Hugo Eckener

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Hugo Eckener (1924)
Eckener and Rudolf Lasarewitsch Samoilowitsch (left) in Friedrichshafen (July 1931)
Hugo Eckener (right) during the transfer of the airship Zeppelin LZ 126, later known as the ZR-3 USS Los Angeles, from Germany to the USA in October 1924.
Zeppelin LZ 129 Hindenburg (1936)

Hugo Eckener (born August 10, 1868 in Flensburg , † August 14, 1954 in Friedrichshafen ) was the successor to Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin . Under his leadership, the airships LZ 126 / ZR-3 Los Angeles , LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin and LZ 129 Hindenburg were built .

Life

Hugo Eckener was the son of the cigar manufacturer Johann Christoph Eckener (1824–1880) and his wife, the shoemaker's daughter Anna Maria Elisabeth Eckener (née Lange, 1832–1893) from Flensburg. He attended the St. Marien boys school and later the old grammar school . After graduating from high school , he studied psychology, philosophy, history and economics in Munich, Berlin and Leipzig and received his doctorate in 1892 under Wilhelm Wundt with the work investigations on the fluctuations in the perception of minimal sensory stimuli .

At a young age he worked as a freelance writer and employee of the national liberal Flensburger Nachrichten . He was married to the daughter of the Flensburg printer's owner LPH Maaß, Johanna (1871–1956). His younger brother was the painter and graphic artist Alexander Eckener .

As a correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung, for which he also worked, he is said to have come into direct contact with Count Zeppelin through one of his newspaper reports on the Zeppelin airship in 1908, which later resulted in a long-term, successful collaboration. His criticism of the Zeppelin airships was initially negative. However, the count succeeded in convincing Eckener of the correctness of his line of thought.

At the end of the 1890s, Eckener moved from Flensburg to Friedrichshafen. Eckener was the route manager and authorized signatory of the Deutsche Luftschiffahrts-Aktiengesellschaft (DELAG) founded in 1909 . From 1912 he took over their management. Even before the First World War, he successfully carried out more than 1,000 trips in airships.

In 1910, Eckener was on board the Zeppelin LZ 7 , which crashed nine days after its maiden voyage on June 28 after an engine failure in a storm on Limberg near Iburg in the Teutoburg Forest . Nobody was harmed in the accident.

During the First World War , Eckener trained many naval airmen in Nordholz and other places, including Hans Flemming .

When the end of German airship construction seemed to have come after the end of the First World War, Eckener succeeded in getting the United States interested in the airship. A contract was signed with the obligation to build an airship for the USA. To prove that the ship was fit to sail, this delivery contract was subject to the condition that the contract could only be regarded as fulfilled after the Zeppelin had been transferred across the Atlantic.

On October 12, 1924, Eckener took off from Friedrichshafen on Lake Constance in the Zeppelin LZ 126 to cross the Atlantic. The airship, later renamed the ZR-3 USS Los Angeles , was part of the German reparations payments to the United States as a result of the First World War. With the landing in Lakehurst on October 15, 1924, Eckener made one of the first non-stop flights across the Atlantic :

This trip became a worldwide success and it laid the foundation for the revival of the airship concept. Only a British aircraft and the British R34 rigid airship had previously been able to do this. The city of Flensburg then made him an honorary citizen in the same year .

After the successful delivery trip with the LZ 126, Eckener collected money for the construction of the LZ 127 with lectures and pictures of the trip . The world trip with the Graf Zeppelin in 1929 earned him the nickname “ Magellan of the Skies” in the press . His son Knut also worked as a crew member on the Zeppelins LZ 127 and LZ 129 and was therefore sometimes directly subordinate to Eckener.

Eckener was multiple honorary doctorates, honorary senator and honorary citizen. Between the world wars, he was one of the most highly decorated Germans and was a very well-known man internationally, and not just in specialist circles for airship travel. Eckener also published various books and writings.

Eckener can claim the fame of having set up the first regular airship service across the oceans.

In the 1920s there were several encounters with the polar explorer Roald Amundsen to discuss a joint trip to the Arctic with the zeppelin. After the death of Fridtjof Nansen in 1930, Eckener succeeded him as President of the Aeroarctic Society . In 1931 he led the Arctic voyage of the LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin . To get more publicity, he had agreed with Hubert Wilkins and his sponsor Lincoln Ellsworth that the airship should meet at the North Pole with their submarine Nautilus . When the departure of the Nautilus was delayed, Eckener changed his plans and instead met on July 27, 1931 in the Silent Bay ( Russian Бухта Тихая , Buchta Tichaja ) on Hooker Island ( Franz Joseph Land ) with the Soviet icebreaker Malygin .

In the course of the investigation into the accident of the British airship R101 in 1930, Eckener was called in as an expert.

