Empires of the Sky

by Alexander Rose

  The navy had lost one of its two Goodyear-built airships at the worst possible time, and the death of their biggest cheerleader, Moffett, was an almost irrecoverable blow to the airshipmen’s hopes for further expansion.

  The long, grueling match between Eckener and Trippe had ended in a temporary stalemate, but a new game would soon be afoot.

  43. The Hooked Cross

  FOR MUCH OF 1932, Eckener’s eye had been not on America, but on Germany, where the rise of Hitler had dragged him, unwillingly, into politics.

  Like Trippe, he was concerned above all with the preservation of his great air project, and like his American counterpart, he presented himself as a moderate-in-all-things patriot, a staunch defender of the middle-ground consensus, in order to ensure widespread support for Zeppelin. For that reason, in January 1932 he made a radio speech in support of reinstalling the universally respected Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, now eighty-four years old, as president.

  Hitler, whose Nazi Party enjoyed more than a third of the vote in some places, was mulling whether to run against the old soldier, but even he was wary of taking on the Victor of Tannenberg in an open fight. Hitler proposed instead that he would not oppose Hindenburg on condition that he dismiss the beleaguered chancellor, Heinrich Brüning, a bespectacled academic, devout Catholic, and leader of the Center Party group in the Reichstag (Parliament).

  If Brüning did not go, he threatened, blood would run in the streets and flow more freely than in even the previous year, when more than eight thousand paramilitaries from all parties were injured or killed in brawls. “It is the duty of all citizens to back up the government without qualification,” Eckener thundered in response, and not to indulge such “demagoguery and incitement.”

  Eckener’s was a powerful and influential voice. In the days after his radio speech, which was reprinted in newspapers around the country, veterans’ societies representing three million members and the Federation of German Industries announced their support for Hindenburg.

  Still, his speech was just the kind of thing that tended to get one’s name added to the Nazis’ ever-lengthening enemies’ list. In the aftermath of the address the Nazi press published a number of, as Eckener said, “malicious pamphlets” about him, and he received a heap of abuse from correspondents calling him a “despicable, narrow-minded person” and pledging never to give another pfennig to the Zeppelin Company. Hitler, it was rumored, was incensed and swore to punish Eckener when his time came.

  The outbursts were an unpleasant wake-up call for a man who had always tried to play both ends against the middle, his only goal being to further the interests of the Zeppelin. Try as he might, Eckener could no longer be friends with everybody.

  But still he tried, by establishing a pressure group that would eschew the extremes of both left and right. This organization, he pledged, would “put aside all partisan and personal special interests and take a united approach…in order to protect the people and the Reich from extreme economic and cultural upheaval.” The German National Association (GNA), as he called it, would be committed to freedom and humanism, the kind of values Eckener had long claimed were represented by the airship, that engine of commerce and international understanding.

  It went nowhere. For his pains, the Deutsche Zeitung commented that “Dr. Eckener builds castles in the air….The middle is politically dead. And not even a name like Dr. Eckener’s will perform the miracle of reawakening it.” Caricatures were printed of Eckener as a hobbled old man staring grimly at an airship and saying, “Great—my entire new party will just barely fit into the Zeppelin.” And there was another torrent of abusive letters telling him he should stay out of politics and stick to flying airships or accusing him of Jewish sympathies or of selling out Germany.

  Eckener was out of step with the times—which were growing ever more extreme. Hitler was publicly pledging to have “heads rolling in the sand” when he came to power, while his henchmen talked excitedly of “the thousands of Marxists to be fusileered and of Jews’ heads lining the way from Munich to Berlin.” Over the summer, more than a hundred Nazis and Communists were murdered in an escalating series of clashes and riots.

  Eckener soon gave up his efforts in view of what he called the “total hopelessness” of the political situation and devoted himself to flying the Graf Zeppelin to South America to wait out the storm—but it only worsened in the closing months of 1932.

