Empires of the Sky

by Alexander Rose

  He and Trippe had once been the closest of friends, or rather, the closest that Trippe got to being friends, and without Lindbergh’s dedication and knowledge, Pan American would never have succeeded, no matter how great Trippe’s abilities. But they had grown apart in the later years, especially politically—Trippe thought Lindbergh’s Nazi sympathies embarrassing. The aviator’s unwillingness to take his side when it counted was treasonable, for Trippe’s relationship with Lindbergh wasn’t just “business,” in which one sought alliances of convenience, but a personal one. They had fought in the trenches together, and to be left for dead (as Trippe saw it) by a comrade who could have saved him was unforgivable. Lindbergh would continue to be associated with Pan American for decades to come, but not as an intimate at the court of King Juan.

  Trippe found new men and raised them from the dust to replace his fallen barons, but never again would he allow anyone to become close enough to threaten his crown.

  The interregnum was over, and the king had returned from over the water. Trippe moved back into Whitney’s vacated throne room, albeit without his famous globe.

  That stage prop was taken by freight elevator to the basement and eventually wound up in the National Air and Space Museum. Trippe, who had become his own man, no longer had any use for such childish things.

  He now, after all, ruled the world.

  Epilogue

  A VISITOR TO ECKENER in the summer of 1939 found him worn out and hopelessly pessimistic.1 He knew a war was coming, he knew Göring was planning to scrap LZ-130, and he knew that the Zeppelin idea was finished. He collected his scores of honors—the Guggenheim Foundation Medal, the National Geographic Society Medal, the gold medal of the Royal Aeronautical Society, the medal of the Fédération International Aeronautique, the Leibniz Medal of the Academy of Science, a Lilienthal Medal, an Albert Einstein Medal, even the Golden Key for Atlantic City, among so many others—and threw them into a simple cardboard box with “Decorations” scrawled on the top. They had all been in vain.2

  With the end of the airships, he told a friend, the Zeppelin Company “switched completely over to armament work,” and its factories and workshops were converted to making Panzer gearboxes and aircraft engines.3 By the fall of 1941, the company had signed contracts to produce rocket-propellant tanks and fuselage sections for Hitler’s promised wonder weapon, the V-2.4

  Eckener remained the honorary chairman with no decision-making role, despite having being appointed a Wehrwirtschaftsführer (leader of the war economy) in 1939—a title Eckener dismissed as meaning “practically nothing” and thought was ridiculous.

  Becoming a “leader of the war economy” was a feel-good appointment for the four-hundred-odd executives of large corporations producing war materials, but before 1940 there was no political litmus test for recipients to prove their Party bona fides (which Eckener would have failed). After that, the title became much more closely identified with Nazi values.5

  At some point, he picked up a temporary directorship of Deutsche Bank, where he did little, though the bank was a nexus of Nazi financing, and sometime in 1944 he became a short-term director of an Austrian company, Kontinentale Rohstoffe und Papierindustrie. It’s possible that the firm was involved in producing gunpowder, but more likely it was a paper-making concern with interests in manufacturing film stock. He was also a deputy chairman of a part-Zeppelin-owned company called Aero Union, whose vague mandate was to promote “airship communication” between nations—essentially, nothing.6

  What happened at Zeppelin was out of his hands. He was merely a convenient and rather pathetic figurehead. Why he stayed on when he could have claimed “illness” and retired—not that he did any work—was probably because he needed the money from his directorships and may have felt that it was his duty to help the country fight a war he loathed. It would prove an unfortunately compromising situation.7

  He instead tried to repel the cult of Nazism from impinging on his daily life. Wagner he had always disliked, but he turned even against Beethoven, seeing him now as too nationalistic—or rather, used too often for nationalistic ends. He listened only to Mozart, “whose music, after all, is completely free” of politics.8

  When he was obliged to travel to Peenemünde to watch a trial of Wernher von Braun’s V-2 rocket in November 1942, he was much more interested in reading the works of Maxim Gorky, the Russian novelist, in order to try to understand the weirdness of his own Soviet experiences and feasting upon the contents of his Johanna-packed lunchbox (“rolls with roast veal, a roll with sausage and a fantastic egg…and a cheese roll”) than he was in the liftoff and the rockets’ military applications. All Eckener hoped for was to get it over with so he could go home.9

