Empires of the Sky
Page 56
In his own lengthy testimony, Eckener spoke very carefully to obscure but not hide the truth. He placed special emphasis on the wire-breaking “sharp turns” that had immediately preceded the disaster and highlighted the decision to land quickly amid the storm-heavy atmosphere. At no point did he comment on who bore responsibility for these actions.
Many years later, Eckener did name names during a chat with his old friend Karl Arnstein. Eckener reproached himself for not having piloted the Hindenburg himself that day, as he would not have made the S-turn that had sparked the fatal chain of events. He remarked that Lehmann “almost always obeyed commanded instructions, though he also put safety on the line once in a while”—as he had done in 1936, when he carelessly damaged the airship during Goebbels’s plebiscite flights. Eckener felt, perhaps a little unfairly, that Rosendahl had been trying to rush the Hindenburg into a dangerous landing, but Lehmann, as he had earlier warned, lacked the mental fortitude to say no.
At the Board of Inquiry, the Zeppelin officers also closed ranks to protect Lehmann, not only out of respect for a dead comrade but to defend the reputation of the company and of Germany.
To a man, the surviving officers of the Hindenburg swore to the Board of Inquiry that all was “absolutely, perfectly normal” on the approach and landing, that nothing was “unusual,” and that everything was exactly as it should have been. Yet their statements were contradicted by numerous American observers not beholden to Lehmann’s memory, and, more circumspectly, by Eckener himself.
The universal agreement in the officers’ testimony that nothing was out of the ordinary seems likely to have been the result of gathering ahead of time to get their stories straight. Heinrich Bauer, one of the watch officers, came close to giving the game away in an odd exchange with his examiner:
Q: Do you believe that the landing maneuver that you have described was proceeding satisfactorily up to the time of the fire?
A: Yes.
Q: Do you believe that this view was shared by all of the other officers with you in the control car?
A: Yes, we are all of the same opinion, that the approach was good.
Perhaps there was a mistranslation on this point, but how would Bauer have known “all” were “of the same opinion” unless they had already discussed the matter and reached a consensus?
What the officers had deliberately left out in their testimonies inadvertently revealed more than what they included: None of them, not a single one, cited Lehmann’s name with respect to his role in the control car. It was as if he, the most senior captain, the veteran commander of the Hindenburg and Graf Zeppelin, the head of DZR, were a ghost.
He had apparently said nothing, done nothing, made no decisions, and given no guidance in the Hindenburg’s final hours, minutes, and seconds. His first appearance is invariably after the fire broke out, when he was leaping from the window in the company of Captain Pruss. Eckener, however, judging by what he said in his later talk with Arnstein, was well aware that Lehmann must have been giving the orders.
Speaking of Pruss, where was he? He sustained grave injuries and was hospitalized, but he never testified before the Board of Inquiry—which conducted several interviews in hospitals—so the primary witness to the events in question and Lehmann’s role in them was not put on record. The simplest explanation is that Pruss, who would be disfigured for life with facial scarring from his burns, was not able to speak owing to his injuries, yet the omission was nevertheless crucial to keeping Lehmann’s reputation burnished.
As a consequence, Lehmann was instantly elevated to the status of hero cut down in his prime, a fallen warrior of Nazi Germany. On May 11, a few days after the crash, a funeral service for the German passengers and crew was held at Pier 86 at West 44th Street—the pier used by the Hamburg-America line. Attended by ten thousand mourners and organized by the German legation and the Bund, the ceremony was a solemn mini-rally replete with swastika-draped coffins and the singing of the “Horst Wessel Song” and “Deutschland Über Alles.” Lehmann’s coffin, bedecked with wreaths like the others, was placed in the center, Last Supper–like, of the single row of twenty-eight.
Brown- and white-shirted members of the Bund carried Nazi banners in double file, gave salutes, and formed a “guard of honor” over the coffins as an orchestra played a traditional hymn. Father Schulte, who had held the airborne Mass, bade a personal farewell to the captain, and both Hans Luther the German ambassador and Rosendahl made speeches on a stage draped in swastika flags.
Lehmann’s coffin remained in New York while the others were loaded onto the Hamburg liner. Frau Lehmann and Martin Wronsky of the DZR would accompany it home a couple of days later.
When the dead arrived in Cuxhaven, Germany, at 11 A.M. on May 21, the ship slowly made its way up the Elbe estuary toward the quays as thousands of spectators doffed their hats in silence. All flags were lowered to half-mast and airplanes circled, dropping wreaths onto the deck. For the official ceremony, the great hall on the pier had been draped in black, and there were eight giant pylons with lit torches. After Chopin’s funeral march, the Air Ministry’s General Milch (representing Göring) gave a speech unctuously thanking the Führer for ordering a state funeral.
52. Resurrection
THERE WERE SOME naifs who believed the destruction of the Hindenburg brought the story of the airship to a close. Despite the initial shock, this was far from the case.1
When Herbert Morrison and Charlie Nehlsen returned to Chicago later that night carrying their precious recordings on four sixteen-inch disks, the only news released had been a brief NBC radio bulletin at 7:45 P.M., followed by two more live updates at 9:07 P.M. and 9:15 P.M. that included interviews with some of the survivors and personnel.
