Free In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson

claimed to have a source high in Hitler’s government who gave her advance warning of future Reich actions. She was a close friend of Messersmith’s; her daughter, Gonny, called him “uncle.”
    Fromm in her diary recorded her initial observations of the Dodds. Martha, she wrote, seemed “a perfect example of the intelligentyoung American female.” As for the ambassador, he “looks like a scholar. His dry humor attracted me. He is observant and precise. He learned to love Germany when he was a student in Leipzig, he said, and will dedicate his strength to build a sincere friendship between his country and Germany.”
    She added: “I hope he and the President of the United States will not be too disappointed in their efforts.”
    The second woman, the American, was Mildred Fish Harnack, a representative of the American Women’s Club in Berlin. She was Fromm’s physical opposite in every way—slender, blonde, ethereal, reserved. Martha and Mildred liked each other at once. Mildred wrote later that Martha “is clear and capable and has a real desire to understand the world. Therefore our interests touch.” She sensed that she had found a soul mate, “a woman who is seriously interested in writing. It’s a hindrance to be lonely and isolated in one’s work. Ideas stimulate ideas, and the love of writing is contagious.”
    Martha in turn was impressed by Mildred. “I was drawn to her immediately,” she wrote. Mildred exhibited an appealing combination of strength and delicacy. “She was slow to speak and express opinions; she listened quietly, her large grey blue eyes serious … weighing, evaluating, trying to understand.”
    COUNSELOR GORDON PLACED MARTHA in a car with a young protocol secretary assigned to accompany her to the hotel where the Dodds were to live until they could find a suitable house to lease. Her parents traveled separately with Gordon, Messersmith, and Messersmith’s wife. Martha’s car proceeded south over the Spree into the city.
    She found long, straight boulevards that evoked the rigid grid of Chicago, but the similarity ended there. Unlike the skyscraper-forested landscape she had walked through every workday in Chicago, here most buildings were rather short, typically five stories or so, and these amplified the low, flat feel of the city. Most looked to be very old, but a few were jarringly new, with walls of glass, flat roofs, and curved facades, the offspring of Walter Gropius, Bruno Taut,and Erich Mendelsohn, all condemned by the Nazis as decadent, communist, and, inevitably, Jewish. The city was full of color and energy. There were double-decked omnibuses, S-Bahn trains, and brightly colored trams whose catenaries fired off brilliant blue sparks. Low-slung automobiles thrummed past, most painted black, but others red, cream, and deep blue, many of unfamiliar design: the adorable Opel 4/16 PS, the Horch with its lethal arrow-in-bow hood ornament, and the ubiquitous Mercedes, black, low, edged with chrome. Joseph Goebbels himself was moved to capture in prose the energy of the city as exhibited in one of its most popular shopping avenues, the Kurfürstendamm, albeit in an essay meant not to praise but to condemn, calling the street “the abscess” of the city. “The bells on the streetcars ring, buses clatter by honking their horns, stuffed full with people and more people; taxis and fancy private automobiles hum over the glassy asphalt,” he wrote. “The fragrance of heavy perfume floats by. Harlots smile from the artful pastels of fashionable women’s faces; so-called men stroll to and fro, monocles glinting; fake and precious stones sparkle.” Berlin was, he wrote, a “stone desert” filled with sin and corruption and inhabited by a populace “borne to the grave with a smile.”
    The young protocol officer pointed out various landmarks. Martha asked question after question, oblivious to the fact that she was trying the officer’s patience. Early in their drive, they