The American Axis: Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and the Rise of the Third Reich

by Max Wallace

Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh have long been exalted as two of the greatest American icons of the twentieth century. From award-winning journalist Max Wallace comes groundbreaking and astonishing revelations about the poisonous effect these two so-called American heroes had on Western democracy. In his wide ranging investigation, Wallace goes further than any other historian to expose how Ford and Lindbergh-acting in league with the Nazis-almost brought democratic Europe to the verge of extinction.

With unprecedented access to declassified FBI and military intelligence files, Wallace reveals how the close friendship and ideological bond between automotive pioneer Ford and aviator Lindbergh culminated in an abuse of power that helped strengthen Hitler's regime and undermined the Allied war effort. Wallace traces Henry Ford's ties to Nazi Germany back as far as the 1920s, presenting compelling evidence of a financial paper trail proving that Ford subsidized the rise to power of Adolph Hitler, who described Ford as "my inspiration." For the first time, the genesis of Ford's notorious Anti-Semitism is The American Axis proves that Ford's private secretary and life-long confidante was a German spy, who channeled his employer's Jew-baiting crusades to further the cause of the Third Reich.

Lindbergh's own anti-Semitism and white-Supremacist views captured the attention of the Nazis, who soon manipulated him in their clandestine Fifth Column efforts. As the first unauthorized biographer to gain access to the Lindbergh archives, Wallace paints a substantially more chilling portrait of Lindbergh's pre-war activities than any previous historian and produces new evidence that the Nazis secretly plotted to install Lindbergh as the leader of the movement to keep America out of World War Two.

The most controversial corporate investigation since IBM and the Holocaust, the book reveals that the Ford Motor Company's military and political complicity in the Third Reich war effort was considerably stronger than the company has acknowledged and that a US Army post-war investigation concluded that the company had become "an arsenal of Nazism." Wallace disputes a recent internal investigation into the use of slave labor at Ford's German plant during World War II - which company officials claimed as a vindication of its wartime activities - and reveals that corporate President Edsel Ford was about to be indicted by the US government for "Trading With the Enemy" at the time of his 1943 death.

The American Axis is not only a mesmerizing, cautionary tale, but a compelling historical exposé.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, World War II, Historical, Politics, Biography, American History

496 pages, ebook

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

MAX WALLACE is a writer and journalist. His book The American Axis, about the Nazi affiliations of Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh, was endorsed by two-time Pulitzer-winner Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Wallace co-authored the New York Timesbestseller Love & Death, about the final days of Kurt Cobain. Earlier, he wrote Muhammad Ali's Greatest Fight: Cassius Clay vs. the United States of America. Ali himself wrote the foreword. From 1996-2000, Wallace worked for Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation documenting the video testimonies of Holocaust survivors. As a journalist, Wallace has contributed to the Sunday New York Times as a guest columnist as well as the BBC. He has appeared three times on NBC's Today, as well as on Dateline NBC, Anderson Cooper 360°, CBS This Morning, and Good Morning America, plus numerous appearances on CSPAN's Book TV.

Reviews

[Trevor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Someone must have recommended that I read this – but I’ve forgotten who or why they might have thought to do so. Earlier in the year I was working on a project funded by Ford Australia and now I’m not sure if that was what encouraged someone to recommend it to me. Hopeless... Anyway, this is a very interesting book – although, I know so little about either man (Ford or Lindbergh) that you could basically get away with telling me anything about them and I would have to take it more or less at face value.

Well, that's mostly true. I was a little concerned early on in this because one of the few things I know about Ford is that he increased the pay of his workers because the conditions in his factory were so appalling he was having a staff turnover rate of about 300% a year. To stop this he massively increased what he paid to his workers, to five dollars a week, unheard of at the time, and this bound his employees with golden handcuffs. This book quotes other ‘masters of industry’ who said Ford was a traitor to his class, but Ford himself said altruism played no part in his decision, and sometimes it is wise to take rich men at their word. I was concerned because the only think I knew about Ford appeared to be something the author of this didn’t know, and worse, the author of this was going with the myth. All the same, that isn’t really the focus of this book – this book is about the relationship of these two men to Nazism, Eugenics and anti-Semitism. And that makes a terrifying story. Hardly surprisingly.

