’ arrival, Martha visited Nuremberg and witnessed a frenzied mob taunting a woman as SA members dragged her down the street. Her head cropped, she wore a placard that read “I have offered myself to a Jew.” Martha, not believing her eyes, argued there must be a reasonable explanation.

The American embassy dealt with regular SA attacks on Americans. Dodd threatened the Nazis and the State Department with warning American travelers to avoid Nazi Germany. The State Department dismissed his growing concern, and directed him to press the Germans to pay off their $1.2 billion debt to American creditors.

As Garden unfolds, Larson reveals Dodd’s backbone. Ever the historian, Dodd presumes to lecture Nazis. With growing alarm he reports the changes occurring in Berlin—persecution of Jews and the amassing of Nazi power. The world ignored him.

Garden’s climaxoccurs in the three-day slaughter called Night of the Long Knives, a political purge carried out by the SS and the Gestapo, Hitler’s secret police. It foreshadows the horrific events that are burned into our psyche.

Larson took five years to research and write Garden. While immersed in Nazi pathology, he experienced mild depression, drank more, and gained weight. Those problems disappeared once he finished. For readers, we’re left with a terrific story about how a citizenry ceded civil and human rights in exchange for power and glory. It’s a theme all too prescient in today’s world.