linguistic:paraphrasing, information:classification
Antisemitism and views on race

Lindbergh's anticommunism resonated deeply with many Americans, while his pro- eugenics views and Nordicism enjoyed social acceptance. His speeches and writings reflected his adoption of views on race, religion, and eugenics, similar to those of the German Nazis, and he was suspected of being a Nazi sympathizer. However, during a speech in September 1941, Lindbergh stated "no person with a sense of the dignity of mankind can condone the persecution of the Jewish race in Germany." Interventionist pamphlets pointed out that his efforts were praised in Nazi Germany and included quotations such as "Racial strength is vital; politics, a luxury."

Roosevelt disliked Lindbergh's outspoken opposition to his administration's interventionist policies, telling Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, "If I should die tomorrow, I want you to know this, I am absolutely convinced Lindbergh is a Nazi." In 1941 he wrote to Secretary of War Henry Stimson: "When I read Lindbergh's speech I felt that it could not have been better put if it had been written by Goebbels himself. What a pity that this youngster has completely abandoned his belief in our form of government and has accepted Nazi methods because apparently they are efficient." Shortly after the war ended, Lindbergh toured a Nazi concentration camp, and wrote in his diary, "Here was a place where men and life and death had reached the lowest form of degradation. How could any reward in national progress even faintly justify the establishment and operation of such a place?"

Lindbergh seemed to state that he believed the survival of the white race was more important than the survival of democracy in Europe: "Our bond with Europe is one of race and not of political ideology," he declared. Critics have noticed an apparent influence on Lindbergh of German philosopher Oswald Spengler. Spengler was a conservative authoritarian popular during the interwar period, though he had fallen out of favor with the Nazis because he had not wholly subscribed to their theories of racial purity.

In a 1935 interview, Lindbergh stated "There is no escaping the fact that men were definitely not created equal..."

Lindbergh developed a long-term friendship with the automobile pioneer Henry Ford, who was well known for his antisemitic newspaper The Dearborn Independent. In a famous comment about Lindbergh to Detroit 's former FBI field office special agent in charge in July 1940, Ford said: "When Charles comes out here, we only talk about the Jews."

Lindbergh considered Russia a "semi-Asiatic" country compared to Germany, and he believed Communism was an ideology that would destroy the West's "racial strength" and replace everyone of European descent with "a pressing sea of Yellow, Black, and Brown". He stated that if he had to choose, he would rather see America allied with Nazi Germany than Soviet Russia. He preferred Nordics, but he believed, after Soviet Communism was defeated, Russia would be a valuable ally against potential aggression from East Asia.

Lindbergh elucidated his beliefs regarding the white race in a 1939 article in Reader's Digest:

We can have peace and security only so long as we band together to preserve that most priceless possession, our inheritance of European blood, only so long as we guard ourselves against attack by foreign armies and dilution by foreign races.

Lindbergh said certain races have "demonstrated superior ability in the design, manufacture, and operation of machines", and that "The growth of our western civilization has been closely related to this superiority." Lindbergh admired "the German genius for science and organization, the English genius for government and commerce, the French genius for living and the understanding of life". He believed, "in America they can be blended to form the greatest genius of all".

In his book The American Axis, Holocaust researcher and investigative journalist Max Wallace agreed with Franklin Roosevelt's assessment that Lindbergh was "pro-Nazi". However, he found that the Roosevelt Administration's accusations of dual loyalty or treason were unsubstantiated. Wallace considered Lindbergh to be a well-intentioned but bigoted and misguided Nazi sympathizer whose career as the leader of the isolationist movement had a destructive impact on Jewish people.

Lindbergh's Pulitzer Prize -winning biographer, A. Scott Berg, contended that Lindbergh was not so much a supporter of the Nazi regime as someone so stubborn in his convictions and relatively inexperienced in political maneuvering that he easily allowed rivals to portray him as one. Lindbergh's receipt of the Order of the German Eagle, presented in October 1938 by Generalfeldmarschall Hermann Göring on behalf of Führer Adolf Hitler, was approved without objection by the American embassy. Lindbergh returned to the United States in early 1939 to spread his message of nonintervention. Berg contended Lindbergh's views were commonplace in the United States in the interwar era. Lindbergh's support for the America First Committee was representative of the sentiments of a number of American people.

Berg also noted:

"As late as April 1939 — after Germany overtook Czechoslovakia — Lindbergh was willing to make excuses for Adolf Hitler. 'Much as I disapprove of many things Hitler had done', he wrote in his diary on April 2, 1939, 'I believe she has pursued the only consistent policy in Europe in recent years. I cannot support her broken promises, but she has only moved a little faster than other nations... in breaking promises. The question of right and wrong is one thing by law and another thing by history. ' "

Berg also explained that leading up to the war, Lindbergh believed the great battle would be between the Soviet Union and Germany, not fascism and democracy.

Wallace noted that it was difficult to find any social scientists among Lindbergh's contemporaries in the 1930s who found validity in racial explanations for human behavior. Wallace went on to observe, "throughout his life, eugenics would remain one of Lindbergh's enduring passions". After Jews began to be murdered on a large scale in 1940 and '41, many of those who had tolerated Hitler began to oppose the regime, but Lindbergh continued to support the regime until Germany declared war on the United States.

Lindbergh always championed military strength and alertness. He believed that a strong defensive war machine would make America an impenetrable fortress and defend the Western Hemisphere from an attack by foreign powers, and that this was the U.S. military's sole purpose.

While the attack on Pearl Harbor came as a shock to Lindbergh, he did predict that America's "wavering policy in the Philippines " would invite a brutal war there, and in one speech warned, "we should either fortify these islands adequately, or get out of them entirely."