I’m not going to give you a synopsis of this book – it is an interesting story and well written. I think it is well worth a read. I just want to mention a few bits that got under my skin.

One of the things that I’ve never understood about racism is the idea that you can know lots of people who belong to a particular group – say Jews – and like each and every one them all (some of my best friends are Jews…blah, blah) and yet you can still be so affected by the stereotype and the racist discourse that surrounds Jews in general that you can believe at the very same time that there is an international Jewish conspiracy, despite you personally never having met a Jew you didn’t like. Ford was like this. He did a lot to spread concerns about ‘the international Jew’ and yet he was taken aback when his neighbour, a Rabbi, refused to take a free car from him as a gift. When Ford asked why the Rabbi had returned the car the Rabbi said something like, ‘well, because you are spreading lies and causing hatred towards my people’. Ford couldn’t quite get his head around this. He felt the ‘good Jews’ ought to be grateful that the truth was coming out about the bad Jews.

And I find that a remarkably terrifying. Part of me would like to believe that interactions between people is the best way for us to help us all stop believing crazy racist shit. I like to believe this because if that doesn't work, it isn't clear to me what might. Maybe a decade ago I started reading the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. I figured it must have been a remarkably well written book, you know, clever and convincing. But I had to stop reading a couple of chapters in. It was so daft, so over-written, so obviously a forgery, that I struggled to believe that even children could be convinced by it. For Ford it didn’t even matter if it was fake or not – he would say to people who pointed out it was a forgery that its ‘truth’ was shown in how the Jews have behaved since - you know, the proof of the pudding... What hope have you when people can know something is a lie and yet still believe it?

If I knew very little about Ford’s life, I knew next to nothing about Lindbergh, other than he flew a plane and lost a child in a kidnapping that went wrong. I’m sure flying a plane was incredibly dangerous at the time, but even given that, it has never been quite clear to me why being able to do something like that might make you a celebrity or, even if it did, qualify you for anything other than flying planes.

Both men here are presented as highly successful in one area of life and yet next to completely ignorant of just about everything else, and yet both men seem to have been treated by everyone else as if they were geniuses on everything they turned their hands to. Lindbergh is portrayed as someone who basically became a pilot because he wasn’t smart enough to become anything else. I remember Gore Vidal saying somewhere he learnt to fly a plane when he was 8 or something – look, I can’t fly a plane, perhaps it is much harder than Gore Vidal made it out to be, but then again, perhaps it isn’t. But even if it is like constant brain surgery, how does that make your opinions on genetics worth listening to?

A couple of times in this the author suggests that if Lindbergh had run for president he would probably have won. Given his Nazi sympathies, his clear calls for the US to appease the Germans, and also to do what it could to effectively allow the British to lose the war, the world would have been a significantly different place if he had decided to run for president and had won. And before you say the US public would never elect such a president – I’ve just three words: Donald Fucking Trump.

Ford in particular doesn’t come out of this smelling of roses. He’s someone else that might well have become president according to the author, not least since his raising the wage of his employees made him popular across the spectrum. His loathing for the Jews increases throughout the book. But he also modified his outspokenness because it is impacting upon his car sales. He continued to run a factory in Nazi Germany and in Vichy France and even used slave labour to run these factories with East European women who were apparently raped by their managers and nearly worked to death. All of this while he either refused to supply aircraft engines to England or he mismanaging military contracts from his own government that undermined the war effort, while refusing to return a medal he got from Hitler - the Nazi government's highest honour. Money has its privileges, and if nothing else, Ford proves that. Surely anyone else would have been executed as a traitor.

Like I said, I don’t know if even half of this is true, although it seems all very convincing – but if even only half of this is true, it is a truly disturbing read.

