Though, again, it was likely that Lehmann was captaining that key flight, Eckener was permitted, perhaps as a loyalty test, to take the Graf Zeppelin to Chicago later that month for the World’s Fair. The Nazis, who had not yet established themselves incontrovertibly as the legitimate government of Germany, obsessively monitored the foreign press and were eager to make a good impression after enduring any number of hostile articles reporting on the bloodletting against their domestic enemies. A visit by the Graf Zeppelin, Goebbels thought, presented an ideal opportunity to show off the New Germany, and having Eckener in command would prove that the claims of tyranny were meritless calumnies.
Eckener, however, was aware of the ploy and told his wife, Johanna, “I’m beginning to think that they feel I’m more valuable to them alive. They know the propaganda value of having German airships flying the world’s air routes. They also know that I enjoy many overseas friendships, particularly in America, and that I can succeed in obtaining foreign cooperation and support whereas they cannot.”10
What should have been an easygoing and uncomplicated visit turned out to be a political minefield. The trouble began even before the flight, when Eckener, following precedent, requested that the U.S. Post Office issue a special Zeppelin stamp to bring in much-needed revenue to help pay for the trip.
When the green 50-cent stamp was issued, it caused an uproar: The Graf Zeppelin had been depicted without a flag on its vertical tail fins.
The flag was a fraught issue both in Germany and among German expatriate populations at the time. The traditional imperial flag, with its three horizontal stripes of (from top to bottom) black, white, and red, had been in use until 1918, when it was replaced by that of the Weimar Republic (a tricolor of black, red, and gold). Throughout the 1920s, the Weimar flag had been abhorred by the ultra-right as the hated and humiliating symbol of democracy and reparations, so on March 12, 1933, it had been outlawed in Germany and replaced by two official flags: the old black-white-red imperial one as a temporary sop to Hindenburg and the conservative traditionalists and the flag of the Nazi Party, a black swastika inside a white disk on a red background.
A year after Hindenburg’s death in August 1934, Hitler would scrap the imperial flag, but during the World’s Fair the law was that the Nazi flag must be painted on one side of all aircraft and the imperial tricolor on the other. In the Graf Zeppelin’s case, twenty-foot-high swastikas were added to the port side of the upper and lower rear fins, with the imperial stripes on the starboard.
Yet on the stamp, which showed the Graf Zeppelin with its port side plainly visible, there was no swastika. Clearly, someone at the Post Office had decided to depoliticize the problem by omitting the flag—but had succeeded only in politicizing it.
In Chicago, where there was a 600,000-strong German community, the absence of the swastika on the stamp proved particularly divisive. The German Group of the World’s Fair, the official organization overseeing the German exhibitions and comprising mostly older-generation Germans, worried that the Nazi flag symbolized anti-Semitism and flew only the imperial colors, while young pro-Nazi activists belonging to the Friends of the New Germany, usually called the Bund, made great sport of tearing down the imperial flag and replacing it with the Nazi one.
So far there had been just a few scuffles over the issue, but the police feared that the Graf Zeppelin’s visit would lead to a riot, bomb threats, or even a sabotage attempt. Hans Luther, the German ambassador, was so worried he warned Cordell Hull, the U.S. secretary of state, of rumors that Communist militants were planning on blowing up the ship.
Eckener and Willy von Meister, running the American arrangements, had early on been notified that trouble was brewing, but were promised that three hundred deputies, a hundred police officers, and two companies of soldiers would be on hand. “Bring that Zepp to Chicago,” growled William Meyering, the Cook County sheriff, to a relieved Meister.
Thus reassured, Eckener went ahead with the visit on October 26 but made some discreet changes to the schedule. Usually, Eckener tried to arrive at the most propitious moment for news photographers, who loved taking shots of huge crowds surrounding the airship. Accordingly, he announced that the Graf Zeppelin would be landing near the World’s Fair in downtown Chicago at 9 A.M.—perfect for the late-morning editions. But in fact he touched ground about twenty miles away at Curtiss Field, in the suburbs of Chicago, three and a half hours earlier.
