Otto van der Haegen

Otto van der Haegen (* 23. May 1887 in Kreuztal , † 7. June 1915 in Gent , Belgium ) was a Prussian lieutenant , Zeppelin - commander and head of the aeronaut School of Berlin . In 1912 he flew over the Siegerland for the first time and took the first aerial photos of this region.

He fell as commander of the airship LZ 37 , with which he crashed on June 7, 1915 after a plane attack by British aviator Reginald AJ Warneford near Ghent . It was the first and only destruction of a moving airship by an airplane using bombs during the First World War . A total of 40 airships were shot down during the war and more were lost as a result of technical defects and / or adverse weather conditions.

The airship, which was on the way back from a previous attack voyage to Great Britain and Calais, fell in fire on the monastery OLV Visitatie in the Ghent district of Sint-Amandsberg.

Van der Haegen and his first officer Kurt Ackermann are still buried today in the former German cemetery (Westerbegraafplaats) in Ghent, on which a memorial for the eight fallen of the airship LZ 37 was erected in 1917.

During the Nazi era , a Reich labor camp was named after him in Kreuztal .

Web links

• From heaven, through hell to the monastery bed. (PDF; 11.6 MB), accessed on August 2, 2018
• The airship rescue of the brave musketeer Lipski. Archived from the original on June 6, 2011 ; accessed on August 6, 2014 . 

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Perspective. 3/2005, p. 6; Publisher: durchblick-siegen Information and Media eV; House Herbstzeitlos.
2. ↑ Siegerlandkurier report from August 23, 2009.  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
3. ↑ Report on the RAD warehouse in Ferndorf (PDF; 1.2 MB)