  Though he had forced Brüning to resign, Hindenburg continued to hold out against Hitler, asserting that he would never allow a “Bohemian corporal” so enamored with violence to become chancellor. Instead, Hindenburg appointed Franz von Papen, a vastly wealthy aristocrat married to the daughter of an industrialist. Reactionary, lightweight, and charming—some might say oleaginous—Papen was liked by the country’s big businessmen, and he packed his cabinet with his noble friends, moneyed pals, and Hindenburg loyalists.

  Then on November 17, following a Nazi-organized vote of no confidence in the Reichstag, the cabinet was forced to resign, leaving the control of Germany in the hands of two men: Hindenburg and an isolated Papen, now ruling by emergency decree over a country in fast-motion economic and social collapse.

  By January 1933, unemployment stood at around six million, but the real figure was closer to nine million if one includes part-time workers, meaning nearly half the German workforce was either unemployed or underemployed. The stock market had fallen by two-thirds since 1929, and industrial production had been halved. The pensions of disabled veterans and war widows had been drastically cut, and every day brought news of farmers and small-business owners declaring bankruptcy. Suicide and crime rates were rocketing, and apathy and hopelessness sought an avenue in extremism, not a refuge in Eckener’s form of centrism.

  Papen was soon forced out by a court intriguer, General Kurt von Schleicher, whom nobody liked, least of all Hitler. So greatly did the Nazi leader detest him that he actually consented to a series of secret meetings with the slightly less detested Papen.

  At their first meeting, on January 4, 1933, Papen promised Hitler that he would back him for the post of vice chancellor if Hitler agreed to his having the chancellorship. Papen still had the ear of Hindenburg and thought that he could get the Grand Old Man to agree to the idea. That would mean knifing Schleicher, which was a pleasurable thought for the both of them.

  Then came a front-page story in the Neues Deutschland newspaper predicting Eckener as the next chancellor. The report was obviously nonsense—the editor was a keen astrologer and published Eckener’s horoscope prophesying his destiny to lead Germany—but Eckener later said that this one article provoked more Nazi hostility to him than anything he had so far done, including forbidding the use of the Friedrichshafen hangar for a Hitler rally.

  He quickly disavowed the story, and in order to allay any dangerous suspicions that he was in fact secretly trying for the chancellorship, Eckener publicly announced that he was burying himself in preparations to work on Projekt LZ-129—stalled ever since his blueprints for the LZ-128 had been roundly panned by IZT and Goodyear three years earlier.

  In the intervening time, Dürr’s design team had completely rethought what Zeppelin’s next big ship would encompass. They knew from the start that it would have to be able to handle helium, which they weren’t enthusiastic about, but they were marching to an American drum now. The performance hit on lifting ability that using helium entailed meant that LZ-129 would have to be much, much larger than previous German airships. This also made it more expensive to build, of course, and Eckener had no money, leaving Projekt LZ-129 a kind of imaginary airship—but at least it signaled he was harmless and harbored no political ambitions.

  With an Eckener candidacy no longer an issue, Hitler persuaded Papen that it would be in his best interests to walk away while he still could. Ultimately, January 28, 1933, brought news of the mass resignation of Schleicher and his cabinet, and t
wo days later, a tired Hindenburg finally agreed to appoint Hitler and summoned him to the Reich Chancellery to swear his oath to uphold the constitution he had long pledged to tear up. “Hitler is Reich Chancellor. Just like a fairy-tale,” gushed Joseph Goebbels, his propaganda master. Privately, Hitler assured his comrades that heads would soon roll.1

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  ONE OF THEM might well have been Eckener’s. His name may not have been at the top of the enemies list, but it was on there. At first, he was left alone, but on February 27, a fire burned down much of the Reichstag building. Hitler spuriously claimed that it was ignited by Communists, and the next day the Reichstag Fire Decree nullified most remaining civil liberties, allegedly to forestall a Red uprising. Arrests began immediately, accelerating after the passage of the Enabling Act of March 24, which granted Hitler the power to enact laws without the consent of the Reichstag.