That decision alone was very strange, but then there was Eckener’s odd choice of approach direction. He had been coming from Indiana, southeast of Chicago, and the most expeditious route would have had him heading into the city with Lake Michigan to his east. Yet he went far out of his way to bear west and approach Chicago from the north, whereupon he’d circled the metropolis in a clockwise direction until landing at Curtiss. When Meister noticed the detour, he asked Eckener about it, who replied quietly, “And let my friends in Chicago see the swastikas?”
In an act of small rebellion, Eckener had deliberately allowed only the starboard imperial tail markings to be seen easily from below and then had made sure to land in such a way that the swastika side was mostly obscured from view.
Unfortunately, stills snapped by an airplane-borne photographer from the sunlit east over Lake Michigan with the fairgrounds as a backdrop were more picturesque than those shot from below or from the west. So when the newspapers printed them, millions more Americans saw the swastikas than Eckener had expected. Unaware of the ruse, the Propaganda Ministry in Berlin was thoroughly delighted with the result, and graded Eckener accordingly, if undeservedly.
The rest of Eckener’s time in Chicago was occupied with similar acts of muted resistance. These consisted of restricting the content of his speeches and interviews to boilerplate rhetoric about the Graf Zeppelin, its technical achievements, and airships’ contribution to world commerce. Eckener may have been obliged to collaborate with the regime for the sake of his own safety and the good of the Zeppelin Company, but he would serve neither as its propagandist nor as its apologist.
At one reception, ostensibly to celebrate “Zeppelin Day,” a supposedly nonpolitical event, Eckener discovered that the venue, the Medinah Temple, was festooned with Nazi flags—a gigantic one hung behind the podium—and the ushers were dressed in stormtrooper uniforms. It turned out the Bund had arranged the affair, and its members occupied themselves making stiff-armed salutes. Eckener, clearly unhappy, gave a brief speech yet again extolling the technical abilities of the Graf Zeppelin and sat down to near-silence, after which a pro-Nazi speaker roused the crowd into singing militaristic choruses of “Deutschland Über Alles.”
Eckener, who had heard the anthem in New York in 1924 after his first triumphal flight, was brought almost to tears. It was a pitiful reminder of how greatly its meaning had changed—from one of Weimar republicanism and liberty to that of racial and ideological domination—in the intervening decade.
On his return home, Eckener was told that the Chicago Bund leaders had informed Berlin that they had been disappointed by his lack of political enthusiasm, though Eckener received a note of appreciation for the voyage from Göring, granting him a modicum of protection from further investigation.11
After all, he still had his uses.
44. The Ledgers
ECKENER’S RELATIONSHIP WITH the regime would remain ambiguous: He never knew for certain on which side of the Nazi ledger he was. Debit or credit? Maybe he was on both—or neither.
On the plus side, in 1933 and 1934 the Graf Zeppelin was turning a corner with its South American service, partly owing to Germany’s slow emergence from the Depression but mostly because Berlin had decided to funnel a million marks a year into the Zeppelin coffers as a subsidy.
By 1934, the Graf Zeppelin was transporting an average of nineteen passengers—almost a full house—415 pounds of mail, and 352 pounds of freight. It would be going too far to say it was a blazing,
profitable success, especially since the entire edifice would have collapsed without the government cash and there was still a lot of empty cargo space, but after a dire 1931 and 1932 at least the numbers were now heading in the right direction.1
On the minus side, alas, the government was taking an increased interest in the Zeppelin Company. It was noted with dismay that Eckener had not yet purged his Jewish employees and moreover had hosted the Goodyear (and former Zeppelin) designer Karl Arnstein, Jew, in late 1933 for a lengthy visit to discuss LZ-129.2 Just as the universities and scientific institutes were being pressured to fire their Jewish professors, the so-called Jewish Influence on Germany’s newest and proudest airship would not be tolerated, and it mattered not that Arnstein happened to be, even more so now that the elderly Ludwig Dürr was nearing retirement, the world’s most experienced designer.
