consideration. The door of every home from Buckingham Palace down
was open to him, but the British afforded him all the privacy he
wanted. If it had been only privacy he sought, he could have led a
restful secluded life in the country home of Harold Nicolson, his
father-in-law’s biographer, and could have remained at peace until
Hitler disturbed it. Lindbergh spent just enough time in England to
convince him that England was soft, England couldn’t take it, England
would lose if it ever went to war. It was bad luck that Lindbergh
should have lived in England during a time when it _was_ soft, just
as we are soft today. It was the England of pacifism, faith in the
principle that if you want peace badly enough you can have it, just
by refusing to fight. It was the England of the Oxford Union when the
debating society boys voted not to fight “for King and Country.” It was
the England which needed waking up, just as we need it today. It was
an England that could get hard, if it had the time, just as we can get
hard too, if we have the time.
But Lindbergh formed his opinion of England then, and from his public
speeches he seems too stubborn to allow even the epic heroism of
England today in battle to change his judgment. Nicolson, long-standing
family friend of the Morrows, mailed Lindbergh a postcard every
week during the Battle of Britain, when the people of England were
persevering under a hurricane of bombs and were calling it their
“finest hour.” Each postcard had the one sentence: “Do you still think
we are soft?” Perhaps he still thinks so, long after the Germans
have stopped thinking so. At any rate, he left England for a tour of
the continent, and thereupon came the second turning point in the
development of his political views.
When he left America he left it embittered by the tragedy of his child,
and he left convinced that it would never have happened except in a
corrupt, gang-ridden democracy. It was, indeed, one of the lowest
periods in America’s public life, when kidnaping for ransom had become
widespread for the first time in any modern civilized state, and the
power of the gangs was a national humiliation. In a sense it was true
that it was the fault of democracy, but the virtue of democracy is
that slowly but almost always sooner or later we correct the faults
and bring under control the license which ever threatens democratic
liberty. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, however, had not grown up
when Lindbergh fled America.
He visited many places on the continent, but the visits to Germany and
the Soviet Union were decisive. Here were crystallized the political
ideas which had been fermenting within him ever since he felt the
thrill that came with the first taste of power over the throngs of
Americans gathered to adore him. In Russia he found the object of his
political hatred: the poverty, squalor, dirt, inefficiency, and cruelty
of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. He was treated well by the
Bolshevik authorities, who as Russians regarded him as an artist, a
genius of the air, a man who, like a great singer, could be considered
outside of politics.
His political slate was up to that time blank. The Russians often
welcome foreign celebrities supposed to be without politics. They gave
Harpo Marx a cordial reception. Lindbergh was shown the Red Army, its
Air Corps, the aviation factories, and no doubt the Bolsheviks thought
he was impressed. A layman traveling through Russia is shocked at the
wretched state of the people, their poor clothing, bad food, their
brutal overcrowding. You may be sure that this was not the prime object
of Lindbergh’s attention. Lindbergh is not interested in human beings.
He is interested in machines. In Russia he saw the poorest machine
he had ever seen. He observed that the ponderous Bolshevik society
operated with an unparalleled waste of man power and with unmatched
inefficiency. He saw the Soviet Air factories, and declared he detected
the slovenly workmanship which mars all Soviet production. He reviewed
portions of the Red Army Air Corps and registered his opinion that most
of the planes were obsolete or obsolescent.
In Nazi Germany Lindbergh found the object of his political admiration,
even affection, for here at last he had found the perfect machine.
Not only was it the antithesis in every material respect of the
Soviet Union, a streamlined, chromium-plated, eighteen-jewel model of
totalitarian clockwork, compared with the dilapidated Soviet jalopy,
but the Nazi machine also promised to banish the Soviet menace from the
face of the earth. Lindbergh had in Germany first an aesthetic delight
in the efficiency of the machine, then a moral satisfaction in the
thought that it would eradicate the blot of Bolshevism.
