In the Garden of Beasts

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

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I liked it ... but I have always been very interested in the holocaust and the events leading up to it, so this was a different perspective and where at first I thought it was going to have more of a story element to it; once I knew for sure that it would not, I was able to read it for what it is.  Which is a piecing together of various bits of research and history and journals and interviews.

A lot of it is astonishing in that during such a crucial time in history a college professor with no experience whatsoever was sent to Berlin as ambassador to the United States.  But then again, that didn't really surprise me.  None of it did. 

One of my greatest questions about the holocaust was why would the Jewish people all stand around in great masses of thousands of people with only a handful of soldiers training guns on them and not revolt?  What I hadn't realized was that the discrimination against them had been so absolute for their entire lives that almost somewhere in the back of their heads they must have come to believe that they were as inferior as the German aryan race said they were. 

I was also not surprised that our American government was well apprised of what Hitler was doing, but once again, it was all about money:  Our Great American Banks had lent money to Germany and they wanted it back.  And they weren't going to piss anyone off, not even a mass murderer, if there was even the smallest teeniest chance that that money would make its way back into their fat cat pockets.  It would make me sick if it had surprised me.  But it didn't.

Do we learn from history?  I think not.



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