On May 20, 1927, Charles Lindbergh took off from Roosevelt Field on Long Island, New York, aboard the Spirit of St. Louis on his historic non-stop solo flight to France. Thirty-three and a half hours later he became the first person to successfully complete the non-stop trans-Atlantic flight and was awarded the Orteig Prize of $25,000. Four prior attempts by other aviators resulted in the loss of six lives, yet Lindbergh persisted in his effort to do it solo and in a single-engine airplane. His achievement made him an American hero. He was hailed at a level beyond anything the world had ever seen.
Tragedy struck Lindbergh and his new wife, Ann Morrow Lindbergh on March 1, 1932, when their first-born child went missing. The child’s body was found weeks later. The investigation into the kidnapping and death of the Lindbergh baby resulted in the conviction and subsequent execution of Bruno Hauptmann, a German-born carpenter who was accused of the kidnapping. The Lindbergh family left America and moved to Europe.
In Germany, Adolf Hiltler began his quest for power a mere 72 days after Lindbergh’s trans-Atlantic flight, when the Nazis gathered at a party convention in Nuremberg and Hitler stated that the German people “want a leadership in which it can believe, and nothing more.”
On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany. By May of that year, the public burning of books written by Jews was ordered.
In 1938, Lindbergh was dining in Germany with several distinguished guests including German Air Minister Hermann Goering. Goering presented Lindbergh with the Service Cross of the German Eagle – an honor which had previously been bestowed upon Henry Ford and IBM Chairman, Thomas Watson.
As a result, Lindbergh was accused by many to be a Nazi sympathizer. This opinion became wide-spread when Lindbergh delivered his America First speech in Des Moines, Iowa on September 11, 1941.
In his speech called Who are the War Aggressors? Lindbergh said, ”the Roosevelt administration, the British “race,” and the “Jewish race” were pushing America towards war.” The speech could have been delivered by Hitler, its message of anti-Semitism was that appalling to the American people. From where, the American people wondered, had Lindbergh’s opinions gestated?
In her book, Suspect No. 1, The Man Who Got Away, Lise Pearlman provides some clues. Her research led her to make a remarkable claim – Lindbergh, like Hitler, believed in eugenics. Both men adhered to this principle which aimed at improving the genetic quality of human populations through selective breeding and controlled reproduction, and the elimination of undesirables from the gene pool.
Hitler termed it ‘Herrenrasse’, a Master Race, which he thought of as an Aryan race made up of the descendants of Nordic Europeans. The Nazis declared Aryans as being superior to all other races. The Nazis actually created a certificate designated as the Aryan Certificate to be issued to those that met the criteria outlined in a document they implemented. The Slavs, Roma, and Jews were defined as being racially inferior and non-Aryan “Untermenschen“, and were thus considered to be a danger to the Aryan or Germanic master race. This became the platform for the hate and exclusion of Jews in Eastern Europe and quickly led to Hitler’s so-called Final Solution, the extermination of Jews, the Holocaust.
Lise Pearlman did a deep dive into the key evidence of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping. After intense scrutiny of forensic evidence and background evidence on Charles Lindbergh, Pearlman presents a solid thesis that Bruno Hauptmann was not guilty of the kidnapping and death of Charles Lindbergh, Jr. Rather it was Charles Lindbergh himself who was responsible.
Pearlman’s conjecture? Charles was convinced that his sickly son was likely never to be a magnificent specimen of a man. The child appears to have been afflicted with a rickets-like condition that affected the development of his bones, along with other conditions that made the lad fall far short of Lindbergh’s expectations for his progeny. In the end, it was Lindbergh’s allegiance to the theory of eugenics that led him, as it did Adolf Hitler, to his own Final Solution.
Conjecture may be too severe a term given the exhaustive research done by Pearlman. She carefully annotates her findings in her nearly 600-page book. It is always difficult to deconstruct one’s thoughts about a hero such as Lindbergh, but long-held beliefs in the face of thoroughly researched forensic evidence may, in the end, be dissolved.
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