Finally a personal consideration came to him. The kidnaping and death
of his baby could never have happened in Nazi Germany. Common crime
was almost unknown in Nazi Germany. He failed to reflect that under
the dictators crime is reserved as the monopoly of the State, and that
from any normal human standpoint there is more crime committed in Nazi
Germany in a year than in America in ten years of its most besotted
gangster period, only in Germany it is all committed by the State.
Lindbergh loved Germany.
He saw the great Army, then in the last stages of readying itself to
spring upon Europe and set out to conquer the world. He saw the great
Luftwaffe, and Goering himself “surprised” him by pinning the Service
Cross of the Order of the German Eagle with Star on his breast before
he could help himself. Lindbergh has not yet divested himself of his
Nazi decoration. He laid down his commission because he quarreled with
the President of the United States, but he has no quarrel with Hitler.
Lindbergh was so delighted with the whole atmosphere of this perfectly
functioning totalitarian machine that he was contemplating making
his residence in Berlin, where an American news agency reported
that the apartment of a Jew, liquidated in the monster pogrom of
November 1938, had been offered him. He stayed long enough to become
convinced that the Nazis were the wave, which, whether we liked it
or not, would eventually engulf the world. Lindbergh liked it. Here
were no democratic gangsterism, corruption, private crime. Here were
no Bolshevik slackness, squalor, waste. Here was the New Order, of
superior men, like himself, of tall, blond, blue-eyed Aryans, like
himself, of Nordics, like himself. He felt among his own kind.
The Terror, the concentration camps, the murderous persecution of the
Jews and political opponents, the suppression of free speech, of the
press, of worship, even of thought and conscience! What of it! This was
only the scum on the wave of the future, and as for the suppression
of the press, _that_ at least was no scum, that was sheer progress.
The literal enslavement of a whole population! Well, they like it,
don’t they? What of the fact that the entire machine and every part
of it was built for war, and for war which if successful in Europe
would eventually reach and thrust at the heart of America? Nonsense,
the Germans could whip Europe all right, indeed Lindbergh declared his
conviction they would, but they intended no harm to America. He knew,
because hadn’t they been nice to him, an American? Anyway, he wouldn’t
say anything about it in public, but if the truth be known, America
could go a long way and do worse than by emulating some of the Nazis’
virtues.
Liberty? Bah, Lindbergh would take order and efficiency any day ahead
of liberty and inefficiency. Besides, Lindbergh was one of the class of
superior men, superior in talent, ability, and comprehension of what
society needs, who in a totalitarian state would enjoy all the freedom
he wanted since his ideas would conform with those of the rulers and he
would belong to the company of masters of the New Order. He had nothing
to fear from a Nazi conquest.
With these thoughts in mind Lindbergh returned first to England
and told them they had better give up because the Russians were no
good and the Germans knew it, and the Germans were strong enough to
conquer all Europe, and the proof was in the air forces he had just
inspected. His advice was believed to have had something to do with the
disaster of Munich, when Britain and France, convinced their cause
was hopeless, lost a war without fighting it. In every point of his
argument Lindbergh had agreed with Hitler, and in every point Lindbergh
and Hitler were correct, save in one point. They made a mistake about
England.
When England recovered from the shock of Munich, she began to throw
off her weakness and get tough. But Lindbergh had left for America. He
did not have time to see England recover the manhood which seemed lost
when he was there. Lindbergh came home now bursting with a message,
eager to lead, anxious to play a political role, and resolved as he has
been all his life to be content with nothing less than the greatest
role. “Lindbergh will be the next President of the United States. He
is our man.” So said the Belgian friend of the Nazis. The British
Lindbergh, Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, is
on the political bottom; he is in Brixton prison. Mosley is no less
sincere a man than Lindbergh. Vidkun Quisling is on the political top;
he is Hitler’s man in Norway. The political future of Lindbergh will
obviously depend largely upon whether Germany or our side wins the war.
