Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  Delayed in Rotterdam for a night because of weather, he learned in a telephone conversation with Truman Smith that trouble had flared up in Moscow over an article published in the mimeographed London newssheet The Week. It claimed that Lindbergh had told members of “the Cliveden Set” that “the German air force could take on and defeat, single handed, the British, French, Soviet and Czechoslovak air fleets,” and that “he knew all about the Russian air force because, when in Moscow recently, he had been offered the post of head of the Soviet civil aviation administration.” The latter remark was sheer invention on somebody’s part, and the rest was a simplification of Lindbergh’s feelings about the strength of the Luftwaffe—which had not been uttered at Cliveden but at a luncheon Thomas Jones hosted in London.

  Pravda reprinted the article as though it had come from a reputable news source, allowing the Russian government to denounce Lindbergh as a liar. Lindbergh’s hosts from the Russian Embassy wired that it was “imperative” that he set the record straight. But Lindbergh adhered to his longtime policy of offering no comment—which only created greater concern.

  Flying into Berlin the next day, Charles was immediately struck by the changes in the country since his visit a year earlier. Berlin showed every sign of “a healthy, busy, modern city.” The aviation community seemed more ebullient than usual, willing to show off their latest planes and factories not only to Lindbergh but also to many distinguished guests who had flown in for the conference, Lindbergh’s friend Igor Sikorsky among them. For a solid week, Lindbergh inspected sites.

  On Tuesday, October 18, 1938—after a long day visiting the Junkers engine factory at Magdeburg, flying to Dessau to visit the Junkers factory, then back to Berlin—Lindbergh left Truman Smith’s apartment for a stag dinner at the American Embassy. The new Ambassador, Hugh Wilson, saw in Lindbergh’s presence the opportunity to establish friendly personal relations with Hermann Goering, thereby improving American-German relations. Furthermore, unknown to Lindbergh, Wilson had told Truman Smith that he also “hoped to obtain at such a dinner Goering’s support for certain measures especially desired by the State Department concerning the easing of the financial plight of the large number of Jews who were being forced to emigrate from Germany in a penniless condition.”

  Lindbergh joined a distinguished group of gentlemen that night—Generals Milch and Udet, the Italian and Belgian ambassadors, several American military attachés, and three of the greatest minds in German aviation, Ernst Heinkel, Adolf Baeumker, and Dr. Willy E. Messerschmitt. Goering was the last to arrive. Lindbergh was standing in the back of the reception room as the Marshal made his way toward him. Before he had even reached Lindbergh, Goering accepted a red leather box from his chief aide-de-camp and began a speech.

  Nobody was prepared for the moment. Because Lindbergh did not speak German, the American Consul-General in Berlin, Raymond Geist, stepped forward to translate. To the surprise of at least every American in the room, Lindbergh was being decorated with the Verdienstkreuz Deutscher Adler—the Service Cross of the German Eagle—a decoration for his services to the aviation of the world and particularly for his 1927 flight, which postwar Germany had never acknowledged. “By order of der Führer,” Goering said, opening the box.

  Inside was a golden cross with four small swastikas, finished in white enamel, strung on a red ribbon with white and black borders. Accompanying the medal was a proclamation on parchment signed by Hitler. Lindbergh was surprised by the honor but thought little of it, only that it “was given with the best of intent and with no more political motif in the background than was usual with the presentation of decorations in Europe.” (In fact, the French Ambassador and Henry Ford had recently received the same award.) Lindbergh accepted the decoration as unceremoniously as it had been presented, and the men all took their seats for dinner.

  Ambassador Wilson sat at the head of one of the two tables, Lindbergh at the other. Through the meal, Lindbergh spoke mostly to Air Minister Milch about aviation, though Milch did ask why Lindbergh should not winter in Berlin. In fact, Anne had been house-hunting that week, as Charles believed Berlin would be the most interesting city in the world during the next few months. Privately, Ambassador Wilson had told Lindbergh that such a move would prove “helpful” to him.

