William E. Dodd was an academic historian, living a quiet life in Chicago, w

游客2024-11-21 42

问题 William E. Dodd was an academic historian, living a quiet life in Chicago, when Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed him United States ambassador to Germany. It was 1933, Hitler had recently been appointed chancellor, the world was about to change.
Had Dodd gone to Berlin by himself, his reports of events, his diary entries, his quarrels with the State Department, his conversations with Roosevelt would be source material for specialists. But the general reader is in luck on two counts: First, Dodd took his family to Berlin, including his young, beautiful and sexually adventurous daughter, Martha: second, the book that recounts this story, " In the Garden of Beasts," is by Erik Larson, the author of "The Devil in the White City." Larson has meticulously researched the Dodds’ intimate witness to Hitler’s ascendancy and created an edifying narrative of this historical byway that has all the pleasures of a political thriller: innocents abroad, the gathering storm.
When the Dodds arrived in Germany in July 1933, storm troopers were beating American tourists bloody on the streets. Jews(1 percent of Germany’s population)were targets of brutal violence and ever tightening social restrictions.
Martha Dodd found life in Berlin entirely charming. Many men courted her and found her eagerly responsive. She was enthralled with the Nazi movement: "I felt like a child, ebullient and careless, the intoxication of the new regime working like wine in me," she wrote in her memoir. To a friend she said, "We sort of don’t like the Jews anyway."
In this last, at least, she echoed the general view at home. Public opinion was isolationist: the country would scarcely open its doors to German-Jewish refugees: the State Department was filled with anti-Semites, inclined to let Hitler have his way. American Jewish leaders were themselves divided on the best response to the crisis. As Roosevelt had instructed Dodd, Germany’s treatment of Jews was shameful, but it was not the business of the American government.
At first, Dodd was optimistic that Hitler’s regime would change. But as the months passed, it became clear to him that a disaster was in process, that Hitler was bound for a war to dominate Europe. Dodd became a Cassandra: "What mistakes and blunders," he wrote, " and no democratic peoples do anything!"
In her love affairs, Martha was ecumenical and prodigal: Rudolph Diels, for one, chief of the Gestapo: the writer Thomas Wolfe, when he came to town: a French diplomat: a German flying ace: and most important, Boris Winogradov, who was attached to the Soviet Embassy, and with whom she fell in love. Martha, now disillusioned with the Nazis, was recruited by the Soviet secret police.
After almost five years in Germany, Dodd came home exhausted and ill. He continued to warn of the great danger ahead, but, as he wrote to Roosevelt in 1939, after Hitler’s invasion of Poland, "Now it is too late." A few months later, he was dead.
Winogradov disappeared in Stalin’s purges, but Martha continued her connection with Soviet intelligence. When she returned to the United States, she was no longer useful as a agent. Nevertheless, in 1953, when Martha and her husband, Alfred Stern, were subpoenaed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, they fled to Mexico, and from there to Prague, where Martha died in 1990 at the age of 82, disillusioned once again.
The story of prewar Germany, of the Jews, of book burnings, of the Reichstag trial, of the Night of the Long Knives, of the Nuremberg rally, of the unfolding disaster is old news. But Larson has connected the dots to make a fresh picture of these terrible events. [br] What does "Night of the Long Knives" in the last paragraph indicate?

选项 A、Bloody murders.
B、Bloody purges.
C、Arms race.
D、The process of arming for war.

答案 B

解析综合题。本题从语义或历史常识角度都可以做出选择。“Night of the Long Knives”的语义为“长刀之夜”，一般晚上亮刀也就意味着血腥的清洗，故B合适。从历史常识考虑，“长刀之夜”即指希特勒1934年对冲锋队员的血洗。

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