Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  They approached the tunnels through Camp Dora, part of the notorious Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Displaced persons of many nationalities inhabited the vast prison grounds, residing in the crude wooden barracks, from which emanated the stench of inadequate sanitation and rotting garbage. Amid the squalor gleamed hundreds of parts for the V-2 rockets, which refugees had fashioned into shelter. The camp had until recently supplied labor for the assembly lines inside; and Lindbergh was told the only way the souls condemned there would ever come out “was in smoke.”

  Lindbergh and Uellendahl entered the massive cavern, driving beside a railroad track. Along the opposite wall of the tunnel sat lathes and jigs, a production line for V-1 buzz bombs. Every so often another tunnel branched off the main artery, leading to a workshop that produced engines or turbo-superchargers. Eerily, while every tunnel of this industrial anthill was devoid of life, it was fully illuminated—“as though,” Lindbergh noted, “waiting only for a change in shift.” The two men explored the tunnels, finding a small hospital here, an office there, V-2s in various stages of assembly everywhere. After exploring for miles, they returned to civilization, spending the night in a large house near the center of Nordhausen.

  The next day was even more phantasmagoric. Intimations of what lay ahead came at breakfast, as members of Lindbergh’s party discussed alleged savageries at Camp Dora. “That’s where the Germans had furnaces that were too small to take a whole body, so they used to cut the arms and legs off and stuff ’em in that way,” said one man. “The prisoners were so badly starved that hundreds of them were beyond saving when the Americans came,” added another.

  A short time later, Lindbergh and his party had made their way up the mountainside above the camp, off the road so that they might reach a low, factory-like building. The diameter of its brick smokestack was disproportionately large for its height. At one end of the building, he saw two dozen stretchers, soiled and bloodstained—“one of them showing the dark red outline of a human body which had lain upon it.” Upon entering the building they saw a plain black coffin with a white cross painted on it. Beside that, covered in canvas on the concrete floor, lay what was unmistakably a human body. In a moment, Lindbergh realized exactly what kind of “factory” he had entered.

  Moving into the main room of the building, Lindbergh saw two large furnaces, side by side, with steel stretchers for holding the bodies protruding through the open doors. “The fact that two furnaces were required added to the depressing mass-production horror of the place,” Lindbergh would note. The sight appalled him. “Here was a place where men and life and death had reached the lowest form of degradation,” he wrote. “How could any reward in national progress even faintly justify the establishment and operation of such a place. When the value of life and the dignity of death are removed, what is left for man?”

  A figure walked through the door, something between a young boy and an old man. It was a seventeen-year-old Pole, wearing a striped prison uniform, cinched at the waist but otherwise much too large for his skeleton of a body. Speaking German to Lieutenant Uellendahl, he pointed to the furnaces and said, “Twenty-five thousand in a year and a half.” Then he ushered the two Americans into the room they had first entered, and he lifted the canvas from the corpse on the floor.

  “It was terrible,” the boy said, his face contorted in anguish. “Three years of it.” Pointing to the bony cadaver, he added, “He was my friend—and he [was] fat.” As though sleepwalking, Lindbergh followed the boy outside, his mind “still dwelling on those furnaces, on that body, on the people and the system which let such things arise.” He was jerked back to reality by Uellendahl’s translating again: “Twenty-five thousand in a year and a half. And from each one there is only so much.” The boy cupped his hands together, then looked down. Lindbergh followed his gaze and realized they were standing at the edge of a pit, eight feet by six feet, and possibly six feet deep. It was filled to overflowing with ashes and bone chips. Lindbergh noticed two oblong mounds of clay nearby, evidently pits that had been capped. The boy reached down and picked up a knee joint, which he held out for Lindbergh’s inspection.

