In the Garden of Beasts

CHAPTER 9

Death Is Death

Dodd sought to maintain his objective stance despite early encounters with visitors who had experienced a Germany very different from the cheery, sun-dappled realm he walked through each morning. One such visitor was Edgar A. Mowrer, at the time the most famous correspondent in Berlin and the center of a maelstrom of controversy. In addition to reporting for the Chicago Daily News, Mowrer had written a best-selling book, Germany Puts the Clock Back, which had angered Nazi officials to the point where Mowrer’s friends believed he faced mortal danger. Hitler’s government wanted him out of the country. Mowrer wanted to stay and came to Dodd to ask him to intercede.

Mowrer had long been a target of Nazi ire. In his dispatches from Germany he had managed to cut below the patina of normalcy to capture events that challenged belief, and he used novel reporting techniques to do it. One of his foremost sources of information was his doctor, a Jew who was the son of the grand rabbi of Berlin. Every two weeks or so Mowrer would make an appointment to see him, ostensibly for a persistent throat complaint. Each time the doctor would give him a typed report of the latest Nazi excesses, a method that worked until the doctor came to suspect that Mowrer was being followed. The two arranged a new rendezvous point: every Wednesday at 11:45 a.m. they met in the public restroom underneath Potsdamer Platz. They stood at adjacent urinals. The doctor would drop the latest report, and Mowrer would pick it up.

Putzi Hanfstaengl tried to undermine Mowrer’s credibility by spreading a false rumor that the reason his reports were so aggressively critical was that he was a “secret” Jew. In fact, the same thought had occurred to Martha. “I was inclined to think him Jewish,” she wrote; she “considered his animus to be prompted only by his racial self-consciousness.”

Mowrer was appalled at the failure of the outside world to grasp what was really happening in Germany. He found that even his own brother had come to doubt the truth of his reports.

Mowrer invited Dodd to dinner at his apartment overlooking the Tiergarten and tried to clue him in to certain hidden realities. “To no purpose,” Mowrer wrote. “He knew better.” Even the periodic assaults against Americans appeared not to have moved the ambassador, Mowrer recalled: “Dodd announced he had no wish to mix in Germany’s affairs.”

Dodd for his part assessed Mowrer as being “almost as vehement, in his way, as the Nazis.”

Threats against Mowrer increased. Within the Nazi hierarchy there was talk of inflicting physical harm on the correspondent. Gestapo chief Rudolf Diels felt compelled to warn the U.S. embassy that Hitler became enraged whenever Mowrer’s name was mentioned. Diels worried that some fanatic might kill Mowrer or otherwise “eliminate him from the picture,” and claimed to have assigned certain Gestapo men “of responsibility” to stand discreet watch over the correspondent and his family.

When Mowrer’s boss, Frank Knox, owner of the Chicago Daily News, learned of these threats, he resolved to transfer Mowrer out of Berlin. He offered him the paper’s bureau in Tokyo. Mowrer accepted, grudgingly, aware that sooner or later he would be expelled from Germany, but he insisted on staying until October, partly just to demonstrate that he would not bow to intimidation, but mainly because he wanted to cover the annual Nazi Party spectacle in Nuremberg set to begin September 1. This next rally, the “Party Day of Victory,” promised to be the biggest yet.

The Nazis wanted him gone immediately. Storm Troopers appeared outside his office. They followed his friends and made threats against his bureau staff. In Washington, Germany’s ambassador to the United States notified the State Department that because of the “people’s righteous indignation” the government could no longer hope to keep Mowrer free from harm.

At this point even his fellow correspondents became concerned. H. R. Knickerbocker and another reporter went to see Consul General Messersmith to ask him to persuade Mowrer to leave. Messersmith was reluctant. He knew Mowrer well and respected his courage in facing down Nazi threats. He feared that Mowrer might view his intercession as a betrayal. Nonetheless, he agreed to try.

It was “one of the most difficult conversations I ever had,” Messersmith wrote later. “When he saw that I was joining his other friends in trying to persuade him to leave, tears came into his eyes and he looked at me reproachfully.” Nonetheless, Messersmith felt it was his duty to convince Mowrer to leave.

Mowrer gave up “with a gesture of despair” and left Messersmith’s office.

Now Mowrer took his case directly to Ambassador Dodd, but Dodd too believed he should leave, not just for his safety but because his reporting imparted an extra layer of strain to what was already a very challenging diplomatic environment.

Dodd told him, “If you were not being moved by your paper anyway, I would go to the mat on this issue.… Won’t you do this to avoid complications?”

Mowrer gave in. He agreed to leave on September 1, the first full day of the Nuremberg rally he so wanted to cover.

Martha wrote later that Mowrer “never quite forgave my father for this advice.”

