If wishes were fishes

Each of us suffers from a tendency to believe what we want to believe, never mind evidence to the contrary. Erik Larson’s 2011 book In the Garden Of Beasts illustrates how this tendency played out while Hitler was strengthening his grip on Germany in the 1930s.

The German people wanted to believe in their country's greatness and that Nazi excesses against political opponents, Jews and others were just temporary or weren’t nearly as bad as some were reporting.

Other governments, including those in the United States and Great Britain, wanted to believe Hitler would stop short of war.

The focus of Larson’s book is William E. Dodd, President Roosevelt's unorthodox choice as ambassador to Germany. Most ambassadors, then as now, were wealthy men rewarded for their political contributions. Nobody else wanted the German post, however, so FDR settled on a college professor of modest means. Dodd had fond memories of living in Germany as a student, and he wanted to believe that Hitler’s Germany was the same country he had known before. At first he was even given to speaking of “the Jewish problem” in much the same way the Nazis did, and he often complained of "too many Jews" working in the embassy.

Gradually, however, Dodd came to see Hitler for what he was, a threat to world peace. “I have a sense of horror when I look at that man,” he wrote in his diary. Still he couldn’t convince those back at the State Department that the man was as dangerous as he knew him to be. Washington didn’t want to believe it. Nor did others in the diplomatic corps want to believe that Dodd, of all people, could possibly know what he was talking about.

Another important figure in Larson’s book is Dodd’s promiscuous daughter, Martha, who accompanied her parents to Germany. Married or not, she had a string of lovers, some of them from the literary world, including Carl Sandburg and Thomas Wolfe. In Germany, she too believing what she wanted to believe, her lovers included various Nazis. She was introduced to Hitler himself, but neither found the other attractive, so the relationship never got beyond him kissing her hand. Yet the man she most loved, and the one she wanted to marry, was a Soviet spy. Boris Winogradov, however, was less interested in marrying Martha than in turning her into a spy. She did, in fact, become a spy but, according to Larson, was an ineffectual one.

Larson has a knack for writing history as riveting as almost any novel, and this is an example of him at his best.