Empires of the Sky

by Alexander Rose

  Those passengers who did not jump tumbled down the steep incline. In the dining room, Margaret Mather, fifty-eight years old, was “hurled a distance of fifteen or twenty feet against an end wall” and was pinned there by “several Germans who were thrown after me. I couldn’t breathe, and thought I should die, suffocated, but they all jumped up.” Then “the flames blew in, long tongues of flame, bright red and very beautiful,” but the lurching of the ship threw everyone “repeatedly against the furniture and the railing, where they cut their hands and faces against the metal trimmings.” She saw several men jump from the windows “but I sat just where I had fallen, holding the lapels of my coat over my face, feeling the flames light on my back, my hat, my hair, trying to beat them out, watching the horrified faces of my companions as they leaped up and down.”

  Just then, she recognized William Leuchtenberg—she had met him, a “red-faced elderly man who had evidently been celebrating his departure with something stronger than Rhine wine,” briefly at the beginning of the flight—and she recalled that he was a German-American importer. When they had taken off, he had admiringly exclaimed, “Mein Gott! Mein Gott!” but now he had thrown himself “against a railing (arms and legs spread wide) with a loud terrible cry of Es ist das Ende [It is the end].”

  Leuchtenberg himself remembered that while he was badly burned “I immediately knew I had to do something to save myself.” He clutched a “girder”—he probably meant the railing mentioned by Mather—but could not see as his eyelids were swollen owing to burning. After Mather heard him cry out, Leuchtenberg let go and slid down toward the fire, expecting to die. But then he heard a voice asking in English: “Can you jump?” Leuchtenberg said he couldn’t, “I am almost all in.” Then he slid down farther toward the bulkhead, where Mather had fallen—but no one was there anymore.

  That was because, according to Margaret Mather, “I heard a loud cry! ‘Come out, lady!’ I looked, and we were on the ground. Two or three men were peering in, beckoning and calling to us. I got up incredulous and instinctively groped with my feet for my handbag, which had been jerked from me when I fell. ‘Aren’t you coming?’ called the man, and I rushed out over little low parts of the framework which were burning on the ground.”

  Then it was the surprised Leuchtenberg’s turn. He heard someone tell him, “You crawl through here quickly, it is afire, but it won’t burn you.” So he did. One thing he remembered doing was removing his artificial teeth and putting them in his pocket. A member of the ground crew was waiting to pull him out and said “I cannot hold you, I will have to drop you” and let him fall what he thought was ten to sixteen feet (it was actually just a couple) into the arms of a sailor, who bore him away from the wreck.

  Their saviors were the ground parties and naval personnel at Lakehurst, who had rushed to the dying Zeppelin. “Those boys dived into the flames like dogs after rabbits,” said Gill Robb Wilson, the New Jersey aviation director.

  * * *

  —

  THE MAKESHIFT HOSPITAL in the base dispensary was bedlam. Rosendahl had already organized a morgue in the hangar to avoid inflicting further unnecessary trauma, but the dispensary was overwhelmed with casualties. Of the ninety-seven passengers and crew aboard the Hindenburg that evening, there would be thirty-five killed (plus one member of the ground crew). Virtually everyone else was wounded, many grievously.

  Until doctors and ambulances could arrive from surrounding areas with proper equipment, burn victims like Margaret Mather were given bottles of picric acid to swab over their injuries. American Airlines stewardesses—trained nurses, fortunately—rushed from Newark to help. One, a Miss Tyler (or Pyler), was briefly interviewed by Herbert Morrison, who was diligently reporting on the aftermath. She didn’t say much, so busy was she.

  Mather had been among the first to arrive, but within a few minutes more carloads of people came in, including one bearing Lehmann’s co-author Leonhard Adelt and his wife, Gertrude. The dispensary, he said, “swarmed with excited people like a disturbed ant heap. In the corridors on tables, stretchers, and chairs lay the seriously wounded. An ambulance orderly with a morphine syringe the size of a bicycle pump ran about to give everyone an injection. In one room a dying young mechanic called from his stretcher alternately for his bride in Germany and a priest. A neighbor on board was led by. He was badly burned and hung more in the arms of his companions than walked. Men with bloody burns strode searchingly through the rooms.”

