Alfred Hildebrandt

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Alfred Hildebrandt before 1900

Alfred Hildebrandt (born June 10, 1870 in Wittingen , † February 24, 1949 in Oberkochen ) was a German aviation pioneer and writer.

Live and act

Alfred Hildebrandt was a son of the Hankensbüttel pastor August Theodor Hildebrand and his wife Henriette. He attended the Royal Prussian Gymnasium in Salzwedel . After graduating from high school, on October 1, 1890, he joined the XV. Army Corps belonging to the Royal Prussian Lower Saxony Foot Artillery Regiment No. 10 in Strasbourg . In 1891 he was appointed artillery officer.

From 1893 to 1894 Alfred Hildebrandt was assigned to study at the United Artillery and Engineering School in Berlin-Charlottenburg . In 1896 he was one of the founders of the Upper Rhine Association for Aviation, and became its chairman. In 1897 he took over the management of the first kite experiments in Germany for meteorological purposes. These were carried out at the instigation of the meteorologist Hugo Hergesell , the explorer Julius Euting , the meteorologist August Stolberg and Alfred Hildebrandt in Strasbourg in Alsace. In the same year he acquired his free balloon pilot license No. 20 from the Royal Prussian Airship Battalion . In 1899, Alfred Hildebrandt supported Hugo Hergesell in the implementation of recording balloon ascents and even undertook balloon flights for scientific purposes e.g. B. to observe falling stars. In 1900 he was transferred to the airship department and worked as a teacher at the officers' college. He took over the management of balloon photography and photogrammetry and the training of the carrier pigeon for use in aviation. In September 1900 he accompanied Hugo Hergesell to the International Aeronautical Congress in Paris as assistant.

On January 10, 1901, Alfred Hildebrandt and Arthur Berson undertook the first German balloon flight over the Baltic Sea. A world record was set with the almost 14-hour journey from Berlin via Sassnitz to near Växjö in Sweden. In 1901, together with Hans Bartsch von Sigsfeld, he was a member of a military commission that investigated the military use of airships. In the same year he conducted meteorological observations to research the higher layers of the atmosphere for the establishment of the Royal Prussian aerological observatory under Richard Assmann on the Tegel shooting range.

In 1905 Alfred Hildebrandt was promoted to captain and teacher at the aeronautical training institute of the Royal Prussian aeronautical battalion. On October 25, 1905, he married Erna Fuhrmann.

In the spring of 1907 Hildebrandt retired from active military service as a result of the numerous injuries sustained during free balloon flights. He studied physics, meteorology and mathematics at the Kaiser-Wilhelms-Universität in Strasbourg under Hugo Hergesell, among others. A few months later he accompanied a scientific ship expedition into the waters of Iceland and the Arctic Ocean to explore the higher layers of the atmosphere. For the results of the expedition he was awarded the North Star Order by the Swedish King Oskar II .

On October 23, 1907, Hildebrandt was a member of the German delegation for the second Gordon Bennett Cup in St. Louis . The winner was the German Pommern balloon with balloon pilot Oskar Erbslöh and American meteorologist Henry Helm Clayton . Hildebrandt traveled to the USA on behalf of and at the expense of the Berlin publisher August Scherl with the aim of persuading the Wright brothers to stage a large public demonstration of one of their aircraft in Germany. In Hildebrandt's report on the trip, he stated that the people he interviewed, who were present on the Wright brothers' flights, unanimously insured the reliability of the aircraft. In Germany he was met with skepticism, and there was even talk of a genuine American bluff that he had fallen for.

On June 28, 1908, Hildebrandt was responsible for the first public flight demonstration in Germany at the Kiel Tourist Office. Only one pilot competed with his machine: the Danish watchmaker, inventor and pilot Jacob Christian Hansen Ellehammer . This flew only 50 meters. In 1909 the Berlin Aviation Association carried out test drives in the balloon named after him in honor of Hildebrandt in Berlin-Wilmersdorf. On January 11th and 12th, 1909, Alfred Hildebrandt was a participant of the extraordinary conference of the International Airship Association in London. After his return, a flight week with the French aviator Armand Zipfel (1883-1954) took place on the Tempelhofer Feld from January 28 to February 4, 1909 . In September 1909, Hildebrandt visited the International Airship Exhibition in Frankfurt am Main . Orville Wright also visited the exhibition.

Alfred Hildebrandt had good relations with the Wright brothers. On behalf of the publisher August Scherl , he asked them to carry out flight demonstrations on the Tempelhof airfield in Berlin. These took place from September 4 to 18, 1909. On September 8, 1909, the third day of flight, Orville Wright flew twice on Tempelhof Airfield. On the second flight, Hildebrandt sat next to Wright and flew with him at a height of 85 meters and landed after 17 minutes. This flight is considered the first German passenger flight.

