Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life (54 page)

When Charles returned to the Smith apartment with the small red box containing his medal, Anne immediately understood. He handed her the box in silence; it was as if the wave had finally crashed.

“The albatross,” was all she said.
⁸²

A
nne and Charles in Paris, winter 1939
.

(Popperfoto)

T
hree weeks later, flames shot through the November darkness as thousands of people scuttled amid the broken glass to escape the beatings of Hitler’s henchmen. It was the Day of the Movement, an official holiday since Hitler had come to power, and his S.A. officers swaggered through the streets of cities throughout Germany, attacking synagogues and storefronts with equal abandon. While Hitler remained aloof and silent, issuing orders through Gestapo headquarters, Himmler announced that “anti-Jewish demonstrations” should not be hindered. As many Jews as possible were to be arrested by the Gestapo—especially wealthy Jews—for immediate incarceration at detention camps. Staged by Hitler as “spontaneous demonstrations” in reaction to the assassination of a German consul in Paris by a young irate
Jew two days earlier, Hitler assigned his civilian thugs, plucked from the general population, to kill the “abdominable Jews” for their crimes against the state. “The swine won’t commit another murder …” Goering would say. “I would not like to be a Jew in Germany.”
²

By the early morning hours of November 10, 1938, as fire turned to smoke, tens of thousands of windows were broken, at least a hundred people had been killed, and thousands more had been subjected to wanton and sadistic violence. Seventy-five hundred businesses had been gutted, and two hundred sixty-seven synagogues burned. Almost all Jewish cemeteries had been desecrated, and at least a hundred and ninety-seven private homes destroyed. Later, it would be called Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass.
³

The official Nazi newspaper, the
Voelkischer Beobachter (The People’s Observer)
, remained silent. It reported nothing on the number of Jews killed, injured, or arrested, or on the damage done to the Jewish homes and synagogues. It urged the German people to exercise discretion and discipline, to avert their eyes when they passed the ruins, and to remember the crimes committed by the Jews against the state.

The pogrom marked a turning; now even the general populace viewed the Jews as “fair game.” Although most Germans were frightened by the violence in their midst, angry at the hundreds of thousands of Reichmarks the damage had cost the state, and fearful of the vengeance of the Jews, thousands watched through the night and the next day as the Jews were marched off to concentration camps.

A hundred thousand people attended a rally to hear the anti-Jewish propaganda of Julius Streicher, the publisher
of Der Stürmer
and one of the most rabid anti-Semites in Germany. A member of the Hitler Youth Movement said, “After Kristallnacht, no German old enough to walk could ever plead ignorance of the persecution of the Jews and no Jews could harbor any delusion that Hitler wanted Germany anything but
Judenrein
, clean of Jews.”
⁴

November 10 was a beautiful day on Illiec, mild and clear, with a cloudless sky and a gentle wind. As the news came over the radio, Anne wrote in her diary that she was “shocked.” But Charles sat quietly at his
desk, wondering whether this was simply a deterrent against further shooting incidents. Or was it a move to oust the Jews from Germany? A means to stir up international anti-Semitism? Or was it the indication of the German government’s inherent hatred of the Jews?

“They have undoubtedly had a difficult Jewish problem,” he wrote. “But why is it necessary to handle it so unreasonably?”
⁵

Kay Smith recorded that Charles called them the morning after Kristallnacht to express his “outrage” and to inform them that he and Anne had canceled their plans to move to Berlin,
⁶
but on the same day, he wrote to Dr. Carrel expressing his regret at having to change his plans. He had hoped that living in Germany would enable him to understand the German viewpoint.

In fact, until the very morning of Hitler’s Kristallnacht, Anne and Charles were continuing with plans to make Berlin their home. Since receiving the German Cross, Lindbergh’s ties to Germany had tightened. He had spoken to Ambassador Hugh Wilson in confidence, asking his advice about taking a house in Berlin for the winter. Wilson counseled him to seek “a degree of immunity with the press” in the United States by speaking with William Randolph Hearst, Colonel Robert McCormick, and other newspaper publishers to work out a
modus vivendi
. Lindbergh vigorously objected to the position that the public had “a right to know” about his and Anne’s private lives. He added that as far as attacks on him went, he “didn’t give a damn.” In any case, he was not ready to return to the United States with his family.
⁷
While Anne had felt strangely “starved” in the midst of plenty, Charles felt increasingly fulfilled. In exile, he had found a home. In the well-guarded Reich, he would no longer have to worry about the whim of a disapproving press or the fury of a volatile public. An official and permanent “bodyguard,” assigned by the Reich, would protect Lindbergh and his home.