[Frank · Rating 4 out of 5]

A few months ago, I read Philip Roth's THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA. In this alternate history, Roth poses the question "what would have happened if Charles Lindbergh, a Nazi sympathizer and anti-Semitic isolationist, had been elected president in 1940." In the novel, Lindbergh gradually unleashes quasi-Nazi forces in the US. He negotiates a cordial understanding with Adolf Hitler, and accepts his anti-Semitic policies. All of this has profound effects on the American Jewish population and America in general. Henry Ford also plays a role in the fictional government posed by Roth. After reading this, I wanted to know more information about Lindbergh and his political views.

I have had AMERICAN AXIS on my shelves for several years and finally got around to reading it. The book details the historical anti-Semitic views and Nazi sympathies of both Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh prior to and during WWII.

Henry Ford propagated one of the most vile anti-Semitic campaigns in American history in the 1920s and 1930s. Ford used his newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, to blame the Jews for most of the world's troubles. The newspaper introduced Americans to a variety of virulent anti-Jewish conspiracy theories, including the notorious "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" which purported to describe a Jewish plan for global domination. A series of Ford's articles trumpeting this theme was translated into German and published in book form as "The International Jew". The book was later cited by many Nazis as deeply influential and Hitler even hung a portrait of Ford over his desk at his Munich headquarters and told a Detroit columnist that he regarded Ford as "my inspiration." Ford is the only American mentioned in Hitler's manifesto, Mein Kampf. The Nazis presented Ford with Germany’s highest civilian decoration, the Order of the German Eagle, on his 75th birthday in 1938. Although Ford tried to repudiate his anti-Semitic views, he and his company provided military equipment to the Nazis during the war and even used slave labor in its plant in Germany.

After Lindbergh's historic flight across the Atlantic and the kidnapping and murder of his first born child, he became disenchanted with his fame and with America. He came to know a French doctor, Alexis Carrel who became his mentor. Carrel was a firm believer in "Eugenics", the science of improving a human population by controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics. Lindbergh became to believe this as well and was soon preaching anti-Semitic beliefs. He was soon taking many trips to Germany and even wanted to move his family there because of his infatuation with the country. He became a dupe of the Germans who used him to vastly inflate German air estimates at a time when the German air force was much weaker than it pretended. The book argues that Lindbergh's well publicized description of German air superiority played a major role in the west's decision to appease Hitler at Munich in 1938. Soon after this, Germany also presented Lindbergh with their highest civilian honor, the Order of the German Eagle. The book describes Lindbergh's prominent role as a leader of the isolationist movement after the commencement of the second world war in Europe and as a spokesperson for the America First Committee lobbying to keep America out of the war. President Roosevelt told his secretary of Treasury, "If I should die tomorrow, I want you to know this. I am absolutely convinced that Lindbergh is a Nazi."

This book was full of interesting facts about both Ford and Lindbergh that I was previously unaware of. It also was very informative in showing the atmosphere of America prior to and during the war and providing many fascinating details of the misguided feelings of not only Ford and Lindbergh but much of America.

[Kusaimamekirai · Rating 5 out of 5]

