Charles A. Lindbergh: Beloved by the Nazis

Here is an exceptional article from China Confidential. Charles A. Lindbergh is a name well known for his exploits in flying. What many do not know is that he was a racist and was a strong Nazi sympathizer. This is an interesting and very provocative read. Maybe you knew abaout Lindbergh, maybe you didn't know he was in so deep with the Nazis. Now you do. My family could not stand
Lindbergh and considered him a trairtor, and rightfully so.

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Art Sleuth Hunts Lost Lindbergh Aeropainting, a Nazi Propaganda Piece Presented by Goering
By Andre Pachter

For China Confidential


China Confidential: An international art investigator is on the trail of an unknown painting with an ugly provenance--and an evil political history.

The pre-World War II painting is believed to be a prime example of aeropittura, or aeropainting, which flourished in Mussolini's Italy. Aeropainting, which celebrated the technology and excitement of flight--and the thrill of aerial combat--was a sub-genre of Futurism, an artistic movement that was identified with Fascism.

The investigator, who has been involved in locating artworks looted from Jews during the Holocaust and in exposing art fraud and forgeries, says the aeropainting he seeks was commissioned as a propaganda ploy by Field Marshall Hermann Goering, at the suggestion of Joseph Goebbels, to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Charles A. Lindbergh's historic, 1927 New York-to-Paris flight. Goering was the head of Nazi Germany's air force, the Luftwaffe. Goebbels was the master propagandist and cultural ruler of the Nazi regime. He sponsored an aeropainting exhibit--the last of three such events--in Berlin in 1934.

Lindbergh, who overnight became an American aviation hero for becoming the first person to fly non-stop and alone across the Atlantic Ocean, was a rabid racist and Nazi sympathizer. He was a 25-year-old U.S. Air Mail pilot when he flew 3,600 miles--and into the hearts of people the world over-- in the Spirit of St. Louis, a single-seat, single-engine monoplane.

Goering first met Lindbergh in 1936 when he and his wife Anne attended the Summer Olympic Games in Berlin as the Nazi's personal guests.

Lindbergh visited Germany twice during the next two years. In 1937, according to the art sleuth, Goering gave Lindbergh the painting, which is said to depict the Spirit of St. Louis flying over Paris, circling the Eiffel Tower.

One year later, Goering, on behalf of the Nazi Fuhrer Adolf Hitler, presented Lindbergh with the Service Cross of the German Eagle for his contributions to aviation.

If not for the outbreak of World War II in 1939, the Lindberghs would have settled in Germany. Instead, they returned to the United States, and Lindbergh devoted himself to the isolationist cause, campaigning to keep the country out of the war.

It is not known if Lindbergh brought the painting back with him when he returned to the U.S. He may have left the gift with a friend in France, Dr. Alexis Carrel, a pro-Nazi, Nobel Prize-winning surgeon and eugenicist, with whom Lindbergh co-authored a book that was published in 1938. Carrel died in Paris in 1944 after a long and profitable association with the Nazi collaborationist Vichy French regime, which funded his research foundation.

The Lindbergh propaganda painting may have been created by Guglielmo Sansoni, who called himself Tato. One of his works, called Aerial Mission, depicts a Luftwaffe bomber in action--most likely over Guernica, the Basque capital. The Nazis and Fascists flew for General Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War; and the aerial bombardment of Guernica in 1937 by German and Italian warplanes killed 1,654 people.

The massacre is immortalized in Pablo Picasso's painting, Guernica.

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