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For a time, he devoted himself chiefly to his latter-day interest in the medical experiments of Dr. Alexis Carrel, the famed French scientist, then working on the problem of keeping human organs alive outside the body. To help Carrel, Lindbergh had used his magical mechanical ingenuity to devise a "perfusion pump" that kept the thyroid gland of a cat alive for 18 days. Gradually, the sickly state of the world drew his attention away from medicine. The Nazis were pushing ahead with their development of an air force, and the U.S. military attache in Berlin figured that they might show Lindbergh things they would not show him. He helped arrange Lindbergh's invitation to Germany.
In three visits over the next three years, Lindbergh was feted, decorated by Göring, shown the Nazis' biggest assembly lines and best planes. He came back convinced that Germany's air force could obliterate any city in Europe and defeat the combined power of any conceivable collection of allies. He also acquired a sneaking admiration for Nazi efficiency. Lindbergh's almost pathological loathing for publicity, suggested Nicolson, had taken on political overtones. "He identified the outrage to his private life first with the popular press and then . . . with freedom of speech and then almost, with freedom. . . . His self-confidence thickened into arrogance. . . . His mind had been sharpened by fame and tragedy until it had become as hard as metal and as narrow as a chisel." On the side, Dr. Carrel may have filled him with his own ideas of superior men, his doctrine being: "The only way to obviate the disastrous predominance of the weak is to develop the strong."
Early in 1939, Lindbergh returned to the U.S. with a message: The real threat lay in the East, and Germany "is as essential as England or France, for she alone can either dam the Asiatic horde or form the spearhead of their penetration into Europe." Anne published a book called The Wave of the Future, in which she argued that Germany, Italy and Russia had all somehow leaped onto that wave and never mind the concentration camps. As Anne put it: "The evils we deplore in these systems are not in themselves the future; they are scum on the waves of the future."