Riveting NPR podcast: U.S Ambassador in Hitler's Berlin

I thought this was such an interesting account of how the State Dept. in Berlin handled Hitler's early days. 

Audio can be found in the link.  It's about 30 mins long. I CP'd a bit of the interview summary below, but recommend giving it a listen:

 This interview was originally broadcast on May 9, 2011. In The Garden Of Beasts is now available in paperback.

In March 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt approached politician James M. Cox to offer him what should have been a cushy gig: the ambassadorship to Germany. But Cox turned down the job. Germany was unstable and violent ? and German Chancellor Adolf Hitler's paramilitary army had started to attack and jail thousands of its own citizens.

The job remained open for months as candidates were summarily rejected. In early June 1933, Roosevelt's commerce secretary suggested an alternative: William Dodd, a professor at the University of Chicago who spoke German and received his graduate degree in Germany.

Roosevelt offered Dodd the job, who accepted and went to Berlin with his wife, son and daughter. Roosevelt emphasized that Dodd needed to be a model of American values in Nazi Germany. But there was a less official mandate, too.

"He wanted Dodd to address [anti-Semitism] in essentially a less-than-official manner," writer Erik Larson tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross, "the argument being that this was, of course, shameful [and] it was an awful thing, but it was not necessarily something that America should get involved with in an official level."

Larson chronicles Dodd's time in Germany in a new book, In the Garden of Beasts. It's a detailed portrait of the man who served for four years as the ambassador to Germany before resigning ? after repeatedly clashing with both Nazi Party officials and the State Department.

"I was interested in him because I wanted to find out what was that like, to have met these people when you didn't know how all of this would turn out?" Larson says. "We, of course, have the power of hindsight in our arsenal, but people living in Berlin in that era didn't. What would that have been like as this darkness fell over Germany?"

 itler's Rise To Power

When Hitler became the chancellor of Germany in 1933, Larson says, many diplomats in the U.S. State Department ? including Dodd ? assumed he wouldn't be in office for very long.

"It was a commonly held opinion, especially among the U.S. diplomats operating in Berlin [and] certainly the British ambassador to Germany also felt that way," he says. "Hitler was such an anomalous character ? he was so over-the-top chaotic in his approach to statesmanship, his manner [and] in the violence which overwhelmed the country initially. I think diplomats around the world ... felt like something like that simply would not be tolerated by the people of Germany."

But Hitler stayed in office for 12 more years, serving as the head of the Nazi Party until he took his own life in 1945. Ambassador Dodd met with him twice in 1933, noting later how unhinged Hitler seemed, Larson says.

"Suddenly [in their first meeting] this ordinary statesman becomes absolutely vehement, savage and outspoken in a way that really kind of takes Dodd aback," Larson says. "In the second meeting, something very similar happens when they talk about Jews. Hitler again completely loses it. ... He says all of the criticism of Germany is coming from Jews and he is going to make an end to them."

Larson says Dodd ignored the remark.

"At that moment, Dodd the rationalist, the student of history, hears a remark like that and doesn't think Hitler truly means it," Larson says. "He doesn't take it seriously. Because, my God, who could possibly even think about something like that? Who could act on something like that? Remember, this is early. This is very early in the march toward the Holocaust."

But in 1934, things changed. Between June 30 and July 2, the Nazis carried out a series of political executions in a weekend known as the "night of the long knives." Tens of critics of Hitler ? including Nazis ? were imprisoned and executed.

"This seemed to be the moment when Dodd, at last, understands the true pathological nature of this regime," Larson says. "He tried to convey his sense of horror to the State Department. And what the State Department said was, 'Look, we don't really care about this, we care about Germany's debt. Can you please start working on getting Germany to pay back its debt to American creditors? It was almost as though, back in America, they wrote this off as some weekend excursion of the Nazis ? not a big deal, not something to worry about."