Q. _Why did Lindbergh attack the Jews?_
A. Because anti-Semitism is an integral part of Hitlerism. If you
are not against Hitler you are for him, and if you are for Hitler
you will be compelled, sooner or later, and whether you intend it or
not, to become an anti-Semite. Every country now under Hitler’s heel
has officially sponsored and promoted anti-Semitism. It was easy to
read Lindbergh’s anti-Semitism between the lines of his references to
the “foreign” influences at work in America. He waited only until he
thought the time ripe for his public announcement, but the results
proved his calculation wrong. His statement against the Jews brought a
roar of repudiation from all creeds and classes of the nation, and the
only approval came from the group around Lindbergh who constitute what
might be called the America First’s Quisling Committee. Lindbergh’s
anti-Semitism could be sufficiently explained on the ground of
temperament. He admires, he understands, and loves only machines and
he could hardly be expected to understand or appreciate, much less
approve, the spiritual values which for thousands of years have upheld
the Jews through adversities which would have annihilated scores of
more numerous but less faithful communities.
Q. _What is to be the fate of the Jews?_
A. If Hitler’s power is not destroyed, if Hitler were to win, all Jews
under his domination would be condemned to slow death. Why slow? Why
doesn’t Hitler kill them all at once? Because he enjoys watching them
suffer, has a sadistic pleasure in it; because he needs their labor
power for the menial tasks to which he assigns them; and because he
probably feels that until he conquers the whole world it would be wiser
not to outrage what there is left of world opinion.
Besides, Hitler finds the Jews useful wherever he wishes to divide a
conquered population, as in France where the hostages he shoots are for
the most part called Jews or Communists. Every time he shoots a Jewish
hostage he says to the non-Jews, “You see, if it were not for your
Jews, you and I could get along perfectly together!” By this device of
making the Jew the scapegoat, he works to arouse anti-Semitism among
the vanquished and anti-Semitism in any form anywhere is the most
faithful handmaid of Hitlerism.
Therefore, he has not completely eliminated the Jews from any part of
his territories, but has allowed to remain, under conditions of the
most abject servitude, 200,000 out of the original 660,000 in Germany
proper; 40,000 out of the original 190,000 in Austria; 100,000 out of
380,000 in Czechoslovakia; 20,000 out of 156,000 in Holland; 30,000 out
of 63,000 in Belgium; an estimated 380,000 native and foreign Jews in
France, occupied and unoccupied; 750,000 in Hungary, including everyone
with one-quarter Jewish blood; 300,000 in truncated Rumania; 97,000 in
Latvia; 177,000 in Lithuania; 5,000 in Esthonia; and 100,000 in Greece.
These figures are cited by _The American Hebrew_. Poland must come
in a separate category since there Hitler has apparently set out to
exterminate the 3,000,000 Jews without the restraint he seems to have
put on himself elsewhere.
Nobody knows how many of the Polish Jews have died; their fate is only
more dreadful than that inflicted upon the entire Polish population.
Sober observers believe that twenty per cent of the Polish population
as a whole have been killed or have died as a result of the two
years of German and Russian occupation. If this is true, then of the
6,000,000 dead, one must reckon that at least 1,000,000 are Jews.
Whether this figure is too high or too low, the obvious intent of the
Germans in Poland is to wipe out the Jews altogether, and the wonder is
that any at all are living today.
In Soviet Russia the 5,000,000 Jews are not subject to any official
discrimination, but suffer as the rest of the population from the
generally wretched conditions of life aggravated by the war. These
conditions of life in the Soviet Union would be intolerable under
normal circumstances, especially since the Jews, like other faiths,
have been deprived of the facilities formally to practice their
religion, but now that Europe under the Nazis has become a charnel
house for Jews, the Soviet Union must seem like a haven of refuge.
There seems to be no alternative for the Jews except that they suffer
death at the hands of Hitlerism, or that Hitlerism be destroyed. It can
be destroyed better with the outspoken, avowed help of the Jews of the
world, and especially the Jews of America.
It is shocking, indeed, to observe the names of a few Jews on
isolationist committees, and one wonders what mental processes have
brought them there. Do they imagine that if America remains aloof
and Hitler wins the rest of the world, that the Jews, or any other
Americans, will be safe? No, if Hitler wins the rest of the world, the
Lindberghs of America will boldly put their anti-Semitism to work, and
the fate of the Jews in America will approximate that of their brothers
abroad. There is no choice for the Jews of America but to put all the
strength of their bodies and souls and purses to work against the enemy
of all mankind. There is no reason for them to apologize for fighting
the universal scourge. The anti-Semite is a friend of Hitler. The
friend of Hitler is the enemy of the United States.
