Those of us who grew up during World War II probably remember quite well how this country united with its allies to take on the Axis. Our childhoods were awash in patriotic fervor, as Americans of all ages were called upon to make serious sacrifices to something called The War Effort.
In those days, women used makeup to darken their legs, because there was no silk from Japan to make into stockings, and the new fabric, nylon, went to making parachutes. Families had ration cards; the amount of meat or butter was apportioned according to the size and ages of your family. Gasoline was scarce. Our military requisitioned all kinds of materials: rubber, steel, even shoe leather. School children could buy small, paper books in which to paste stamps, so that you could, when you covered all the pages, turn them in for a real war bond. In the process of filling up the pages with those stamps, you covered up highly disturbing cartoons of things like Hirohito being smacked, with a caption that said: “Slap the Jap,” or a drawing of Hitler about to be hit with a bomb, captioned: “Heil! Heil! Right in der Fuhrer’s face!”
We, being children, never questioned the how and why of the war. All we knew was that our country was fighting it. We also knew that America’s part in it started when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. What we didn’t know was that what began for us in December, 1941, had been going on for almost ten years in Europe.
In the Garden of Beasts is focused on those early years when Hitler and his crew seized and solidified their power. In 1933, when Hitler had been made Chancellor of Germany, Field Marshall von Hindenburg, then 85, was still the president. He held the constitutional authority to appoint and remove chancellors, and he also enjoyed the loyalty of the regular army. Hitler was at that time only forty-four, and his cohorts, Hermann Goering and Joseph Goebbels were 40 and thirty-six, respectively.
In 1933, the post of American Ambassador to Germany was open. “Nobody,” as Mr. Larsen puts it, “wanted the job.” America’s diplomats were well aware of the unpredictable behavior of Hitler and his henchmen, and were becoming deeply alarmed over the brutal treatment of Germany’s Jews.
What should have been a plum assignment seemed impossible to fill. At last, William E. Dodd, a professor of history at the University of Chicago, was mentioned to President Roosevelt.
As a young man, Dodd had studied at the university in Leipzig, and had developed a deep love for both the country and the German people. He was an historian, a southerner, and for many years had been hoping to publish a four-volume history of the old South. His academic duties, however, had long frustrated his desire to work on this project, so when President Roosevelt’s people approached him about the ambassadorship, he foresaw a quiet job that would afford him the time to finish writing his magnum opus.
Dodd had a wife and two grown children whom he took with him to Germany. His daughter, Martha, was a vivid, intelligent young woman who moved with ease through a large number of affairs with attractive young men, be they fascist or communist. During the first months in Germany, she was convinced that Hitler represented a refreshing change for stodgy old Germany, but as the months went by, she grew disillusioned. A passionate love affair with a Russian led to her recruitment (for a brief time) as a communist agent
William Dodd had, from his first days as ambassador, seen the dangers in the Nazi party. As civil liberties eroded and Jews endured terrifying attacks, Dodd endeavored to make the State Department aware of what was happening in Germany. His measured, careful responses to the growing chaos did not please the fascists nor, sadly, did they stir up outrage back home. There seems to have been a kind of casual anti-Semitism in America which, if not actually sanctioned by our government, was at least tolerated at just about every level. There was also, at that time, a vivid memory of World War 1, which fed the beliefs of America’s Isolationists, who wanted no part of “the squabbles going on in Europe.”
Despite the fact that Martha Dodd has been quoted as remarking casually: “We don’t much like the Jews,” she and her family were horrified by the growing anti-Semitism in Germany. After his recall at the end of 1937, Dodd spent the three years before his death (1940) giving speeches all over the country, recounting the atrocities he had witnessed in Germany, and warning the world about the evils of the Nazi Party.
While they were in Germany, the Dodds lived in a house on Tiergarten Strasse, near a large park called the Tiergarten where Ambassador Dodd loved to walk. Although the book never explains it, a quick word search uncovers the fact that the German word “tiergarten” translates as “zoo,” or a compound where animals live. Hence the title of this extraordinary book.
*Erik Larson is also the author of The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America, among other books.
©2012 Reviews by Julia Sneden for SeniorWomen.com
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