The Rise and Fall of Charles Lindbergh: Chapters 20–26

An investigation had been done by Arthur Koehler, the country’s preeminent expert on wood identification.

Radio stations and newspaper publishers sent special correspondents—gossip columnist Walter Winchell, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Edna Ferber, renowned newspaperman Damon Runyon—to the trial, in hopes of capturing the poignant, the shocking, and the tragic for listeners and readers all around the world.

Vendors hawked everything from the phony to the macabre—ladies’ lapel pins shaped like miniature ladders and forged photographs of Charles and Anne.

With Schwarzkopf beside him, he parked two blocks from the courthouse, then walked—with a sure stride and a resolute set to his jaw—through the jostling, pointing, shouting crowds to the courthouse.

The trial continued. The prosecution presented a good circumstantial case.

She’d been impressed by Reilly’s track record of getting his clients acquitted in difficult homicide cases.

He called a motley parade of poorly prepared witnesses whose testimonies were easily discredited by Wilentz on cross-examination.

So shady and disreputable were most of these witnesses that at one point Hauptmann looked over at Lloyd Fisher, one of the members of the defense team, and said in disgust, “Where are they getting these witnesses? They’re killing me.”

All through the day—as the jurors remained sequestered in their guarded room and reporters and broadcasters spread speculative stories—tension mounted.

Dr. Carrel peered at it through his pince-nez, considering where to make the incision. He held out a gloved hand and was given a scalpel. Deftly, he sliced open the animal’s neck.

If organs could be kept alive indefinitely, they could be used as replacement parts to keep members of the “higher council” alive forever. Living uninterrupted for centuries, these men could gather knowledge, reach conclusions, and issue edicts telling the rest of mankind how to live.

At noon on March 7, 1936—two months after the Lindberghs’ arrival in Europe—Adolf Hitler, the Nazi dictator of Germany, stepped to the rostrum in the Reichstag, his country’s parliament.

He had purposely flouted the Treaty of Versailles.

Reported one American journalist, “Their hands raised in slavish salute, their faces now contorted with hysteria, their mouths wide open, shouting, shouting, their eyes, burning with fanaticism, glued on their new god, their Führer, Hitler.”

Standing at the rostrum, his head lowered as if in humility, he now waited out the exuberant pandemonium of the Reichstag.

Standing at the rostrum, his head lowered as if in humility, he now waited out the exuberant pandemonium of the Reichstag.

On a Sunday morning in May 1936, Major Truman Smith, military attaché to the American embassy in Berlin, sat down to breakfast with his wife, Kay.

What exactly were the Nazis building? Despite his well-cultivated connections inside the Reich, his information remained sketchy.

With the world spotlight on Germany, it was his chance to extol the virtues of the Third Reich, cast himself as a strong, sane, and tolerant leader, and prove that Germany had crawled out of the economic ditch of the Depression.

Charles ignored Straus’s entreaty.

Even the virulent anti-Semitic newspaper Der Stürmer had temporarily ceased publication.

Having witnessed Nazi “virility” and “efficiency,” he felt that the British people’s “softness” and “stupidity” were obvious in comparison.

England “saw not the future, but the past,” he testily wrote in his journal.

But this second April in Kent was not as idyllic as the first.

Soaring above hilltop castles and the spires of cathedrals, they followed a tributary of the Rhine River until they finally landed in Munich.

The memorandum was eventually sent to the United States War Department, and not only detailed all Charles had seen, but also estimated the strength of the entire Luftwaffe. Charles was convinced that strength was awesome, easily outstripping the French and British air forces, and quickly closing in on the United States.

Any fanaticism he glimpsed was offset by the Germans’ “sense of decency and value which in many ways is far ahead of our own.”

As soon as he was sworn in, however, Seyss-Inquart—following Hitler’s orders—cabled Berlin and begged for Germany’s help in restoring order. It was a ruse, of course, an excuse for a German invasion of Austria.

A majority of the Sudetenland’s inhabitants remained ethnic Germans, and many of them genuinely wanted to return to German rule. Using their desire as pretext, Hitler demanded the Sudetenland be handed over to him.

While French prime minister Edouard Daladier and British prime minister Neville Chamberlain desperately searched for ways to avoid a fight with Germany, Hitler grew angrier and more strident, and the Czechs grew even more stubborn.

That summer, over breakfasts of black bread and oatmeal, during walks along the wave-pounded shore, in the flickering shadows cast by Carrel’s fireplace, the two talked about the precarious state of civilization and race betterment.

He hadn’t lost confidence in the projects, but “the problems of civilization and survival towered above [all else],” he later explained. “Why spend time on biological experiments when our very civilization was at stake, when one of history’s greatest cataclysms impended?”

Charles had no qualms about leaving Jon with the local help Anne had quickly hired.

Charles’s dire predictions merely confirmed the prime minister’s belief that appeasement was the only possible choice.

An agreement had been concluded between Britain, France and Germany. The Sudetenland would be ceded to Hitler. In return, the Führer promised not to invade any other countries.

But he knew this wouldn’t happen, because of the “shortsightedness and vacillation” of British and French statesmen.

At first, most Americans sided with charming, savvy President Roosevelt.

Reported the New York Times, every time Charles “flashed [his] familiar, winsome smile, a murmur of approval ran through the hall. He still seemed to be one of the world’s most fascinating figures.”

Charles hadn’t forgotten, either. He smiled genially, knowing full well he was being scrutinized. “Roosevelt judges his man quickly and plays him cleverly,” he wrote that night in his journal.

The war clouds over Europe darkened. And Charles still mulled over his actions should war erupt. He wanted to keep his fellow Americans from getting embroiled in the conflict.