Lindbergh Remembered As a Sympathizer of Nazi Regime

Charles A. Lindbergh, the aviation pioneer who died at his home in Hawaii of cancer yesterday at the age of 72, is remembered by Jews as a sympathizer with the Hitler regime in the late 1930s; as a man who accepted a medal from Hermann Goering and refused to return it even after his own country was at war with Germany; and as an advocate of American non-intervention in World War II who publicly accused American Jews of pushing the nation into war and called them a “danger” to their country because of “their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.”

Despite that statement, which Lindbergh made in a speech in Des Moines, Iowa on Sept. 11, 1941 after naming “the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt Administration” as the groups seeking American “entanglement in European affairs,” the flyer vigorously denied that he was anti-Semitic.

New York Times writer Alden Whitman recalled today that when, in an interview with Lindbergh two years ago he put the question to him, Lindbergh replied “Good God, no” and cited “his fondness for Jews he had known or dealt with.” According to Whitman and others who knew Lindbergh. the aviator had a “blind spot” that allowed him to criticize Hitler’s genocidal policies while at the same time supporting Nazi theories of racial elitism.

In his Des Moines speech. Lindbergh conceded, “No person with a sense of dignity of mankind can condone the persecution the Jewish race suffered in Germany.” But, he added, “Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way for they will be among the first to feel its consequences.”

REFUSED TO REPUDIATE HIS VIEWS

He preached to Jews that “tolerance is a virtue that depends on peace and strength. A few farsighted Jewish people realize this and stand opposed to intervention. But the majority still do not. Their greatest danger to their country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.”

Lindbergh was, at the time of that speech, an admired national hero whose 1927 solo flight across the Atlantic and subsequent mapping of international airline routes colored his remarks with the enormous prestige of his exploits. He refused to repudiate the Service Cross of the German Eagle which Goering awarded him in 1938 at the direction of Hitler while on a visit to Berlin. He said later that he felt Goering had given him the award “with good intent and friendship” and that he did not “want to throw it back in his face” however much “I disagreed with him about other things.”

Lindbergh visited Germany several times during the 1930s and expressed the view that the Nazi Luftwaffe was unbeatable and that Germany and Britain should cooperate on the basis of their racial ties against the menace of the Soviet Union. Neither those views nor his attitude towards Jews were ever repudiated. He re-affirmed them in his “Wartime Journals.” published in 1970.