Hans Bertram (aviation pioneer)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hans Bertram

Hans Bertram (actually Hans-Karl Bertram; born February 26, 1906 in Remscheid ; † January 8, 1993 in Munich ) was a German pilot , aerial photo publisher, writer , aviation entrepreneur, film director , screenwriter and production manager .

Life

After graduating from high school in 1926, Hans Bertram, son of an innkeeper from Nordstrasse in Remscheid, spent six months apprenticeship in shipbuilding at the Hamburg companies Blohm & Voss and Bäumer. At the same time, he attended the flying school and acquired the A license. During his subsequent studies at the Technical University of Munich , he also took further flight lessons and completed this with the aerobatics test and the B license for land and water.

Klausmann and Bertram after their rescue in Northwest Australia by Constable Gordon Marshall (from left to right)

From 1928 to 1934 Hans Bertram worked as an advisor and organizer of the naval air force of the Chinese President Chiang Kai-shek . During this time he undertook a series of extreme flights - partly together with the on-board mechanic Adolf Klausmann , partly alone - for the purpose of record attempts, which occasionally ended with emergency landings and the loss of the aircraft. During the world flight planned with Adolf Klausmann and not Erich Brammen in 1932 with a Junkers W 33 named Atlantis , both had to make an emergency landing in north-western Australia near Wyndham . They believed they had landed on Melville Island , but were driven about 450 km west by strong easterly winds. For more than 50 days they struggled to survive in the bush. The case made headlines around the world. Bertram landed in Berlin at Easter 1933 after a 6½-day record flight that had started in Surabaya .

As in Germany in the 1930s after the emigration of many artists great need for film professionals in the service of National Socialism arose, Bertram began a career as a writer and film director and wrote and directed several films - especially pilots films - that as today Nazi propaganda are classified . Bertram was a member of the SA from 1934 . During the attack on Poland in 1939 he was the head of the Bertram special film troop and directed the film Baptism of Fire on behalf of Göring , which was supposed to justify the attack on Poland. In 1942 Bertram was expelled from the Reich Chamber of Culture .

Bertram married the actress Gisela Uhlen , with whom he first worked together on the production of Symphony of a Life (1942). The marriage was divorced in the early 1950s after Gisela Uhlen met Wolfgang Kieling . Their daughter Barbara Bertram , born in 1945 , later also became an actress.

In 1954, Hans Bertram founded the Bayerischer Flugdienst company , which operated regional air traffic from 1970. An Luftbildverlag emerged from the flight service in 1954, the owner of which Hans Bertram remained until his death. The Luftbildverlag Hans Bertram GmbH has been based at Memmingen Airport since January 2005 .

Bertram was buried in the Munich forest cemetery. In the city of Remscheid, a path on the Hohenhagen not far from the former airfield was named after him.

Books by Hans Bertram

  • Flight to hell. My Australian adventure . Frankfurt, Berlin (1933 - Ullstein) 1995, ISBN 3-548-23833-5
  • Flight to hell. Report from the "Bertram-Atlantis-Expedition" 1933 Drei Masken Verlag Berlin
  • Call of the wide world 1937 Drei Masken Verlag Berlin
  • Flight to the Stars 1954 Kurt Desch Publishing Munich • Vienna • Basel 1954. It was revised in 1980 under the title “Götterwind”, Universitas Verlag, Munich 1980.
  • God wind. Aviation pioneers . Frankfurt, Berlin (1980 - Universitas) 1992, ISBN 3-548-22687-6

Filmography

  • 1938: Women for Golden Hill (screenplay)
  • 1940: Baptism by fire. The film about the deployment of our air force in the Polish campaign (director, screenplay)
  • 1939: D III 88 (screenplay with Wolf Neumeister)
  • 1940: The Fox of Glenarvon (screenplay)
  • 1941: Kampfgeschwader Lützow (direction, line producer, screenplay)
  • 1942: Symphony of a Life (direction, line producer, screenplay)
  • 1950: The Enchanted Sound (short documentary) (Director)
  • 1949: A Great Love (director, screenplay)
  • 1952: Towers of Silence (director, screenplay)
  • 1977: Flight to Hell (Director, Screenplay)
  • 1985: Flight into hell , German-Australian series in 6 parts based on the novel by Bertram

literature

  • Kay Less : Between the stage and the barracks. Lexicon of persecuted theater, film and music artists from 1933 to 1945 . With a foreword by Paul Spiegel . Metropol, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-938690-10-9 , p. 426f
  • Gisela Uhlen: My glass house. Novel of a life . Frankfurt, Berlin (Ullstein) 1991, ISBN 3-548-22367-2
  • Gisela Uhlen: hugs and revelations . Berlin (Parthas) 2002, ISBN 3-932529-33-2

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Ernst Klee : The culture lexicon for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-10-039326-5 , p. 47.
personal data
SURNAME Bertram, Hans
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bertram, Hans-Karl (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German aviation pioneer, aerial photo publisher, film director, screenwriter and production manager
DATE OF BIRTH February 26, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Remscheid
DATE OF DEATH January 8, 1993
Place of death Munich