Over the Atlantic Ocean: May 4, 1937
Ernst Lehmann had transported some interesting creatures in his time as a zeppelin captain—prize Trakehner horses from Prussia; gorillas, chimpanzees, and monkeys used in scientific research; guinea pigs; canaries; carrier pigeons; even queen bees—but perhaps the species that made itself the biggest nuisance for the crew was dogs. Dogs always seemed to come along with American entertainer owners who were apparently unable to travel without them. The year before, the silent film actor Douglas Fairbanks, star of swashbuckling hits like The Mark of Zorro, Robin Hood, and The Three Musketeers, was traveling home from Europe with his new bride, the former Lady Sylvia Ashley, and their six-month‑old Scottie named Bobby Burns. While in flight, Mrs. Fairbanks had allowed little Bobby Burns off his leash so he could avail himself of the facilities. As the first animal aboard the new airship, he decided to mark his territory, leaving, as steward Wilhelm Balla quipped, his “business cards everywhere” while Mrs. Fairbanks worked on a jigsaw puzzle.
Passengers’ casual disregard for the sheer wonder of flight, or just how quickly they became bored and defaulted to their mindless earthly activities, never ceased to amaze Lehmann. On the Graf Zeppelin’s very first flight over Germany in 1928, he had passed through the dining room and found two passengers who had already grown tired of looking out the window and were instead sitting quietly playing a game of chess. “How quickly men become accustomed to the unusual!” he had remarked with disdain.
Man had dreamed of flying for centuries. “What was a miracle yesterday, becomes a habit today,” he had harrumphed in his memoir. Lehmann’s was a complaint shared by many groundbreaking aviators, of the heavier‑ and lighter‑than‑air varieties alike. Even Charles Lindbergh agreed. “In developing aviation, in making it a form of commerce, in replacing the wild freedom of danger with the civilized bonds of safety,” he mused, “must we give up this miracle of air?”
Passengers’ casual disregard for the sheer wonder of flight, or just how quickly they became bored and defaulted to their mindless earthly activities, never ceased to amaze Lehmann.
It could not have been lost upon Lehmann that this first trip of the Hindenburg’s 1937 season had commenced a mere eighteen days shy of the tenth anniversary of Lindbergh’s own “miracle of air.” While Lindbergh’s achievement was remarkable, many seemed to forget that he had only accomplished what airships had been proving possible since the British beat the Germans to transatlantic zeppelin flight in 1919. The rivalry between airships and airplanes aside, the brotherhood of aviators had witnessed some remarkable sights in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Only an airman knew that when flying over London, the lights along the Thames looked like the Milky Way, and only from an aircraft could the “benumbing” and “monstrous” vastness of the swamps, forests, and streams of Siberia be appreciated in their endless expanse.
So uncharted was their route on the round‑the‑world flight that when planning their journey over the Stanovoy mountains in the Russian Far East, the crew could find almost no information about the height of the range aside from one report that suggested the section in question was 3,500 feet high. As a precaution, Eckener added an extra 2,000 feet of clearance as they groped their way through fog and clouds. Just before they reached the Sea of Okhotsk, the clouds finally dispersed, and only then did the crew realize they had cleared the mountain ridge by a mere three hundred feet. After Siberia’s wild, hostile nature, it was a “refreshing” relief when they reached the island of Hokkaido the next morning and could look down to see “neatly divided…rice fields, gardens, and clean houses.”
On a zeppelin, as a DZR marketing pamphlet exclaimed, “the prophetic vision of Jules Verne has been realized.” Passengers could experience for themselves the stuff of science fiction novels. In describing this balance between wonder and commerce, DZR might have done a bit too much to convince nervous fliers that riding on a zeppelin was as easy as sitting in their own living rooms. In the passenger lounge, where card games and jigsaw puzzles always began to appear midway through the first full day of the crossing, some passengers seemed oblivious to the fact they were airborne at all.
Perhaps Lehmann’s frustration with the passengers was unfairly placed and actually had more to do with the demands of his job, which had changed considerably since he had been promoted. Lehmann now had to be bothered with all the nonflying aspects of the zeppelin business, in which he had little interest but which made a great impression on the passengers. Things like advertising, marketing, and the minutiae of internal operations now took up a great deal of his time.
Over the last year, DZR had been making a series of investments in its future operations to ensure that its international clientele saw zeppelins as the height of comfort, convenience, safety, and glamour in travel. It had been aggressively expanding advertising abroad, including a targeted effort to promote airship service to Europe for the coronation and the Paris Exposition. DZR had also offered some of its business associates free flights in exchange for a report with their general impressions and suggestions for improvement. One of them, a Brit named George Grant, who was an assistant manager at the firm that handled zeppelin bookings in London, had joined this flight. Grant seemed to be enjoying his paid vacation. So far, he had neglected his report, aside from noting that linen covers should be placed at the heads of the beds in the cabins to prevent grease marks marring the cabins’ fabric‑covered walls, and went about touring the airship with the stewards instead.
