[1] He received an appointment from Walter I. McCoy to attend the United States Military Academy at West Point, graduated in 1917[2] and served in World War I.

[citation needed] On the evening of March 1, 1932, Colonel Schwarzkopf, then 37, and the first chief of the New Jersey State Police, was among the officials called to the East Amwell[3][6] residence of Charles Lindbergh, following the kidnapping of his 20-month-old son, Charlie.

He arrived on the scene with his second-in-command, Major Charles Schoeffel, and established a police command post in the three-car garage on the side of Lindbergh's house opposite the nursery, but he found it impossible to protect the area from contamination.

When Charlie's skeletonized corpse was found by a truck driver on May 12, Schwarzkopf inspected the shallow grave, four miles from the Lindbergh home, whose lights were visible from the site.

[7] To test the theory of how the baby was abducted and then killed early on, Schwarzkopf had duplicates constructed of the makeshift ladder used to climb into Charlie's second-story nursery window and the ransom letter, and reenacted the crime himself.

Schwarzkopf dropped the bag, and it struck the cement windowsill of the library, echoing the massive skull fracture that served as Charlie's cause of death.

[citation needed] In late 1932, Schwarzkopf was contacted by New York psychiatrist Dudley D. Schoenfeld, who concluded from the kidnapper's written notes that the perpetrator was a mechanically inclined, 40-year-old German suffering from dementia paralytica, caused by a sense of powerlessness; this is now considered an impressive early example of criminal profiling.

[8][2] For a short time, he narrated the radio program Gang Busters (he can be heard in the March 28, 1941, episode The Case of the Nickel and Dime Bandits) before he returned to active duty in the US Army with the onset of World War II.

[citation needed] After World War II, he was promoted to brigadier general and in the late 1940s was sent to occupied Germany to serve as provost marshal for the entire US sector.

[citation needed] Before retiring from the Army in 1953 with the rank of major general, Schwarzkopf was sent by the Central Intelligence Agency as part of Operation Ajax (correct name TPAjax, TP meaning Soviet-backed Tudeh Party of Iran), to convince the self-exiled Iranian monarch, Mohammad Reza Shah, to return and seize power.

[citation needed] Major General Schwarzkopf died in 1958 from complications of lung cancer[4] and is buried at West Point Cemetery, on the grounds of the United States Military Academy.