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Book: In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin
Quotes of Book: In the Garden of Beasts: Love,
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  1. Erik Larson _ In the Garden of Beasts: Love,

    Throughout that first year in Germany, Dodd had been struck again and again by the strange indifference to atrocity that had settled over the nation, the willingness of the populace and of the moderate elements in the government to accept each new oppressive decree, each new act of violence, without protest.
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  2. Erik Larson _ In the Garden of Beasts: Love,

    The Death of Boris,' by Mussorgsky?
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  3. Erik Larson _ In the Garden of Beasts: Love,

    Hitler had just announced his decision to withdraw Germany from the League of Nations and from a major disarmament conference that had been under way in Geneva, off and on, since February 1932.
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  4. Erik Larson _ In the Garden of Beasts: Love,

    Thomas Wolfe wrote, "Here was an entire nation … infested with the contagion of an ever-present fear. It was a kind of creeping paralysis which twisted and blighted all human relations.
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  5. Erik Larson _ In the Garden of Beasts: Love,

    Under Stalin, peasants had been forced into vast collectives. Many resisted, and an estimated five million people-men, women, and children-simply disappeared, many shipped off to far-flung work camps.
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  6. Erik Larson _ In the Garden of Beasts: Love,

    In the end, Dodd proved to be exactly what Roosevelt had wanted, a lone beacon of American freedom and hope in a land of gathering darkness.
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  7. Erik Larson _ In the Garden of Beasts: Love,

    If someone asks me why we did not use the regular courts I would reply: at the moment I was responsible for the German nation; consequently
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  8. Erik Larson _ In the Garden of Beasts: Love,

    found the State Historical Society of Wisconsin to be a trove of relevant materials that conveyed a sense of the woof and weave of life in Hitler's Berlin. There, in one locale, I found the papers of Sigrid Schultz, Hans V. Kaltenborn, and Louis Lochner. A short and lovely walk away, in the library of the University of Wisconsin, I found as well a supply of materials on the only UW alumna to be guillotined at Hitler's command, Mildred Fish Harnack.
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  9. Erik Larson _ In the Garden of Beasts: Love,

    Gleichschaltung.
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  10. Erik Larson _ In the Garden of Beasts: Love,

    In a conversation with a British embassy official that occurred at about this time, quoted in a memorandum later filed with the foreign office in London, Diels delivered a monologue on his own moral unease: "The infliction of physical punishment is not every man's job, and naturally we were only too glad to recruit men who were prepared to show no squeamishness at their task. Unfortunately, we knew nothing about the Freudian side of the business, and it was only after a number of instances of unnecessary flogging and meaningless cruelty that I tumbled to the fact that my organization had been attracting all the sadists in Germany and Austria without my knowledge for some time past. It had also been attracting unconscious sadists, i.e. men who did not know themselves that they had sadist leanings until they took part in a flogging. And finally it had been actually creating sadists. For it seems that corporal chastisement ultimately arouses sadistic leanings in apparently normal men and women. Freud might explain it.
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  11. Erik Larson _ In the Garden of Beasts: Love,

    The Chancellor's assurances were so satisfying and so unexpected that I think they are on the whole too good to be true," Messersmith wrote. "We must keep in mind, I believe, that when Hitler says anything he for the moment convinces himself that it is true. He is basically sincere; but he is at the same time a fanatic." Messersmith urged skepticism regarding Hitler's protestations. "I think for the moment he genuinely desires peace but it is a peace of his own kind and with an armed force constantly becoming more effective in reserve, in order to impose their will when it may become essential." He reiterated his belief that Hitler's government could not be viewed as a rational entity. "There are so many pathological cases involved that it would be impossible to tell from day to day what will happen any more than the keeper of a madhouse is able to tell what his inmates will do in the next hour or during the next day." He urged caution, in effect warning Phillips to be skeptical of Dodd's conviction that Hitler wanted peace. "I think for the present moment … we must guard against any undue optimism which may be aroused by the apparently satisfying declarations of the Chancellor.
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  12. Erik Larson _ In the Garden of Beasts: Love,

    Contrary to the predictions of many students of international problems, I feel fairly certain that we shall not have war in the near future.
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