  Throughout the war, as carefully expressed in his letters to his friends, which were read by the Gestapo, Eckener disguised his habitual sarcasm and irony with seemingly banal cheerleading and Hitler adoration to make it past the censors. “What good does it do to complain and to question?” he asked. “Now we just have to get through so we can end up in the realm of the promised thousand-year happiness and peace; otherwise, we’ll be in a very bad way.” After all, “a person thinks, but the Führer directs,” so all would no doubt turn out well.10

  If he had little to do at Zeppelin before, he had still less after the night of June 20–21, 1943, when the Royal Air Force bombed the Zeppelin factory producing the V-2 parts. (Eckener laconically commented that “it was a rather violent visit that brought a great deal of confusion.”)11 That marked the end of Zeppelin’s contribution to the rocket program.

  Neither did Friedrichshafen escape the attention of Bomber Command. The following year, in the lead-up to D-Day, when it was critical to hamper German tank production, a major raid by 322 Lancaster bombers occurred in late April. This time the damage was far worse, with some two-thirds of the town’s industrial buildings destroyed.12 The Zeppelin tank-gearbox factory was completely demolished.

  Eckener’s modest house sustained severe damage, with one bomb landing in the back garden and another near the front gate. Glass splinters and bomb fragments littered the interior. Eckener and Johanna had happened to be visiting their daughter Lotte in Constance at the time and so had not taken shelter in the cellar, which had caved in; they would surely both have perished.13 From then on, Eckener and Johanna lived at Lotte’s house.

  On July 20, 1944, yet another raid, this time by the American 485th Bombardment Group, destroyed almost the entirety of whatever was left of the Zeppelin works. To Eckener, it was as if the whole history of the count’s enterprise had been wiped from the record. Lotte noticed that her father for the first time looked “small and pale,” though at least his gruffness soon returned. “He truly is a stoic, after all.”14

  The respite didn’t last long. July 20 also happened to be the day on which Colonel Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg attempted to assassinate Hitler with a briefcase bomb at the Wolf’s Lair headquarters. In the murderous aftermath, thousands of suspected anti-Nazis were rounded up and interrogated by the Gestapo, including Eckener, who was “interviewed” several times. He had known several of the plotters, though he had been uninvolved with the conspiracy.15 Had Eckener been even tangentially privy to the plot, that would have been enough to prompt a show trial and a hanging—of seven thousand people arrested, nearly five hundred were executed—but he had cautiously avoided any and all politics since the 1930s.

  After being released, Eckener waited for the war to end. In late April 1945, French troops entered Friedrichshafen. For a short time Eckener held out hope that the French occupying authorities would support the rebuilding of the Zeppelin facilities to help Germany’s economic redevelopment. A Major Lasnier was willing to put Maybach back on its feet, but for the Zeppelin Company there was no prospect. The major said, in a remark harking back to the First World War, that “everyone in France regards the name Zeppelin as a symbol of Germany’s warlike will.”


  Despite Eckener’s decades-long insistence that the airship was a peaceful instrument, he had been done in again by the acts of others. Eckener himself appealed to the French that Zeppelin had not manufactured military equipment “for any length of time after the war began” and claimed, in a curious callback to Colsman’s plan to make Zeppelin-branded aluminum pots and pans in 1918–19, that the company had focused instead on aluminum household goods.16

  This was a desperate fib, and the French knew it. They ordered that anything left of the Zeppelin works was to be demolished, but the military government had many other things on its plate, and there was a delay.