  The horrors were not lost on Lindbergh. “Of course, I knew these things were going on,” he would write in his journal on June 11, 1945; “but it is one thing to have the intellectual knowledge, even to look at photographs someone else has taken, and quite another to stand on the scene yourself, seeing, hearing, feeling with your own senses.” His mind flashed back to the rotting Japanese bodies he had discovered in the Biak caves and the load of garbage he had seen dumped on dead soldiers in a bomb crater. He thought in rapid succession of stories he had heard of Americans machine-gunning prisoners on a Hollandia airstrip, of Australians pushing Japanese captives out of transport planes, of American soldiers probing the mouths of Japanese soldiers for gold-filled teeth, of pictures of Mussolini and his mistress hanging by the feet. “As far back as one can go in history,” he told himself, “these atrocities have been going on, not only in Germany with its Dachaus and its Buchenwalds and its Camp Doras, but in Russia, in the Pacific, in the riotings and lynchings at home, in the less-publicized uprisings in Central and South America, the cruelties of China, a few years ago in Spain, in pogroms of the past, the burning of witches in New England, tearing people apart on the English racks, burnings at the stake for the benefit of Christ and God.”

  Lindbergh never considered that his ignoring—or his ignorance of—the Nazi slaughter was tantamount to condoning it. Instead, he stood ready to accept only collective blame, as an American and a member of the human race. “It seemed impossible that men—civilized men—could degenerate to such a level,” he wrote. “Yet they had. Here at Camp Dora in Germany; there in the coral caves of Biak. But there, it was we, Americans, who had done such things, we who claimed to stand for something different. We, who claimed that the German was defiling humanity in his treatment of the Jew, were doing the same thing in our treatment of the Jap.”

  Lindbergh could reckon with the horror of this systematic mass genocide only by equating it with other human atrocities. Looking down at the pit of ashes at Camp Dora, he concluded, “What is barbaric on one side of the earth is still barbaric on the other. ‘Judge not that ye be not judged.’ It is not the Germans alone, or the Japs, but the men of all nations to whom this war has brought shame and degradation.” To the end of his life he clung to his impression “that in World War II Japanese and German atrocities averaged worse than ours, but everything considered I don’t feel at all certain about it.” In a letter to a professor who later analyzed his political position before the war, Lindbergh contended that he had no “vengeful wish against the Germans in general,” feeling that “they had suffered enough by the end of the war.” But he was adamant that “we could not let atrocities such as those of the concentration camps go unpunished.” He strongly supported the trials against war criminals that opened in Nuremberg that November.

  Lindbergh descended the mountain and spent the next three hours walking through the whitewashed tunnels of Nordhausen, inspecting V-1 and V-2 parts, marvelling at the technology and trying to reconcile the way in which the forces of evil had harnessed it. “The V-2s,” he concluded, “were the last symbol of the mystical drive and dictatorial power of the Nazi Führer, used to advance ‘Nordic civilization’ and his political doctrines.” He thought back to that day in 1936 when he watched Hitler walk across the grass of the Olympic stadium in Berlin while one hundred thousand people cheered, investing their hopes in what he now regarded as “a strange mixture of blindness and vision, patriotism and hatred, ignorance and knowledge.”

  “Some irrational quality of the man, his actions, and his oratory enticed the entire German nation to support his ideas,” Lindbergh would write of Hitler with twenty-five years of hindsight. Nowhere did Lindbergh acknowledge, either in the spring of 1945 or anytime after that, that the promise of Hitler had seduced him as well. Anne Morrow Lindbergh would later note that “the worst cr
imes of the Nazis were not known until after Pearl Harbor and some not until the end of the war or even until the Nuremberg Trials”; but she was also as quick to admit, “we were both very blind, especially in the beginning, to the worst evils of the Nazi system.” Lindbergh never made any such concession. His observations about Camp Dora were his only public acknowledgment that he had misjudged the Third Reich.

  Having covered almost two thousand miles during his last two weeks in Germany, Lindbergh returned to Paris. After two days of conferences with military personnel and the American Ambassador, he arranged his journey home. With that, he brought seven years of diary-keeping to an end, closing the book on his wartime experiences.