Q. _I would like to read you a passage from a speech of Lindbergh
delivered shortly after the German invasion of Russia, and ask you
what you think of it, as it is quite confusing to me. The passage
reads: “The longer this war in Europe continues, the more confused its
issues become. When it started Germany and Russia were lined up against
England and France. Now, less than two years later we find Russia and
England fighting France and Germany. Winter before last, when Russia
was fighting Finland, the interventionists demanded that we send all
possible aid to Finland. Now, when Russia is fighting Finland again
they demand that we send all possible aid to Russia.... Finland and
France are now our enemies; Russia our friend. We have been asked to
defend the English way of life, and the Chinese way of life. We are
now asked to defend the Russian way of life.... Judging from Europe’s
record, if we enter this war, we can’t be sure whether we will have
Germany or Russia for a partner by the time we finish it. We don’t even
know whether we will end up with France or England on our side. It is
quite possible that we would find ourselves alone fighting the entire
world before it was over.”_
A. The confusion is of Lindbergh’s own making. There is a simple key
to all the apparent contradictions he brings out. The key is that
Hitler Germany was, is, and will remain the enemy until Hitlerism is
destroyed. The correct way to express the relationships which Lindbergh
has put so confusingly is: All nations fighting Germany are fighting
on our side; all nations fighting on the side of Germany are fighting
against us. When a nation, for any reason, switches sides, for or
against Germany, it automatically switches sides for or against us.
The question of friendship, of liking for any of these nations, or of
approval of their “way of life” does not decide the matter. The matter
is decided solely by the effect the particular nation is having on
Germany’s war.
Let us examine each of Lindbergh’s statements in turn. He says the
longer the war continues, the more confused its issues become. Not at
all--the longer it lasts the more plain it becomes that the issue is:
Germany against the world. Do not be confused by the fact that some
countries which were fighting Germany, now come out on Germany’s side.
As Germany conquers one country after another, she attempts to force
them into fighting for her, as in the case of France. No matter what
Hitler’s puppet government in France does, we know that the true France
is no friend of Germany, but an implacable enemy. Napoleon at one time
had half a dozen armies raised from among the peoples he had conquered,
marching under his banners. But the moment Napoleon suffered reverses,
they revolted. So it will be with Hitler.
Finland’s position is easy to understand if you reflect that she was
so much subject to Hitler’s coercion that she had to behave almost
as though she too had been conquered. It would have been suicide if
Finland, resisting Germany’s demands that she join the German side,
should have had to fight both the German and the Russian armies. That
way Poland was torn to pieces. It would have been unthinkable that
Finland, so recently mutilated by Russia, should have admitted the Red
Army to her territories. It was inevitable that Finland should choose
the lesser of two evils. And so we, understanding Finland’s plight,
must classify her on Germany’s side and embargo goods to her. But we
can still think of her as a friend, and only as a technical enemy by
force of circumstances.
The position of Russia is equally clear. Bolshevik Russia, the Soviet
Union, is nobody’s friend, and never pretended to be. She, like
Germany, is “against the world,” and by making the pact with Germany
at the beginning of the war she expected to see the world eventually
collapse and become her loot. Now that Germany has forced Russia to
fight, Russia should enjoy every material aid we can give her. As long
as she continues to fight Germany, we should do all we can to help
her blows injure our enemy. So it is only in order to confuse us that
Lindbergh phrases it the way he does: “Finland and France are now our
enemies; Russia our friend.”
Lindbergh says we are asked to defend the English, the Chinese, and now
the Russian way of life. It would not make any difference to us if the
English, the Chinese, and the Russians lived like lizards, crocodiles,
and alligators, so long as they were aiding directly and willingly
as the British, or directly though unwillingly, as the Russians, or
indirectly as the Chinese, to protect us by opposing our enemies. We
are only helping ourselves when we help them.