ANOTHER OF DODD’S EARLY visitors was, as Dodd wrote, “perhaps the foremost chemist in Germany,” but he did not look it. He was smallish in size and egg bald, with a narrow gray mustache above full lips. His complexion was sallow, his air that of a much older man.

He was Fritz Haber. To any German the name was well known and revered, or had been until the advent of Hitler. Until recently, Haber had been director of the famed Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry. He was a war hero and a Nobel laureate. Hoping to break the stalemate in the trenches during the Great War, Haber had invented poison chlorine gas. He had devised what became known as Haber’s rule, a formula, C × t = k, elegant in its lethality: a low exposure to gas over a long period will have the same result as a high exposure over a short period. He also invented a means to distribute his poison gas at the front and was himself present in 1915 for its first use against French forces at Ypres. On a personal level, that day at Ypres cost him dearly. His wife of thirty-two years, Clara, had long condemned his work as inhumane and immoral and demanded he stop, but to such concerns he gave a stock reply: death was death, no matter the cause. Nine days after the gas attack at Ypres, she committed suicide. Despite international outcry over his poison-gas research, Haber was awarded the 1918 Nobel Prize for chemistry for discovering a means of mining nitrogen from air and thus allowing the manufacture of plentiful, cheap fertilizer—and, of course, gunpowder.

Despite a prewar conversion to Protestantism, Haber was classified under the new Nazi laws as non-Aryan, but an exception granted to Jewish war veterans allowed him to remain director of the institute. Many Jewish scientists on his staff did not qualify for the exemption, however, and on April 21, 1933, Haber was ordered to dismiss them. He fought the decision but found few allies. Even his friend Max Planck offered tepid consolation. “In this profound dejection,” Planck wrote, “my sole solace is that we live in a time of catastrophe such as attends every revolution, and that we must endure much of what happens as a phenomenon of nature, without agonizing over whether things could have turned out differently.”

Haber didn’t see it that way. Rather than preside over the dismissal of his friends and colleagues, he resigned.

Now—Friday, July 28, 1933—with few choices remaining, he came to Dodd’s office for help, bearing a letter from Henry Morgenthau Jr., head of Roosevelt’s Federal Farm Board (and future Treasury secretary). Morgenthau was Jewish and an advocate for Jewish refugees.

As Haber told his story he “trembled from head to foot,” Dodd wrote in his diary, calling Haber’s account “the saddest story of Jewish persecution I have yet heard.” Haber was sixty-five years old, with a failing heart, and was now being denied the pension that had been guaranteed him under the laws of the Weimar Republic, which immediately preceded Hitler’s Third Reich. “He wished to know the possibilities in America for emigrants with distinguished records here in science,” Dodd wrote. “I could only say that the law allowed none now, the quota being filled.” Dodd promised to write to the Labor Department, which administered immigration quotas, to ask “if any favorable ruling might be made for such people.”

They shook hands. Haber warned Dodd to be careful about talking of his case to others, “as the consequences might be bad.” And then Haber left, a small gray chemist who once had been one of Germany’s most important scientific assets.

“Poor old man,” Dodd recalled thinking—then caught himself, for Haber was in fact only one year older than he was. “Such treatment,” Dodd wrote in his diary, “can only bring evil to the government which practices such terrible cruelty.”

Dodd discovered, too late, that what he had told Haber was simply incorrect. The next week, on August 5, Dodd wrote to Isador Lubin, chief of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: “You know the quota is already full and you probably realize that a large number of very excellent people would like to migrate to the United States, even though they have to sacrifice their property in doing so.” In light of this, Dodd wanted to know whether the Labor Department had discovered any means through which “the most deserving of these people can be admitted.”

Lubin forwarded Dodd’s letter to Colonel D. W. MacCormack, commissioner of immigration and naturalization, who on August 23 wrote back to Lubin and told him, “The Ambassador appears to have been misinformed in this connection.” In fact only a small fraction of the visas allotted under the German quota had been issued, and the fault, MacCormack made clear, lay with the State Department and Foreign Service, and their enthusiastic enforcement of the clause that barred entry to people “likely to become a public charge.” Nothing in Dodd’s papers explains how he came to believe the quota was full.

All this came too late for Haber. He left for England to teach at Cambridge University, a seemingly happy resolution, but he found himself adrift in an alien culture, torn from his past, and suffering the effects of an inhospitable climate. Within six months of leaving Dodd’s office, during a convalescence in Switzerland, he suffered a fatal heart attack, his passing unlamented in the new Germany. Within a decade, however, the Third Reich would find a new use for Haber’s rule, and for an insecticide that Haber had invented at his institute, composed in part of cyanide gas and typically deployed to fumigate structures used for the storage of grain. At first called Zyklon A, it would be transformed by German chemists into a more lethal variant: Zyklon B.

