The Rise and Fall of Charles Lindbergh, page 27
Meanwhile, in Bloomfield Hills, Anne was too busy to record her thoughts. That month she’d learned that their landlord would not be renewing their lease. The family would have to move again. Anne wrote to Charles, asking his advice. They had to be packed and out by September 1.
He could do nothing from New Guinea, he replied. She’d just have to find a place on her own. He knew she could do it. And it didn’t have to be in the Detroit area. He wasn’t returning to the Ford factory, so she was free to pick a home anywhere she wanted. “There is nothing I would rather do than spend a few months studying and writing in a beautiful and quiet place,” he wrote.
With four children, Anne doubted the house would be very quiet, though she could probably find something beautiful. By August she’d rented a place in Darien, Connecticut, that “looks rather like us and has apple trees and a brook for the children and lots of room for Jon’s goldfish and cocoons.”
Planning. Packing. Train tickets. Busyness.
Goodbyes.
She regretted leaving all the friends she’d made—her own friends. She felt, she said, “snatched away.”
One of the hardest leave-takings was from Evangeline. Charles’s mother had enjoyed her time with the family. Now “frail and so gallant,” she and “Brother” waved goodbye from the driveway. Anne felt she could hardly bear it.
In the middle of all this, at the end of August, Anne opened the newspaper to find a brief paragraph in the Detroit Free Press. That month, Paris had been liberated and the recently reinstated French government had turned the city’s Palais des Sports into a detention camp for civilians accused of collaborating with the Germans. One of those arrested was Dr. Carrel.
SEPTEMBER 1944
The transport plane rose over the base in Honolulu and above broken cumulus clouds. Charles sat in the last seat in the tail. Reclining as much as possible, he folded his hands behind his head. In just a few days he’d be with his family again. Would Anne sense his disappointment at being back?
He longed to stay in the Pacific, flying with his fighter group, weaving through black puffs of smoke and strafing enemy barges, but he knew he couldn’t. He wasn’t enlisted in the military, and he certainly wasn’t supposed to be flying missions. He’d carried out his assignment to survey aircraft thoroughly. Now he had no choice but to return to the countryside of Connecticut.
But oh, he wanted to stay!
And then he was back, joy “flooding everything,” Anne wrote in her diary about his homecoming on the twentieth, “the house, the stream, the woods, the flowing fall weather…the children. [Ansy] tossed up in his arms. Scott, shy and round-eyed. The boys now at last free to vent their bursting energy…roughhousing with him, building a dam across the stream, or just throwing stones and trying their aim against his.”
But where did she and Charles stand? She wasn’t sure. Something had changed. “Both of us are groping and a little lost,” she admitted, “but we are together.”
“After my death, the molecules of my being will return to the earth and the sky.”
—Charles Lindbergh
THE MORTAL SCIENTIST
There it was on page nineteen of the New York Times: DR. ALEXIS CARREL DIES IN PARIS AT 71. Charles read the brief article, struggling to take it in. A day earlier, on November 5, 1944, distressed over accusations that he was a Nazi collaborator, Dr. Carrel had had a fatal heart attack. To the very moment of his death, he had denied the charges.
Indignation surged through Charles. How dare the French suggest that Carrel had helped the Nazis? The scientist loathed the Germans and had often vented his disgust for them. He hadn’t been a collaborator. The charges were completely baseless.
Sadness followed indignation. The father figure who’d shaped his thinking about race and civilization was no more. “I wanted to pick up the phone and call [him], to hear his voice at the other end, the precise French accent, the dignity, the warmth of welcome. But he is dead, killed by the unfairness of war, by the false accusations of men who never made a fraction of the sacrifice he did for his country.” It was hard, Charles admitted, “to make myself realize he [was] gone.”
ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS
Charles was working as a test pilot again, this time for United Aircraft in Hartford, Connecticut. Absorbed in fighter designs and questions about fuel range, rate of climb, speed, and firepower, he spent little time with his family. He knew the end of the war in Europe was in sight. America’s entry into the conflict, along with Britain’s heroic efforts and the Russians’ forcing Hitler to fight on two fronts, had turned the tide.
Now, as the spring of 1945 bloomed, so did hopes of an imminent German surrender. At the end of March, American and British troops marched into Germany’s heartland. Moving eastward toward Berlin, they bombed cities and liberated concentration camps. What they found in those camps—gas chambers in which Jews, homosexuals, political opponents, and others had been murdered, ovens in which their bodies had been incinerated, piles of human ashes, stacks of corpses—sickened them. But it was the survivors who caused many battle-hardened men to break down and weep. Skeletal, starving, their heads shaved, some of the prisoners crowded around their liberators, kissing their arms and touching their jeeps to make sure it was true. Those who couldn’t walk crawled toward the soldiers. Many hid in their barracks, too afraid to come out.
“I couldn’t understand this,” said Private Leon Ball, recalling the day his infantry unit arrived at Buchenwald, one of the largest concentration camps in Germany. “So I walked around…I wanted to…understand more. I went to a building where they stored body parts from ‘medical experiments’ in jars of formaldehyde….I saw mounds of little children’s clothing. Little children who didn’t survive….But I never saw a child….If this could happen here, it could happen anywhere.”
