The Lindbergh Kidnapping Hoax 

 ALEXIS  CARREL   1873 - 1944  

 "Father of the Gas Chambers" and Mentor to Charles Lindbergh 

 "Those who have murdered, robbed ..., kidnapped children, despoiled the poor of their savings, misled the public in important matters, should be humanely and economically disposed of in small euthanasic institutions supplied with proper gases. A similar treatment could be advantageously applied to the insane, guilty of criminal acts."     

 -  Alexis Carrel   "Man the Unknown" (1938)  

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   The "Mystical"  Relationship Between Carrel & Lindbergh

  Rue Carrel - Perspectives in Biology & Medicine 2004 Journal article 

 by Marc E Weksler    

  Man The Unknown  1935  (entire book online)

                               History of Perfusion          Eugenics   

   L'Affaire Carrel: Sur la question de l' eugenisme  

        Biographie - in German

War Against The Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race  by  Edwin Black

The American Axis: Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh & Rise of Third Reich  by Max Wallace

  The Plot Against America  by  Philip Roth          Ron Rosenbaum on Spielberg, Roth & Lindbergh

 Alexis Carrel, a Nazi sympathizer,  was Charles Lindbergh's close friend and mentor.  

Fascism a la mode
Harper's (excerpt)
Oct 1997

by David Zane Mairowitz


"The Front  [Marie Le Pen] has found other uses for "ecology" as well.  As Bruno Megret puts
it, "Why fight for the preservation of animal species while at the same
time tolerating the disappearance of certain human races due to general
crossbreeding?" The "founder" of modem ecology, according to Le Pen, is
the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Alexis Carrel, who, working under Petain,
promoted the idea of enforced euthanasia via gas chamber for criminals
and the deranged. In Avignon, as in other French towns, a campaign is under
way to change the street name Rue Alexis Carrel; that this push has been
unsuccessful is largely due to the Front's growing power."



Paris Left wants eugenics advocate taken off street


Ben MacIntyre in Paris

The Times
January 6, 1998

A PARIS street named after Alexis Carrel, the Nobel Prize-winning French
scientist who was also a fervent supporter of the collaborationist Vichy regime
and an advocate of eugenics, has become the latest battleground in the intense
ideological debate over the nation's wartime past.

Left-wing city officials have written to the Mayor of Paris demanding that
rue Alexis-Carrel in the 15th arrondissement be renamed since it commemorates a
man whose scientific theories echoed those of the Nazis.

"Paris must cease to honour Alexis Carrel," the petition said, pointing out
that the scientist had argued in favour of systematically eliminating
"undesirable" and "genetically inferior" members of society several years before
the Nazis put such ideas into murderous effect. Jean Tiberi, the Gaullist Mayor
of Paris, has so far refused to change the name of the street, despite evidence
of Carrel's extreme views and dubious wartime role.

Born in 1873, Carrel was a pioneering surgeon who won the Nobel Prize in
1912 for his research into human tissue and organ transplants. During the First
World War he worked at the military hospital in Compiegne, where his methods for
cleaning wounds saved many lives.

In 1935, however, Carrel published a highly popular book of pseudo-science
claiming the existence of a "hereditary biological aristocracy" and arguing that
"deviant" human types should be suppressed using techniques similar to those
later employed by the Nazis.

"A euthanasia establishment, equipped with a suitable gas, would allow the
humanitarian and economic disposal of those who have killed, committed armed
robbery, kidnapped children, robbed the poor or seriously betrayed public
confidence," Carrel wrote in L'Homme, cet Inconnu (Man, this Unknown). "Would
the same system not be appropriate for lunatics who have committed criminal
acts?" he suggested.



A friend of the Vichy leader, Marshal Philippe Petain, Carrel was offered
the post of Health Minister in the collaborationist Government but instead took
over the French Foundation for the Study of Human Problems, where he recommended that children, labourers and the mentally ill should be provided with only minimal food rations.

Carrel died of natural causes in 1944. After the war he was hailed as one of
the greatest French scientists, and it was not until 1991 that his views on
genetics and selective breeding were revealed.

The row over the rue Alexis-Carrel comes amid mounting pressure in France
for a full accounting of the Vichy era.
Streets named after Carrel in Strasbourg, Montpellier and Limoges have
already been renamed, and last year the University of Lyons rechristened its Carrel medical faculty in honour of Rene Laennec, the French inventor of the stethoscope.
A spokesman for the Mayor of Paris said: "Rechristening a street always
seriously disrupts the lives of those living there.