DESPITE THIS ENCOUNTER, Dodd remained convinced that the government was growing more moderate and that Nazi mistreatment of Jews was on the wane. He said as much in a letter to Rabbi Wise of the American Jewish Congress, whom he had met at the Century Club in New York and who had been a fellow passenger on his ship to Germany.

Rabbi Wise was startled. In a July 28 reply from Geneva, he wrote, “How I wish I could share your optimism! I must, however, tell you that everything, every word from scores of refugees in London and Paris within the last two weeks leads me to feel that far from there having been, as you believe, an improvement, things are becoming graver and more oppressive for German Jews from day to day. I am certain that my impression would be borne out by the men whom you met at the little conference at the Century Club.” He was reminding Dodd of the meeting in New York that had been attended by Wise, Felix Warburg, and other Jewish leaders.

Privately, in a letter to his daughter, Wise wrote that Dodd “is being lied to.”

Dodd stood by his view. In a response to Wise’s letter, Dodd countered that “the many sources of information open to the office here seem to me to indicate a desire to ease up on the Jewish problem. Of course, many incidents of very disagreeable character continue to be reported. These I think are the hangovers from the earlier agitation. While I am in no sense disposed to excuse or apologize for such conditions, I am quite convinced that the leading element in the Government inclines to a milder policy as soon as possible.”

He added, “Of course you know our Government cannot intervene in such domestic matters. All one can do is to present the American point of view and stress the unhappy consequences of such a policy as has been pursued.” He told Wise he opposed open protest. “It is my judgment … that the greatest influence we can exercise on behalf of a more kindly and humane policy is to be applied unofficially and through private conversations with men who already begin to see the risks involved.”

Wise was so concerned about Dodd’s apparent failure to grasp what was really occurring that he offered to come to Berlin and, as he told his own daughter, Justine, “tell him the truth which he would not otherwise hear.” At the time, Wise was traveling in Switzerland. From Zurich he “again begged Dodd by telephone to make possible my air flight to Berlin.”

Dodd refused. Wise was too well known in Germany and too widely hated. His photograph had appeared in the Völkischer Beobachter and Der Stürmer too often. As Wise recounted in a memoir, Dodd feared “I might be recognized, particularly because of my unmistakable passport, and give rise to an ‘unpleasant incident’ at a landing place such as Nuremberg.” The ambassador was unswayed by Wise’s suggestion that an embassy official meet him at the airport and keep him in sight for the duration of his trip.

While in Switzerland, Wise attended the World Jewish Conference in Geneva, where he introduced a resolution that called for a world boycott of German commerce. The resolution passed.

WISE WOULD HAVE BEEN heartened to learn that Consul General Messersmith held a much darker view of events than Dodd. While Messersmith agreed that incidents of outright violence against Jews had fallen off sharply, he saw that these had been superseded by a form of persecution that was far more insidious and pervasive. In a dispatch to the State Department, he wrote, “Briefly it may be said that the situation of the Jews in every respect except that of personal safety, is constantly growing more difficult and that the restrictions in effect are becoming daily more effective in practice and that new restrictions are constantly appearing.”

He cited several new developments. Jewish dentists were now barred from taking care of patients under Germany’s social insurance system, an echo of what had happened to Jewish doctors earlier in the year. A new “German fashion office” had just excluded Jewish dressmakers from participating in an upcoming fashion show. Jews and anyone who had even the appearance of a non-Aryan were forbidden to become policemen. And Jews, Messersmith reported, were now officially banned from the bathing beach at Wannsee.

Even more systemic persecution was on the way, Messersmith wrote. He had learned that a draft existed of a new law that would effectively deprive Jews of their citizenship and all civil rights. Germany’s Jews, he wrote, “look upon this proposed law as the most serious moral blow which could be delivered to them. They have and are being deprived of practically all means of making a livelihood and understand that the new citizenship law is to practically deprive them of all civil rights.”

The only reason it hadn’t become law already, Messersmith had learned, was that for the moment the men behind it feared “the unfavorable public sentiment it would arouse abroad.” The draft had been circulating for nine weeks, and this prompted Messersmith to end his dispatch with a bit of wishful thinking. “The fact that the law has been under consideration for such a long time,” he wrote, “may be an indication that in its final form it will be less radical than that still contemplated.”

DODD REITERATED HIS COMMITMENT to objectivity and understanding in an August 12 letter to Roosevelt, in which he wrote that while he did not approve of Germany’s treatment of Jews or Hitler’s drive to restore the country’s military power, “fundamentally, I believe a people has a right to govern itself and that other peoples must exercise patience even when cruelties and injustices are done. Give men a chance to try their schemes.”