While DZR actively courted such feedback from its own associates, the general public sometimes took it upon themselves to write in with unsolicited advice. DZR had recently received a letter from a man named Hinrich Schröder, a children’s toilet seat manufacturer. He had noticed a newspaper article about DZR having hired a stewardess, from which he concluded there would be increasingly more children traveling on board. Therefore, he concluded, the zeppelins required sanitary facilities for these “little guests.” He wrote that he hoped to receive an order from DZR for his toilet seats, which attached to the main seat and could be folded up so that adults need not be bothered and children would not have to use a pot. Herr Schröder would, unfortunately, be disappointed.
DZR’s biggest effort by far, which had taken up considerable amounts of Ernst Lehmann’s time over the last few months, was a push to capture the attention and the business of wealthy American travelers, who, attracted by the time savings of zeppelin travel, made up 70 to 80 percent of its paying customer base by 1937.
“Our century has been called the technical age. It has also been called the age of abbreviation,” Lehmann wrote in his memoir with an air of disdain. “Time is money, the American says; to decrease time means to save money.” This deliberate shift toward the American market had begun in earnest the prior October with the Hindenburg’s “Millionaires Flight,” where over seventy mostly wealthy and high‑profile American passengers took a ten‑and‑a‑half‑hour cruise over the Eastern Seaboard. They included Wall Street financiers like Nelson Rockefeller and Winthrop Aldrich, aviation leaders like Great War ace and Eastern Airlines General Manager Eddie Rickenbacker, Pan Am founder Juan Trippe, and Goodyear’s Paul Litchfield. All together, the passengers’ net worth was over a billion dollars.
By the beginning of 1937, it appeared that overtures to American passengers were proving successful. It was only May, and three quarters of the Hindenburg’s 1937 bookings were for Americans. If the numerous American passengers relaxing in the smoking lounge with drinks in hand or inscribing postcards in the writing room were any indication, DZR seemed to be attracting exactly the kind of well‑heeled executives it sought to entice.
American packer Nelson Morris was by far the wealthiest passenger on board, and both the speed of travel and the allure of flight clearly appealed to him. Better yet, he had purchased a second ticket for his friend Bert Dolan. Fortunately, Morris was the antithesis of unimpressed passengers who so rankled Lehmann. He clearly fancied himself a fellow airman and was already seeking out the steward for a tour of the Hindenburg’s vast structure.
Also keen was passenger Peter Belin, the young Yale graduate on his way home to Washington, DC, after a year in Paris. Belin was related to the Du Pont family of gunpowder‑industry millionaires, but his presence also showed that DZR was making inroads with the influential Washington set. His father, F. Lammot Belin, had left private business to become a diplomat, serving as one of the State Department’s earliest chief protocol officers and then as ambassador to Poland from 1932 to 1933. Peter Belin planned to have a similar career and already had that inherent cosmopolitan ease about him. As with Morris, he enjoyed the technical aspect of flight.
Alongside being a member of the undefeated Yale soccer team, the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity, and the Book and Snake secret society, Belin had also taken flying lessons at New Haven Municipal Airport and received his pilot’s license from the Boeing Aeronautical School. Throughout the day, the square‑jawed, dark‑haired young man with a broad smile would take out a pen and a folded paper map of the Western Hemisphere and smooth it out on one of the small writing tables. Checking the airship’s coordinates, which the crew posted along with news bulletins in the reading room, he would draw a dot to mark their position and connect it back to the previous dot, charting their progress since their Frankfurt departure.
Fantastically wealthy passengers like Nelson Morris and Peter Belin had easily been sold on air travel as fellow, albeit not terribly experienced, airmen, but San Francisco canning executive Moritz Feibusch was part of the next tier of lower‑profile but highly successful Americans whom DZR was courting and who had been drawn in by the promise of adventure. Feibusch was a German Jewish immigrant originally from Rogasen, or Rogoźno, a now Polish town that, like Alsace, had traded hands at various times in its history. Feibusch, a slender, gray‑haired, bespectacled fifty-seven‑year‑old of average height, seemed utterly delighted by his good fortune in life and was determined to make the most of it.
As a young man, he had moved to San Francisco, where he got a job working for Prager’s Department Store. He became a merchandise broker and within a few years had built his own canned foods company, which sold products like Pebble Beach Tuna Flakes and Sardines and Calbear Fruit Salad. He owned a home on the edge of Golden Gate Park, and he and his wife, a violinist and composer, had traveled extensively throughout Britain, Italy, Turkey, Czechoslovakia, Egypt, Syria, the British Mandate of Palestine, and, of course, back to Germany and Poland to visit his large family. He had even managed to bring three of his brothers, their wives, and three nephews over from Germany—its climate increasingly hostile to Jews—to live in San Francisco and was in the process of adopting one of his nephews. After his wife died in 1935, he took several extended trips, including to Paris, where he began a new travel tradition. He had a set of custom postcards designed with the words “Souvenir de mon ascension” and a cartoon of himself as a giant wearing a boater hat and spats standing jauntily on the Eiffel Tower, which he sent to business contacts, family, and friends.
