In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin

 Larson, Erik. In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin. 2011. 448p. ISBN 9780307408846. 

Following the ascension of Hitler to power in Germany in 1933, a new US ambassador was named to represent the American government in Berlin. William E. Dodd, a professor from Chicago, becomes President Roosevelt's man in Berlin at a time where Nazi Germany is rearming and threatening its neighbors, along with its Jewish population. Dodd moves to Berlin in the middle of an economic Depression, with limited funds and almost no support from the State Department back in Washington. 

Accompanied by his wife, his son, and Martha, his adult daughter, Dodd soon grasps that the portrait Germany is broadcasting of a society reordering itself and crushing the Depression hides an uglier truth, with opponents imprisoned, disappeared, or shot, and all forms of oppositions eliminated. The new Germany is a violent Germany that doesn't respect the rights and the customary laws of foreign affairs.

For Martha, however, the Third Reich is filled with young vigorous men who are zealous Nazis but who are attracted to her. Enjoying their presence, she has several affairs, including with the head of the Gestaop, Rudolf Diels. She also meets a Soviet agent whom she falls in love with, and eventually travels through the Soviet Union with him.

Dodd and his family have a front-row seat at the establishment of a Nazi dictatorship, and his warnings to the State Department and to his fellow Americans about the dangers that this new Germany pose remain ignored until it was too late.

This scholarly yet riveting account of the decade between 1933 and 1940 showcases the blindness that affected many leaders at this time, who sought not to understand what Hitler was really up to. Fans of history will appreciate this descent into madness and the cruelty that will eventually lead to the Second World War.