The events in this book are nearly 100 years old, and yet I found myself getting indignant at the anti-semitism, treason (yes treason), and simple casual disregard for human beings that characterized most of the lives of Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford.
This is not to say that any of us live perfect lives. We say things we wish we hadn’t and occasionally, take up positions that we later regret. Yet on the whole most of us don’t do evil.
I cannot say this about these two men.
There’s way too much to cover in both of their lives but the abridged version goes something like this:
Henry Ford was a strike breaker and fiercely anti-union. He was also an outspoken anti-semite who financed a newspaper for 7 years out of Dearborn, Michigan whose sole purpose was to spread hate about Jews. He forced most of his Ford dealerships to stock and sell this paper at their establishments as well. He only shut it down (again, after seven years) because it was hurting his sales. By most accounts, his views on Jews never changed.
This in and of itself is pretty reprehensible. However, Ford also provided armaments, via his Ford factories in Germany, to the Nazis (there is also strong circumstantial evidence that he supplied significant financing to the Nazis in the pre-war years as well). There is ample documentation that he did this in the lead-up to the war and enough to show that his factory continued to do so in the early years of the war as well.
As the author writes, imagine what must’ve been going through the mind of an American soldier in Germany as a German tank with “FORD” written on it was bearing down on them.
There is a reason why Hitler had a portrait of Ford hanging on his wall.
As for Lindbergh, he shared many of Ford’s anti-semitic beliefs.
Lindbergh would speak about about not fighting the Germans and how America should simply accede to a Nazi controlled Europe. Lindbergh also received a medal from the Nazis (as did Ford) which he never returned.
But perhaps the worst thing Lindbergh did was convince the British under Neville Chamberlain that Nazi strength was so overwhelming that fighting them would be suicide. The Nazis had cleverly allowed Lindbergh to tour their military facilities and led him to believe they were much stronger at the time than they actually were.
Lindbergh dutifully repeated verbatim what the Nazis told him, leading to England and France allowing HItler into Czechoslovakia, largely based on Lindbergh’s information.
Oh, Lindbergh was also an avid believer in Eugenics. Much like the Nazis, he believed in a deeply anti-democratic society where the weak were “eliminated” and society was run by the elite.
When I finished this book I tried to find what made me so angry about their stories (apart from the obvious).
I realized that much like in their day, we also in the present day have men (and they are mostly men) who much like Lindbergh and Ford, are trying to destabilize the foundations of democracy with their money and fame. One can only hope that despite the damage they may cause in the short term, that these foundations are strong enough to not crumble.

[Da1tonthegreat · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book covers the political views and activities of two great Americans, Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh, before and during the Second World War. Both men had extensive ties to the Third Reich, promoted isolationism with the America First Committee, and each was decorated with the Service Cross of the German Eagle. Ford and Lindbergh both took a public stand against Franklin Roosevelt and the Jewish elite, a principled stance that harmed them and their legacies.

Author Max Wallace, who is Jewish, is clearly not objective. I believe he does make an effort to treat his subjects fairly in spite of his explicit disapproval, but his historical analysis is affected. He has a great many sources and does make some attempt to understand the opposing perspective. He also includes historical misinformation in his narrative, claiming the German concentration camps had gas chambers and that the Jews are a religious, rather than a racial, group. The book gets noticeably bogged down in the final third, where the bulk of Wallace's research focuses. Still The American Axis is a good source of information on the pro-fascist, anti-Semitic leanings of Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh.

[Stefan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Max Wallace’s investigation into the anti-Semitism, political views, and lives of Charles Lindbergh and Henry was fascinating. I would not call this a definitive or soberly objective account of either man, but it did provide some insight into the two men and the time period in which they lived.

[David Hill · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the topics I've been giving a fair amount of thought to lately is Americans' tendency to hero-worship, particularly businessmen. We think folks who are successful in business are smarter than most, and are more deserving of accolade than those who are less successful, or aren't in the business world. Many feel Mitt Romney deserved to be president because he made a lot of money in business - he must be smarter. Similar sentiments are expressed about Donald Trump.

In a 2002 survey, 85% of respondents said they admired Henry Ford. There is no doubt that Ford was a successful businessman. He was instrumental in the development of production line techniques and his products transformed transportation and the modern city. But the man was ignorant of history, was a raging anti-Semite, received the highest civilian decoration from Nazi Germany, refused to build engines for the RAF while his factory in Germany was mass producing trucks for the Wermacht.

The American Axis goes to great lengths to detail the beliefs and actions of Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh, to influential men who were heroes of the 20's and 30's. The book is meticulously researched and tries to paint a fair picture of these men.

Now, it's always fraught to judge people of other times by standards of our own, but I think Wallace does a good job of placing Ford's and Lindbergh's beliefs in the proper context. For example, other Americans received awards from Hitler. But those others returned their awards rather than hold them when America entered the war.

Overall, an interesting look at these two icons.

[Eric Mccutcheon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really well researched book on Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh. Lots of info I hadn't known much about. Unfortunately, the author's bias comes through a little heavy-handed at times.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've known that Charles Lindbergh was an isolationist, opposed to US involvement in WWII, and I knew that he had visited Nazi Germany prior to the war, expressing a certain amount of admiration for their achievements. And I was vaguely aware that Henry Ford had expressed anti-Semitic views. But I was unaware that these two men had been friends, or the extent to which their views and positions had influenced and benefited Hitler and his regime.

