Walk in the garden with Red RIding Hood, Mr Rogers, & the Big Bad Wolves
In the early days of Hitler's rise to power in Germany, FDR sent an unusual ambassador to Berlin, a plain and uncomplicated man, who represented American values better than a more typical ambassadorial candidate might have. Wm E Dodd was a Professor of History at the University of Chicago, not a millionaire, or a graduate of Harvard-Princeton-Yale, as so many ambassadors of the period were. He more represented a Democratic Cal Coolidge than the "Pretty Good Club" members of the State Department would have preferred; these worthies worked against him for the entirety of his tenure in Berlin, ignoring his reports, or placing them in the worst light.
The sad result of history would prove Dodd correct and the Pretty Good Club dangerously wrong, not just in their blatant anti-Semitism, but in their failure to recognize the danger Hitler and his gang represented. While England and France desperately sought appeasement, emotionally and physically spent after the excesses of the "War to End All Wars", or WWI, Hitler played the Big Bad Wolf to their fears. Despite warnings from Dodd, and from Consul General George Messersmith, the Pretty Good Club twiddled their thumbs. Messersmith had been vehement in his warnings to the State Department about the increase in violence against Jews and American tourists in Germany, even before the arrival of Dodd in Berlin, a topic much ridiculed at State.
It's difficult to imagine a more benighted man than William Phillips, Undersecretary of State, and informal head of the "Pretty Good Club", whose anti-Semitism rivaled the most virulent Nazi. Phillips blocked Dodd's efforts, at every turn, to awaken American policies and politicians to the coming threat of war. The author describes the growth of paranoia among the Diplomatic Corps and the civilian populace, as the Nazis increase their stranglehold on daily life, when the threat of a knock in the night by the Gestapo became a feared reality. Things came to a head with the “Night of the Long Knives“, when Ernst Rohm and his brown-shirted Storm Troopers were neutralized--by wholesale executions, described by Hitler as "only 77 deaths, three of whom were loyal soldiers killed in attempting to arrest" some of the miscreants.
The putsch allowed Hitler to consolidate his power base; the death of President Hindenburg offered Hitler an avenue to usurp total power, achieving a stranglehold on the country. His elevation to Fuhrer ultimately lead to the staged invasion of Poland five years later. Author Larkin develops this story well, offering insights into the paralysis of the Allies, the German people themselves, and ordinary lives in a turbulent time. The siren song the Nazis played struck a responsive chord among a despondent people that allowed Hitler to fulfill his wildest fantasies, eventually enveloping the world in a firestorm to consume some 50 million lives.
Counterpoint to the story follows Dodd's daughter, Martha who first found the stereotypical Nazi superman intensely attractive, but would later see the Nazis as bloodthirsty jackals. In the meantime, she bedded a cast of characters, from the head of the Gestapo, to a Soviet NKVD agent, who she claimed to be the love of her life, although he was less enamored of her. Ironically, his masters used him to control her, forcing him to write a last letter to her at gunpoint. In truth, the Soviets were no better, as bloodthirsty as the Nazis, and as intent on feeding their own interests at theRead full review
