Lindbergh
Page 52
While Anne enjoyed a week of deluxe tours around Berlin, Charles followed a rigid military schedule, a succession of inspections. Accompanied by an assistant air attaché, Theodore Koenig, Lindbergh visited the Tempelhof civil airport, where he was permitted to pilot a Junkers (JU) 52, the Luftwaffe’s standard bombardment plane, and the Hindenburg, a large four-motored experimental passenger plane. He spent a day with the Richthofen Geschwader (Wing), the elite fighter group of the Luftwaffe. One day he visited two Heinkel factories and saw their latest dive-bomber, medium bomber, fighter, and observation planes—all, Lindbergh found, of superb design. He spent another day at the Junker works at Dessau, where he saw their new JU 210 engine, a liquid-cooled engine far more advanced than he or Koenig had expected, and a JU 86, a low-wing, all-metal medium bomber already in mass production. Lindbergh spent another day at the German air research institute of Adlershof, where the scientists spoke freely of their work until he steered the conversation to the subject of rockets.
In light of all the new construction he saw, Lindbergh concluded that Germany was “now able to produce military aircraft faster than any European country. Possibly even faster than we could in the States for the first few weeks after we started competitions. Certainly we have nothing to compare in size to either the Heinkel or Junkers factories,” he wrote Harry Davison. Even greater than the size of the plants and their crews was “a spirit in Germany which I have not seen in any other country. There is certainly great ability, and I am inclined to think more intelligent leadership than is generally recognized. A person would have to be blind not to realize that they have already built up tremendous strength,” he wrote Henry Breckinridge.
Lindbergh participated in three important social events during his week in Germany. The first came the day after his arrival at an Air Club luncheon in his honor. Before a crowd of aviators and diplomats, Lindbergh delivered a speech, which he had worked on for weeks. Its text ran longer than anybody had expected, prolonged by its having to be translated into German, sentence by sentence. Its subtext lingered long after it had been delivered. “We who are in aviation carry a heavy responsibility on our shoulders,” Lindbergh said, “for while we have been drawing the world closer together in peace we have stripped the armor of every nation in war. It is no longer possible to shield the heart of a country with its army. Armies can no more stop an air attack than a suit of mail can stop a rifle bullet…. Our libraries, our museums, every institution we value most, are laid bare to our bombardment.”
With his unique diplomatic status, Lindbergh seized this opportunity to express a simple sentiment theretofore unspoken. “In making the address,” he would later explain, “I tried to issue a warning of the dangers involved in the Nazi military development, and, at the same time, keep in mind that I was a guest of Germany on an invitation issued through the military branch of an American Embassy.” In straddling that line, he drew his lunchtime remarks to a close by saying: “Aviation has brought a revolutionary change to a world already staggering from changes. It is our responsibility to make sure that in doing so we do not destroy the very things which we wish to protect.”
The reaction in the hall and in the German press was measured. While Hitler himself was said to have insisted that the newspapers print the speech in its entirety, no papers commented editorially.
The reaction elsewhere was far less repressed. Speaking of a “new” Charles A. Lindbergh, The Literary Digest observed, “He was Lindbergh in full maturity, no longer shy, ready to take his place as a world citizen, among the influential of the planet. In a ten-minute speech … and at the age of thirty-four, he had thoughtfully and deliberately abandoned forever, the role of private citizen to which he had clung with desperate futility since he stepped out of ‘The Spirit of St. Louis’ at Paris at twenty-five.” “Colonel Lindbergh’s frank, truthful and courageous words have rendered a notable service to Europe and perhaps to the entire world,” wrote British pundit Henry Wickham Steed. The speech deeply moved Dorothy Thompson, columnist in the New York Herald Tribune, as well. It reminded her of another brave oration, one she had heard as a young woman just out of college, when the recently defeated Congressman C. A. Lindbergh had argued against American intervention into the European war. “The colonel spoke bravely in the midst of the quicksands, with the backing and aid of world prestige and world renown,” Thompson wrote on July 28, 1936. “But it was from his father, whom the war drove into obscurity, that he inherited both the courage and the right to speak as he did and where he did. There is some justice in history. And ‘as the twig is bent, so is the tree inclined.’” Editorial reaction at home was almost unanimously favorable.