Morrison had tried calling the main NBC newsroom line in New York from Lakehurst, but the operator told him she was putting no one through. He explained who he was and she said, “WLS? That’s in Chicago. What would someone from WLS be doing in New Jersey?” And then she hung up.
In fairness, news organizations had been slammed with calls about the disaster—The New York Times received more than five thousand in two hours—and Morrison’s tale that he had gold was scarcely believable. Even if he had been taken seriously, his report would not have been broadcast in any case, as the radio networks at the time banned recordings. A radio play, for instance, would be broadcast live on the East Coast and then, for the West Coast stations, the actors would reperform it live.
But Morrison’s astounded managers at WLS decided to break the rule by playing short excerpts early in the morning. Now that the dam had been broken, NBC followed suit with a portion of Morrison’s recording about twenty minutes before noon on May 7 and then another portion, adding some live interviews from Lakehurst, in the late afternoon. These were the only occasions on which Morrison’s as-it-happens reports were ever played on the radio, but they marked the first time that recordings of a breaking news event were ever broadcast.
Listeners were horrified by his famously urgent narrative of the disaster. In truth, Morrison had been more restrained in his description, but Nehlsen’s portable Presto 6D device had recorded the event slightly slowly so that during normal playback it made Morrison’s mellifluous, deeper “radio voice” sound higher-pitched, faster, and more excited than it actually was.
By the weekend, the newsreel footage, narrated by studio announcers using prescripted lines, reached movie theaters, causing further tremors among audiences. Everyone had heard and read of previous airship disasters, but these had always occurred at sea, at night, or in remote locations. Never before had a disaster as epic and as spectacular and as close as the death of the Hindenburg been caught on film. (Only decades later, it’s worth mentioning, would Morrison’s “Oh, the humanity” voiceover be dubbed onto newsreel footage; at the time, no one heard and saw them together, notwithstanding any number of instances of false memory.)
2
Frank Nugent, the film reviewer for The New York Times, judged the newsreels to be “the most dramatic spectacle ever shown on screen.” There they were, “on record, changeless as long as film endures—a picture of disaster, death, and human heroism and a mighty testament to the force of that strongest instinct of all—self-preservation. No Hollywood fiction will ever equal it, and automatically it becomes the most dramatic picture of the year.”3
Audiences may have stiffened in their seats and clutched the armrests as the Hindenburg went to its fiery doom, but airshipmen were galvanized into action by the footage and newspaper coverage. In the end of the Hindenburg they heard not the tolling of a bell but its ringing. This crisis was the opportunity they had been waiting for.
Eckener, upon first visiting the site of the Hindenburg’s grave, had seen nothing but a “disorderly tangle of girders, wires, and crumpled sheet metal.” It appeared to be nothing less than the “hopeless end of a great dream, a kind of end of the world, a mournful symbol of what I, proscribed myself, expected to be the final outcome for Germany.” But on second thought, though admittedly suffering from “emotional depression,” he confided to Johanna that “maybe the accident, which could have been worse, will quickly help us along.”4
Eckener now openly and repeatedly admitted that airships were dangerous—but only, he added, because they were filled with hydrogen. Replace the hydrogen with helium and they would be 100 percent safe. Had the Hindenburg been a helium dirigible, as it had originally been intended to be, the “disaster” would have ended with a gentle landing at Lakehurst with the passengers none the wiser.
In short order, this argument became immensely influential in both Germany and America.
* * *
—
IN GERMANY, THE immediate reaction to news of the Hindenburg’s destruction was one of disbelief. Only a few minutes earlier DZR had received a telegram from Lakehurst stating that the airship had arrived safely. The earliest editions of the morning’s papers had accordingly gone to press carrying the happy news, only for later ones, now black-bordered, to be rushed out relaying the tragic update. The official German news agency, which had initially dismissed the news as a monstrous hoax, finally admitted that “the German people…have not been spared” the kind of airship disaster which had “[befallen] other nations.”
There were few details available. Many employees showed up for work at Friedrichshafen unaware that anything had happened. They were greeted by a notice at the gate and a directive to gather in the hangar, where Ludwig Dürr informed them the Hindenburg had been lost.
Dürr, usually so reticent, drew deep on Zeppelin mythology to allay their fears. The German people, he said, had found themselves in a similar position in 1908 after the Echterdingen accident, but they had rallied behind the count and Zeppelin had emerged only stronger from the test. They would do so again.
Ministry of Propaganda policy followed a similar logic. The official line, Goebbels had quickly decided, must be “Forward, despite everything.” He had noticed a disturbing sense of national sadness at the loss of the Hindenburg and wanted to curb such enervating weakness. Subversive sentiments like that found in the Frankfurter Zeitung—“the children went to school sad and gloomy-faced…and have aged from the experience”—were to be crushed.
Government officials were soon urging Germans to “stand up under the blow,” for “the young and strong nations” can bear such challenges and emerge more resilient than before. Rest assured, a new ship, LZ-130, was already partly completed and would “take the place of the Hindenburg as ambassador from continent to continent, carrying the German flag over the ocean.”
