Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power (33 page)

Smith’s appeal to Lindbergh, who at that point was living with his wife, Anne, in England to escape the constant publicity about them in the United States following the kidnapping and murder of their son in 1932, would prove to be a fateful initiative. Lindbergh’s response that he would be “
extremely interested
in seeing some of the German developments in both civil and military aviation” led to a series of visits to Germany—and charges that the aviator was sympathetic to Hitler’s regime. But it would also prove to be just the kind of breakthrough in military intelligence-gathering that Smith had hoped for.

Smith was certainly aware that the Germans would seek to exploit Lind-bergh’s visit for propaganda purposes, and he hoped to keep the press away from the famous aviator as much as he could. But when the dates for the first visit were set for July 22 to August 1, 1936, that meant the last day coincided with the opening of the Olympics. The Germans insisted that Lindbergh attend the opening ceremonies as Goering’s special guest. Smith understood this would attract just the kind of publicity he was hoping to avoid, but there was nothing he could do to prevent it. Instead, he focused on getting the Germans to agree to a long list of airplane factories, research facilities and Luftwaffe units that Lindbergh would be allowed to inspect, accompanied by either Captain Koenig or him. That way, the American attachés would be able to both view these installations and make valuable new contacts.

When the Lindberghs flew to Berlin in a private plane, they were greeted by Air Ministry officials, Lufthansa executives, other representatives of German aviation and the American military attachés. Truman and Kay had offered to put them up in their apartment, and the two couples immediately struck up a friendship. “
Colonel Smith is
alive, questioning, and talks well,” Anne Morrow Lindbergh recorded in her diary. “She is observant, intelligent, and amusing.”

Anne’s diary entries reflected her newcomer’s credulity about the new Germany (“The neatness, order, trimness, cleanliness . . . No sense of poverty . . . The sense of festivity, flags hung out”), but also contained numerous wry asides. At their official greeting, “Everyone is in uniform; lots of clicking of heels. ‘Yah.’ Clipped speech. They hardly notice me; very few women.” When she is separated from Charles, who is driven off in an open car accompanied by German officers while she and Kay and Kätchen Smith “drive behind quietly” in a closed car, she notes: “Ah, yes—subservience of women in Germany!” And as for the formalities: “This raising of the arms business adds to the complications of life. It is done so often and takes so much room.”

On the first full day of his visit, Charles was the guest of honor at an Air Club luncheon attended by senior German officials and American
diplomats. Knowing that he would be asked to speak, he had prepared a text and showed it to Truman ahead of time. His message was a somber one. “
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 from every nation in war,” he declared. “The army can no more stop an air attack than a suit of mail can stop a rifle bullet.”

Air power had changed “defense into attack,” and made it impossible “to protect our families with an army. Our libraries, our museums, every institution we value most, are laid bare to bombardment.” All of which underscored the importance of how the “revolutionary change” of aviation would be handled. “It is our responsibility to make sure that in doing so, we do not destroy the very things which we wish to protect,” Lindbergh asserted. His speech received widespread international coverage; the German press printed the text without offering any comments. According to Kay, “the Germans were not too pleased with the speech.” Later, while discussing plans for Lindbergh’s subsequent visits, one Air Ministry official added, “
But no more speeches
.”

The most important social event during Lindbergh’s visit was a formal luncheon at Goering’s official residence on Wilhelmstrasse. It was attended by many of the most important aviation officials, including the legendary World War I pilot Ernst Udet. Arriving in a black Mercedes escorted by several motorcycles, the Lindberghs and the Smiths were treated as honored guests. For Truman, this was the first time he had the chance to talk with the Luftwaffe’s chief—and he took full advantage of the occasion to observe him. “
Goering showed many facets
of his personality,” he noted. “In turn he was magnetic, genial, vain, intelligent, frightening, and grotesque. Despite excessive corpulence, it could be seen that in his youth he had been both handsome and formidable looking.”

