Abstract
This tendentious work defends the pro-appeasement views and activities of Colonel Truman Smith, US military attaché in Berlin from 1935 to 1939, and his close friend Charles Lindbergh, while downplaying their anti-Semitism. Henry Gole praises Smith as ‘both a friend of Germany and an American patriot’ (p. xiii). He considers Lindbergh’s insistence that Nazi military power provided a necessary bulwark against an allegedly more dangerous Soviet Union (a view Smith shared) as ‘prophetic’ (p. 204), ignoring the consequences of encouraging Germany’s eastward expansion.
Gole shares Smith’s disdain for the anti-Nazi US ambassador to Germany William Dodd (1933–7), who refused on principle to attend the annual Nazi Party congresses at Nuremberg. The author neglects to mention that during these congresses, which featured vicious anti-Jewish harangues, Nuremberg was decorated with anti-Semitic posters and caricatures, and Jews feared leaving their homes. Smith was present at all four congresses held during his posting in Berlin.
Smith and his wife Kay much preferred Dodd’s successor Hugh Wilson, who applauded the Munich settlement in 1938. Indifferent to the Nazis’ savage street beatings and public humiliation of Jews, Kay in 1935 credited the Hitler regime with making Berlin safe: ‘all the drunks, bums, and homosexuals, etc.’ (p. 145) were imprisoned in concentration camps.
The book documents the Smiths’ intense hatred of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who denounced Lindbergh as a defeatist, like the Civil War’s pro-Confederate Copperheads. When Roosevelt died in 1945, the Smiths ‘burst into roars of delighted laughter’ because ‘the evil man was dead!’ (p. 276).
The author views favourably Truman Smith’s close personal friendships during the 1930s with German military commanders Field Marshall Walter von Reichenau and General Colonel Walter Warlimont. Gole fails to mention that von Reichenau, as commander of the German Sixth Army, presided over the annihilation of what he called ‘Jewish sub-humanity’ in Ukraine, or that a US military government tribunal in 1948 sentenced Warlimont to life imprisonment for war crimes.
Gole justifies Lindbergh’s acceptance from the monstrous Hermann Goering of the Service Cross of the German Eagle, one of the Hitler regime’s highest decorations for foreigners, on the grounds that turning it down would have offended the Nazi leader and Ambassador Wilson. To Smith, accepting the medal seemed ‘natural’ because the Munich conference had ‘much diminished’ tension in Europe (p. 222). His wife considered Goering ‘likeable’ (p. 208).
Gole maintains that Smith’s purpose in arranging Lindbergh’s much criticized visits to the Third Reich was to obtain useful information about German air power for US military intelligence. However, Lindbergh’s emphasis on Germany’s alleged vast air superiority contributed to the isolationist effort to persuade Americans that a war against Germany was unwinnable. In 1938 Lindbergh and his wife seriously considered moving to Nazi Germany. Oddly, Gole does not discuss Germany’s significant military involvement in the Spanish Civil War. Smith’s friend Warlimont was Hitler’s military envoy to Spain’s fascist General Francisco Franco.
Smith shared Lindbergh’s belief, voiced in his anti-Semitic speech at Des Moines in September 1941, that Roosevelt, the British, and the Jews, whom he alleged controlled America’s mass media, were pushing the United States into an unnecessary war with Germany. Lindbergh repeatedly told the American press during the period when Britain stood alone against the Axis military machine that he favoured neither side in the war. Lindbergh strongly opposed American Lend-Lease legislation to help defend Britain. The author implies that Americans who condemned the Des Moines speech were irrational, and dismisses Jewish radio commentator Walter Winchell’s denunciations of Lindbergh’s and Smith’s pro-appeasement stand as ‘personal attacks’ (p. 242). He appears unconcerned that the isolationist objective of denying military or economic assistance to an embattled Britain would probably have rendered Allied victory in World War II impossible. German conquest of Britain in 1940 or 1941 would have removed the only major military force opposing the Nazis between the fall of France and the invasion of the Soviet Union, and eliminated the possibility of bombing Germany and invading Nazi-occupied Western Europe.
The author notes but does not discuss Smith’s reservations about the post-war Nuremberg war crimes trials, and shares Smith’s view that denazification efforts impeded West German rearmament. Gole fails to discuss the persistence of Smith’s anti-Semitism in the post-war decades, or his association with anti-Israel extreme rightists such as Merwin Hart, who conflated Zionism with Communism. Gole acknowledges Smith’s support for Senator Joe McCarthy, but does not examine his reaction to McCarthy’s vicious attacks on Smith’s mentor George Marshall.
The book is strongly sympathetic to the discredited pre-Second World War American isolationist movement. The author does not seriously examine the anti-Semitism of either Truman Smith or Charles Lindbergh, and its influence in the US military both before and after the Second World War.