Some French rue street name
Science
Jan 23, 1998

by  Constance Holden

 


Sylvie Scherer and Cecile Silhouette are campaigning to change the name
of Rue Alexis-Carrel in Paris France. The French-American surgeon after
whom the street was named, Alexis Carrel, won a 1912 Nobel Prize but also
supported eugenics and the Vichy government during World War II.

In 1974, Paris renamed a tiny street near the Eiffel Tower after the French-American
surgeon Alexis Carrel, winner of the 1912 Nobel Prize for developing new
tissue culture methods and techniques for sewing blood vessels together.
At the time. no one seemed to care much that Carrel had been a fervent
advocate of eugenics and a supporter of the collaborationist Vichy government
during World War II.

But now some Parisians have decided they care a lot. Two members of the
municipal council, ecologists Sylvie Scherer and Cecile Silhouette, are
campaigning to change the name of Rue Alexis-Carrel. So far the city has
refused, despite vocal support for the duo's efforts from other scientists
and activists. "Even if he did absolutely remarkable things at the beginning
of the century, he also participated in acts that today we consider reprehensible,"
says Jacques Testart, a human reproduction researcher at the French biomedical
agency INSERM.

Paris isn't the first locale to consider severing its nominal ties to Carrel.
In recent years, several French cities have stripped his name from street
signs, and in 1996, after 4 years of acrimonious debate, the University
of Lyons renamed a faculty of medicine dedicated to Carrel.

But Scherer and Silhouette may face an even more arduous task changing
minds in Paris. A spokesperson for the city says it is "very unlikely"
that the initiative will succeed. "In Paris, we rarely change the name
of streets," she says, "because it is too complicated for the post office
and the residents."

"The atmosphere of libraries, lecture rooms and laboratories is dangerous to
those who shut themselves up in them too long. It separates us from reality like
a fog."  -   Alexis Carrel

 Charles A. Lindbergh and the American Dilemma:

 Excerpt From The Conflict of Technology and Human Values 

 by Susan M. Gray   1988 

 Bowling Green State University Popular Press
 Bowling Green, Ohio  

 From Chapter IV 

The Personal Influences on Charles Lindbergh—Alexis Carrel, 
Antoine De Saint Exupery, 
and Anne Morrow 

"Men have forgotten this truth.... But you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed." 1
Antoine de Saint Exupery

Many factors contributed to Charles Lindbergh's transition from an early emphasis on the value of technology to more human and spiritual concerns. A study of his childhood and of his initial impulses toward flying reveals that a love of spiritual and natural elements underlay his devotion to aviation, rocketry, and medical biology. Additionally, events such as World War II moved him away from his initial heavy reliance on science as a solution for the problems of twentieth-century civilization. The war had shown him not only the military capabilities of the science to which he had devoted himself, but also its destructive potential, the power it had given human beings to play the role of God and to destroy the entire world. Here was the point of Lindbergh's greatest questioning of values.

But it was not only events which caused this change—individuals played a great role in it too. His friend and fellow scientist, Alexis Carrel; fellow aviator and author, Antoine de Saint Exupery; and most importantly and most lastingly, his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, influenced and affected him in ways which moved him inexorably from a devotion and dedication to the achievements of science and technology to an exploration of the personal and mystical elements of life.

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Lindbergh's scientific interests led him not only to a professional collaboration but also to a friendship with Alexis Carrel, French biologist and head of the Department of Experimental Surgery at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. As mentioned earlier, the two men met and began to work together initially because Lindbergh was searching for some way to help his wife's sister, who was suffering from a serious heart disease. Together, they developed the perfusion pump, in which organs which had been removed from the body could be kept alive to be studied or transplanted. Because the pump circulated fluid around these organs, it was frequently referred to as the first "artificial heart."

Obviously, Lindbergh had a great deal to learn about science from Carrel; but there was more, for in addition to being a scientist, Alexis Carrel was also a mystic and a philosopher. The book which he and Lindbergh wrote about their experiments and inventions, The Culture of Organs, was exclusively scientific, as were other of his works, but other books, namely Man, the Unknown, Voyage to Lourdes, and Reflections of Life, were philosophical musing on the future of science and humanity. Carrel was a strange man, full of opposites and contradictions; and his well-intentioned hopes for the future development of the human race seem tainted now by their overtones of eugenic racism. Still, his efforts reflect the intentions of a scientist who was interested not only in the physical but in the spiritual and moral development of human beings as well.