With this in mind, Eckener’s position as the head of Zeppelin was increasingly precarious. A secret memorandum of March 30, 1934, marked for highest eyes only (among the recipients were Hitler, Göring, Goebbels, and Heinrich Himmler), judged that airships were economically, culturally, and politically important as a means of international transportation and should be exploited as such. More Zeppelins should be built to take advantage of Germany’s near monopoly on the airship industry and more agreements negotiated with foreign countries to allow more frequent flights.
The memorandum conceded that Eckener was “an excellent airship operator and a man of unusually outstanding merit,” but ultimately he was too much in love with the Americans, too involved with the Jews, too globalist in his outlook to be permitted to represent Germany. Henceforth the Reich should take over all dealings with Washington and fund the Zeppelin Company to whatever amount (“forty, thirty, or even twenty million” marks) was necessary to ensure success. In short, the memorandum recommended that Eckener be ousted at some point and the Zeppelin Company fully Nazified and nationalized.3
That this had not already happened—political parties, companies, trade unions, sporting associations, social clubs, and the civil service had all been shut down, crushed into submission, or ruthlessly cleansed—was testament to Eckener’s world fame but not exclusively so. Other noncompliant world-famous figures, like Albert Einstein, the playwright Bertolt Brecht, the conductor Otto Klemperer, and the novelist Thomas Mann had already exiled themselves or been forced to emigrate, but unlike these subversive parasites, Eckener was considered necessary to the airship effort, at least for the time being.
Until he exhausted his utility, Berlin, keeping Eckener on his toes and his back foot, gave with one hand and took with the other.
So, sometimes he received the kid glove treatment, such as when he was requested to visit the Propaganda Ministry, where Goebbels, seemingly casually, asked him how he was coming along with LZ-129. When Eckener replied that he needed the equivalent of at least half a million dollars to reach the next stage of construction, Goebbels “said with great composure, ‘Is that all? Why, that’s a mere bagatelle! I will approach some big industrialists and suggest they contribute what you need.’ ” When his rival Göring heard about Goebbels’s generosity with other people’s money, he too disgorged a nonrepayable “loan” from the Air Ministry.4
And then at other times, he was shown the mailed fist. An arrest order was issued for Eckener during the Night of the Long Knives between June 30 and July 2, 1934. This was the operation in which Hitler decapitated the brownshirted leadership of the SA militia, rid himself of troublemakers, and avenged himself on old enemies. In Eckener’s case, two Gestapo men knocked on his door, and upon being told he wasn’t there, departed without saying a further word. By good fortune—or maybe the Gestapo just wanted to give him a scare in absentia—Eckener was at that moment on board the Graf Zeppelin in South America. He only arrived back in Germany on July 7, after the murders and beatings had ceased.5
This unpredictable combination of punishment and reward was cleverly thought out, and Eckener was by no means the only victim. It was a common enough strategy to bring the recalcitrant into line once they realized the world could be theirs if only they behaved. The Nazi leadership knew perfectly well that Eckener was addicted to airships and was likely to do anything in order to be allowed to finish LZ-129. An opportunity to test Eckener’s loyalty soon came along; if he passed, perhaps he could stay as the head of Zeppelin for a time longer.
Following the death of Hindenburg in early August 1934, a national plebiscite was ordered to approve the bestowing upon the former Herr Hitler the title of Führer und Reichskanzler (“Leader and Reich Chancellor”), thereby making him supreme commander of the armed forces and a divine entity to whom unconditional obedience was required.6
In the days leading up it, Goebbels asked Eckener “in a somewhat threatening tone” to make a radio speech supporting the measures. It was not a matter of whether or not to accept the request, for as Eckener recalled, “it was immediately clear what a refusal of this imposition…would mean to me.” His concern was, rather, what should he say and how should he say it?
Eckener’s speech was an extremely careful and most cunningly worded model of balance, in and of itself a subtle sign of resistance at a time when lickspittles and toadies were falling over themselves to praise the Führer. Much of it stated the obvious and recited banal truisms, but other parts could be understood in different ways depending upon the listener’s perspective.