  After dinner, Goering approached Lindbergh again, leading him into a room for a personal talk. Ambassador Wilson accompanied them to translate. Goering immediately asked about Lindbergh’s trip to Russia; and before a second question on the subject could be raised, Wilson diplomatically offered the translating services of Consul-General Geist, knowing that an ambassador’s presence during a private conversation about world affairs could prove inhibiting if not embarrassing. Lindbergh spoke frankly, saying that he did not think the conditions in Russia were good and that the people did not seem well-fed or happy.

  Goering steered the conversation to German aviation. While the American diplomats were grateful for whatever information they could glean, they also had to consider the possibility that the Germans were using Lindbergh, pulling the wool over his eyes by filling him with false impressions of German strength. (Later, people told stories of the Germans secretly moving planes by night from one airfield on Lindbergh’s itinerary to another, to impress him with the size of their fleet. The stories were both untrue and unnecessary, as Lindbergh was less concerned at that moment with the potency of the Luftwaffe than with its potential. He was more interested in their research and development than the existing number of planes.) And when Goering spoke of a new Junkers 88 bomber, which no American had seen, Lindbergh did not doubt the Air Marshal’s boasts of its ability to fly at five hundred kilometers an hour. (In fact, the JU 88 would quickly become the nucleus of the Luftwaffe’s fleet of bomb-carriers, with Germany producing fifteen thousand of them over the next six years.) Lindbergh left the Embassy a few minutes after Goering. It was the second, and last, time they ever conversed.

  Anne Lindbergh and Kay Smith were chatting when their husbands returned from the Embassy. Neither of the men had attached much importance to the Goering medal; and Charles showed it to Anne without comment. “She gave it but a fleeting glance,” Truman Smith observed, “and then—without the slightest trace of emotion—remarked, ‘The Albatross.’”

  Lindbergh never saw it that way, insisting almost twenty years later that the decoration “never caused me any worry, and I doubt that it caused me much additional difficulty.” But Kay Smith went to bed that night prophesying to her husband, “This medal will surely do Lindbergh much harm.”

  Two weeks later, Lindbergh wrote General H. H. “Hap” Arnold, Chief of the Air Corps, urging him to visit Germany immediately to assess the military situation there for himself. Arnold wrote back that he was “100% in favor of making the trip just as you outlined.” Lindbergh himself prepared to return there for his own enlightenment. “I am extremely anxious to learn more about Germany and I believe a few months spent in that country would be interesting from many standpoints,” Lindbergh wrote Joseph Kennedy on November 9, 1938. Anne found a house in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, which she thought would “do perfectly.” They returned to France to pack up Illiec and collect their children.

  The very night of Lindbergh’s letter to Kennedy, Germany staged the worst pogrom that the Third Reich had witnessed, a nationwide series of “spontaneous” demonstrations. More than one hundred synagogues were burned, thousands of shops and houses owned by Jews were destroyed, tens of thousands of Jews were arrested and carted off to confinement camps, and dozens of Jews were killed. “Kristallnacht,” as that night of mayhem came to be known, opened the world’s eyes to the barbarism on which the Third Reich was built. “My admiration for the Germans is constantly being dashed against some rock such as this,” Lindbergh wrote in his journal back on Illiec. Then he confessed an utter inability to understand such persecution.

  The Service Cross of the German Eagle suddenly reflected badly on its recipient. The press, which had grown to resen
t Lindbergh’s uncooperative attitude, instantly revised history. In December, for example, Liberty Magazine reported Lindbergh’s having flown to Berlin especially to receive the medal; The New York Times wrote of his proudly wearing the medal all evening. “With confused emotions,” wrote The New Yorker on November 26, 1938, “we say goodbye to Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh, who wants to go and live in Berlin, presumably occupying a house that once belonged to Jews…. If he wants to experiment further with the artificial heart, his surroundings there should be ideal.” FDR’s Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, lashed out against Lindbergh in a speech before a Zionist meeting in Cleveland that December, asserting that anyone who accepts a decoration from Germany also “forfeits his right to be an American.”