  Tens of thousands of Communists, Jews, democrats, centrists, old-line conservatives, and Catholics began to be held under what was euphemistically called “protective custody.” What this really meant was that they were kidnapped by Hitler’s stormtroopers, beaten up, whipped, and tortured in old military barracks and Heldenkeller (secret dungeons). A suspiciously large number were “shot while trying to escape.”

  Eckener later found out that he was to be rounded up, too, but claimed Hindenburg had personally intervened with Hitler to stop the order. This possibly might have been true, though a little far-fetched; more likely is that the new Nazi leadership’s will-they-or-won’t-they policy on arresting Eckener reflected their own confused and ambiguous views of the airship.

  To some senior figures like Hermann Göring, a former fighter ace and currently the aviation minister (along with other posts, such as Prussian minister of the interior), the airship was a relic of the imperial past and an obsolescent has-been compared to the modern, technologically advanced airplanes he wanted to build. On the other hand, the airship was famed abroad for its ability to forge new air highways and develop trade links with the Americans, northern and southern.

  Owing to his own uncertainty, then, while Göring initially rejected a funding request from the Zeppelin Company for 2 million marks to keep it afloat, he reversed his refusal a few weeks later. Cutting Graf Zeppelin service to expatriates in South America when the regime was claiming to stand up for German rights abroad would have been hypocritical, and throwing hundreds of employees onto the welfare line when Hitler had repeatedly promised to put Germany back to work, embarrassing—especially when Zeppelin was saying it would forge ahead with LZ-129 after the bailout. Not that Göring really wanted a new airship—it was just that not having it was worse than having it.

  Over at the Propaganda Ministry, Goebbels, a pronounced rival of Göring’s, was just as conflicted, but for different reasons. For him, the Zeppelin symbolized Germany’s national rebirth out of the struggle of the 1920s, and its sheer gigantism awed and fascinated those below. Eckener had, despite the odds, heroically succeeded in keeping the airship cause alive in the face of British and French opposition, much as the Nazis had, so Goebbels figured, fought valiantly against their enemies to bring the German people out of the darkness and into the light. Balanced against that, of course, were Eckener’s dubious politics, so for Goebbels it was critical to make clear the distinction between the machine and the man, the technology and the cultural icon who personified it. If the world had learned to identify Eckener with the Zeppelin, the world now had to unlearn it.

  So it was that in April 1933 Goebbels demanded, in the manner of a creditor calling in his debts, that in return for the two-million-mark financing Eckener release the Graf Zeppelin for a flight over Berlin on May 1 to mark the Nazi version of May Day—a celebration of German brotherhood via Gleichschaltung (which can be translated in various ways, such as “coordination” or, less positively, “bringing into line”).

  The Graf Zeppelin’s reputation as an elitist, rich man’s means of travel was turned on its head so that the airship displayed the proper Volksgemeinschaft, or the soul and spirit of united national community, by inviting guests of all classes aboard. “Next to the general stands the unskilled worker from Lake Constance, next to the son of the postal official, the deputy switchman, and next to the airship captain, the salesman,” cooed one tame journalist. “A single feeling fills us: gratitude to the unknown German worker whom we celebrate today, and who helped create the wonder of German technology.”2 Eckener was not mentioned.

  A couple of weeks later, Goebbels, after offering an additional 2 million marks, took the Graf Zeppelin to Rome to visit one of his heroes, Mussolini. Their romance was characterized by mutual flattery—Goebbels gushingly declared him a “political genius,” and Il Duce played to his admirer’s intellectual vanity by calling him Il Dottore (the Doctor).