Anne Lindbergh wrote that the forty-three-year-old Goering was “
blazoned in
white coat, with gold braid, good-looking, young, colossal—an inflated Alcibiades . . .” The host shook her hand but didn’t look at her. Anne was seated on Goering’s and his wife Emmy’s right and Kay on their left, but the host focused all his attention on Charles. When he
asked who had been his copilot and checked his instruments on one of his longer recent flights, Kay volunteered that it was Anne. In response, he used a familiar German expression that directly translates as: “
I find that to laugh
to death.” In other words, he didn’t believe her.

Lunch was an elaborate affair, with five different wines, one for each course, leaving Kay to marvel: “I have never tasted such nectar.” But if this display suitably impressed Goering’s guests, they were also curious about some of his stranger habits. Charles asked if they could see his pet lion cub, and the host happily obliged. They walked through large halls, decked out with old tapestries, illuminated as if they were pictures, and other artwork. Then they assembled in a library, and the doors were dramatically opened for the young lion. Kay estimated he was about three feet tall and four feet long, and “not too happy” when he saw the large gathering of people there. “I want you to see how nice my Augie is,” Goering announced. “Come here Augie.”

Goering was sitting on a sofa and the lion bounded to him, jumping up into his lap and licking his face. Kay kept a safe distance, with a table between her and this scene, but could clearly see what happened next. One of the German aides laughed. “The startled lion let loose a flood of yellow urine all over the snow white uniform!” Kay recalled. “A wave of red flowed up Goering’s neck.” The host pushed off the lion and jumped up, “his face red with anger, his blue eyes blazing.” Emmy Goering rushed over, putting her arms around him. “Hermann, Hermann, it is like a little baby,” she pleaded. “There are too many people!” Goering calmed down, conceding that the animal was like a little baby.

Truman had turned away, pretending not to witness all of this, and Anne had the same instinct. “
I see and say nothing
,” she recorded in her diary. While the guests studiously admired the library’s artwork, Goering rushed off to change. Returning, he was dressed “in a pongee suit, whiffs of eau de Cologne, and a diamond pin,” Anne wrote.

Although Kay had worried that Goering would hold this incident against Truman and the others in the room, the luncheon started a relationship that allowed the military attaché to maintain contact with the Luftwaffe chief for the rest of his tour in Berlin.
When Goering’s lion
grew too difficult to handle and was sent back to the Berlin Zoo, Truman
arranged for his daughter to see the animal there and even hold it on her lap. In the photo of that scene, Kätchen is looking at the camera, flashing a weak smile while wearing gloves to avoid touching the lion directly. “I was scared to death,” she recalls. “My father loved that picture.”

The lunch wasn’t the only occasion where Truman didn’t know what to say in Goering’s presence. As he recalled, during a meeting at the Air Club a year later, Goering kept going on about his devotion to Hitler. His eyes were moist when he declared: “
Smith, there are
only three truly great characters in all history: Buddha, Jesus Christ, and Adolf Hitler.” Referring to himself as usual in the third person in his writing, Truman noted: “This remark reduced the military attaché to speechlessness.”

But the real payoff of Lindbergh’s visit came in the form of the daily visits to Germany’s air installations.
At Rostock
, for instance, Lindbergh and Koenig, the assistant attaché, were allowed to inspect the new Heinkel He 111 medium bomber. Lindbergh concluded that it was comparable to British and American bombers, and superior to French ones. They also watched Udet fly the He 112, the prototype of a new fighter—and saw the plane disintegrate during a dive, forcing the famed pilot to parachute to safety. Still, based on what they saw of those and two other Heinkel planes (the He 70 observation plane, and the He 118 dive bomber), along with the company’s modern factory for navy planes at Warnemünde, the Americans were suitably impressed. “I have never seen four planes, each distinct in type and built by one manufacturer, which were so well designed,” Lindbergh told Smith when he returned to Berlin that evening.

Writing to the banker Harry Davison, Lindbergh pointed out that “
we have nothing
to compare in size to either the Heinkel or Junkers factories.” In another letter, he professed he was struck by “a spirit in Germany which I have not seen in any other country,” and the fact that the country’s new rulers had already built up “tremendous strength.”

Captain Koenig continued to be allowed to visit more airfields and factories after Lindbergh’s first visit, which meant that his reports about Germany’s air capabilities were packed with increasingly detailed rundowns. Based on such observations and the second visit by Lindbergh in October 1937, Smith reported to Washington that, if current trends continued, Germany would “
obtain technical parity
with the USA by 1941
or 1942.” If the United States slowed down its program for any reason, he warned further, “German air superiority will be realized still sooner.”

