Service Cross of the German Eagle

The Service Cross of the German Eagle is both a physical decoration awarded to Charles A. Lindbergh by Nazi Germany and a recurring political symbol in the novel. Lindbergh’s acceptance made it a visible sign of his dealings with the Nazi regime; his refusal to return it after Kristallnacht intensified its significance, while Lionel Bengelsdorf later recast that same acceptance as a service to the United States. The medal’s meaning is therefore contested: its public presence offers a concrete object around which conflicting accounts of Lindbergh’s motives and loyalties gather.

Award and Political Background

During five visits to Germany, Lindbergh gained firsthand familiarity with the scale of its military power and was conspicuously welcomed by Hermann Göring. He also expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler and Germany. In 1936, the Nazi leadership awarded him the Service Cross of the German Eagle in the Führer’s name. The decoration was a gold cross bearing four swastikas, an emblematic form that made its political origin unmistakable.

The award came against the background of Nazi racial laws that had stripped German Jews of civil, social, and property rights, revoked their citizenship, and prohibited marriage between Jews and Aryans. By November 1938, the violence of Kristallnacht had made the persecution impossible to treat as an abstract matter of German policy. In the novel’s American Jewish household, Lindbergh’s name already provoked indignation. The medal joined his public admiration of Germany to a specific, portable object, giving that anger a visible focus.

Refusal and Public Display

After Kristallnacht, Lindbergh was urged to return the decoration as a public response to the Nazi assault on Jews. He declined, reasoning that surrendering the medal publicly would insult the Nazi leadership. That refusal gave the object a new significance: it was no longer only a record of an earlier honor, but a choice Lindbergh continued to stand behind after the regime’s persecution had become starkly evident.

The medal became part of the public case against Lindbergh when he was nominated by the Republicans to run against Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940. The left-wing newspaper PM placed a large photograph of it on its front page, then showed Lindbergh touring Germany in 1938 and shaking hands with Hermann Göring, the medal conspicuous around his neck. The sequence made the award an image that readers could connect directly to Lindbergh’s German visits and to the political question of what his admiration for the regime meant. The medal thus circulated beyond the circumstances of its presentation: in print, it became an argument addressed to the electorate.

Competing Interpretations

At a rally supporting Lindbergh, Lionel Bengelsdorf offered a sharply different explanation of the medal and the visits that preceded it. He claimed that Lindbergh had traveled to Germany as a secret adviser to the United States government, not as a sympathizer with Hitler. In this account, the visits helped strengthen American military preparedness and aviation, while accepting the Nazi decoration was a way of exploiting German admiration to protect American democracy and preserve neutrality through strength.

Bengelsdorf’s speech does not remove the medal’s associations; it tries to redirect them. The same acceptance that critics treated as a troubling alignment with Nazi Germany becomes, in his telling, a calculated act undertaken for American purposes. The contrast between the photographed medal and the rabbi’s defense makes the object a compact site of political dispute: its origin and public display are concrete, while the intention assigned to it remains contested. For the novel’s child narrator and his family, the decoration is inseparable from Lindbergh’s politics; Bengelsdorf’s explanation demonstrates how supporters attempt to make that symbol serve an opposing account.