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| Lindbergh gets a tour from German officers. |
By Dan Hagen
The Lindberghs were “perfectly
thrilled” by their two visits to Nazi Germany in the 1930s, Anne Morrow
Lindbergh said.
She pronounced 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.”
Yes, people who object to being
stripped of all rights and ruled with an iron fist are just so boorish, aren’t
they, Anne?
Oh, well, the Lindberghs weren’t
the first Americans to be wooed by the charms of totalitarian dictatorship, and
they certainly weren’t the last. In 21st century America, we’ve got
plenty of their fellow travelers still pining for it, in fact.
Charles Lindbergh displayed the
typical virtues and flaws of an autodidact — flashes of brilliant,
outside-the-box insights and mountainous blind spots. His blind spot about the
Germans would cost him, and the situation wouldn’t be improved by his musings
about “voluntary eugenics.”
In fact, Lindbergh’s visits to
Germany provided valuable data about Nazi air power to U.S. intelligence, and
that was their underlying purpose. No one but Lindbergh — the most famous man
in the world at the time — could have gotten that kind of access, and few had
the technical expertise that enabled Lindbergh to make such swift, astute
assessments of the Luftwaffe’s progress in aviation technology. What he saw
alarmed him about the prospects for peace.
Lindbergh even observed an amusing
omen about the coming conflict between England and Germany, even if nobody
recognized it as such.
During a luncheon at the Wilhelm Strasse
residence of Hitler’s “paladin,” the rotund Hermann Goering sat on a sofa and showed
off playing with his pet lion, until it urinated all over his white pant leg.
Source:
‘Lindbergh’ by A. Scott Berg
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