Henry Ford is largely (although by no means solely) responsible for bringing the fraudulent "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" to wide spread attention, firmly embedding it as part of the anti-Semitic worldview even today. Even after it was thoroughly discredited as a fraud, the fact that Ford had endorsed it trumped those findings and it continues to be viewed by anti-Semites as important evidence supporting their beliefs. In addition, the publication of "The International Jew" help inspire the Nazis (among many others), and helped to lay the foundations for the Holocaust. If this was the extent of Ford's involvement with Nazi Germany, it damning enough. But Ford's company actively resisted helping the UK in the early days of WWII, while simultaneously willingly contributing to the Nazi war machinery. And the Ford subsidiary in Germany was also a willing exploiter of forced and slave labor during the war, increasing its profits off the involuntary labor of Nazi victims. The Ford company has done a good job of burying this history and avoiding responsibility for its contributions to the atrocities committed during WWII by the Nazis.

As for Lindbergh, it appears that he also came to hold significant anti-Semitic views, but his embrace of the Nazi's appears to have been more the result of incredible naivete than any sinister motives. Unfortunately, his willing acceptance of what he was shown by the Nazis caused him to become their pawn in the build up to the war, and evidence suggests that his opinions may have had an impact in the negotiations surrounding Hitler's annexation of the Sudetenland and ultimately all of Czechoslovakia, ultimately making the war longer and more costly than it might have been otherwise.

Both Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh were awarded medals by the Nazis, and neither of them ever expressed any remorse for accepting those medals or made any effort to return them. Even after the war, Lindbergh never truly acknowledged the scope of the atrocities committed by the Nazis, even as he accused the Allies of imposing cruelty upon the conquered German nation.

This book, published in 2003, is a disturbing look at how public heroes can influence public opinion in ways that are disturbing and dangerous. In the nearly two decades since, we have seen additional evidence of how this can happen. This book is an important historical corrective that looks behind the white wash that has been applied to these issues, and serves as a cautionary reminder that we always need to remain vigilant against those who might use their fame and fortune to promote dangerous ideas.

[Bruce · Rating 4 out of 5]

I recommend the reading of this book both for its revelations about these two men, who were sometimes heroes and sometimes villains . Two American "heroes" are the protagonists in this study of a part of American history not usually touched upon in general American History courses. There are 'inconvenient truths' that are ignored or glossed over to perpetuate strongly believed myths. The author shows both these men to be instrumental in the rise of the Third Reich. One because of his deep seated anti-Semitism, the other possibly due to his naivete. In some ways one view what happened in the past as being similar to what is occurring now. Max Wallace provides a 1938 quote from US Ambassador to Germany William Dodd. "Fascism is on the march today in America. Millionaires are marching in tune.... A clique of U.S. industrialists is hell-bent on bringing a fascist state to supplant our democratic government...."
With the flood of corporate money into politics and its effect on elections, esp. to support candidates advocating destruction of government programs benefiting the general population one can see a rising plutocracy. This book was published in 2003 and like good history books it has cautionary words for today. The last sentence of the book needs to be heeded: "Unless we honestly examine the phenomena that fueled the rise of the destructive social forces championed by Ford and Lindbergh we ignore--at our peril--a cautionary tale of intolerance, abuse of power, and reckless hero worship just as applicable to our times."

[Cheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

I struggle to find words to sum this book up. It clearly lays out the evidence that Henry Ford -- AND HIS COMPANY (despite their attempts to deny it) -- and Charles Lindbergh were of inestimable help in forwarding the cause of Hitler and the Nazi party in the drive for world domination and extemination of the Jewish people. Solidly researched and chillingly thorough. And painstakingly objective, to include a weighing of the evidence as to whether Ford and Lindbergh were Nazis. In short, Lindbergh was an easily influenced anti-Semite who valued austerity and efficiency and "pure breeding" over everything else. So not quite a Nazi. Ford much closer to being a Nazi, with a fascist mindset to running his company and his virulent anti-Semitism.