  Both Adelt and Mather encountered Captain Lehmann, in shock and suffering from second- and third-degree burns to his face and body. During his appearances among the passengers when the ship was in flight, said Mather, “he always looked alert but genial, with keen blue eyes,” but “now his face was grave and calm, and not a groan escaped him as he sat there, wetting his burns. His mental anguish must have been as intense as his physical pains, but he gave no sign of either, and when my burns became intolerable and I would reach for the bottle [of picric acid] he would hand it to me with grave courtesy, wait patiently while I wet my hands and receive it back with a murmured ‘Danke schön.’ It was a strange, quiet interlude, almost as though we were having tea together.”

  Shortly after, Adelt found Lehmann “crouched upon a table. He was half unclad and sat bent over.” Adelt thought he’d broken his back escaping from the wreck. “I went to him. ‘What caused it?’ I asked. ‘Blitzschlag [lightning],’ he replied. These were the only words we exchanged….We looked into each other’s eyes; when I could no longer contain myself, I left.”

  Still later, Rosendahl visited him, later claiming (according to an FBI report) that Lehmann had told him that an “infernal device”—a bomb—had been planted in the airship and “that the accident would have happened, no matter whether they had utilized helium gas or hydrogen in the superstructure of the Hindenburg.”

  51. The Infernal Device

  THIS REVELATION OF a bomb on board, rather than Lehmann’s earlier, somewhat more accurate statement, prompted an FBI investigation into the possibility of sabotage, as well as myriad conspiracy theories. The Hindenburg did, after all, have many enemies. Communists and anti-Hitler activists may well have wanted to strike a spectacular blow against such a powerful symbol of Nazi power.

  In a memorandum to J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, dated the day after the disaster, Percy Foxworth, one of his assistants, notified him that agents would be checking out tracks and paths near Lakehurst to elicit whether a shooter—there was already a rumor that someone had fired phosphorus-filled incendiary bullets at the Hindenburg—had left behind empty cartridges. Over the coming weeks, the FBI and police would devote, or waste, a lot of time making plaster casts of footprints in the area.

  Meanwhile, FBI Special Agent G. N. London reported on recent articles in The Daily Worker boasting that Communist sailors were doing “perilous underground work” aboard several German passenger liners. They spotted the Gestapo agents aboard, held secret meetings, and circulated Communist propaganda by means of tiny parchments rolled inside cigarettes. Perhaps a similar cell had been operating on the Hindenburg, he asked? But no evidence could be found of Communist infiltration in Friedrichshafen or Frankfurt.

  The Red angle wasn’t working out, but there were so many others to choose from. Someone suggested that “photographing racketeers” had set up the fire to make money selling pictures and had warned their newspaper chums to stay off the Hindenburg that day.

  From there it got only more bizarre. Someone wrote a misspelled, strangely ungrammatical letter to Senator Royal Copeland of New York saying that with the destruction of the Hindenburg, “Zeppelin competitions in America against my airship invention are now out of my way.” He promised to “construct an real American helium airship, better & satftier than a Zepplin, it will cost lesser money, useful for war as well, as commerce.” A tired FBI agent wrote on the back of the letter, “I am trying to find out all info about such nuts. This guy
might actually have done the dirty work, or some other disgruntled inventor like him.”

  That unpromising lead went nowhere, but then another nut emerged. This was Hans Omenitsch of Jackson Heights, New York, who claimed that he could read secret codes in newspapers giving orders to sinister operatives to destroy the airship: “The Codes appear to be operated by an invisible super-government and they are decidedly anti-American.”

  Even the Nazis themselves, who many thought (accurately) had burned down their own Reichstag in 1934, were not above suspicion. Destroying the Hindenburg could have been part of a diabolical ruse to generate sympathy in the United States for Germany. An anonymous note that Special Agent in Charge Whitley forwarded to Hoover asserted that Lehmann, of all people, had planted a time bomb with the approval and knowledge of Eckener, who “got Berlin O.K.” Alternatively, suggested Dr. Nathaniel A. Davis, president of the “Planet-Aryans” in Los Angeles, a sexy female Nazi agent placed the bomb in the Hindenburg so that Hitler could benefit from the insurance money.