Goering may have deliberately exaggerated some of his claims to Lindbergh about Germany’s capabilities, but his guest was inclined to take them all seriously. At a cocktail party hosted by Ambassador Dodd’s wife, the society reporter Bella Fromm overheard Lindbergh telling Udet: “
German aviation
ranks higher than that in any other country. It is invincible.” And German officials boasted that Lindbergh would prove to be “the best promotion campaign we could possibly invest in.”

Smith and Koenig remained convinced that Lindbergh’s visits provided them with crucial information about Hitler’s aviation buildup, which they regularly conveyed to Washington. At the end of World War II when some columnists attacked Smith for his close ties to Lindbergh, FDR advisor Bernard Baruch wrote to then Chief of Staff General George Marshall on June 13, 1945: “
How well and how
timely were his [Smith’s] warnings about German preparations! And what little attention we paid to them!”

Of course, the reason why the Smith-Lindbergh relationship became controversial in the first place was the political trajectory of the aviator and his wife that can be traced to that first visit to Germany, which ended with his brief appearance at the opening ceremony of the Olympics in a VIP seat. By inviting Lindbergh and rolling out the red carpet for him everywhere, the Nazis hoped to demonstrate the strengths of the new Germany—both political and military. They would continue to do so during his subsequent four visits before the outbreak of the war in 1939.

Right after their first visit to Germany in 1936, both Charles and Anne were full of the kind of impressions that their hosts had tried so hard to convey. In a letter to her mother from Copenhagen on August 5, Anne wrote: “
I have had
ten days in Berlin—bursting to talk about it . . . The feeling that one was right in the center of the volcano of Europe . . .” She described the shock of seeing in person what she had been viewing through “the strictly puritanical view at home that dictatorships are of necessity wrong, evil, unstable, and no good can come of them, combined with the funny-paper view of Hitler as a clown.”

As for the real picture, as Anne saw it, “there is no question of the power, unity, and purposefulness of Germany. It is terrific. I have never in my life been so conscious of such a
directed
force. It is thrilling when seen manifested in the energy, pride, and morale of the people—especially the young people.” But Anne admitted this unity could also be terrifying as “a weapon made by one man but also to be used by one man.” Hitler, she added, “is like an inspired religious leader, and as such fanatical—a visionary who really wants the best for his country.” She pointed out many things she disliked about the new Germany: “their treatment of the Jews, their brute-force manner, their stupidity, their rudeness . . .” But she concluded “it could be a force for good in the world” if only the world would seek to acknowledge Germany’s new rulers, turning them “in the right direction” rather than ignoring or insulting them.

Also from Denmark, Charles wrote to Truman: “
While I still have
many reservations, I have come away with a feeling of great admiration for the German people.” As for Hitler, Lindbergh wrote in a letter to the banker Harry Davison, “
he is undoubtedly
a great man, and I believe he has done much for the German people.” While conceding that Hitler and the German people exhibited fanaticism, he added: “It is less than I expected . . .” And many of Hitler’s accomplishments would have been impossible “without some fanaticism.”

The event that would cement
Lindbergh’s reputation as pro-Nazi took place on October 18, 1938, during the flyer’s third visit. Hugh Wilson, who had recently returned to Germany to take up the post of ambassador, hosted a stag dinner that included Goering and other German aviation officials and experts. When Goering arrived with his aides, he greeted Wilson and then, with the ambassador at his side, made straight for Lindbergh. Holding a small red box in his hand, the Luftwaffe chief made a short speech in German and awarded Lindbergh the Service Cross of the German Eagle, one of the highest decorations for civilians. As Wilson confirmed later in a letter to Lindbergh, both of them were caught by surprise by this award, which was given for his services to aviation. Truman Smith, who was also present, noted there was “no possibility” for Lindbergh to have turned down the decoration. “To have done so would have been a personal affront to Ambassador
Wilson, his host for the evening, and to Minister Goering, who in a sense was a host in Germany,” he wrote.