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448 pages. Includes Sources and Acknowledgments, Notes, Bibliography, Photo Credits, and an Index. Also includes two black and white endpaper maps--one of The Tiergarten 1933, and the other one of Berlin and the Tiergarten Area. Signed by the author on the title page. A non-fiction book about William E. Dodd, who became America's first ambassador to Hitler's Germany in 1933, a year that proved to be a turning point in history. A mild-mannered professor from Chicago, Dodd brought along his wife, son, and flamboyant daughter, Martha. But as evidence of Jewish persecution mounts, confirmed by chilling first-person testimony, William Dodd telegraphs his concerns to a largely indifferent State Department back home. As that first year unfolds and the shadows deepen, the Dodds experienced days full of excitement, intrigue, romance--and ultimately horror, when a climactic spasm of violence and murder unmasks Hitler's true character and ruthless ambition. Erik Larson (born January 3, 1954) is an American journalist and author of nonfiction books. He has written a number of bestsellers, including In the Garden of Beasts (2011) about an American diplomat in Berlin in the early period of Hitler's Third Reich and The Devil in the White City (2003), about the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago and a series of murders by H. H. Holmes that were committed in the city around the time of the Fair. The Devil in the White City won the 2004 Edgar Award in the Best Fact Crime category, among other awards. William Edward Dodd (October 21, 1869 - February 9, 1940) was an American historian, author and diplomat. A liberal Democrat, he served as the United States Ambassador to Germany from 1933 to 1937 during the Nazi era. Initially a holder of the slightly anti-Semitic notions of his times, he went to Germany with instructions from President Franklin D. Roosevelt to do what he could to protest Nazi treatment of Jews in Germany "unofficially," while also attempting to follow official State Department instructions to maintain cordial official diplomatic relations. Convinced from firsthand observation that the Nazis were an increasing threat, he resigned over his inability to mobilize the Roosevelt administration, particularly the State Department, to counter the Nazis prior to the start of World War II. In 1937, Dodd stepped down as ambassador in Berlin, and President Roosevelt appointed Hugh Wilson, a senior professional diplomat, to replace him. After leaving his State Department post, Dodd took a position at American University in Washington, D.C., as well as campaigned to warn against the dangers posed by Germany, Italy, and Japan, and detailed racial and religious persecution in Germany. He predicted German aggression against Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. Dodd, who suffered for years from a severe throat condition exacerbated by the stress of his ambassadorship, traveled on a speaking tour of Canada and the US, establishing his reputation as a statesman who opposed the Nazis. Historian Gerhard Weinberg believes no other ambassador to Nazi Germany was more effective, Derived from a Kirkus review: A true tale of diplomacy and intrigue. William E. Dodd, the unlikely hero of the piece, was a historian at the University of Chicago in the early 1930s, tenured and unhappy, increasingly convinced that he was cut out for greater things. Franklin Roosevelt, then in his second year in office, was meanwhile having trouble filling the ambassadorship in Berlin, where the paramilitary forces of Hitler's newly installed regime were in the habit of beating up Americansâ "and, it seems, American doctors in particular, one for the offense of not giving the Nazi salute when an SS parade passed by. Dodd was offered the job, and he accepted. Dodd did yeomanlike work, pressing for American interests while letting it be known that he did not think much of the blustering Nazisâ "even as, the author writes, he seems to have been somewhat blind to the intensi. Seller Inventory # 79505
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