  Given the tenor of the times, it didn’t take long, of course, for the usual scapegoats to be targeted. Within twenty-four hours of the disaster, one correspondent informed Senator Copeland that “the Hindenburg was fired at in lower New York—I saw it from a skyscraper window….Some hireling of anti-nazis [sic] did this job and was paid by the jews [sic], [including the “half jew, half wop Mayor La Guardia”]…And it won’t be long now, Senator, before Americans start massacring kikes just as other nations have done.”

  An FBI man later reviewed all the correspondence received, finding that 30 percent of the letter writers believed the destruction was caused by mechanical defects, half by static electricity, and fully 20 percent by Jewish sabotage. Within the bureau, there was a lot of eye-rolling at the patent craziness on display, but Lakehurst’s Charles Rosendahl’s suggestions were taken more seriously.

  On May 19, W. S. Devereaux, Special Agent in Charge, informed Hoover that the evening before he had received a phone call from Rosendahl asking him to come to Lakehurst. He implied that he had something important to impart that only could be done in person.

  When Devereaux and Special Agent Lee Malone arrived, Rosendahl said that Eckener had stated to him that “the first opinion that he had formed of the disaster of the Hindenburg was that her wreckage was caused by sabotage…either on the part of Communists or on the part of sympathizers with the Anti-Nazi movement.” As for Rosendahl, he was, said Devereaux, convinced it was sabotage and specifically mentioned Lehmann’s opinion that there had been an “infernal device” on board.

  Rosendahl, unfortunately, gave no indication as to exactly when Eckener had said these things, and another key point was that Rosendahl did not state that Eckener had said that this was his current opinion, just that his “first opinion” was that it sounded like sabotage. There was, it would turn out, a large difference between what was then and what was now.

  * * *

  —

  ON THE NIGHT of May 6 Eckener had been asleep in Graz, Austria, where he had been scheduled to give a talk the following evening. That afternoon he had visited the well-known Austrian sculptor Gustinus Ambrosi, who had shown him a new work, of Icarus plunging aflame from the sky.

  The Berlin correspondent of The New York Times, having enterprisingly discovered his whereabouts soon after hearing about the disaster from the New York office at 1 A.M., woke Eckener up at 2:30 to relay the news of the Hindenburg’s end. Few details were available and Eckener was groggy, but he had expressed “deepest grief over the loss of so many lives.” As his voice “shook with emotion,” he added, “I am shocked and very sorrowful for all on board. I can scarcely say more…until I have learned the circumstances of the disaster.”

  At 8 A.M., Eckener, still in the dark as to what exactly had happened and fretting, despite his atheism, that Ambrosi’s Icarus had been some kind of divinely inspired premonition, was driven to Vienna to fly to Berlin on a 1:30 P.M. private flight for emergency meetings with Göring at the Air Ministry.

  In view of his “impaired political health,” as he put it, whenever Eckener traveled abroad he was assigned an official custodian to make sure that he behaved himself. In this case, it was his friend, a wartime Zeppelin captain, now Luftwaffe colonel, Joachim Breithaupt of the Air Ministry, and it was now that the system failed. At the airfield in Vienna, before Breithaupt could stop him, Eckener mentioned offhandedly to reporters that the company had for some time “received threatening letters, and it is just possible that one such threat materialized in the brain of some fanatic.”

  It was this ill-considered “first opinion,” combined with Lehmann’s alleged assertion about an “infernal device,” that became the root of Rosendahl’s sabotage theory.

  * * *

  —

  IN THE MINUTES, hours, and days after the disaster, Eckener, Rosendahl, and Lehmann experienced varying forms and degrees of cognitive failure when confronted with the shock and magnitude of what had just happened—which could not have happened.