  For more than ten years, Lindbergh had been a universal symbol, an Übermensch whose accomplishments had been in the name of mankind, not any single class of people. And though he had been for three years a man without a country, many at home now hoped he would end his exile and lead the fight against Fascistic oppression.

  As a long-festering resentment of Germany surfaced in the United States, it became increasingly difficult for Lindbergh not to take a stand against the Third Reich. “Now,” theorized Aubrey Morgan in a letter to Lindbergh at year’s end, that boiling population had “found a convenient channel to explode their pent-up wrath by stoning a fellow American. So you have become the scapegoat. The press certainly went out of their way to make you the real villain and Machiavellian intriguer behind the European scenes.”

  “People in this country have stopped thinking,” Dr. Carrel wrote Lindbergh from New York—where, he noted, gentiles almost as much as Jews had become agitated by the German attacks against its Jews. “The papers have published misleading articles about your plan to stay in Berlin,” he added, noting their terrible effect. “There is a good deal of ill feeling against you.” Friends and relatives wrote the Lindberghs, urging them not to live in Berlin and to return the medal. “We know Charles never denies anything the newspapers print and we know too that some outrageous things have been printed about him,” the wife of one of Anne’s cousins wrote her. “But this thing seems to us to be different. For the first time, it actually puts Charles on a side, it allies him with something this country believes is wrong and bad, and it may give impetus and encouragement to some weaker men who lean to the wrong side.”

  Lindbergh needed nobody to tell him to abandon his plans to move to Berlin. Wanting immediate access to the diplomatic corridors of a city (and a proper school for his son Jon), Anne and Charles decided on their own to leave Illiec for an apartment at number 11 bis Avenue Maréchal Maunoury in Paris’s 16th arrondissement. “I am not very much concerned by the stories printed in the newspapers, and I have neither desire nor respect for a popularity which is dependent on the press,” he explained to Dr. Carrel in early December. The move to Paris, he explained, was for one basic reason: “the fact that I do not wish to make a move which would seem to support the German action in regard to the Jews.” He admitted that he still did not understand the Germans’ methods; and until he did, he wrote, “I do not wish to cause embarrassment to our Government, or to the German Government. Moving to Berlin under present circumstances might easily do this.”

  As for returning the medal, Lindbergh would write almost three years later, after it assumed even greater significance in the public eye: “It seems to me that the returning of decorations which were given in times of peace, and as a gesture of friendship, can have no constructive effect. If I were to return the German medal, it seems to me that it would be an unnecessary insult. Even if war develops between us, I can see no gain in indulging in a spitting contest before that war begins.” And, Lindbergh wondered, what of medals from other nations that might become enemies. All those decorations were part of the past, the property of the Missouri Historical Society.

  With Paris as his base, Lindbergh spent the next four months continuing his shuttle diplomacy. He paid several visits to England, where he conferred with Ambassador Kennedy, the Astors, and the aviation officials of the United Kingdom. At the requests of the air ministers of France and Germany, he embarked on two secret missions to Berlin—a week in mid-December and three days in mid-January—during which he advanced the same notion he had during the Canadian Plan conferences. Recognizing the need to fortify their air force, Daladier and La Chambre at last told Lindbergh that they were prepared to buy engines at least, if not planes, from Germany, if the Third Reich was willing to sell them. Lindbergh never learned whether or not the plan was agreed to by Hitler himself, but Air Minister Milch told Lindbergh that they could proceed with a deal. His work done, Lindbergh withdrew from the project. He subsequently learned the French did as well, for tensions between the countries were mounting again.

  During his visits to Berlin, Lindbergh persistently sought answers to what was euphemistically being called “the Jewish question.” Raising the subject whenever possible, he did not find a single German who did not seem ashamed of the recent lawlessness against the Jews. Nor did he encounter a single German who did not want the country rid of the Jews. He felt the entire nation had bought into the Nazi propaganda that the Jew “is largely responsible for the internal collapse and revolution following the war. At the time of the inflation the Jews are said to have obtained the ownership of a large percentage of property in Berlin and other cities—lived in the best houses, drove the best automobiles, and mixed with the prettiest German girls.” Lindbergh met with George Rublee, an old friend of Dwight Morrow who had become Chairman of the Inter-governmental Refugee Committee and was in Berlin lobbying for Germans to moderate their attitude toward the Jews. Lindbergh extolled Rublee’s virtues to Milch and Udet and introduced him to Otto Merkel, of Lufthansa, whom he thought might prove sympathetic to Rublee’s mission.