The official newspapers obediently followed Goebbels’s cue to steer public reaction in the approved way. Der Angriff, the Nazi Party organ, reasoned that “we would feel only dark despair this morning if we were not Germans who have conquered forever the desire to capitulate. The king of the air is dead; we will provide another king.” The SS paper, Das Schwarze Korps, optimistically cried, “Whoever thinks that the crash would mean the end of the Zeppelin idea doesn’t know the Germans!”5
Meanwhile, Göring had called an urgent meeting with DZR and Eckener at the Air Ministry. In the late afternoon of May 7, it was decided, first, to appoint Eckener as managing director of DZR in Lehmann’s place, and second, to send him and a small party to the United States to serve as a German Commission to investigate the causes of the disaster alongside the American Board of Inquiry being formed.
During the meeting, Göring had said (as Eckener told his wife) that “he had never thought much of airships, but now, it was necessary to persevere.” In another instance of the regime’s cynicism, Goebbels noted in his diary on May 10, “The Führer is right. The future belongs to the airplane.”
A key point emerged in the course of these discussions at the Air Ministry: Though Göring and Goebbels themselves credited the idea of a bomb being placed on board, the German Commission must conclude that sabotage was nothing more, despite a sleep-deprived Eckener’s careless speculation earlier that day, than a very distant possibility.
The Nazis had a congenital inclination toward conspiracies—both mounting and theorizing about them—but in the case of the Hindenburg, they conspired to tell the truth rather than the usual lies. If the Hindenburg had been blown up by evildoers, as Göring and Goebbels believed, it would indicate that Hitler was not universally beloved, undermine the image of Germany as a placid and law-abiding society under Nazi rule, and give the enemies of the Reich, like the Jews and the Communists, hope that the regime was vulnerable.
Thus, in order to explain the discrepancy between Eckener’s initial, ill-formed “first opinion” in Vienna and the new official line, Goebbels directed him to make a brief radio speech for American listeners confessing that “of course a question of sabotage…occurred to me in the first moment” in Graz but that he had since come to the conclusion that this was “only a very slight probability.”6
German representatives abroad were then given their marching orders to quash any rumors of sabotage. When asked about the subject the day after the disaster, the German Embassy in Washington curtly replied that there was “no possibility” of foul play. Fritz Kuhn, the national leader of the Bund, who usually saw sinister Jewish puppet masters behind even the most minor events, said he could scarcely believe “hatred could possibly run so deep” as to invite sabotage.7
During the Board of Inquiry’s proceedings, the German commissioners accordingly showed a marked lack of interest in investigating sabotage leads relative to their American counterparts (who, as noted, would turn up nothing). The only reason the final German report mentioned, briefly at the end, the possibility of sabotage was to keep the door open in case Berlin ever decided a charge of foul play would come in useful for propaganda purposes.
Instead, the German Commission worked on the assumption that the disaster was due to hydrogen and asserted that had helium been used, the Hindenburg would never have come to grief. Eckener went along with this version of the truth because, put simply, it was the truth and happened to comport with his own views.8
In short order, helium had become the key to the future of the Zeppelin Project and transatlantic travel.
* * *
—
IN THE AFTERMATH of the disaster, the Germans could count on a sympathetic hearing in America, that they knew. The year 1937 was a relatively quiet one in U.S.-German relations, and the loss of the Hindenburg brought a groundswell of condolences and support for Zeppelin and Germany.
Roosevelt and Hitler had exchanged friendly messages of sympathy and thanks, while Göring expressed to Rosendahl his gratitude “for the heroic rescue of the survivors of the German airship Hindenburg” and composed a lovely letter to Mrs. Rosendahl for “car[ing] for my fellow countrymen with unending kindness.” He enclosed a handsome photo of himself for some reason.9
The effect of the Hindenburg’s destruction on the American public’s view of airships was much less dire than people today tend to assume. Air disasters were, after all, a frequent phenomenon at the time. In the sixteen months between January 1, 1936, and May 1, 1937—a few days before the end of the Hindenburg—American domestic airlines killed an average of six people a month, and there had been no fewer than ten major crashes in the same period.
In one particularly dreadful two-week period (December 15–30, 1936), five airliners had gone down, killing forty-one people, soon followed by another spate between January 25 and March 25, adding twenty-nine to the pyre. (This was just the scheduled airlines; private planes were veritable death traps, with 541 dead in 1936–37.)
When an airplane crashed, it was usually the case that everyone died horribly. In that light, that “only” a third of the Hindenburg’s passengers and crew had perished in a cataclysmic blaze seemed a testament to the airshipmen’s familiar argument that airships were actually safer than airplanes in an emergency.
The question of air safety happened to be of utmost concern among Americans that summer. The Hindenburg was destroyed amidst this greater crisis, caused primarily by an antiquated safety and navigation system struggling to keep up with flying’s increasing popularity. In short order, updated air-traffic control measures, mandatory filing of flight plans, increased reliance on instrument flying, and more federal oversight of inspectors were introduced. As a result, passenger fatalities dropped by 85 percent between 1937 and 1939, with only nine people killed in the latter year.