  He returned from his two months in Europe more alarmed about the state of the world than ever. But he knew that the American public no longer gave a hoot for his opinions. In fact, many delighted in rubbing Lindbergh’s nose in news clippings—old ones full of his defeatist predictions, new ones detailing Nazi atrocities. As the extent of Germany’s evils was steadily revealed to the world, letters to newspaper editors invited the Lindberghs to gaze upon the “wave of the future” that had fascinated them so. Bernard DeVoto, in a long column in Harper’s magazine, had recently reminded his readers that “It didn’t seem to matter to Charles A. Lindbergh that the Jews were being exterminated. The Jews didn’t seem to matter nor the Poles nor the Czechs nor the Greeks. The destruction of France didn’t seem to matter, nor the invasion of Russia, nor Holland, Belgium, Norway, Denmark. Massacre, the bombing of Coventry or Warsaw or Rotterdam didn’t seem to matter, the enslavement of millions, the starvation of millions, the slaughter of millions. What the hell? It was just the same old game about the balance of power. If we would only mind our own business we’d be able to get along with the Germans.”

  For the rest of his life, Lindbergh cleaved to his theories, insisting that he had been right in his noninterventionist position. More than once he qualified his prewar statements, emphasizing the “vast difference” between vanquishing Germany and winning the war. “Seldom in history has a nation been defeated as completely as Germany,” Lindbergh granted. “Most of her cities are in ruins; millions of her people are dead. Yet the disturbing fact remains that while our soldiers have been victorious in arms, we have not so far accomplished the objectives for which we went to war. We have not established peace or liberty in Europe. There is less security there now than perhaps ever before, and less democracy. The value of truth has never been so low. The ideals of justice and tolerance have practically vanished from a continent. Freedom of speech and action is suppressed over a large portion of the world, especially in the so-called ‘liberated nations,’ many of whom have simply exchanged the Nazi form of dictatorship for the Communist form. Poland is not free, nor the Baltic states, nor the Balkans. Fear, hatred, and mistrust are breeding on a scale that never existed before. In fact, a whole civilization is in disintegration.”

  As he had for the better part of a decade, Lindbergh feared the rising power of Soviet Russia. That, coupled with chaos reigning in Europe, made America’s withdrawing its influence on the Continent in the foreseeable future seem impossible. “We have taken a leading part in this war,” he said, “and we are responsible for its outcome. We cannot retire now and leave Europe to the destructive forces which it has let loose. Honor, self respect, and our own national interests prevent that.” He further believed, “No peace will last which is not based on Christian principles, on justice, on compassion allied with strength, and on a sense of the dignity of man. Without such principles, there can be no lasting strength; no matter how great the technical advancement or how large the armies. The Germans found that out.”

  Not long after his return to America, Lindbergh visited his mother in Detroit. His letter to her from the train home revealed a changed man. He wrote of “spiritual awareness” and the importance of spending time in the garden, enjoying the sun, listening to the birds. He copied page after page for her of Lao-tzu, a philosopher Anne had given him to read years earlier but whose words had taken on new resonance for him since his trip to Germany. “Think what a different world we would be living in if Hitler had read and understood him,” Charles wrote his mother, quoting the following passage:

  One who would guide a leader of men

  in the uses of life

  Will warn him against the use of arms

  for conquest.

  Weapons often turn upon the wielder …

  A good general daring to march,

  dares also to halt,

  Will never press his triumph beyond

  need….

  He now counted Lao-tzu “among the greatest of philosophers”—next only to Christ as a mystic—and quoted him for the rest of his life.

  Lindbergh’s report of his European mission, which he submitted to Admiral H. B. Sallada, urged the United States government to immerse itself immediately in all the written material “liberated” from Germany, to bring selected German personnel to America, and to construct research facilities for the development of high-speed aircraft. “German plans for increasing accuracy through radio and television, for increasing range through high-speed catapults, larger rockets, and more efficient design, and for the incorporation of wings and cockpit,” he said, “all indicate the tremendous development rocket aircraft will probably go through in coming years.”