  Unfortunately, who was in command of the Graf Zeppelin during the May Day or Rome flights is difficult to say. Eckener was certainly not, not when the regime wanted less publicly visible faces. Of the five captains available at that time, at least two—Max Pruss and Anton Wittemann—were or would shortly become Nazi Party members, and Ernst Lehmann, by far the most experienced, was closely identified with the Party. It was probably Lehmann, then, assisted by one or more of the others.3

  In the meantime, Eckener was not playing along as well as he was expected to. On April 26, Göring, alarmed at the scale of the ongoing violence inherent in the “protective custody” scheme, had created the Geheime Staatspolizei (Gestapo), or Secret State Police, to investigate and neutralize political opponents. In other words, the terror was to become more orderly, even if the intent remained the same. Its first chief was a (relatively) urbane and (objectively) philandering member of the Prussian Political Police named Rudolf Diels.4

  In late May Diels, no doubt on Göring’s say-so, invited—or, perhaps, ordered—Eckener to dinner at the Hotel Esplanade in Berlin. After some small talk, Diels said that he’d heard some “complaints” about Eckener and produced a file containing enough material to brand him an enemy of the state.

  In Friedrichshafen, apparently, he’d been overheard talking to an Austrian friend, to whom he had exclaimed, “My dear Count, you’re forgetting that Germany is now a nation governed by criminals!” Another time, while walking through the lobby of the Hotel Bristol in Berlin to meet a colleague, he’d seen some SS officers drinking coffee and muttered loudly, “Look at these gangsters. They would have locked me up long ago had they any guts.” A phrase Eckener liked to bandy around—“Nazism brings to the surface all the evil qualities of human character”—was particularly troubling. He’d also been rather foolish by expressing these views in front of the workers and crews at Zeppelin, most of whom ignored them, but it seems that a few had not. What was certainly clear was that Eckener was being watched and informed upon.

  “We don’t expect you to become a member of the Party,” Diels smoothly went on, “but it would be to your best interest to stop your remarks and to retract those that you’ve already made.” At this, Eckener looked at his watch, said gruffly he’d think about it, and left, telling Diels that “I’ve got to get back to Friedrichshafen for a flight to Brazil.”5

  In spite of his later claim that he marched out, head held high, Eckener had been given a scare. If he didn’t clean up his act, there was a good chance, no matter how internationally prominent he was, that he’d be spending some time in one of the new concentration camps. Eckener subsequently made himself scarce in the first two weeks of June by undertaking the voyage to South America he’d mentioned to Diels, and then doing the same in July, only to find himself having a chance encounter with Hitler himself several days after returning home.6

  On July 19, according to Eckener’s daughter Lotte, the family was on vacation near Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s favored resort area. They were staying in a rural hotel, quietly admiring the views of the mountains, when a wave of great excitement ri
ppled among the guests: Hitler was coming! Eckener headed for his room, grumbling something along the lines of, “Don’t jump off the roof unless you have to,” but he was duly summoned to the verandah, where a long table had been prepared for Hitler’s entourage, including Rudolf Hess, Julius Streicher, and Eva Braun. Remembered Lotte, “My mother and I could now look through the window and curtains and observe how the two stood opposite each other as if no connection at all existed between them.”7

  What exactly was said is uncertain—Eckener mentioned later that Hitler issued a torrent of words—but the meeting, and the mere fact that Hitler, who usually remained at a discreet distance when he wished someone dead, wanted to see him in the flesh, indicated that Eckener could count himself safe, at least for the time being. He was lucky, too, that the wave of arrests was subsiding and that the Nazi leadership had decided that the Zeppelin was worth saving.

  For Hitler personally, airships as a whole were dangerous and awkward, and he refused to ever travel in one. Asked about them, he once declaimed, “The whole thing always seems to me like an inventor who claims to have discovered a cheap new kind of floor covering which looks marvelous, shines forever, and never wears out. But he adds that there is one disadvantage. It must not be walked on with nailed shoes and nothing hard must ever be dropped on it because, unfortunately, it’s made of high explosive.”8

  Yet even Hitler recognized airships’ power. In a signal that Eckener might rehabilitate himself if he kept his views to himself, in September 1933 Hitler approved an appearance of the Graf Zeppelin over that year’s Nuremberg rally. Filmed by Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s court director, the airship passed slowly over the parade and, in the words of a Nazi propagandist, “traces her majestic route over Germany’s youth….A frenetic jubilation shakes the whole stadium. Over one hundred thousand voices ring as a single immense scream of joy and pride at the giant of the air.”9