Read Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life Online
Authors: Susan Hertog
In deference to Charles’s demand for privacy, neither Hitler nor Goering was present when the Lindberghs landed. They were greeted by several officials, but few spectators. As the soldiers clicked their heels and saluted, Captain Koenig ceremoniously shook everyone’s hand. Anne was struck by the formality of the assemblage and by the clipped speech and movements of the attending officers. Amid a flurry
of Heil Hitlers
, raised arms, and heel clicks, Anne was presented with a bouquet of roses.
To her relief, Hitler managed to control the crowds even at their official welcome in Berlin. The formalities increased, but Anne enjoyed the ceremonies. Charles, too, with rare generosity, consented to ride through the streets in an open car. Quickly, Anne was separated from him. “Ah, yes,” she wrote, “the subservience of women in Germany.” As the crowds cheered her husband, Anne rode in a closed car behind the entourage. Smiling, Anne wondered whether she would ever see him again.
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In fact, the antifeminist fervor in Germany far surpassed that in England. The Nazis glorified domestic life and saw the clamor for women’s rights as a form of moral decadence. While the nationalization of industry in the Weimar Republic had accelerated industrialization, opening unspecialized jobs to women, the economic depression that paved the way for the Nazis had lessened the demand for unskilled labor. In Germany, as in England, women colluded with the government for the restriction of their freedom. The Housewives Union organized to restrain individual opportunity, thereby ensuring a supply of domestic servants. The union proposed and won an ordinance requiring a year’s service for every German schoolgirl. But the constant propaganda had its dark side in laws that enforced compulsory sterilization to maintain racial purity. In the six years preceding the outbreak of World War II, 320,000 people, nearly half of 1 percent of the population at large, were sterilized.
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Sitting in the back car with attention focused on her husband, Anne resumed her role as observer. She was struck by the clean, treeless streets and the stark concrete buildings in a city that seemed to have sprung up overnight. Unlike London or New York, Berlin looked untouched by poverty and despair. There was an air of order and optimism, wrote Anne. The boulevards were filled with cars and bicycles and alive with pre-Olympic festivities. The avenues were draped with red Nazi flags and the white blue-ringed colors of the Olympics. Emblematic of the new “Aryan vision” was the Olympic stadium, garishly decorated with pseudo-Greek statues. While the German aesthetic felt alien to Anne—
clumsy and heavy and too ornate—it had a bold magnificence she could not deny.
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It was a city eager to forget its past; it raised monuments to a future it could not yet articulate.
But no matter how visionary that future was, Adolf Hitler was certain that Charles Lindbergh personified it. His tall frame, his sandy-haired boyishness, his piercing blue eyes, made him the quintessential Aryan. The Nazis could not have constructed a more eloquent embodiment of their vision. Although Hitler had promised him privacy, Charles did not object when the press circulated portraits of him as an American hero, praising him for his indomitable will and his precision and skill as a pioneering aviator.
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Truman Smith marveled at Charles’s knowledge and precision; Katharine Smith responded to his beauty and charms.
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Smiling and hatless amid the stern German officers, Charles burst with vitality and confidence. His compelling presence underlined Anne’s self-apologetic stance.
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Kay sensed that Charles was the couple’s “designated spokesperson.”
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Hoping to shield them from unwanted publicity, the Smiths invited Anne and Charles to stay at their apartment in Berlin. Observing Anne daily, Kay saw only the façade of self-deprecation, not her intrinsic strength.
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Anne’s diary entries for her days in Berlin were replete with insight into people and events; she was intent on documenting a culture in the process of inventing itself.
In a sense, the Lindberghs’ visit was another of Kay Smith’s victories. She had a practical, intuitive intelligence, along with a desire to join the political fray. Under five feet, not more than a hundred pounds, Kay, like Anne, was a diminutive figure beside a strapping and athletic husband. Her pointed, birdlike features contrasted with Truman’s solid, brawny frame, described by his daughter as befitting a “Grecian God.”
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But as smart and as competent as he was, Truman never knew “when to come in from the rain.”
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Kay, in short, kept Truman safe, governing his life while he commanded the lives of others.
Kay and Anne were mirror images of a common ideal: service to the
husband in a male-dominated culture, each woman as relentlessly vigilant as the other, each ambitious and daring. Kay sought to master the political scene while Anne honed her skills of observation. But Kay’s practicality was also her frailty. Her view of the world was cynical, un-tuned to the nuances of Anne’s complex personality, so different from her own.
On the first day of their tour, Charles was scheduled to make a speech to his hosts in the presence of the international press. But he converted a perfunctory salutation into serious commentary. Speaking at the Lufthansa headquarters at Templehof, the center of German commercial aviation, Charles reminded his fellow aviators of the heavy responsibility they bore:
We who are in aviation carry a heavy responsibility on our shoulders, 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. Aviation has, I believe, created the most fundamental change ever made in war. It has abolished what we call the sense of warfare. It has turned defense into attack. We can no longer protect our families with an army. Our libraries, our museums—every institution which we value most—is laid bare to bombardment. Aviation has brought a revolutionary change to a world already staggering from changes…. I find some cause for hope in the belief that power which must be bound to knowledge is less dangerous to civilization than that which is barbaric.
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He finished his speech with a toast to aircraft: “May pursuit planes get faster and faster” and may “bombers get slower and slower.”
Charles was showing his ambivalence, and the Nazi officers were confused. Was he warning or praising them? They smiled politely but drank their wine “as if it had hairs.”
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The government-controlled German press distorted Charles’s speech, toning down his admonitions, and the American reporters applauded
him for his courage. Since he was viewed both as a spokesperson for the concerns of his countrymen and as an informed observer of the British military, his speech was regarded as an event of “cardinal importance”
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and “a notable service”
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to Europe and, perhaps, to the entire world.
