Hugo Eckener

German aviator

• Born: August 10, 1868
• Birthplace: Flensburg, Prussia (now in Germany)
• Died: August 14, 1954
• Place of death: Friedrichshafen, West Germany (now in Germany)

Eckener was the most important person associated with zeppelin development during and after World War I. As head of the Zeppelin Airline, he made a number of pioneering flights that made him one of the most famous Germans of his day. He thus became not only the leader of the zeppelin movement but also an important force in reestablishing Germany’s reputation in world opinion after World War I.

Early Life

Johann Christoph Eckener, the father of Hugo Eckener (EHK-eh-nehr), came to Flensburg from Bremen with his two brothers in 1864 as a consequence of the war between Prussia and Denmark. They established Eckener Brothers Tobacco and Cigar Manufacturing Company. Within a short time, Johann Christoph married Anna Maria Elisabeth Lange, and Hugo, the second of five children, was born. When he was only eleven years old, his father died of tuberculosis. After attending secondary school in Flensburg, he intended to go to the University of Jena, but his mother asked him to go to Munich instead, because his younger brother was enrolled in an art school there. She had gone into deep mourning after the death of her husband, and Hugo was eager to please her, so he abandoned his plans and entered the University of Munich. He studied philosophy, history, medieval literature, and art history. After two terms, he left Munich for Berlin, where he remained for three terms. In 1891, he transferred to Leipzig University to study experimental psychology under the famous Wilhelm Wundt. After three terms there, he received his Ph.D. His dissertation was on the effects of minimal sensory stimulation on the ability to maintain concentration.

He had no sooner received his Ph.D. than he had the opportunity to take an academic position in Canada. The University of Toronto had requested Wundt to help them establish an institute for experimental psychology, and Wundt asked Eckener to become its founding director. Unable to decide whether to go to Canada, Eckener left his fate in the hands of the military medical examiners. He had been told as a child that an inflammation of his knee left him unfit for military service, and he could have escaped conscription by going to Canada, but he chose to take the military medical examination. The army disagreed with his childhood doctor, and he spent the period from October, 1892, to November, 1894, in the Eighty-sixth Regiment of Fusiliers. In the fall of 1893, his mother died of influenza.

On his release from the army, Eckener had no immediate prospects. He appeared essentially as he would look for the rest of his life blond, close-cut hair, a rather long face, a prominent nose, and a mustache. As he grew older, he gained weight, but there was no radical change in his appearance. While in the army, he had decided that the field of experimental psychology was too narrow for his interests and turned to political economy and sociology. To supplement his income from the family tobacco business, he wrote articles on politics. His intention was to save enough money to begin a formal study of his new interests. In 1897, he married Johanna Maas, the sister of one of his closest friends, who was also the publisher of a local newspaper. He was still studying and had begun to plan a book, when he went to Bodensee in 1900.

Life’s Work

Among the newspapers for which Eckener had written was the Frankfurter Zeitung, and its editors contacted him at Bodensee about covering a flight of Ferdinand von Zeppelin’s rigid airship scheduled for October, 1900. Eckener had no background in the subject of aeronautics and was not particularly interested in it, but he was in the Lake Constance area, where the flight was to occur, and the newspaper would be saved the expense of sending a reporter if he accepted the assignment. After some hesitation, he covered the flight, and it left him unimpressed. Apparently investors were similarly unimpressed, as Zeppelin had to dissolve his company for lack of financial support. He was not discouraged, however, and built another ship, which crashed on its first flight in 1905. Eckener again reported the flight and added his own technical analysis of the reason for the crash. Soon thereafter, Zeppelin called on him to discuss the article, and a friendship developed between the two men.

Eckener gradually became so involved with the enterprise that the business manager of the German Airship Transportation Company, as it was then called, asked him to become director of flight operations, and, under his leadership, the company made more than two thousand flights carrying passengers within Germany during the years between 1910 and 1914. During World War I, Eckener served with the German navy, training rigid airship pilots. After the death of Zeppelin in 1917, Eckener became the best-known person connected with rigid airships.

By the end of the war, airships had been developed until they reached a volume of 2.5 million cubic feet and could fly at an altitude of 23,000 feet. Despite their poor wartime performance as a weapon, the navies of the world were interested in them for long-range observation. They were, therefore, seen as militarily useful, and the London protocol limited Germany to airships of no more than 1 million cubic feet capacity. Germany was also supposed to surrender existing airships to the Allies. The one intended for the United States was purposely destroyed by its German crew, and the United States demanded $800,000 in reparations for it. Eckener was able to use this demand to have the restrictions of the London Protocol abrogated by proposing to the U.S. Navy that the reparations be paid in the form of a completed zeppelin. The result was the ship known as the ZR III. In October, 1924, Eckener delivered it to Lakehurst, New Jersey.

