Charles Lindbergh

[superaielman]

Due to a pretty steady diet of Hearts of Iron 2, I've been reading up a fair bit about major figures from the WW2 era.  What really got my interest though was talking to Strago about Lindbergh and how his theater group was going to do a play on the life of Lindbergh.

What's the general opinion of him now? While he definitely appears to be a racist and his tolerance for Nazi Germany is horrifying, he was entirely correct about the threat that the Soviet Union posed towards Europe and the world at large. Does his condemnation of the Holocoust at all lessen the taint of not giving back the Iron Cross to Germany? His legacy as an aviator was forever tainted by these actions, but did Roosevelt made the right choice in banning him from the military entirely?


http://americanstoryproject.blogspot.com/ -The aforementioned theater group.
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I'd actually really like to ask my grandfather about this. As for my own opinion? He looks like a misguised isolationist till you delve into some of his comments at the time. Even though he condemned what Germany was doing to it's jews, he made no effort to fix it and his own comments about Jews were tinged with more than a little anti-semtism.

[Grefter]

I have not read up a great deal on the man, but generally speaking, anti-semitism was fairly prevalent in lots of places leading up to WW2 still, it wasn't until all the dust cleared that I think people got actually human about it.

There is tons of similar stories from England around the time as well, people who didn't know the realities of what was going on in Germany in the lead up to the war who praised Hitler and were going for the throats of the communist movement and Russia in general, the Black Shirts. (Orwell addresses them in some of his essays).  It is kind of disturbing really.

[Meeplelard]

As much as I'd like to comment on him...I don't know a lot about the guy.  I know some of the basics (like him being Pro-Germany in general), so I can't really form a well thought out opinion on him.

[Dunefar]

The fundamental problem is that both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were horrific dictatorships. If you support one over the other, you're still supporting a tyrant. This said, I try not to hold that against people too much, as it's a distinct product of the era.

Lindbergh wasn't a monster, nor was he a saint. He was a normal man trying to do what he thought was right in an era that made this all too easy to be wrong. If you want to go after him more, go after him for isolationism. It's one thing to support one dictatorship over another; hell, we propped up Stalin in WW2 with massive infusions of Lend/Lease. It's another to turn your nose up at all of it and let the tyrants run free. Yet despite that, he gave himself to the war effort once the USA got dragged into it and served loyally.

Wikipedia provides a decent primer on the man. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Lindbergh