Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler is the central foreign power behind the novel’s alternate American history: his regime persecutes Jews in Europe while using Charles A. Lindbergh’s fame and political authority to keep the United States neutral and advance German aims. For the Roth family, Hitler is not an abstraction confined to distant war reports. He is the source of a political danger they recognize before many of their neighbors do, and, in the novel’s eventual explanation, the person whose agents have manipulated the Lindbergh family and the American presidency for years.

Identity and Historical Record

The narrative first establishes Hitler through the contrast between Lindbergh’s admiration for him and the persecution already underway in Germany. After the Lindbergh baby kidnapping and the family’s move to a village in England, Charles A. Lindbergh made five visits to Nazi Germany. He was received ceremonially by Hermann Göring, awarded the Service Cross of the German Eagle in the Führer’s name, and spoke approvingly of Hitler and Germany. These expressions of regard came after the Nuremberg Laws had stripped German Jews of civil, social, and property rights, revoked their citizenship, and prohibited intermarriage with Aryans.

The contrast sharpens in 1938. During Kristallnacht, Nazi-organized violence destroyed synagogues, Jewish homes, and businesses, and Jewish people were taken from their homes and transported to concentration camps. When Lindbergh was urged to return the medal he had received from Göring, he refused, calling a public return an unnecessary insult to Nazi leaders. In the Roth household, Lindbergh’s name consequently became a source of anger, associated with the same political threat as Father Coughlin’s broadcasts. Hitler himself is less often present in these early scenes than the consequences of his rule, but those consequences make Lindbergh’s public respect for him impossible for the family to regard as harmless.

The book also places Hitler in a wider network of American sympathizers and political allies. Henry Ford had published a series of antisemitic articles in the Dearborn Independent and later accepted the Service Cross of the German Eagle from Hitler’s government. Hitler had described Ford as a leader of the growing fascist movement in America. That history makes Lindbergh’s own acceptance of the German honor part of a broader political pattern rather than an isolated gesture. The novel’s historical frame thus links Nazi influence abroad with American figures whose status and institutions give prejudice domestic reach.

Lindbergh, Neutrality, and the Public Case for Hitler

After returning to the United States in 1939, Lindbergh traveled on behalf of the government to promote aviation and the modernization of the military air wing. As the war in Europe expanded, he used public meetings, radio broadcasts, and magazine articles to argue against American intervention and aid to Britain and France. In a speech at Des Moines, he identified Jewish people as one of the groups pressing the country toward war, presenting a minority population as a danger to American interests. Hitler’s policies and ambitions were thereby defended indirectly through an argument that cast opposition to Nazi Germany as foreign influence and a threat to national safety.

Lionel Bengelsdorf supplied a more explicit defense of Lindbergh’s earlier German visits. Speaking on the radio, he claimed that Lindbergh had traveled as a secret adviser to the United States government, gathering knowledge that strengthened American military preparedness rather than acting as Hitler’s supporter. At Madison Square Garden, Bengelsdorf argued that the European war was not America’s war. He condemned the persecution of German Jews, including scholars he had known in Germany, but maintained that American entry into the conflict would not relieve their suffering and might worsen their situation. The address allowed Lindbergh’s supporters to acknowledge Nazi persecution while continuing to oppose action against the regime responsible for it.

The Roth family’s arguments expose the gulf between that reassuring public account and the danger they see. At dinner, Herman Roth insists that Hitler is not simply another European ruler in a succession of old wars: he has conquered much of Europe, is fighting the Soviet Union, and has shown through his treatment of Jews what American Jews could face if his power extended further. Herman argues that Lindbergh’s agreement with Hitler offers no real protection, because Hitler has broken previous agreements. Bengelsdorf answers that Lindbergh is a democratically elected leader, not a dictator, and presents the Office of American Absorption as evidence that the administration intends to include Jewish Americans in national life. The disagreement turns on competing meanings of safety: for Bengelsdorf, neutrality and assimilation promise security; for Herman, Hitler’s record makes those assurances dangerously unreliable.

After Lindbergh’s election, he travels to Iceland and signs an understanding with Hitler guaranteeing peaceful relations between Germany and the United States. The agreement alarms Democrats and opponents of Lindbergh, who see a meeting with a fascist ruler on territory occupied by Germany’s war as tacit acceptance of conquest. Lindbergh then announces that the United States will not join the European war, while continuing to arm and train the country and invest in aviation. The stated policy is neutrality; its practical consequence, as later developments make clear, is time and strategic room for Hitler’s Germany.

The War and the Meaning of Neutrality

When Germany attacks the Soviet Union in June 1941, Lindbergh addresses the nation from the White House and praises Hitler’s assault as a defense against communism. He argues that German success could spare the United States from confronting a communist power and suggests that American forces might otherwise have had to fight a war Germany is now conducting. This speech makes the administration’s neutrality more than a refusal to enter the conflict: it identifies German military success as beneficial to the United States.

