Iceland is the site of the negotiations between President Charles A. Lindbergh and Adolf Hitler that produce the Iceland Understanding. Though the meetings themselves are described indirectly, their alleged bargain becomes a hinge in the novel’s political crisis: a peace presented as a way to keep the United States out of war is linked to Nazi expansion and the threatened submission of Britain to fascist rule.

The Iceland Understanding

In a family discussion about Germany’s advance into Russia, Herman Roth explains the understanding as a bargain between Lindbergh and Hitler. In his account, Lindbergh intends to present himself as the savior who will negotiate an end to the war, but only after Hitler has taken Russia, the Middle East, and whatever else he wants. Lindbergh would then call what Herman describes as a sham peace conference. Its price for peace and the avoidance of a German invasion of Britain would be an English fascist government, including a fascist prime minister in Downing Street. If the English refused, Herman argues, Hitler would invade with the consent of the American president.

That account is Herman’s interpretation of the agreement’s terms, not a scene of the negotiations themselves. The narrative does, however, establish that an Iceland understanding was reached and that Joachim von Ribbentrop negotiated at Hitler’s side throughout the meetings. Iceland therefore names a diplomatic arrangement whose public promise of peace conceals, in Herman’s reading, the coercive future it would impose on another country.

Competing accounts of Lindbergh

The meaning of the Iceland meetings is contested within the Roth family. Herman sees them as evidence that Lindbergh’s neutrality serves Hitler’s ambitions. His son Sandy, by contrast, has moved toward the administration’s position, and his reaction to Herman’s denunciation reveals how far he has drifted from his father’s political outlook. Herman’s warning is thus not only a claim about foreign policy; it also exposes a division within the household over what the agreement means and whether Lindbergh should be trusted.

Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf offers a defense of Lindbergh’s government. He says that, in recent conversations with the president, he has heard Lindbergh acknowledge earlier anti-Semitic statements as products of ignorance and accept Bengelsdorf’s account of Jewish life. Bengelsdorf presents the administration’s neutrality and its programs for Jewish Americans as evidence that Lindbergh is not an enemy or a dictator. His defense does not explain away Herman’s account of the Iceland bargain; instead, it shows how Bengelsdorf’s confidence in Lindbergh competes with Herman’s fear of what the understanding enables.

From secret negotiations to public ceremony

In spring 1942, the administration publicly celebrates what it calls the success of the Iceland Understanding with a White House state dinner honoring Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. He is identified as the negotiator seated beside Hitler throughout the Iceland meetings and as the first Nazi leader invited to the United States by a government official or agency since the fascists came to power. The dinner makes the consequences of the negotiations visible: what began as an understanding reached in Iceland is now marked by the formal welcome of a senior Nazi official in Washington.

The invitation provokes criticism from the liberal press and rallies and demonstrations across the country. Franklin D. Roosevelt also emerges from seclusion to urge Lindbergh to rescind it, warning of the consequences for freedom and for people whose ancestral countries live under Nazi rule. Iceland’s significance consequently extends beyond the negotiations themselves. It becomes the name attached to an agreement the administration celebrates as a diplomatic success and its opponents regard as bound up with appeasement and danger.