  Nazi Germany, a rising monument to technocracy, was an ideal Lindbergh kept hoping to embrace. So long as he was able to intellectualize his feelings, he was able to believe some new system of government—a new order—might save a degenerating world. “I shared the repulsion that democratic peoples felt in viewing the demagoguery of Hitler, the controlled elections, the secret police,” he would later reveal. “Yet I felt that I was seeing in Germany, despite the crudeness of its form, the inevitable alternative to decline—a challenge based more on the drive to achieve success despite established ‘right’ and law.” Rather than look at the price being paid for that “success,” Lindbergh buried his head in the sand when confronted with the crimes of inhumanity that repelled so many others.

  In Lindbergh’s mind, the final shootout in Europe would not be between Fascism and democracy but between two dictators—Stalin and Hitler. Nothing he had heard attributed to the Nazis even approached the “ruthlessness and terror” of the Russians, who were rumored to have slaughtered forty million people since their revolution. “My greatest hope,” Lindbergh would write, explaining the political policy that would guide him over the next few years, “lay in the possibility that a war would be confined to fighting between Hitler and Stalin. It seemed probable that Germany would be victorious in such a conflict; and by that time France and England would be stronger. Under any circumstances, I believed that a victory by Germany’s European people would be preferable to one by Russia’s semi-Asiatic Soviet Union. Hitler would not live forever, and I felt sure the Germans would eventually moderate the excesses of his Nazi regime.”

  As late as April 1939—after Germany overtook Czechoslovakia—Lindbergh was willing to make excuses for Hitler. “Much as I disappove of many things Germany has done,” he wrote in his diary on April 2, 1939, “I believe she has pursued the only consistent policy in Europe in recent years. I cannot support her broken promises, but she has only moved a little faster than other nations have in breaking promises. The question of right and wrong is one thing by law and another thing by history.” After his January 1939 mission, Lindbergh did not set foot on German soil until the Third Reich had fallen. />
  The Lindberghs took advantage of their winter in Paris, frequenting museums and galleries. They posed for sculptors—Jo Davidson did a bust of him, and Charles Despiau one of her; and they bought several oil paintings by Vlaminck. They also dined with the likes of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Lin Yutang, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. (Lindbergh now wrote him off as an utter bore, noting of his private conversation with the ex-King, “The entire time was spent in talking about two subjects: the flavor of wines and how much higher the Étoile is than the Place de la Concorde.”)

  One night Anne and Charles went to the Tour d’Argent on the Seine. Their beautiful dinner was spoiled by a group of Americans and French at the next table, who recognized them. They spoke too loudly about Lindbergh’s hostile relationship with the press—“about newspaper rumors, about the kidnapping of our baby, about the trial at Flemington, about all the things that discretion should have prevented their mentioning at an adjoining table,” Lindbergh wrote in his journal. He was no longer an unequivocal hero.

  Indeed, some held him in contempt. In the Lindberghs’ absence, many Americans wearied of feeling guilty for their departure and wondered why they were reluctant to return. Family and friends informed them that there was a campaign afoot against them. Audiences in motion-picture houses hissed when Lindbergh appeared in the newsreels; many Jewish booksellers boycotted Anne’s critically acclaimed bestseller Listen! The Wind; and, in December 1938, advertisements from TWA appeared without its slogan “The Lindbergh Line.” These rumblings distressed Anne deeply, because she felt, “C. is not and never has been anti-Semitic.” She hoped this moment of unpopularity would prove fleeting, but she knew the “ball of rumor and criticism, once it starts rolling, is difficult to stop.”