Herman Roth sees the same events from the opposing moral and political perspective. As German forces prepare a renewed offensive toward the Caucasus, he fears that a Soviet collapse would transfer immense resources to Germany and leave millions of Russian Jews under Nazi rule. The advance of the German army is, to him, both a strategic threat and a danger to Jewish communities, including relatives on his wife’s side of the family. Meanwhile, Lindbergh’s public reassurance avoids naming the most disturbing subjects: he does not mention the German-American Bund, the Iceland Understanding, or the connections between his policy and Nazi aims. The silence helps preserve his appeal even as his administration’s stance favors the destruction of the Soviet Union by German military power.

The novel gives that political evasion a concrete international explanation only much later. In the account attributed to Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Nazi agents have held the Lindberghs’ kidnapped child as leverage since 1932. Hitler’s government, according to this account, dictated where the family would live, whom they would befriend, and what political views Lindbergh would express. After allowing the parents to see their son in Germany in 1938, the regime ordered them back to the United States and directed Lindbergh to promote America First. His public campaign, the account says, followed speeches and instructions supplied by Berlin, including the speech accepting the Republican nomination, which had been written by Joseph Goebbels.

The Hidden Leverage and the Presidency

In this retrospective explanation, Hitler does not merely benefit from Lindbergh’s politics; he directs them. After Lindbergh defeats Franklin D. Roosevelt, Hitler takes charge of preparing a foreign policy that will serve German wartime objectives. He consults with Göring, his designated successor and director of the German economy, and Heinrich Himmler, who oversees Germany’s internal affairs and the Gestapo. The new account reframes Lindbergh’s presidency as part of a German strategy to prevent the United States from entering the war while Germany fights the Soviet Union and pursues its imperial ambitions.

Himmler also presses Lindbergh to impose increasingly repressive measures on American Jews. The administration establishes the Office of American Absorption, whose programs include Just Folks and Homestead 42. Bengelsdorf describes such programs as invitations to participate more fully in national life; the later account presents them as measures meant to answer Himmler’s demands while initially limiting the harm to American Jews. The gap between these descriptions is crucial. What appears to the public as a policy of assimilation is revealed as part of a larger system of pressure and intended marginalization.

The account further describes Lindbergh’s resistance as limited and compromised by the threat to his son. Himmler rebukes him by invoking the child and the boy’s upbringing in Germany, and the novel portrays Lindbergh as a weak instrument for Hitler’s purposes rather than the fully committed ideologue the Nazi leadership had hoped to control. His election nevertheless gives Germany valuable time: it delays the possibility of American intervention and, in the account, gives German industry and science two additional years to prepare for a future conflict with the United States. Hitler’s strategy therefore depends not only on ideological sympathy but also on the political consequences of a seemingly constitutional American presidency.

When Lindbergh disappears in October 1942, the reported circumstances initially create a public crisis. British intelligence reports that he is alive in Berlin after a staged disappearance involving the Spirit of St. Louis, a German submarine, and a flight to Hitler’s retreat at Berchtesgaden. The later account connects the disappearance to Berlin’s decision to remove a president who had not carried out the regime’s demands as completely as it wished. Hitler’s use of Lindbergh thus ends not with a public break between the two leaders but with the president’s removal and a transfer of power to Acting President Wheeler, who implements measures that Lindbergh had resisted.

Narrative Role and Significance

Hitler’s power in the story operates at two levels. In the Roth family’s ordinary life, his rule is visible in news from Europe, in the threat Herman hears behind Lindbergh’s assurances, and in the growing fear that American Jews may be abandoned or targeted. At the level of the novel’s concealed history, his influence reaches into American elections and domestic policy through the hostage-taking of the Lindbergh child. The late revelation turns political unease into a causal history: the public story of Lindbergh’s admiration and neutrality has concealed coercion, collaboration, and a struggle over how much the United States will resist.

The structure also preserves the difference between public persuasion and private explanation. Bengelsdorf’s broadcasts translate Lindbergh’s record into a reassuring account of military service and Jewish inclusion; Herman’s objections interpret the same record through Hitler’s broken agreements and the persecution of Jews. The account attributed to Anne Morrow Lindbergh then supplies information neither speaker could establish in those earlier scenes. It does not erase the real consequences of Lindbergh’s policies: whatever the hidden pressure behind them, his presidency delays American resistance to Nazi Germany. Hitler is therefore both the distant dictator named in political arguments and the concealed author of the novel’s central political trap, while the competing accounts show how easily a policy that serves an aggressor can be presented as peace, security, and national self-interest.