As camp after camp was liberated, a cold anger toward the Germans welled up among Allied troops. Those living in the nearby towns insisted they hadn’t known about these atrocities. But the stench caused by overcrowded living conditions, as well as the odor of the crematories, wafted for miles over the countryside. It brought tears to the eyes of another Buchenwald liberator, Private Walter Lewis. “How,” he wondered, “could [Hitler] give such an order, so cruel to human beings?”
News of these gruesome discoveries quickly made its way back to the United States. In Connecticut, an air of depression overtook Charles and Anne. “Obviously, this winter and spring [we] are going through profound disillusionments & despairs,” she wrote to her mother in early April.
* * *
On Thursday evening, April 12, 1945, thirteen-year-old Jon and eight-year-old Land lay on the carpet in front of the radio listening to The Adventures of Daniel Boone. Suddenly, an announcer broke in. “We interrupt this program to bring you a special news bulletin….President Franklin Roosevelt is dead. The president died of a cerebral hemorrhage. All we know so far is the president died at [his retreat in] Warm Springs at Georgia.”
Neither Charles nor Anne mourned the president’s passing. While most of the world felt they’d lost a great leader, Charles viewed the event differently. The American people, he believed, were lucky to finally be rid of the man who’d tricked them into war with Germany.
And Charles felt as if a load had been lifted from his back. Practically overnight, official attitudes toward him changed. “The vindictiveness in Washington [has] practically disappeared [where I am] concerned,” he wrote an acquaintance from his America First days.
Indeed, Roosevelt had been dead just one week when military brass called Charles to the nation’s capital. The Reich’s surrender was expected any day. As soon as that happened, would Charles go to Germany to survey the Nazis’ developments in high-speed aircraft and missiles, as well as interview their developers? As he had in the South Pacific, he would travel as a civilian consultant attached to the Naval Technical Expedition.
Charles eagerly accepted. “Some say the Germans would have held supremacy of the air if they had been a year farther ahead with their jet and rocket development,” he wrote his mother. “It is important for us to find out what the real facts are, and that is my primary mission.”
On April 30, with Russian troops just yards from his underground bunker, Adolf Hitler took a cyanide capsule, then put a pistol to his head and pulled the trigger. German troops struggled on for a few more days without their Führer. But on May 6, they laid down their arms. The next morning, they surrendered unconditionally. After six catastrophic years, the war in Europe was over. The Third Reich was no more.
* * *
Five days later, Charles Lindbergh boarded a navy C-47 transport plane bound for Germany. Charles craned his neck and peered out of the porthole. Munich was coming into view. What he saw shocked him. Ruined walls. Piles of rubble. Blasted factories. “It is a city destroyed,” he said.
When he’d last set foot in Germany seven years ago, the country was still “proud” and “virile.” Now it felt like “hellish death.” Anger surged through him. He’d warned against Western civilization fighting itself. He’d predicted it would lead to needless destruction. Now, here was proof. Western civilization, he wrote in his journal, “has reaped the whirlwind [it] caused.”
The plane landed, then taxied over the rough runway with its gravel-filled bomb holes before coming to a stop beside the still-intact terminal. American soldiers occupied the building—“steel helmets, rifles, and khaki uniforms in the vestibule, jeeps and trucks parked all around outside.”
One of those soldiers was Colonel George Gifford, a United States Marine who spoke fluent German and would act as Lindbergh’s military escort. After introducing himself, Gifford led his guest to their jeep. Where did Charles want to go first? he asked. He expected Charles to say Dachau. The infamous concentration camp was just a few miles away and had become the place every GI and visiting dignitary went to see. The place, warned Gifford, was hard to take, but provided a clear reason for the fight.
“I prefer to miss Dachau,” replied Charles. Instead, he wanted to see the Eagle’s Nest, Hitler’s former headquarters at Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps.
With Gifford at the wheel, they drove along streets lined with mounds of rubble that had been pushed to the side to let traffic through. Block after block, Charles saw nothing but fallen walls, gutted interiors, collapsed ceilings. As they left the city, ruined buildings gave way to the burned and wrecked carcasses of German cars and trucks, hundreds of them, that had been strafed by low-flying Allied aircraft and bulldozed off the road as American troops advanced. Bomb craters dotted the surrounding hillside, and pine forests stood splintered and shattered. After turning up a winding, stone-paved road, they climbed into the mountains, around wreckage and rubble, until they arrived at the place where Hitler had lived, worked, and held many of his conferences.
Charles found himself standing in the Führer’s debris-strewn office. Gazing out the picture window, with its shattered glass, to the most beautiful mountain view he’d ever seen, Charles imagined “the man Hitler, now the myth Hitler.” Just a few weeks earlier, “he was here where I am standing, looking through that window, realizing the collapse of his dreams, still struggling desperately against overwhelming odds.”
Charles couldn’t grasp it. “Hitler, a man who controlled such power, who might have turned it to human good, who used it to such resulting evil: the best of his country dead; the cities destroyed; the population homeless and hungry; Germany overrun by…the armies of Soviet Russia,” he wrote in his journal later that day.