Viewing the streets of Berlin on the morning after Kristallnacht, Hitler, it was said, told his men that the success felt like a “dream,” accomplished with a modicum of bloodshed and with the tacit blessings of the people. Through his skillful handling of a docile and able press, he had invented a monstrous propaganda machine and had turned his
greatest enemy, the voice of a free people, back on itself. He had broken not only the public will, but the resolve of Western officialdom.

On November 12, as Charles left to confer with Finance Minister Monnet in Paris, all the papers, except those in Germany, attacked him. The German atrocity had stoked the fire.
Pravda
continued to call him a “stupid liar,” a lackey and henchman of the Nazi Reich;
⁸
the British press began to wonder aloud whether Charles Lindbergh was a German spy.
⁹
The
Times
of London blackballed Anne’s book
Listen! The Wind
, omitting it from its Christmas list,
¹⁰
and the American press reported demands that Charles return the Nazi medal.
¹¹
Public pressure became so high in the United States that Transcontinental and Western Air were forced to drop Lindbergh’s name from their advertising slogan.
¹²
While Charles remained “marvelously untouched,”
¹³
Anne had deep forebodings. She believed it would be an age full of hatred, lies and slander that would require her total commitment, even at the cost of her principle.
¹⁴

To bolster her spirits, Betty Morrow shipped reviews
of Listen! The Wind
to Illiec. “Mrs. Lindbergh,” declared the
New York Times
, “has written a nearly perfect little book … It is the personal record of one who writes at least as well as her husband is said to fly.”
¹⁵
While
North to the Orient
had been touted as the book equal in expertise to her own flying, this time she was being treated as Charles’s equal—a writer who could fly like a hero.

To Anne, it was as if they were writing about someone else. Charles, on the other hand, felt unreserved joy. Anne was immensely touched by his praise.
¹⁶

In spite of the political snubs,
Listen! The Wind
did well in the American market. By November 1938, it was already in its fifth printing, in 1939, Anne would receive the American Booksellers Association Award for “favorite” nonfiction.
¹⁷
The praise came to her like a dove of peace from an American audience grown hostile. Now, the prospect of facing a public that admired her work, regardless of her husband’s politics, along with the offer of an honorary degree from Amherst, encouraged her to consider a trip to the States in the spring.
¹⁸
For the moment, though, she and Charles had to decide where to live.

As Daladier’s fear of invasion mounted,
¹⁹
and in spite of Hitler’s obvious threat to France, the Lindberghs decided to move to Paris. Charles believed he would be welcomed there.
²⁰

Anne finished packing on December 3 and took one last walk with Charles around the island. Sitting on the huge rock overlooking the sea, she experienced a bright awareness. “Journey pride.” She had felt it before; the very act of traveling, which defied the rhythms of the norm, seemed to carry the weight of sin. At eight
P.M.,
as the cart waited at the door and the trunks were piled high, the shores of Illiec were reminding her that nothing important would ever change. Yet she did feel a vast uncertainty.

She awakened and dressed Land and handed him to Charles so that she could climb onto the high cart. From there, she said good-bye to the servants at the lighted door and to Thor, standing inside. Jon, dressed in his town coat and huge hat, sat beside her, and Land clung to her in his fuzzy Eskimo suit.

In one of the most lyrical passages of her diaries, Anne describes the sights and sounds of their “strange exit” from the island: her child singing to the rhythm of the cart, the soft cloudy “mackerel” sky, and the “three-quarter moon” gleaming on the rocky coast of the sea.
²¹

While Anne was settling into their apartment on Avenue Maréchal-Maunouy, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, speaking at a banquet of the Zionist Society in Cleveland, on December 19, blasted Charles:

His comments were a reflection of the administration’s anger toward its officials in Berlin. President Roosevelt could not reconcile the current wave of Nazi brutality with the reports coming from the embassy. Resolved to purge the State Department of all pro-German influence,
he began to call his officers home. Truman Smith, summoned to Washington to be tested for diabetes, understood that his career was over. “Retirement at this crucial moment in history would be too cruel, too uselessly cruel,” Kay Smith wrote in her diary.
²³
Later, her daughter Kaetchen said that her father’s involvement with Lindbergh in Berlin “all but destroyed his career.”
²⁴
An era in American diplomacy was over; the new ambassador, Hugh Wilson,
²⁵
would also be recalled. Sympathetic to the Nazi regime, Wilson had been running the embassy as if it were an officers’ club, a salon for the American and German military and intellectual elite.
²⁶