Goering, delighted with Charles’s Swedish roots, could not have been a more willing host. He was impressed with Charles’s technical skill, his acute powers of observation, and his commitment to the development of aviation. As he paraded Lindbergh through the Heinkel and Junker factories, Goering permitted him to inspect an elite Luftwaffe group and to fly a JU–52, a standard bomber, and the Hindenberg, a four-motor experimental passenger plane. He took him to Adlershof, a major research facility, to show him engines and equipment no one had seen before, including the JU–87 Stuka, a dive bomber, and the Messerschmitt 109, which became Germany’s prime combat plane.
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As they toured, Goering, a self-aggrandizing liar, fabricated statistics with the greatest of ease. He told Charles that Germany was producing between five hundred and eight hundred combat planes a month and would soon build twenty thousand a year. England, he noted, produced seventy a month; France, a mere fifty at best. Ironically, Goering’s numbers corresponded with those of American intelligence, which was willing to accept “hot news,” often unreliable and “wildly inaccurate,” deliberately planted for its obfuscation.
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Toured by day and dined by night, Lindbergh would return to the Smiths’ apartment to tell the attaché his impressions of the day. Often the lights would burn into early morning as the two men discussed and interpreted the information to send back to the War Department.
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But Lindbergh and Smith made a vital error in their assessment of German air power. They did not understand that the Luftwaffe was a tactical, not a strategic, force, designed to support the army but not to carry out long-range bombings. There were few four-motored aircraft and no heavy bombers. Deceived by Goering’s hyperbole, they failed to see the inexperience and inefficiency of many of the Luftwaffe generals.
Their report to Washington was comprehensive and detailed, but fraught with exaggerated assessments of German air power.
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While Charles was being manipulated by the dissembling air minister, Anne was systematically courted. Officers flanked her daily at lunch at the Air Club, feeding her propaganda along with herring and Bavarian bread. Kay monitored Anne’s every move, and recorded the drama faithfully in her diary.
Minister Milch approached Anne like a predator stalking his kill. Bowing stiffly, he began his rendezvous with the colonel’s lady. Complementing her on her modest demeanor, he rendered a short history of German leadership, portraying Hitler as a man of peace. The Führer, said Milch, believed that enough lives had been lost on the battlefield. France would always be their enemy. But he wanted a bloodless victory. Their goal was not the conquest of people, merely the acquisition of land.
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But on the streets, Anne noticed the young boys, in brown shirts and pants, goosestepping like soldiers.
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Influenced by his renewed worldwide approbation, Charles began to take his own opinions seriously. After six months in England with nothing to do, Charles was again the hero poised at the edge of history. The Germans, in a sense, had reinvented Charles in the image he had come to expect. And the Nazi leaders, masters of pageantry and drama, understood how to use his political power for their ends. Charles was eager to be of “use” for a cause and a culture that transcended his own. The spirit of the German people was “magnificent,” he wrote to a friend, and, one may note, closely akin. They refused to admit that anything was “impossible or that any obstacle was too much to overcome.” It was an attitude he feared the American people were losing.
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For the moment, he was hailed on both sides of the Atlantic. The Americans and the Germans believed him invaluable to the process of military preparations and international rapprochement. On a visit to the newly built Olympic stadium, Charles took a sprint around the track, to the delight of photographers and reporters. Now a world-class spokesman, he imagined himself a world-class athlete. Walking in the
parklike surroundings of grass, trees, and flowers, Charles inspected every corner of the Olympic village and gave it his complete approval.
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Anne, however, was less exuberant. She sensed that Charles was playing the fool. She was tired of the ceremony and the raised arms, and sick of the press intruding despite the orders of Hitler’s officers. She questioned the whole premise of Olympic competition and asked herself of what use was physical prowess. What about spiritual and intellectual pursuit? Would the Germans breed a race of brawny, insipid athletes?
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Persuaded by his friend Henry Ford, whom he had met after his flight in 1927, Charles accepted an invitation to see the ousted German crown prince, Eitel Friedrich van Hohenzollern. The Smiths were nervous, but Charles was determined. In fact, the visit turned out to be a trap. Although it was portrayed as a private social affair, the prince hoped the legitimacy associated with Lindbergh’s presence would be construed as an insult to the Nazi regime. Reporters stalked the men from behind potted plants, and Kay Smith was appalled. At dinner she sat between a reporter and Charles to drown out the conversation between him and the prince. When the prince invited Charles out to the verandah for a “casual photo,” and photographers came forward with their tripods, Kay became furious. She demanded that they stop, but the damage was done. The next day a photograph of Charles appeared in the morning news—an insult to his Nazi hosts.
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Kay later described Charles as a “naïve political thinker … It was the silliest thing for him to do because he was the guest of another government.”
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Calling on her skills of observation, Anne tried to penetrate Goering’s intentions. When the Lindberghs were invited to a state luncheon at Goering’s home on the Wilhelmstrasse, in the heart of Berlin, Anne found a reception worthy of a ball. As in her parents’ receptions for Charles in Mexico, guards lined the red-carpeted steps, and a flurry of footmen shuffled and bowed. Nazi officers paved the way to the formal reception. While the men conferred, the women formed a constellation
around the yellow-haired wife of the German minister. Dressed in a long green-velvet gown, shimmering with diamonds, Frau Goering appeared to Anne no less than a queen. Moving closer, Anne realized that her diamond brooch was a swastika set in a sea of emeralds.
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In his coat of braided gold, Goering, too, had the air of royalty. At forty-three, he was less handsome than formidable, strutting like a peacock in a barnyard of chickens. But Anne sensed more than she saw. She later referred to him as an “inflated Alcibiades,” comparing him to the Greek general who led his men into wars to suit his amoral ends.
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