In the current world climate, it is important to be aware of the many tendrils of fascism in our world and to understand how this mindset works and the many faces that it wears. I have become a devoted listener of the podcast Behind the Bastards, which I have found informative on this topic, as is The Dollop. Both have addressed the fact that Lindbergh and Ford were aligned with the Nazis (as was one Prescott Bush, who gained his family fortune fronting for the Third Reich -- a fact discussed in this book). So when I saw that my friend Andy was reading this book, I begged to read it next. It has been sobering to read about the rise of Hitler and his annexation of European countries while Putin has staged his invasion of Ukraine. And I have found it important to realize that by the time the prejudices against minority groups become the main talking points of different movements that we are very far down the slope to the destruction of democratic principles. Recent US history bears this out.

[Brandon Montgomery · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredibly well researched, in-depth and veracious account of the dark side of two Americans who are today remembered and revered for superficial achievements, while their actual lives have been whitewashed. You'll never see a Ford the same way again.

[Karl · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the maelstrom of inter-war America, many feared involvement in a second European war. Others expressed a grudging or enthusiastic admiration for Nazi Germany. Isolationist organizations would claim hundreds of thousands of members. Racist opinion leaders like Rev. Gerald L. K. Smith and Father Charles Coughlin would have national audiences. After Pearl Harbor, some of the most vocal admirers of fascism would persist with their racist rhetoric. Others, like the main subjects of this book, would awkwardly try to distance themselves from their more controversial statements and actions.

Max Wallace's thoroughly researched book critically examines the public and private positions of auto magnate Henry Ford (and Ford Motor Company) and pilot Charles Lindbergh in order to answer two questions: 1) What motivated their obvious racial anti-Semitism, and 2) were they active "fifth columnists", i.e. supporters of Nazi Germany? A recurring theme of the book is that each had been praised as prime examples of heroic accomplishment but their public endorsement of anti-Semitism forever tainted their reputations. The author had access to many files and papers from these men and those around them, and he masterfully assembles his case, though the large number of personalities can be daunting. Wallace has to unravel a complex web of business, personal, and casual associations which include some genuine German spies and a host of political agendas. The most obvious fact is that a significant number of Americans were not just opposed to intervention in the war but actively embraced many of the ideas of the Nazi movement, its rejection of democracy and racialist theories especially. There were several plots, some more serious than others, to somehow overthrow the Roosevelt Administration in favor of a right-wing dictatorship.

The records of Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh are damning in many respects, but even Wallace cannot clearly identify the sources of their prejudices, which went well beyond the "casual anti-Semitism" of the time. Ford and Lindbergh come across simultaneously as crude bigots and the naïve tools of others. However, Wallace does substantiate his argument on their moral guilt. Ford (the man and Corporation) produced armaments for the Nazi regime in Ford plants in Germany before the US entry into the war. Wallace also documents how the company continued those ties during the war and ultimately profited from slave labor at those factories. Likewise, while Wallace finds no evidence that Lindbergh revealed secret information to the German government, he also never abandoned his racialist thinking or admiration of Hitler's regime. The book also contains a very good discussion of the various strands of isolationism in 1930s and 1940s America, from pacifist groups to overt Nazi sympathizers.

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The American Axis" is a thoroughly documented, engrossing book about the dark side of Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh, men whose biases led them to excuse and facilitate the rise of fascism in the days leading up to America's entry into World War Two.

Prior to reading this book I'd been aware of Henry Ford's virulent anti-Semitism, but didn't know the extent to which upper-level employees at Ford company worked to spread his beliefs and even collaborated with the Nazis for profit.

The most disturbing and repellent aspect of the book details Charles Lindbergh's hatred not only of Jews but also "yellow" races who he saw as a threat to Western civilization. It's all here in loathsome detail - the Des Moines speech in which Lindbergh targeted Jews with less than subtle threats for supposedly dragging the U.S. into war, his contempt for Jewish refugees after Kristallnacht and his evident desire for Britain to lose the war to Nazi Germany, which he admired.

"The American Axis" is a useful antidote to revisionist biographies which soft-pedaled this sad history. It's also a reminder that we can be led down this path again by demagogues who profit by stirring up fear of "the other".

