# In the Garden of Beasts

## Metadata
- Author: [[Erik Larson]]
- Full Title: In the Garden of Beasts
- Category: #books
## Highlights
- That’s the trouble with nonfiction. One has to put aside what we all know—now—to be true, and try instead to accompany my two innocents through the world as they experienced it. ([Location 128](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004HFRJM6&location=128))
- There existed at this time a widespread perception that Hitler’s government could not possibly endure. ([Location 341](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004HFRJM6&location=341))
- Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, the first woman in American history to hold a cabinet position, was energetic in trying to get the administration to do something to make it easier for Jews to gain entry to America. Her department oversaw immigration practices and policy but had no role in deciding who actually received or was denied a visa. That fell to the State Department and its foreign consuls, and they took a decidedly different view of things. Indeed, some of the department’s most senior officers harbored an outright dislike of Jews. ([Location 505](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004HFRJM6&location=505))
- Both Carr and Phillips favored strict adherence to a provision in the nation’s immigration laws that barred entry to all would-be immigrants considered “likely to become a public charge,” the notorious “LPC clause.” ([Location 524](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004HFRJM6&location=524))
- In this, Colonel House expressed a sentiment pervasive in America, that Germany’s Jews were at least partly responsible for their own troubles. Dodd ([Location 648](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004HFRJM6&location=648))
- As the Dodds left that evening, Crane gave the ambassador one more bit of advice: “Let Hitler have his way.” ([Location 663](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004HFRJM6&location=663))
- “Time, solitude, toil are the main oldtime simple requisites for you; you’ve got just about everything else for the doing of whatever you want to do as a writer.” ([Location 698](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004HFRJM6&location=698))
- Geheime Staatspolizei, only just becoming known by its acronym, Gestapo (GEheime STAatsPOlizei), coined by a post office clerk seeking a less cumbersome way of identifying the agency. ([Location 923](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004HFRJM6&location=923))
- The Gestapo’s reputation for omniscience and malevolence arose from a confluence of two phenomena: first, a political climate in which merely criticizing the government could get one arrested, and second, the existence of a populace eager not just to step in line and become coordinated but also to use Nazi sensitivities to satisfy individual needs and salve jealousies. ([Location 925](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004HFRJM6&location=925))
- Hitler himself acknowledged, in a remark to his minister of justice, “we are living at present in a sea of denunciations and human meanness.” ([Location 931](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004HFRJM6&location=931))
- As of January 1933 only about 1 percent of Germany’s sixty-five million people were Jewish, and most lived in major cities, leaving a negligible presence throughout the rest of the country. Nearly a third—just over 160,000—lived in Berlin alone, but they constituted less than 4 percent of the city’s overall population of 4.2 million, and many lived in close-knit neighborhoods not typically included on visitors’ itineraries. ([Location 936](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004HFRJM6&location=936))
- “It was easy to be reassured,” wrote historian John Dippel in a study of why many Jews decided to stay in Germany. “On the surface, much of daily life remained as it had been before Hitler came to power. Nazi attacks on the Jews were like summer thunderstorms that came and went quickly, leaving an eerie calm.” ([Location 945](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004HFRJM6&location=945))
- The German public had so avidly embraced the salute as to make the act of incessantly saluting almost comical, especially in the corridors of public buildings where everyone from the lowliest messenger to the loftiest official saluted and Heiled one another, turning a walk to the men’s room into an exhausting affair. ([Location 954](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004HFRJM6&location=954))
- Messersmith recommended that American visitors try to anticipate when the songs and salute would be required and leave early. ([Location 963](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004HFRJM6&location=963))
- Where there had been love, as Martha later put it, there were now only “embers,” and these were not enough. ([Location 974](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004HFRJM6&location=974))
- Hitler’s cabinet enacted a new law, to take effect January 1, 1934, called the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases, which authorized the sterilization of individuals suffering various physical and mental handicaps. ([Location 1020](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004HFRJM6&location=1020))
- Hindenburg—known widely as the Old Gentleman—remained the last counterbalance to Hitler’s power and several days before Dodd’s departure had made a public declaration of displeasure at Hitler’s attempts to suppress the Protestant Church. Declaring himself an “Evangelical Christian,” Hindenburg in a published letter to Hitler warned of growing “anxiety for the inner freedom of the church” and that if things continued as they had, “the gravest damage must result to our people and fatherland, as well as injury to national unity.” ([Location 1049](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004HFRJM6&location=1049))
- It was a problem Messersmith had noticed time and again. Those who lived in Germany and who paid attention understood that something fundamental had changed and that a darkness had settled over the landscape. Visitors failed to see it. In ([Location 1110](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004HFRJM6&location=1110))
- In letters back to America she proclaimed that Germany was undergoing a thrilling rebirth, “and that the press reports and atrocity stories were isolated examples exaggerated by bitter, closed-minded people. ([Location 1637](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004HFRJM6&location=1637))
- Albrecht Dürer entitled Knight, Death and the Devil ([Location 1755](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004HFRJM6&location=1755))
- As a historian, he had come to view the world as the product of historical forces and the decisions of more or less rational people, and he expected the men around him to behave in a civil and coherent manner. But Hitler’s government was neither civil nor coherent, and the nation lurched from one inexplicable moment to another. ([Location 2073](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004HFRJM6&location=2073))
- Even the language used by Hitler and party officials was weirdly inverted. The term “fanatical” became a positive trait. ([Location 2076](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004HFRJM6&location=2076))
- realm was too petty: The Ministry of Posts ruled that henceforth when trying to spell a word over the telephone a caller could no longer say “D as in David,” because “David” was a Jewish name. The caller had to use “Dora.” “Samuel” became “Siegfried.” And so forth. ([Location 2104](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004HFRJM6&location=2104))
- “Why should you worry?” Fromm asked. “I have reason, Bella darling. I wrote for my papers, chased all over the place getting them. Finally I found out that my grandmother was Jewish.” With that news her life had been abruptly, irrevocably altered. Come January she would join a wholly new social stratum consisting of thousands of people stunned to learn they had Jewish relatives somewhere in their past. Automatically, no matter how thoroughly they had identified themselves as Germans, they became reclassified as non-Aryan and found themselves consigned to new and meager lives on the margins of the Aryans-only world being constructed by Hitler’s government. ([Location 2894](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004HFRJM6&location=2894))
- Hans Gisevius, the Gestapo memoirist, ([Location 3842](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004HFRJM6&location=3842))
- Other writers, in exile, watched with disdain as Fallada and his fellow inner emigrants surrendered to government tastes and demands. Thomas Mann, who lived abroad throughout the Hitler years, later wrote their epitaph: “It may be superstitious belief, but in my eyes, any books which could be printed at all in Germany between 1933 and 1945 are worse than worthless and not objects one wishes to touch. A stench of blood and shame attaches to them. They should all be pulped.” ([Location 4105](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004HFRJM6&location=4105))
- Rudolf Diels, in his memoir, acknowledged that at first he also missed the point. “I … had no idea that this hour of lightning was announcing a thunderstorm, the violence of which would tear down the rotten dams of the European systems and would put the entire world into flames—because this was indeed the meaning of June 30, 1934.” ([Location 4947](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004HFRJM6&location=4947))
- this happiness was fostered by German law, which forbade cruelty to animals and punished violators with prison, and here Dodd found deepest irony. “At a time when hundreds of men have been put to death without trial or any sort of evidence of guilt, and when the population literally trembles with fear, animals have rights guaranteed them which men and women cannot think of expecting.” He added, “One might easily wish he were a horse!” ([Location 4979](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004HFRJM6&location=4979))