Some Jews, however, wished Lindbergh had never gone to Germany. “I AM CONVINCED THAT THE GERMAN PROPAGANDA DEPARTMENT WILL TRY TO INTERPRET YOUR VISIT AS AN APPROVAL OF THEIR REGIME,” cabled Harry Guggenheim’s brother-in-law Roger Straus. “I EARNESTLY REQUEST THAT YOU DO WHATEVER YOU CAN TO PREVENT SUCH AN INTERPRETATION BEING MADE EITHER WITHIN OR WITHOUT GERMANY.” The world was already aware of overt public acts of anti-Semitism in Germany—the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 stripped the Jews of German citizenship and forbade their marrying Aryans, while earlier laws had already restricted their employment and excluded them from public office, participation in any of the mass media, or sitting on the stock exchanges. But Guggenheim himself wrote Lindbergh that he had “every confidence that you would so conduct yourself as to give no aid to anti-Semitism.”
Lindbergh’s second important social occasion in Berlin was on July 28, 1936, when Hermann Goering hosted a formal luncheon in his honor at his opulent official residence on the Wilhelm Strasse. Past a line of bows and salutes, the Lindberghs were taken upstairs into a long hall, where Frau Goering—dressed in green velvet and wearing a dazzling pin, a diamond swastika set in emeralds—greeted them. The most important figures in German aviation—including Chief of the Technical Bureau of the Luftwaffe, Colonel Ernst Udet, whom Lindbergh had met years earlier at air races in America—suddenly fell silent when a pair of doors at one end of the room opened and an imposing figure appeared.
General Goering wore a white uniform bedecked with gold braid and medals. His body was turning to schlag, but the visage was still worthy of marble—strong, good-looking, and youthful. “There were few people in Berlin in 1936 who doubted that Goering was dangerous and a ‘killer,’” observed Truman Smith of the Führer’s most faithful adjutant—for he had undoubtedly been involved in the “blood purge” of June 30, 1934, and other internecine atrocities. But Goering also presented himself as the Third Reich’s renaissance man—the one with an eye for masterworks of art, antique furniture, precious stones, as well as the German crafts of handwrought silver, porcelain, and weaving tapestries. “My paladin,” Hitler called him, appointing him not only Air Minister but also the presiding officer of the Reichstag, Commissioner for the Four-Year Plan for economic recovery, Director of the state theaters of Prussia, and Minister of forests.
Goering made charming conversation with Anne during lunch—about the opera at Bayreuth, the fine wine, and her role in aviation; but he was most interested in her husband. Long fascinated with all things Swedish, Goering wanted time with Lindbergh alone.
After their meal, Goering and the Lindberghs walked through art-filled galleries to a less formal room, where he sat on a couch and played with his pet lion until the beast urinated on his white pant leg. While Goering changed into a pair of golf knickers, the Lindberghs were granted the further honor of visiting Goering’s study, a long, book-lined drawing room decorated in scarlet and gold, with tapestries, Madonnas, and other objets d’art he had “borrowed” from German museums. Now reeking of cologne, Goering rejoined them, showing off his possessions, including a fine sword. He handed it to Lindbergh to test, but Lindbergh courteously refused. At last, Goering took Lindbergh off alone to a side table on which sat a photograph album. “Here are our first seventy,” he said turning the pages, each of which contained a picture of a mil
itary airfield. “From the inspection trips I had made through German factories,” Lindbergh would later note, “I knew warplanes were being built to fill those fields.”
“Beyond question,” Truman Smith would later write of that afternoon, “the ‘state’ luncheon of Goering’s was an important milestone in the air intelligence progress of the office of the American attaché. From this day on, an even closer liaison developed between the American officers and the Air Ministry.” Had it not been for Lindbergh’s visit to Germany in 1936, “it is likely that the American air attachés would never have obtained the privileged position that was soon theirs in the Berlin attaché corps.”