  Rosendahl, who had served aboard the ill-fated Shenandoah, the Los Angeles, and the doomed Akron, was severely confused, bouncing off one theory or another as he tried to come to terms with the seeming end to his decades-long dream, so often disappointed, of making airships an American success story.

  In the aftermath of the explosion, for instance, he had pestered FBI investigators about a harmless German-American passenger named Joseph Späh, an acrobat/contortionist who performed under the stage name of “Ben Dova.” Rosendahl said one of the stewards believed Späh had acted oddly during the flight. He had “appeared to him [the steward] to be unsympathetic to…airship travel and impressed him as being a peculiar type of passenger; also that this individual remained aloof from the other passengers and was not at all responsive to the explanations of the crew regarding the various technicalities of the airship itself.”

  Ignoring the otherwise simple explanation that Späh might just not have been interested in an airship’s “technicalities,” Rosendahl helpfully added that “it would take a fairly active man to climb the rigging separating gas cells 4 and 5 in order to gain access to the gas shaft” and plant a bomb. Späh was an acrobat, was he not?

  When that didn’t pan out, he switched to a different tack and wanted the New York Police Department, the FBI, and the Bureau of Mines and Explosives to test a mysterious yellow substance allegedly found smeared on a valve. He suspected it was sulfur and therefore proof of sabotage, but it turned out to be nothing of any interest, as Devereaux noted to Hoover.

  Rosendahl sometimes wasn’t even quite sure whether he himself believed his own conspiracy theory. Two days before he had called Devereaux to his house, Rosendahl had told the special agent that “there was no evidence of sabotage.” After the Devereux visit, when he had changed his mind yet again, Rosendahl was regarded as making a fool of himself: Nobody authoritative was by then citing sabotage as anything but the remotest of possibilities.

  Lehmann, likewise, could not admit the reality, but for different reasons. The Hindenburg was the pinnacle of German engineering, German technique, German airpower, and German prowess: It was fundamentally inconceivable that human error, an act of God, pure accident, or a simple defect of any kind could have murdered it. Hence his conviction that some sinister external force—an infernal device—must have been the cause of the disaster. Lehmann would die in terrible pain at 5:55 P.M. on May 7, the day after the disaster, at Paul Kimball Hospital in Lakewood, New Jersey, so he never was given the chance to change his mind.

  Eckener, however, after his initial suspicion of foul play, faced the truth squarely and recognized that the Hindenburg had been destroyed partly by human error: that is, Lehmann’s.

  He never stated this openly, because he couldn’t. The ghastly death of his old comrade, rival, and foe made it impossible to point a finger directly, and he was surely affected by the d
istress of Frau Lehmann. The fact that their only child, two-year-old Luv, had died five weeks before of complications arising from an ear infection only doubled her sorrow. Blaming her husband would have been an uncharacteristically cruel act on Eckener’s part.

  When all was said and done, Eckener and Lehmann had known each other since 1909, had worked together, had stuck together, had intrigued together to make the Zeppelin the marvel of the age. They had fought and bickered and backstabbed each other, too, which could not be forgotten, but it could be forgiven, and maybe it didn’t seem so important now. “For nearly thirty years we worked together, always in perfect harmony and as close friends,” Eckener announced with “unrestrained grief.” This was untrue, but it seemed the right thing to say, given the fate Lehmann had met on the very cusp of their success.

  A relationship as complex as that between this old married couple could not be explained in a few cheap words or glib sentiments, as Eckener well knew. The Zeppelin Project had to continue, and Eckener understood that the truth was paramount, even if it had to be shaded.

  To investigate the causes of the disaster, the Department of Commerce organized a Board of Inquiry, which held hearings between May 10 and May 28 in the Lakehurst hangar. There were two components to the inquiry—the American and the German—and two subsequent reports. The American “accident board” comprised members of the department’s Bureau of Air Commerce, with Commander Rosendahl, among others, serving as a technical adviser. The “German Commission,” which included Eckener (who told Rosendahl about his “first opinion”) and a reluctant Ludwig Dürr (his first time off German soil), arrived four days after the hearings began. The Board of Inquiry interviewed scores of witnesses, crewmen, officers, and experts.