Lindbergh ends: “It is quite possible that we would find ourselves
alone fighting the entire world before it was over.” No, it is not just
“quite possible,” it is absolutely certain that we will find ourselves
fighting the entire world if we do not intervene to save some part of
the world to fight on our side.
Q. _In one of Lindbergh’s speeches he made the statement that “the only
reason we are in danger of becoming involved in this war is because
there are powerful elements who desire us to take a part.” Is this
true?_
A. There are powerful elements who desire us to take part, namely all
the intelligent patriotic Americans who wish to defend their country
while there is yet time, but that is not what Lindbergh meant. He is
using veiled language to express what his admirers, the Nazi Bundists,
the Fascists, and the Kluxers say openly when they charge that America
is being “driven into war by the Jews, the international bankers, and
the armaments manufacturers.” It is a rule of the politics of this era,
as Alexander Woollcott pointed out, that if you are not against Hitler,
you are for him, and sooner or later, willingly or unwillingly you
become lined up for all the things he stands for, some of which you may
not have wished to embrace, as racial hatred, anti-Semitism, and the
rule of the man with the gun.
The rich men in the America First Committee of Lindbergh and General
Wood, fancy they are protecting their investments by lining up against
beating Hitler, but if they permit him to win they will lose their
wealth as surely as if they had helped run up the Red Flag.
Q. _Can you give us a brief, objective resumé of Lindbergh’s argument
against our entering the war?_
A. Yes, he has set it forth very clearly in his “Letter to America”
published in _Collier’s_ magazine, where his principal ideas are
summed up, without any omission save the fact of his contempt for
the democracies and his admiration for the totalitarian system. It
runs as follows: England and France have only themselves to blame for
their defeat. (He takes for granted that England is defeated.) First,
because they did not make a reasonable adjustment with Germany while
there was still time. Second, because they made the Versailles treaty
too harsh to appease Germany and too lenient to hold her down. Third,
because when Germany rose under Hitler they did not take advantage of
the last chance to stop him when they could, at his reoccupation of the
Rhineland in 1936. They were always too late, and now we in America are
too late to stop him. We are unarmed and unable to fight. We have not
as many thoroughly modern fighting planes in our Army and Navy combined
as Germany produces in a single week. “If we enter the war now, it
would mean humiliation and defeat.” It is impossible for us to invade
Europe. On the other hand, it is impossible for Germany to invade us.
They cannot invade us by air over Greenland because it is too cold, nor
by way of South America because it is too far, and the South Americans
with our aid could prevent them from constructing landing fields. We
can stay out of the war, make ourselves impregnable, and afterward
force other nations to trade with us. That should be our policy.
Counterattacking, he demands to know if we enter the war, first, how
are we to defeat Germany? Second, how are we to “impose our ideology”
on our enemies? Third, what would it cost to win the war in American
lives and how long would the war last? Fourth, what are our war aims?
But he always comes back to the question: “How could we win the war if
we entered it?”
Q. _How can we win?_
A. I have an answer. There are too many surprises in warfare--witness
the German attack on Russia--for anyone, including the military
experts, to be sure of anything, and I am not a military expert. But
I should like to preface my reply to Lindbergh’s whole argument by
remarking that he assumes we have a choice in the matter, and that we
can avoid going to war if we want to. I do not believe we have any
choice except in the matter of timing. I should like to ask Lindbergh
if he believes that by adopting his complete program, even withdrawal
of all aid to Britain, thus insuring British defeat, we could thereby
induce Hitler to grant us better terms? Leaving aside all national
honor and pride, suppose we were to switch our policy completely and
not only abandoned Britain but like Vichy France made clandestine war
upon her, or openly stabbed her in the back with a declaration of war
à la Mussolini. Even in that case can anyone believe we would receive
any better treatment than Hitler has in store for Vichy France or his
ally Italy? It is plain that all we should gain by such conduct would
be an increase in the unbounded contempt he already has for us.
We have not the choice of war or isolation. We have only the choice of
war or surrender.