At the third important social event, on his last full day in Germany, Lindbergh got a glimpse of Adolf Hitler himself. On August first, both Lindberghs joined a crowd of one hundred thousand for the colorful opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games. The predominantly German crowd cheered wildly when Hitler arrived in the stadium and received a bouquet of roses from a young blonde girl. Lindbergh had a choice seat from which to view the proceedings. Although Truman Smith, with the approval of the Embassy, had hoped to arrange for a meeting between Lindbergh and Hitler, Lindbergh’s place on one of the gray stone benches of the grandstand that day was the closest he would ever get to the Führer.
The following afternoon, the Lindberghs flew to Copenhagen, where Charles and Dr. Carrel addressed the International Congress of Experimental Cytology. They remained for two weeks, during which time Lindbergh and his mentor demonstrated their pump—perfusing a cat’s thyroid gland—in a small room of the Carlsbad Biological Institute for ten scientists at a time. In this, Lindbergh’s debut before a scientific body, he explained each part of the apparatus, while Dr. Carrel translated into French. After viewing the mechanism, many of the two hundred fifty scientists who saw the pump in action declared that “Lindbergh’s work as a scientist would probably be remembered long after his flight to Paris is only a dimly recalled event in aviation history.”
Lindbergh himself had, in fact, become more concerned with the immediate future; and in the middle of his stay in Copenhagen, he committed to paper some thoughts. “As I travel in Europe,” he wrote, “I become more concerned about the power of destruction which is being built in aircraft; yet it is not so much the power I think is dangerous, as the suddenness with which it can be used. There has been great military power assembled before but it could only be expended with comparative slowness. The flame of war has never been difficult to light, but while it has burned in the past it is more likely to explode in the future.”
For all his fears, Lindbergh could not help feeling Germany was “the most interesting nation in the world today, and that she is attempting to find a solution for some of our most fundamental problems.” Some solutions he had trouble accepting, as with the case of a brilliant young doctor he met in Copenhagen: Richard Bing, a half-Jewish German citizen, was just then coming “under the Jewish stigma.” Lindbergh and Carrel rushed to Bing’s aid, helping him secure a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, which enabled him to move to New York and become an American citizen. But Lindbergh could not open his eyes to the fact that Nazi anti-Semitism was much more difficult to deal with than that.
“There is no need for me to tell you that I am not in accord with the Jewish situation in Germany,” he wrote Harry Guggenheim after his visit to Germany. And while he was not yet able to accept what he heard as anything but rumor or propaganda, the “undercurrent of feeling” was “that the German Jews had been on the side of the Communists.”
“While I still have many reservations,” Lindbergh wrote Truman Smith from Denmark, “I have come away with a feeling of great admiration for the German people. The condition of the country, and the appearance of the average person whom I saw, leaves with me the impression that Hitler must have far more character and vision than I thought existed in the German leader who has been painted in so many different ways by the accounts in America and England.”
“With all the things we criticise,” Lindbergh added, this time to Harry Davison at J. P. Morgan, “he is undoubtedly a great man, and I believe has done much for the German people. He is a fanatic in many ways, and anyone can see that there is a certain amount of fanaticism in Germany today. It is less than I expected, but it is there. On the other hand, Hitler has accomplished results (good in addition to bad), which could hardly have been accomplished without some fanaticism.”
In thanking General Goering for his visit, Lindbergh offered nothing but praise. “It is always a pleasure to see good workmanship combined with vision in design and great technical ability,” he wrote on August 20, 1936. “I have never been more impressed than I was with the aviation organizations I saw in Germany. I believe that the experimental laboratories which are being constructed will undoubtedly contribute very greatly to the progress of aviation throughout the world.”
In the afterglow of the Berlin Olympics, Lindbergh’s feelings toward Germany were hardly unique. Anne, even more than Charles, found herself shocked by the “strictly puritanical view at home that dictatorships are of necessity wrong, evil, unstable and no good can come of them—combined with our funny-paper view of Hitler as a clown—combined with the very strong (naturally) Jewish propaganda in the Jewish owned papers.” While Anne’s published papers would later reveal her enthusiasm for the new vitality in Germany, she would take her editor’s advice and expurgate some of her gushier effusions about her ten “perfectly thrilling” days in Berlin. “Hitler,” she wrote her mother on August 5, 1936, “I am beginning to feel, is a very great man, like an inspired religious leader—and as such rather fanatical—but not scheming, not selfish, not greedy for power, but a mystic, a visionary who really wants the best for his country and on the whole has rather a broad view.”
