Dr. Eckener's Lament

LIV

A computer-generated version of the Hindenburg's helm

It wasn't the Germany he knew anymore.

He was a German patriot. But one can love the body and yet hate the disease that spreads within it.

He wondered if it was his fault. If only he had agreed to run for office in 1932.

1932 was a pivotal year in German politics. The elections that year had brought a fractured, hydra-headed coalition government to power, headed by the increasingly senile President Paul von Hindenburg. In the Reichstag, little political parties bickered over minor exchanges of influence while the National Socialists --- a minority party itself --- set about, via collusion, coercion, and intimidation to make itself the fulcrum of the German political system.

Hindenburg over Recife, Brazil, 1936

And in 1933 they'd succeeded. On January 30th of that year they had forced President von Hindenburg to appoint Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany. Hitler had immediately acted to secure his grip on power by hunting down and most often killing his political opponents. The National Socialists were violent and crude and supported by Free Corps Militiamen, xenophobes, racists, assorted cranks and violent anti-Semites, but they were also very effective at spreading their message among Germany's disaffected.

Many people were disaffected. And unemployed. And hungry. The Mark was virtually worthless and armed mobs took what they wanted when they took to the streets. In the lanes of sedate old cities, Communists fought Socialists, Socialists fought Anarchists and National Socialists fought them all. Gunfire had become the new music of Germany. The Nazis promised order. At the price of freedom perhaps, but Germany was not a land where representative democracy had taken deep root.

Liberals, intellectuals, internationalists and cosmopolitans were particular targets of the Nazi ire, and Nazi gunfire, and he knew he was lucky to be alive. But he couldn't keep silent. He kept speaking out against them; it had become a compulsion.

Hindenburg (L) and Graf Zeppelin (R) over Germany’s Lake Constance (Bodensee) in 1936

In 1934, old von Hindenburg had died at age 86. The President's death had at least settled the issue of what to call the new airship, 'til now just LZ-129. Hitler had immediately combined the offices of President and Chancellor into the semi-political, semi-mystical and even semi-occult one of Der Fuhrer --- The Leader --- and replaced governance with Der Fuhrerprinzip --- The Leadership Principle. In short, Hitler made himself Germany, and Germany began to resemble Hitler.

He and Hitler hated each other. They had met once --- someone had thought it a good political move --- and had barely exchanged a word. He despised everything he saw in Hitler --- the chauvinism, the ranting behavior, the appeal to gross stupidity --- and Hitler hated everything he saw in him. They were like mirror images of one another, and the fact that, he, not Hitler, might have been Chancellor, made him an Enemy of The State. Hitler was called, in fear and respect, "The Leader" but he was called, affectionately, "The Old Man."

Hindenburg over Boston, 1936

They had stripped him of his citizenship, but the public objected. So they restored it, but had rendered him an Unperson with no honors. They had nationalized his company, DELAG, and called it DZR. But even without authority he had carved for himself a niche while the new airship was being birthed. He watched like a hawk as every component was added to every other and the pile of girders, wires and gasbags in the hangar took massive shape. He would at least allow no Nazi functionary to cut corners as she became what she was to be. Everyone, even Ernst Lehmann, the protege-turned-toady-turned-Captain, knew that the ship belonged to him. When the crew manifest was published, his name was at the top without rank and without title. He didn't need any.

As she was walked out of the hangar at Friederichshafen on March 11, 1936, his heart swelled to see her gleaming body with her name painted upon the bows in gothic script --- Hindenburg. And his heart sank just a bit as he saw the massive swastikas on her vertical control surfaces.

Hindenburg over lower New York City, 1936

And though he was forbidden to skipper her on her maiden voyage, breaking a tradition started by Graf von Zeppelin himself, he ignored the slight. Instead, he spent that voyage --- and every other voyage she took that year --- inspecting her, evaluating her, and making suggestions for improvements.

The Nazis had used her, as he knew they would, as a propaganda machine. They had flown her over major German cities in tandem with the Graf Zeppelin, loudspeakers blaring the Fuhrer's virtues. They had flown her over the newly-reoccupied Rhineland to drop patriotic leaflets. They had used her as a centerpiece, to tumultuous applause, at the Nuremberg Party Rally of 1936. They had, through "navigational errors" overflown Austria and the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia, bringing with her another rain of leaflets. And she had appeared --- to universal awe --- over the Berlin Olympics.

Hindenburg, over the central Olympic Stadium in Berlin, 1936

But she had also made ten round-trip passages to New York and had alternated the South American route with the Graf Zeppelin.

Hindenburg at the Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, 1936

In the evenings, the ship's passengers considered it an honor to sit at his table; it was, shockingly, a lesser grace to sit at the Captain's Table. When she took her "Millionaire's Flight" --- there was collectively over a billion dollars aboard in the midst of the Great Depression --- Lehmann joined him.

Except for courtesies though, the two men, once close friends, never passed a word in conversation, except if it was about the ship.

Juan Trippe, the President of Pan American Airways, on "The Millionaire's Flight" in 1936. Dr. Eckener, who'd been an early airline rival of Trippe's, tried to interest Trippe in backing a transpacific zeppelin route. Trippe decided to stick with flying boats --- "Clippers" --- but the lavish accommodations on board the Hindenburg undoubtedly influenced Trippe's ideas about how the Clippers had to be flown

The 1936 season had been spectacular, a financial success, a cultural event. He knew there were a few glitches. Every ship had them, and he trusted that his --- well, the --- technicians would correct them.

Every person on the Millionaire's Flight got a souvenir ashtray. Made of sterling silver and engraved, the glass airship contains Esso Gasoline

His only real concern was Ernst Lehmann. He had noticed how, as Lehmann grew into his role as appointed successor, he had begun to ignore the carefully-drafted "Flying Bible" that had defined German airship flight since it had seen its first pages written in 1910. He hoped Lehmann was not throwing out a quarter-century of accumulated knowledge. But he had seen some things that worried him. Lehmann's tendency to fly into bad weather --- though that might be a way of putting her through her paces. A few small things he himself would have done differently, that Lehmann used to do differently, but were still within a Captain's purview.

What worried him most was Lehmann's sudden obsession with keeping to schedule. Yes, it was now a "regularly-scheduled" passenger service, but DELAG's hardest rule had always directed an airship skipper to place safety above all.

He wondered who in the Nazi hierarchy was pressuring Lehmann to voyage by the clock, and he prayed that his one-time student had the spine to put his ship first.

A comparison: White Star's Titanic, lost with 1,500 lives off Cape Race, Nova Scotia in 1912. DZR's Hindenburg, lost at Lakehurst, New Jersey in 1937 with 36 lives lost, and Pan Am's Clipper Maid of The Seas, lost with 270 lives over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988

Otherwise, it could be a disaster.