  Taking advantage of the unexpected reprieve, in February 1946 Eckener tried once again to save the company by admitting, belatedly, that the firm indeed had been a “subcontractor for arms manufacturers” but pleaded that Zeppelin was known throughout the world for bringing “understanding and cooperation among the nations.” As a sop, he even suggested changing the name to the anodyne “Equipment and Vehicle Construction Company” if that would make the French feel better—but it was all to no good. The demolition order stayed.17

  The following year, there was better news from America, where old friends like Meister, Litchfield, Arnstein, and Rosendahl were eager to see Eckener. Litchfield and Rosendahl arranged (as Eckener could hardly afford it) for him to travel to the United States for a six-month visit. The just-retired Rosendahl, whom even Eckener considered an airship obsessive—he would launch into long monologues on their virtues at the slightest opportunity—was working with Goodyear’s Litchfield to resurrect the American airship program.18

  To that end, Litchfield had recently published a book, rather plaintively titled Why? Why Has America No Rigid Airships?, and he and Rosendahl wanted Eckener to be their star attraction. Eckener was only too pleased to go, for it meant that he could send care packages back to his family from the Land of Plenty. He thought three or four months would be enough, as he and Johanna were “too old to want to live separated.”

  In early April 1947, Eckener, now aged almost eighty, began his trip to America, but before he departed he bade his farewell to Ludwig Dürr “in a deeply emotional way.” His reason, unfortunately, is unclear, but the two may have had a political falling out, with Dürr refusing to see the reality that the Zeppelin Company would be, could be, no more.19

  For the first time, Eckener was traveling by airplane to the United States, albeit by military transports rather than by Pan American. There was a layover in the Azores, which he had passed over so many times before, and he saw how far aviation had advanced since the 1930s. The Americans had at least twenty airplanes based there nowadays, as well as comfortable quarters and more food than Eckener had seen in years. After that, it was on to Newfoundland, where they again landed after a nine-hour flight, and then on to Connecticut, where a plane picked him up and took him to Lakehurst. It was quite a change from the old days.

  Eckener took the time to visit New York to see Meister and Rosendahl and Jerome Hunsaker from PZT—and Karl von Wiegand, too, whom he’d known since the First World War. Wiegand had had a terrible Second one, having been interned with his Graf Zeppelin–adoring love, Lady Drummond-Hay, in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in the Philippines. When they were released in 1945, she was ill, and would die of coronary thrombosis several months later. Wiegand was still quite sprightly, traveling and churning out copy for Hearst (who remained friendly with Eckener), though he was almost totally blind.

  Afterward, Eckener caught the plane to Akron—now just two hours away—to visit Litchfield and Karl Arnstein.20 Eckener was happy again. He had plenty of food and good company, and it made a wonderful change to be free of his German troubles and to walk down the street and still be recognized by fans.

  Then it was time for business. Back he went to New York for a jolly get-together with the old gang from AZT/IZT. Amid much chatter, there was excited talk about the Litchfield/Rosendahl plan and getting the financing together for a transatlantic airship line. While Eckener enjoyed himself, he doubted whether much, if anything, would come of it. He was right about that. A scheduled meeting in Washington with apparently interested politicians kept getting bumped, and the buzz, whatever there was of it, slowly died away.21 AZT/IZT would be formally dissolved in June 1950, though for some reason its long-dormant Pacific counterpart, PZT—perhaps Litchfield and Hunsaker couldn’t bear to let it go—lingered on until 1957.22

  Eckener stayed a few months longer, “just to accumulate some more funds, which can be used to send packages out.”23 But he was getting homesick, and he knew he would never see his friends again.

  Just before Christmas 1947, he came home to Germany, only to be confronted by one of the most horrible experiences of his life. On Christmas Eve, there was news that as part of the Allies’ denazification process—intended to find, expose, “cleanse,” and punish those closely identified with Nazism—he, Hugo Eckener, had been classified as a “beneficiary” of the regime owing to his directorships, his status as a Wehrwirtschaftsführer (leader of the war economy), and his chairmanship of Zeppelin.24

  The punishment was a severe one. He was fined 100,000 reichsmarks, prohibited from all managerial activity for five years, and forbidden to vote or to hold elected office for the same period.25

  To gain some idea of the absurd magnitude of the fine, which Eckener had nowhere near the means to ever pay—he had savings of 35,000 reichsmarks, and lived on 300 a month—consider that Ernst Heinkel, a fellow Wehrwirtschaftsführer but one who was an active member of the Nazi Party, the manufacturer of the Luftwaffe’s eponymous bombers, an amasser of a colossal fortune, and an eager employer of slave labor, was fined 2,000 reichsmarks.26