Carrel was originally a medical rationalist, believing most firmly in the physical healing powers of science and medicine; in his ideas of treatment, there had been no place for mental or spiritual influences at all. Much of his thinking was profoundly changed by his visit to the shrine of Lourdes in 1903. Later fictionalized into a short novel called Voyage to Lourdes, the experience jarred his previous commitment to scientific rationalism. After observing medically-unexplained but seemingly valid cures at the shrine, he was moved to a realization of natural forces which worked beyond the realms of known science. His book was an argument in favor of an open-minded world-view which would acknowledge both the efficacy of the scientific method and the validity of the religious impulse—authenticating the curative powers of each. Charles Lindbergh called the novel "an early attempt to find a bridge between the two worlds of science and religion." 2

Similarly, in Man, the Unknown, Carrel argued for a life style and an approach to the world's problems which would humanize technology without sacrificing the benefits of science—the achievement of a "golden

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mean," the same concept to which Lindbergh would later apply the term "balance." He argued:

None of the dogmas of modern science are immutable. Gigantic factories, office buildings rising to the sky, inhuman cities, industrial morals, faith in mass production, are not indispensable to civilization. Other modes of existence and of thought are possible. Culture without comfort, beauty without luxury, machines without enslaving factories, science without the worship of matter, would restore to man his intelligence, his moral sense, his virility, and lead him to the summit of his development. 3

In Reflections on Life, Carrel argued that human beings, like civilization itself, must be regarded as totalities—that not only their physical health, but also their mental and spiritual well-being needed attention. Echoing the dynamo-virgin opposition described by Henry Adams in his Education Carrel argued for the reemergence of the religious impulse into modern life—for the building, once again, of "cathedrals in the bleakly magnificent universe of the physicists and the astronomers." 4 Carrel's view of science and its capabilities was favorable, but he also felt that it had been misused. Because scientists did not generally approach the world in its totality—holistically and with a sense of balance—and because the products of science had been put to materialistic uses and exploitation, people had gained and learned little from its advancements. Instead of knowledge, only profit had occurred. Carrel argued, as Lindbergh would come to do later, for a balance between the scientists and the mystics, the technologists and the artists, the materialists and the spiritualists. He asked, "Ought we to accept the answer of science or that of religion? Should we let ourselves be guided by reason or feeling?" He answered his own questions by arguing for a combination of both: "Wisdom consists in conforming one's conduct both to reason and to feeling, to science as well as to faith, to the true as well as the beautiful." 5

In his own writings, Lindbergh reflected on the parallels between himself and his friend—the two sides of their personalities and their attempts at internal and external resolution. The scientific work which they performed together led, somewhat ironically, to explorations of the mystical. The very atmosphere of Carrel's lab was nearly medieval. Monklike, the doctors and the lab workers wore black gowns and hoods; the walls of the operating rooms were black, not white. To Lindbergh, this was a place where life and death, the natural and the supernatural met and where the borders between these "oppositions" were crossed. The work which Lindbergh and Carrel accomplished at the Rockefeller Institute was medically significant, yet it did not stop with the scientific.

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The very solution which they developed led to more questions and to more rather than less wonder about the mysteries of life. Later, writing about the experience in his Autobiography of Values, Lindbergh noted:

We had opened a new field with the perfusion of organs. A lifetime could easily be spent developing it. But suppose we solved all problems... How much closer would we have come to solving life's basic mysteries?... The essence of life, I concluded, did not lie in the material. It penetrated, but was not bound to, the physical world of science.
But how are the qualities of life susceptible to mechanical concepts? After five years at the Rockefeller Institute, I placed less and less value on the mechanistic qualities of life. 6

At the Rockefeller Institute and, later, on the French coastal islands of Saint-Gildas and Illiec where the Lindberghs and the Carrels lived before World War II, the friendship between the two men contributed to Lindbergh's development, to his increasing recognition of the mystical rather than the material elements of life, and to his eventual belief in a balanced holistic approach to life which would be supported and reinforced by science.

NOTES

1

Antoine de Saint Exupery, The Little Prince (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), p. 88.

2

Alexis Carrel, The Voyage to Lourdes (New York: Harper and Row, 1950), p. viii.

3

Alexis Carrel, Man, the Unknown (New York: Halycon House, 1935), p. 299.

4

Alexis Carrel, Reflections on Life (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1953), p. 164.

5

Carrel, Reflections, p. 169.

6

Charles A. Lindbergh, Autobiography of Values (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), pp. 138-39

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