In 1909, Alfred Hildebrandt went on expeditions to Tenerife with Hugo Hergesell and Gotthold Pannwitz , where meteorological observations were carried out with the help of balloons. Hergesell set up an observatory on the Teide at an altitude of 2200 meters.

In March 1910, the Association of German Flight Technicians initiated a petition to the Federal Council and the Reichstag in order to get quick financial support for the development of aircraft. This should be done just like the well-supported balloon and airship technology. The signatories included a. Alfred Hildebrandt, August von Parseval and Sebastian Finsterwalder . Alfred Hildebrandt was chairman of the aviation commission of the German Airship Association and was therefore also present at the pilot examination. He signed protocols for record flights and was employed as an expert. For example, on January 30, 1912, he prepared an opinion for the First Public Prosecutor of the Berlin Royal District Court II on the cause of the fatal crash of the pilot Werner Alfred Pietschker on November 15, 1911.

In October 1910, Alfred Hildebrandt was elected President of the International Commission for Airship Maps at a congress held in Paris . He was a member of the International Commission for Scientific Aviation and proposed the establishment of the Scientific Commission of the German Aviation Association and the Committee for the Germanization of Aviation Terms . From 1910 to 1911 he continued his studies at the Berlin University and the Royal Technical University of Berlin. The focus of his studies was engine technology. He worked for one semester in Adolf Miethe's photochemical laboratory . In April 1911 he moved to the University of Rostock . In March 2012 he was awarded a Dr. phil. PhD.

In mid-1912, Alfred Hildebrandt, the chemist Gottfried Kümmell from the University of Rostock and the Rostock fur and hat merchant Balgé founded an operating company for the operation of an air station. The Rostock air station was opened on December 6, 1912 on the railway line to Bad Doberan, and Gottfried Kümmell took over the management. Alfred Hildebrandt played a large part in the opening and further development of the Johannisthal airfield .

Alfred Hildebrandt led various commands during the First World War, among other things he was the commander of the Flieger-Ersatz -teilung No. 5 in Hanover, in which pilots and observers were trained. In 1915 he was the leader of the Army Aviation Park of the Bug Army and the Southern Army , which was stationed in Cholm . In July 1917 Hildebrandt became company commander of Flieger-Ersatz -teilung 7 in Braunschweig under the command of Georg von Tschudi . In 1918 Hildebrandt was the commander in the pilot replacement department 11, which was set up as an observer school.

In 1924 the Reich Ministry of Transport appointed a 31-person advisory board for aviation, of which Alfred Hildebrandt was a member. In the same year he took part in balloon rides in Warsaw. In 1925, Hildebrandt was one of the co-organizers of the international flight competition held in Munich from September 12 to 14 on the occasion of the German Transport Exhibition. In 1929 he was a member of the honorary committee of the 23rd German Aviation Day. In 1933 Hildebrandt was balloon captain and leader of the balloon group of Fliegerlandesgruppe XIV of the German Air Sports Association. In 1934 he worked as a Reich aviation advisor and in the Reich Association of the German Press. From October 13, 1940 to April 9, 1943, Alfred Hildebrandt was commanded as a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force war correspondent company ZbV . On February 28, 1943, he was released from active military service.

From August 1943 to July 1944, Alfred Hildebrandt and his wife were evacuated to five different places before they found accommodation in Natzevitz near Samtens on Rügen in April 1944 . From there they moved to Oberkochen in Baden-Württemberg in August 1944 . The couple had two sons. The bank or insurance clerk Wolfgang Hildebrandt, born April 15, 1910 in Berlin, died in a car accident on June 11, 1937. The younger son Horst Hildebrandt, born on February 4, 1912 in Berlin, died in 1944 as a major in a tank reconnaissance department Of Ukraine.

Alfred Hildebrandt died on February 24, 1949 in his apartment in Oberkochen. He was buried in the Protestant cemetery in Oberkochen. His wife Erna moved to a nursing home for the elderly and was also buried in the family grave after her death in 1956.

Awards

Works

  • 1907 Aviation
  • The Wright Brothers
  • A. Hildebrandt, G. Kümmell: The work of the "Rostocker Luftwarte" in Friedrichshöhe near Rostock in 1913 . In: Meeting reports and treatises of the natural research society in Rostock. New episode . Volume 6, 1914/15 (published 1916), pp. 65-110. Digitized
  • 1933 From flying to flying high

literature

  • Alexander Kauther, Paul Wirtz: Lieutenant Colonel ret. Dr. phil. Alfred Hildebrandt in the series of documents on the Berlin-Johannisthal airfield, issue 30, 2nd edition, 2012

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Entry in the Rostock matriculation portal
personal data
SURNAME Hildebrandt, Alfred
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hildebrandt, Alfred Louis Heinrich (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German aviation pioneer and writer
DATE OF BIRTH June 10, 1870
PLACE OF BIRTH Wittingen
DATE OF DEATH February 24, 1949
Place of death Oberkochen