This was the first transatlantic flight by a rigid airship, and it created a sensation in the United States, but this was nothing in comparison to the enthusiasm generated by subsequent flights. The Graf Zeppelin made its initial transatlantic flight in October, 1928. A storm damaged the ship, but it arrived at the Lakehurst terminal without mishap. Recognizing the public appeal of these flights, William Randolph Hearst offered $150,000 in 1929 to cover the cost of Eckener’s proposed round-the-world flight on condition that the Hearst newspapers have a monopoly on reporting the journey. Eckener knew that he would be vilified by European papers if he agreed to Hearst’s terms and excluded the Continent from the monopoly. Thereupon, Hearst reduced his offer to $100,000. An appeal to the German government for financial help was fruitless, but Eckener was able to make up the difference through passenger fees and by exploiting the interest of stamp collectors who wanted stamps that had been carried on the flight.

Hearst insisted that the flight begin in the United States, so the Graf Zeppelin had to fly to Lakehurst for the official beginning and then back to Germany. From there, the flight went over the Soviet Union to Tokyo and across the Pacific to California. Eckener landed in New Jersey twelve days after his departure in the opposite direction. The Graf Zeppelin passed over a number of cities as it crossed the United States, and the enthusiasm for it was unbridled everywhere it appeared.

It is curious that the popularity of the rigid airships has been virtually forgotten. Except for the Hindenburg disaster of 1937, historical accounts of the interwar period make no reference to them, yet they were constantly on the front pages of newspapers throughout the 1920’s and 1930’s. After the 1929 round-the-world flight, New York gave the largest ticker-tape parade ever held up to that time for Eckener and his crew. President Herbert Hoover invited Eckener to the White House and compared him to Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama, and Ferdinand Magellan. On two previous occasions, in 1924 and 1928, he had been to the White House to visit President Calvin Coolidge, and he would subsequently see President Franklin D. Roosevelt there.

In May, 1930, the Zeppelin Airline began regular airship passenger and mail service to Rio de Janeiro and New York from Germany. This service was to last until the Hindenburg disaster. The Hindenburg joined the Graf Zeppelin in 1936, and between them, in that year, they carried fifteen hundred passengers. In 1935, the Graf Zeppelin carried thirty-one thousand pounds of freight, including 900,000 letters.

The last of the publicity flights came in 1931, when Eckener flew the Graf Zeppelin to the Arctic for a week-long trip. He expected financing from Hearst again but finally had to obtain some help from the German government and proceeds from stamps and passenger fares. Throughout his promotion of the rigid airship, he failed to get as much help from the German government as he had expected. He saw the government’s failure to capitalize on the popularity of the airship as a lost opportunity, because he believed that a passenger service could do much to restore German prestige in the international community. He attributed governmental indifference to the influence of the promoters of airplanes. According to him, the airplane interest feared that rigid airships would divert funds and attention from airplanes. He argued that these fears were unfounded because the rigid airship had already proved no match for airplanes in military situations. As for passenger service, he conceded that airplanes would ultimately prevail because of their speed. However, he believed that it was foolish not to utilize the rigid airships until the airplane developed enough to carry passengers across the Atlantic. The government finally became friendly toward the zeppelins because of public opinion. A new government came to power, however, with Adolf Hitler’s assumption of office in January, 1933.

The Nazis did not care for zeppelins or for Eckener. Hitler did not want his name used on a new ship, refused to ride in one, and let it be known that he wanted nothing to do with airships. Hermann Göring, the air minister and a former fighter pilot, was suspicious of them. Joseph Goebbels recognized the propaganda value of the zeppelins but distrusted Eckener. When Eckener refused to endorse Hitler’s occupation of the Rhineland in 1936 and tried to prevent the Hindenburg from being used to drop propaganda leaflets, he became the enemy of Goebbels, who probably already distrusted Eckener’s Social Democratic political sympathies. Goebbels tried to prevent Eckener’s name or picture from appearing in the newspapers and informed the foreign press that he was ill. The timing for this maneuver was poor, however, as Eckener was piloting the Hindenburg to Brazil when the announcement was made. Reporters from the foreign press interviewed him, and it soon became apparent that his prestige and fame were too great for such tactics. The Nazis suspected that he harbored ambitions of running for president against Hitler, and his popularity was so great that there had, indeed, been talk of his candidacy. Although the Nazis could not remove him from public view, they could, and did, remove him from control of the Zeppelin Airline.