The Propaganda Ministry, which had a sensitive nose for these sorts of things, allowed the speech to be broadcast—so Eckener had passed the test—but only after one of the censors had made changes to the “significant final sentences” that had, Goebbels thought, called a touch too much attention to the late Hindenburg’s “integrity, sense of duty, and love for his country.” If one didn’t know better, it might be thought that Eckener was discreetly contrasting Hitler to his predecessor.7
* * *
—
ECKENER’S COOPERATION HAD bought continued government support for the airship program, his primary concern. Construction work on LZ-129, which had proceeded in fits and starts for years, now advanced at a fast clip.
Harold Dick, a young Goodyear engineer, received the rare prize of a yearlong secondment to Friedrichshafen at the personal request of Paul Litchfield. Not since the early 1920s and the arrival of the U.S. Navy inspectors had any foreigners been permitted to visit Eckener’s Chamber of Secrets, but he graciously welcomed this one.
Eckener wasn’t being entirely altruistic: He knew Dick had an inside line to Litchfield and would be reporting on LZ-129’s progress. It was critical for the future success of IZT that Litchfield be kept apprised of the marvel that he was planning so that Goodyear could get ready to build its own in Akron.8
Explaining Dick’s visit was that the IZT scheme had very recently, and entirely unexpectedly, been given new life after years in the doldrums—but it would be without United’s Frederick Rentschler, its leading backer. He’d become a major person of interest during a recent Senate investigation into the Post Office’s cozy awarding of airmail contracts in the 1920s and early 1930s. When his staggering salary was revealed, he had been roundly condemned as the worst of the worst, a man who grew rich on stock pyramids, market manipulations, and the lamb-shearing of innocents. As a result, the giant United Aircraft and Transport Corporation was broken up into three companies and Rentschler was banned from running an airline.9
The ouster of Rentschler, who’d long since lost interest in airships, had been greeted with sighs of relief in Akron. At last free of United, once seen as their savior, Goodyear and IZT could pursue their own ambitions without having to worry about pleasing the airline.
The bullish Litchfield now wanted to go full speed ahead on transatlantic passenger service. Commercially successful flights by Eckener’s next-generation LZ-129 would lead to increased American interest in IZT, which would enable Goodyear-Zeppelin to quickly build LZ-129 copies in
the currently empty Air Dock.
* * *
—
DURING THE AIR Mail scandal that had taken down Rentschler, Trippe, too, had been asked a series of uncomfortable questions once Post Office auditors found that Pan American, like United, had long been benefiting from favoritism and backroom deals to receive maximal subsidies. Between 1927 and 1934, Pan American had pocketed no less than $35.7 million from the government, but it proved impossible to distinguish between what was proper and what was padding since Trippe, more adept than Rentschler in covering his tracks, had made it diabolically difficult for the investigators to understand Pan American’s bookkeeping.
Any number of key accounts were dispersed among Alaska, Texas, and Florida, while others were scattered among the many operating divisions in South America. Internal reports carelessly (or carefully) obfuscated distinctions between types of expenses. Breakdowns of the sums for overhauling aircraft, records of passenger miles, and other data critical for cost analysis went mysteriously missing or were sent to the wrong office.
The upshot was that very little, if anything, could be pinned on Trippe personally. Certainly, there were raised eyebrows—why, pray tell, were Pan American’s administrative expenses quadruple those of other airlines? And why did the New York headquarters charge its overhead to the Caribbean division?—but, legally speaking, Trippe apparently knew nothing of his own company’s financial operations even if he obviously knew everything. Rather like Eckener, he was on both sides of a ledger and on neither.
In the event, he escaped from the scandal barely scathed: Mail payments to Pan American would be cut by 25 percent. Trippe wasn’t bothered one way or another because he’d already prepared for the worst by reorienting Pan American toward the less politicized, less regulated tourist trade—and now he had the perfect plane for the job.10
Empires of the Sky Page 45