  Eckener was given no reason for the decision, and the mortal embarrassment and humiliation shocked him into silence for several weeks, but there was still hope. Denazification was often clumsily or randomly imposed or prompted by political reasons (Eckener suspected that Communists in the state government had put the French up to it), and a small fish could be hooked while many a big fish swam away. A decision could also be reversed with “positive evidence of anti-Nazi activity,” and with that Eckener was handily endowed.27

  Over the coming months, the newspapers were full of letters from readers indignantly pointing out Eckener’s well-known opposition to Nazism. People, including tortured resistance leaders, sent notes to him saying the charge against him was laughable, and there was a letter, signed by a large number of eminent politicians, publishers, lawyers, scientists, and professors backing him to the hilt. Eckener himself wrote to the German state government and the French military authorities asking for clarification and citing all the episodes in the 1930s in which he had found himself in hot water with the Nazis.

  On July 14, 1948, the judgment was completely rescinded by a U.S. tribunal, which found that Eckener had not been “incriminated” and had in fact “wanted nothing to do with the politics of National Socialism, but rather lived only for his business ventures and the old tradition of airship construction.”28 The German Federal Republic gave him the Order of Merit to make up for the affront.29

  The news of his victory, which came a few weeks before Eckener’s eightieth birthday, was a cause for necessarily modest celebration. He and Johanna were still living at his daughter’s house, and no one had much money. Eckener had been reduced to begging Meister to send him spaghetti, coffee, shrimp, and cooked ham from the United States to help him through, and his birthday gifts consisted of flowers from the garden, some ancient cigars, and a little bowl or vase from the back of someone’s cupboard. But he received three hundred letters and sixty telegrams from well-wishers. He was still remembered.30

  Two years later, Eckener and Johanna were finally able to return to a home of sorts in Friedrichshafen, only for Johanna to suffer a stroke in October 1951. She continued to experience paralysis for many months afterward and had another stroke
at the end of 1952, rendering her almost unable to speak and see, while Eckener despaired.31

  On his eighty-fifth birthday in 1953, when former Zeppelin employees honored him with a traditional torchlit procession, Eckener surprised them by admitting publicly for the first time the obvious truth that he had lost the battle against Trippe and his airplanes. “You all must finally come to terms with the fact that the era of the airship is over for good,” he told the consternated crowd. “If you expect that the airship will get a chance again, then it would be the same as if you wanted to stop the automobile traffic on the roads in order to reinstate the covered wagon.” Even the safety of the airplane these days, he added, was the same as that of the airship, and as for speed and technological jumps, it wasn’t even a competition.32

  Eckener himself was weakening quickly. He gardened a little, as he had been doing when the count first visited him half a century before, listened to Mozart, read Goethe, and received the occasional guest at his (as The New York Times put it in a “Whatever Happened To…?” type column) “shabby pavilion on the lake in Friedrichshafen.” To these guests, he always said on their departure, “Look on this visit as your parting from me.”33

  A year later, on August 14, 1954, four days after his eighty-sixth birthday, Eckener died of heart failure (but was outlived, to many people’s surprise, by Johanna, who’d staged a marvelous recovery). Described by The New York Times as the “Graf Zeppelin Pilot”—which Eckener would have appreciated—he was interred next to six of the crewmen who had perished aboard his Hindenburg.34

  * * *

  —

  WHEN HE HAD addressed the former Zeppelin workers on his eighty-fifth birthday, Eckener had already seen the future: jet-powered airplanes. But he died just fourteen months before Trippe ordered the first of what would become a 128-strong fleet of Boeing 707s—capable of 600 mph—for Pan American’s Atlantic service. Carrying around 135 passengers, flying at an altitude of 32,000 feet, enjoying a 4,000-mile range, and with a maximum takeoff weight of some 168 tons, Trippe’s Boeings were far beyond anything remotely imaginable in the golden years of the 1920s and 1930s.