[ExtremeBibliophile · Rating 5 out of 5]

Titans in their respective fields of manufacturing and aviation, Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh shared more than a common hometown (Detroit) and massive public adulation-both were Nazi sympathizers (Hitler had a portrait of Ford in his office) and both used their near-deified status to promote their views on Nazism, Aryan supremacy and , in Ford's case, blatant unrepentant antiSemitism. Max Wallace is to be commended for producing this extemely well-researched chronicle of some very dark days in the United States of the 1920s and 1930s. This book cannot be described as an expose since both men's viewpoints were widely known and even supported by fellow colleagues and employees. Ford in particular used parts of his colossal fortune and influence to spread antiSemitic ideas, garnering the first ever Grand Cross of the German Eagle medal which was the highest honor Nazi Germany could give to any foreigner (and which Ford never renounced or returned.)Lindbergh received a similar accolade, the Service Cross of the German Eagle, presented to him personally by Hermannn Goering (and similar to Ford, Lindbergh never denounced or disavowed the honor.) A definite must-read for any student of history or anyone who seeks to demythologize famous men.

[John Kenrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Prepare to be surprised - even shocked

With a lifelong interest in history, I knew that Lindbergh and Ford were anti-Semitic. But this book shows in thoroughly researched and clearly presented detail how these men were unrepentant hate mongers -- and Ford cooperated with the Nazis even during WW II. He and Lindbergh were friends, each supportive of the others hate mongering. I was utterly disgusted to learn that two men I was taught (in Catholic school) were great Americans were both decorated by Hitler -- and never returned or repudiated their Swastika-covered medals. The author reveals that it has long been kept secret that while watching footage from a liberated concentration camp, Ford suffered a debilitating stroke from which he never recovered. And to his dying day, Lindbergh never recanted his vile statement about Jews or his sympathy for Hitler -- both died claiming that Jews were to blame for WWII. With white supremacists on the rise, this book is a powerful and timely reminder of the way facts can be twisted or denied in an attempt to say there are "good people on both sides."

[Scott Holstad · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not a bad book and the subject is both interesting and, I think, extremely historically significant, certainly in the US. That said, there are a number of books on this exact subject (I know having read most and owning most) and while this is solid, it seems to me that most are, so this book's greatest weakness is it doesn't seem to do anything to separate it from the pack and make it stand out. If it had done, definitely five stars. As is, a solid four stars and recommended.

[Baard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating read about Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh and their connection to Adolf Hitler. Hitler had a painting of Henry Ford in his office, and it is clear that he was inspired by the American industrialist.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very important book and very well written. The culpability of these men and the Ford company is amazing and worth reading.

[Laurie Locke · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was very informative but a little dry. It took me a while to get through it but I'm glad I did. It gives a solid glimpse into a time in our history that tends to be spoken of in broad-strokes instead of focusing in on smaller details. I thought it was a fair portrayal of everyone involved and was backed up with detailed research. Before I read this book I had a vague understanding that Ford and Lindbergh were anti-Semitic but never realized the extent of those views and how they truly impacted American politics at the time. I certainly had no idea that Ford as a company was so heavily involved in German manufacturing during WWII and what can only be described as slave-labor. I also couldn't help but notice that a lot of the events that happened in the 30's and the 40's are being mirrored in today's world (except the U.S. seems to have switched places with Germany with all of the anti-Muslim bias and our very own unintelligent, radical, ridiculous leader ). History really does repeat itself.

[Bronwyn]

I'm counting this read even though I didn't quite finish. Good book, not a whole lot new and the author seemed to jump to some conclusions that his evidence didn't back up, but easy to read and enjoyable over all.

[Weavre]

OST NON-FICTION ADULT STK 305.892 WAL

[Craig Bolton]

"The American Axis: Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and the Rise of the Third Reich by Max Wallace (2003)"

[Grahammu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enlightening read, some disturbing truths about iconic americans.

[Jim Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thorough account of an embarrassing time in American History. We must have more accounts like this or we will be doomed to repeat it.