The Hindenburg was the last of the great zeppelins. It had a volume of 7 million cubic feet in comparison to the 3.5 million of the Graf Zeppelin. Speed increased to eighty-four miles per hour with diesel engines nine miles per hour faster than the Graf Zeppelin with gasoline engines. It could carry fifty passengers rather than the twenty of the Graf Zeppelin. Another improvement was to be the use of helium to provide buoyancy rather than flammable hydrogen, but the only source of helium was the United States, where natural deposits occurred in the Rocky Mountains. It had been considered militarily important, and a law prevented its export, but the U.S. Congress was about to repeal the law for the sake of the Zeppelin Airline when the Nazis came to power. The spirit of cooperation disappeared abruptly, and the Zeppelin Airline did not get its helium. On May 6, 1937, while Eckener was on a speaking tour in Austria, the Hindenburg caught fire as it was landing at Lakehurst, and thirteen of the thirty-six passengers were killed. The fire was probably the result of a leaking hydrogen bag inside the ship that was ignited by static electricity. It was the last flight for the Zeppelin Airline.

Significance

Eckener was an unlikely pioneer of aviation. Temperament and training seemed certain to lead him to an academic career when he, by chance, came into contact with Zeppelin and rigid airships. Despite his background and interest in the social sciences, he entered into the technical and promotional aspects of the airship enterprise with a passionate devotion. In the 1920’s and 1930’s, his name became linked to the rigid airship almost to the same extent that Zeppelin’s had been before his death in 1917. However, Eckener was more than an adventurous pilot, capable designer, and gifted promoter. He was an idealist as well.

He saw himself as an ambassador of goodwill from the German people to the rest of the world. His flights across the Atlantic, around the world, and to the Arctic were intended not only to demonstrate the practicality of the zeppelin concept and to gain support for it but also to improve the international standing of the German nation in the aftermath of World War I. In view of the great enthusiasm that greeted him and his ships in all of his journeys, it is difficult not to conclude that he was successful in achieving his ambassadorial goals. Even after the Nazis came to power and gave Germany’s reputation a turn for the worse, Eckener remained popular in foreign lands. On one occasion in 1936, Roosevelt resorted to the ruse of inviting Eckener to tea to discuss the zeppelins without appearing to give sympathy to the German government and without the presence of the German ambassador.

The contribution of the rigid airship to aviation is problematic. Eckener realized that airplanes would ultimately replace it for long-distance travel because the airplane was faster. Nevertheless, he appears to have thought there might have been a permanent place for it as a convenient means of making scientific observations or, perhaps, as a sort of luxury liner of the skies for passengers more interested in a comfortable, pleasant trip than in a rapid arrival at their destination. The Hindenburg disaster and the advanced development of airplanes during World War II, however, meant the end of rigid airships. Potential passengers would never be convinced of their safety, and they could not compete with the airplanes of the 1940’s. They had flourished for only a brief time, but they had led to the discovery of much about weather, wind, and other conditions aloft that would smooth the way for long-distance airplane flights. They had also created a public awareness, if not enthusiasm, concerning the possibilities of long-distance passenger service through the air.

Bibliography

Botting, Douglas. Dr. Eckener’s Dream Machine: The Great Zeppelin and the Dawn of Air Travel. New York: H. Holt, 2001. Recounts how Eckener promoted the development of the zeppelin and the technology’s demise after the Hindenburg disaster in 1937.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗, et al. The Giant Airships. Alexandria, Va.: Time-Life Books, 1980. A typical Time-Life book, with numerous pictures and clear, simple text that gives the history of the rigid airship.

De Syon, Guillaume. Zeppelin! Germany and the Airship, 1900-1939. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Traces the history of the zeppelin’s development and production and the airship’s impact on German culture and society.

Eckener, Hugo. My Zeppelins. Translated by Douglas Robinson. New York: Arno Press, 1979. An abridged edition of Eckener’s German autobiography. Contains some photographs and an appendix on the technical aspects of zeppelins. Omits the period of Eckener’s life before he met Zeppelin in 1900.

Knäusel, Hans G. Zeppelin and the United States of America. Translated by M. O. McClellan. Friedrichshafen, West Germany: Luftschiffbau Zeppelin and Zeppelin-Metallwerke, 1981. Many pictures, reproductions of documents, schedules, and advertisements. Text printed in both English and German. This book is sponsored by the city of Friedrichshafen, which maintains a Zeppelin museum. As the title indicates, it emphasizes the impact of the zeppelins on German-American relations.

Leasor, James. The Millionth Chance: The Story of the R.101. London: H. Hamilton, 1957. Describes the development, construction, and wreck of the R.101. This was Great Britain’s last attempt to put a rigid airship in service. It crashed in France in 1930, killing forty-eight people. Includes illustrations.

Moody, Michael M. The Hindenburg. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1972. Concentrates on the Hindenburg disaster but also examines the history of the zeppelin concept, passenger arrangements, and the like. Includes numerous diagrams, illustrations, and photographs.

Stephenson, Charles. Zeppelins: German Airships, 1900-1940. New York: Osprey, 2004. Provides a detailed history of zeppelins.