The Lindberghs were hardly alone in being swayed by Hitler’s magnetism. Arnold Toynbee and Lloyd George had recently formed similar opinions. From Lindbergh’s vantage point, “Europe, and the entire world, is fortunate that a Nazi Germany lies, at present, between Communistic Russia and a demoralized France. With the extremes of government which now exist, it is more desirable than ever to keep any one of them from sweeping over Europe. But if the choice must be made it can not be Communism.” In the end, Lindbergh felt the Germans were “especially anxious to maintain a friendly relationship with England,” they had no “intention of attacking France for many years to come, if at all,” and they seemed “to have a sincere desire for friendly relations with the United States, but of course that is much less vital to them.”
“I don’t believe anybody else in the world could have succeeded in doing what you did,” Major Smith wrote Colonel Lindbergh after his visit: “pleasing everybody, both the German public and the American public.” After that visit, Truman Smith observed, “Captain Koenig found himself in a privileged position in the attaché corps. In the ensuing twelve months, he visited more factories and airfields than any other foreign attaché, with the possible exception of the Swedes and the Italians.” Of even greater benefit, Smith added, by the end of that year, Air Corps headquarters in Washington awakened at last to the “imposing rearmament program in Germany.”
Something reawakened in Lindbergh as well, a spirit that had lain dormant since his son’s kidnapping. His wanderlust had returned. Over the next year he would spend more than two hundred hours in the air, most of it piloting his new Miles Mohawk with its Menasco B6 engine, across three continents. These flights—always in the name of professional aviation but just as much for his personal edification—had not lost their power to enthrall the world.
In November 1936, he flew alone to Ireland to inspect a landing field for Pan American. What was meant to be a three-day trip stretched to ten, as a stubborn fog created the longest delay Lindbergh had ever faced on account of weather. He made the most of his time in the home of his forefathers, the Lodges and Kissanes. “It has always had a strange attraction for me,” Charles wrote his mother of Ireland. “Possibl
y because I shall never forget the first sight of the hills of Kerry from the Spirit of St. Louis; possibly because a love of the old country is passed on even to the distant descendants of all Irishmen.”
Lindbergh gave Eamon de Valera, the Prime Minister of the Republic of Ireland, his first airplane ride; and the thrilled passenger invited Lindbergh to a dinner he was giving for U. S. Postmaster General Farley. En route to the dinner, Lindbergh thought it might amuse his host, the Minister of Defence, to know that he and Farley had been on opposite sides of the recent airmail controversy. “Oh! Don’t let that worry you,” he replied in his lilting brogue. “The leader of the opposition will be present tonight. He executed seventy-nine of us a few years ago. We haven’t forgotten it, but we don’t bring politics into affairs for people from other countries.” Anne was happy to have sat this trip out, for she had recently discovered she was pregnant for the third time, her baby due in May.
The Lindberghs spent Christmas at Long Barn, preparing for a major trip on which his wife would accompany him. During the many stops they would make in Asia, Africa, and Europe in early 1937, the Lindberghs observed what Charles would later record were “the early symptoms of the breakup of the British Empire and of Western civilization’s waning power in the East”:
In Rome, Lindbergh was startled by the omnipresence of Mussolini’s soldiers and intrigued by the massive excavation within the city, exposing its great past in building its future. “The twentieth-century dictator prophesied that Italy would return for a third time to be the directing force of Western civilization,” Lindbergh observed. “He would electrify railways, drain the Pontine Marshes, increase the birth rate, and reclaim the Italian Empire. How imitative it was! A dictatorship, conquest, and power, armies marching off for Africa and Spain, great structures rising—one might be describing ancient Rome instead of modern Italy.”