In 1932, Eckener was even traded as a candidate for the presidential election. Eckener withdrew the candidacy, however, when Hindenburg ran for re-election.

Then he continued to build and operate civilian airships. Between 1931 and 1937 a regular transatlantic line service between Frankfurt, the USA and Brazil with the two Zeppelins LZ 127 and LZ 129 of the German Zeppelin Reederei founded by Eckener was set up. In May 1937 there was a momentous explosion of the Zeppelin LZ 129 Hindenburg in Lakehurst, USA, in which 36 people died.

Since he did not succeed in obtaining the incombustible gas helium from the USA, with which he could have replaced the highly flammable hydrogen, passenger journeys with the luxurious zeppelins were stopped. Eckener was now considered to be partly responsible for the disaster. In 1939, before the start of the Second World War, he withdrew from the public and took over the management of a mechanical engineering company. According to his information in the questionnaire on denazification , he was completely apolitical and belonged neither to the NSDAP nor to any subsidiary organization and had not participated in any political elections since 1932. He did not attach any importance to the fact that he was appointed military economic leader in 1939 .

In 1945 he was a co-founder of the Südkurier in Konstanz .

Friedrichshafen main cemetery, grave of Hugo Eckener

In 1947, Eckener stayed in the United States for seven months and worked as a consultant for Goodyear Aircraft Corporation at the invitation of Director Paul W. Litchfield (1875-1959) . In the mid-1940s the decision was made to build a new type of large airship that could also have been used to transport freight . However, due to a lack of government funding, the project did not materialize - one possible reason why in the 1950s, Eckener was negative about the ideas that were emerging in Germany around the so-called Frankfurter Kreis to revive German airship travel .

Hugo Eckener died four days after his 86th birthday on August 14, 1954 and was buried in the Friedrichshafen main cemetery. His wife Johanna, with whom he was married for 59 years, died in January 1956.

Honors, awards

Dr. The Eckener March by Kaspar Siehler around 1928

The following are named after him:

Eckener House on Norderstrasse in Flensburg
Figurative panel by Bernhard Hoetger at the House of the Glockenspiel in Bremen
Eckenerplatz in Kiel-Holtenau

Publications (selection)

  • Investigations into the fluctuations in the perception of minimal sensory stimuli. In: Philosophical Studies. Volume 8, 1893, pp. 343-387.
  • In the zeppelin over countries and seas. Christian Wolff, Flensburg 1949.
    • In the zeppelin over countries and seas - experiences and memories. Edited and updated version of the original edition from 1949. Morisel, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-943915-01-3 .
  • Count Zeppelin. Cotta, Stuttgart 1938. New edition: Phaidon-Verlag, Essen 1996, ISBN 3-88851-171-2 .

literature

Web links

Commons : Hugo Eckener  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Herrmann Degener: Degeners Who is it? , Berlin, Verlag Herrmann Degener, 1935, p. 337.
  2. ↑ Erich Rackwitz: Travel and Adventure in the Zeppelin . New Life Publishing House, Berlin 1955, p. 202
  3. ↑ Bleibler, J. (2002): The fifties and sixties - large airship projects in Germany and the USA, in: Meighörner, W. (Ed.): Airships that were never built, Friedrichshafen, pp. 151–175.
  4. ↑ a b Dr. Eckener March. From: Kaspar Siehler on YouTube , accessed on February 7, 2017.
  5. ↑ a b Kaspar Siehler. In: Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek / Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg, Department State Archive Sigmaringen, Wü 13 T 2 No. 2607/159, accessed on February 6, 2017.
  6. ↑ Denazification files on landesarchiv-bw.de
  7. ↑ Flensburger Tageblatt of June 11, 2015, p. 6
  8. ↑ The Graz honorary doctorate for Lieutenant Commander Eckener. In:  Badener Zeitung , May 9, 1925, p. 5 middle. (Online at ANNO ).Template: ANNO / Maintenance / bzt
  9. ^ Mathias Kotowski: The public university: Event culture of the Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen in the Weimar Republic. Franz Steiner Verlag, 1999, page 147
  10. ↑ Harald Derschka : The association for the history of Lake Constance and its surroundings. A look back at one hundred and fifty years of club history 1868–2018. In: Writings of the Association for the History of Lake Constance and its Surroundings , 136, 2018, pp. 1–303, here: p. 229.
  11. ↑ Dr. Eckener March. From: Th. Krieghoff on YouTube , accessed February 7, 2017.
  12. ↑ Th. Krieghoff. From the Smithsonian Institution catalog, accessed August 20, 2015.
personal data
SURNAME Eckener, Hugo
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Head of the Zeppelin factory in Friedrichshafen and the first to cross the Atlantic in a zeppelin
DATE OF BIRTH August 10, 1868
PLACE OF BIRTH Flensburg
DATE OF DEATH August 14, 1954
Place of death Friedrichshafen