It was mild condemnation for a man who’d brought about the murder of some six million Jewish people, as well as countless others. But it was the closest Charles ever came to admitting he’d been wrong about Germany’s dictator.
For the next five weeks, Charles toured the country, inspecting Nazi engine works, plane factories, and research facilities. More importantly, he searched out the men who’d headed these projects and recruited them to work for the United States government. With promises of expunged war crime records and lucrative jobs, Charles helped bring hundreds of former Nazi scientists and their families to America to assist in the development of the country’s rocket and missile program. He particularly relished this part of the job, since every recruit meant one less scientist for the Soviets’ rocket program.
As he “confiscated documents, interrogated engineers and scientists, and picked [his] way through litter in looted laboratories,” Charles grew increasingly outraged at American treatment of the conquered Germans. At every turn, he saw old people hunting for scraps of food in army garbage pails, displaced families straggling along roadsides with carts and bundles, hungry children hanging around the Red Cross stand for bites of uneaten food. And while he conceded that Hitler and the Nazis had caused it, he placed most of the blame for their current misery on “well-fed [Americans]” who “stuffed themselves” while the German people suffered. “What right have we to damn the Nazi…while we carry on with such callousness and hatred in our hearts.” It made him feel ashamed, he wrote in his journal. “We in America are supposed to stand for different things.”
One morning, he and Gifford stopped to ask directions from a group of young German soldiers. In uniform but disarmed, they were plodding along a ruined road, apparently returning home from the war. They gave the Americans directions as best they could, “showing no trace of hatred or resentment, or of being whipped in battle,” noted Charles. “They looked like farmers’ sons.” He would have given them a ride if it hadn’t been against army regulations. Instead, he settled for sharing his rations.
But a few days later, when American officers asked him and Gifford to drive a Russian captain fifteen miles to Allied headquarters in Heidelberg, Charles balked. He didn’t “like [the Russian’s] face” or “the way he look[ed] at me.” Convinced the officer was “capable of anything,” Charles kept his right hand under his coat and on his gun. The exhausted captain soon fell asleep, but Charles remained on guard until they reached their destination.
THE MOUSERY
Toward the middle of June, Charles headed to Nordhausen in the Harz Mountains. He’d read reports of a V-2 rocket factory that had been built underground in a hill to avoid Allied bombing.
It was a pleasant drive. He and his new translator, Lieutenant E. H. Uellendahl, had spotted some canaries in the boughs of trees and stopped to taste the first strawberries of the season. As they neared the factory, however, they realized they could not reach its entrance without driving through the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp.
Although American troops had liberated the camp in early April, some prisoners remained behind because they had nowhere else to go. Their families had been killed, their homes confiscated, their villages reduced to rubble. They’d been joined by hundreds of other newly released and homeless prisoners of the Nazis, mostly Russians, Poles, and Czechs. Camping out in the crude wooden barracks, they lived in overcrowded, squalid conditions.
As Charles rode through the camp, he noted that their clothes were filthy but “adequate for the season.” And judging from their “faces and bodies,” he determined that they were “not badly fed.” But their odor! It assailed Charles’s nostrils. And it pricked at his memory. Where had he smelled it before?
On the mountainside above the camp, the Americans noticed a “low, small, factory-like building with a brick smoke stack.” None of their government reports had mentioned this structure. They turned, then headed up the hill to investigate.
The doors of the building stood wide open. The rodent smell was here, too, even stronger. The men stepped inside. On the concrete floor lay a corpse, carelessly covered with canvas. In another room stood two large cremation furnaces, “the steel stretchers for holding the bodies sticking out through the open doors,” said Charles.
He’d heard the reports about the German atrocities, horrors beyond imagining. But he hadn’t really believed them. How could something that evil be true? He’d put the worst rumors down as anti-German propaganda spread by the Jewish-controlled press.
But here, before his eyes, was terrible, terrible proof. “How could any reward in national progress even faintly justify [this]?” he asked himself in the pages of his journal.
A “man” wearing a prison costume shuffled into the room. “No,” Charles corrected himself, “a boy.” The uniform bagged around him. And as the boy moved closer, Charles saw he was a walking skeleton, “arms so thin that it seem[ed] only the skin is left to cover them.”
Speaking in German, with Uellendahl translating, the boy told them he was seventeen and that he’d been at the camp for three years. He led them outside to what was once an oblong pit, eight feet long, six feet wide, and six feet deep. It was one of several such pits, each heaped with ash.
“Twenty-five thousand in a year and a half,” the boy said. “And from each one there is only so much.” He cupped his hands to show the measure. Then he walked over to a mound of ash yet to be dumped into the pit. Reaching inside, he pulled out something. Charles recognized it. It was a knee joint.
Charles remembered. The rodentlike smell that hung so heavily about the Nazi victims had also hung heavily in a place of science, his place of science, the laboratory where he’d worked beside Dr. Carrel. It was the smell of the mousery. The mousery—that living experiment in survival of the fittest—where the strong had dominated the weak through intimidation, violence, and death. He had believed it “represented real life and the struggle for existence,” showed how “superior civilizations developed.” But had it represented the truth?