  While Lindbergh’s political opinions may have been arguable, his acumen regarding rockets had long proved prescient. It frustrated him to discover that the German V-2 design of 1943 was virtually identical to Robert Goddard’s rocket of 1939, and that even after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the government did not appreciate the value of Goddard’s work. Ironically, the enemy had taken greater interest in Goddard’s accomplishments than had his own countrymen. Indeed, when one German technical officer was being debriefed in May 1945, he blurted out, “Why don’t you ask your own Dr. Goddard?”

  Battling cancer along with his chronic tubercular condition, Goddard was eventually employed by the Navy. He worked under a government contract at Annapolis, developing small rocket motors less sophisticated than he had designed years earlier. More than a decade would pass before Washington would grasp the significance of his work, two hundred patents that would radically affect defense systems and help launch America into space. Back in 1945, however, the government was evidently funneling its resources into secret weaponry of another kind. Goddard died on August tenth, living just long enough to learn what it was.

  Lindbergh had long predicted that atomic energy would be used to attain much greater speeds in all mechanical modes of transportation; but he was taken aback when, in early August, he learned unofficially that the United States had split the atom and harnessed enough of its power to allow America to drop an “atomic bomb” somewhere over Japan. A group of scientists asked Lindbergh to join them in their attempt to persuade the government not to drop the bomb, “because of its terrible power and the precedent of ruthlessness that would be set.” Lindbergh declined to participate, because he felt, as he later explained, “that under the political circumstances that existed at the time, my participation would do more harm than good.”

  On August 6, 1945, a B-29 Superfortress flew over Hiroshima and dropped one of the new bombs, killing almost eighty thousand Japanese. “Nothing before so revolutionary had impacted on the lives of men so suddenly,” Lindbergh would later reflect. “The announcement … that the entire center of a large Japanese city had been leveled by one bomb, bursting as a secret of intellectual development, seemed too fantastic to be earthly.” Lindbergh considered the act a “mistake.” He believed that releasing the bomb “in the way we did will forever remain a blot on American history.” Years later he explained, “I would not have objected to dropping the bomb had it been necesssary to win the war, or even if we had informed the Japanese of its existence and they had thereafter refused to surrender.” Three days later the United States Air Force dropped a second bomb on Nagasaki, and within a
week the Japanese had surrendered. The old game boards on which international policy had theretofore been played had to be discarded, as those two blasts completely redefined all concepts of war and power, indeed the modern world itself.

  On a visit to the Midwest in September 1945, Lindbergh dined with Robert M. Hutchins, Chancellor of the University of Chicago, whom he had befriended years earlier during their fight against intervention. Hearing Lindbergh’s present concerns, he invited him to stay for an Atomic Energy Control conference which the university was hosting. It was a gathering of both atomic and social scientists—the former group having created this doomsday weapon, the latter discussing its future uses.

  Lindbergh considered the issues discussed at the conference the most pressing of their time; and despite all his instincts to avoid reentering the public arena, he would not be able to contain his newfound insights for long. The splitting of the atom had placed science in what he called “the unique position of having challenged God, threatened the existence of man, and scared its own disciples out of their wits all at the same time.” He considered “asinine” the assertions of many that weapons had become “so terrible that World War II would be the last war fought.”

  Not two months after the Chicago conference, on November 8, 1945, Lindbergh confidentially addressed fifteen Republican congressmen in a private dining room of a Washington hotel. Although everybody present was sworn to secrecy, his remarks reached the press within a few days, complete with inaccuracies. The New York Times reported that Lindbergh had advised “keeping the atomic bomb a complete American military secret,” that he had advocated “maintaining American air power superior to that of all the rest of the world,” and that he had expressed strong mistrust of Russia: all that was true. But the article proceeeded to state that Lindbergh said “he had changed his views about isolationism during the war” and that he had suggested that he did not feel “America should place confidence in the United Nations Organization but should rely on her own armed strength.”