The Lone Eagle and the Swastika

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 21^st 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