Feibusch was on his way home from his annual business trip to Europe. His manager and secretary had returned by steamship, but Feibusch had decided to treat himself to a few additional weeks abroad with an airship journey as a climactic conclusion. This adventure had clearly been on his mind for some time, as he had previously sent souvenir mail to his brother in Berlin on the 1929 round‑the‑world flight of the Graf Zeppelin. Once again he had a set of two hundred custom postcards printed, this time a compilation of his passport photo and an image of the zeppelin flying above. (Interestingly, despite being Jewish, he opted for authenticity and included the Hindenburg’s very visible swastikas on the artistic rendering.) Though enthusiastic travelers were more likely to proselytize zeppelin travel to family and friends, DZR was happy to sell a ticket to anyone willing to pay.
Philip Mangone, for example, who had thus far put in little appearance in the public rooms and largely kept to his cabin, was a sturdy fifty‑two‑year‑old Italian American and a dispassionate traveler. This was just one more transatlantic crossing to add to an impressive tally over nearly half a century after having immigrated to New York from Calabria with his family as a child. He was a seventh‑generation tailor with an eighth‑grade education who started his career as a fitter at the B. Altman department store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and had gone on to become one of the era’s chicest designers, specializing in women’s tailored looks, particularly suits and reversible capes. He was best known for having developed the swagger coat and topper. Back in 1915, twenty‑two years earlier almost to the day, he had been booked to travel on board the Lusitania but had canceled at the last minute, narrowly escaping disaster.
On that very voyage, the Lusitania was torpedoed and sunk by a U‑boat off the coast of Ireland. Such a near miss with fate apparently left Mangone unfazed. His booking on the Hindenburg was purely practical in nature. True to American form in this age of abbreviation, he had decided to fly simply to save four extra days to stay on schedule with his fall collection.
The reality was that as the novelty of the technology wore off and airship journeys became as commonplace as crossing the Atlantic on an ocean liner, no doubt there would be more and more travelers with Mangone’s attitude than with that of Morris, Belin, and Feibusch. Lehmann really should not complain, because those time savers were the difference between a profitable enterprise and his beloved airships becoming an odd relic of a short‑lived era.
DZR had recently implemented a number of changes for the 1937 season to ensure that the onboard experience met with these Americans’ approval. There was a sense of irony to this, as the zeppelin company was facing an increasingly split reality. On the one hand, the outward image of the zeppelins was becoming progressively more associated with the Nazi regime. Meanwhile, inside the airships and in DZR’s commercial practices, everything was becoming more and more American every day.
Over the winter, Willy von Meister, DZR’s representative in the United States, had written Lehmann a twenty‑page letter filled with suggestions for improvement. Von Meister, a tall and imposing six foot six (compared with Lehmann’s approximate five foot two), was culturally well placed to make these suggestions. Through his German father, the former governor of the state of Hesse, von Meister was a godson of the last kaiser, Wilhelm II, but his mother was an American raised in London. He had lived in the United States for over a decade.
That such mundane minutiae should frustrate Lehmann was no surprise. He was not a businessman who enjoyed tinkering with inputs to maximize the bottom line. He was a true airman in his heart and soul.
First and foremost, von Meister instructed Lehmann, the stewards must provide carafes of ice water on the tables in the lounge and dining room: “Americans should not have to give up the habit of drinking ice water on board.” Menus and news posted on the reading room blackboard should be posted in both German and English, and on all trips to Germany, the chief steward should announce which golf club Americans could use while in Frankfurt. Von Meister also emphasized the need to provide additional entertainment on board, no doubt much to Lehmann’s chagrin, as it carried the implication that zeppelin travel was, well, rather boring. As it took most of the first day of a two‑day trip for passengers to get to know each other sufficiently to gather for games of bridge and skat, the stewards should supply more games for two people, such as chess and backgammon, both very popular in the United States. They should also provide other physically lightweight entertainments, like Ping‑Pong balls and paddles for play on the longer dining tables between meals and jigsaw puzzles with pleasant scenes (though none so large that they could not be finished by the end of the short trip).
It was also essential to have a doctor on board. Thus far, DZR had been lucky that no passenger had fallen seriously ill while in the air, but it was only a matter of time until their luck ran out. “It is very easy to imagine that a German doctor who doesn’t have a private practice or is not a particularly good doctor, or has too little interest in private practice” would be interested in such a unique (and generally unchallenging) occupation, wrote von Meister. “I am convinced that the extra weight and the additional cost of one such man would pay off in spades,” he concluded, not least because a small number of American passengers tended to show up drunk and could cause themselves small injuries. When his medical services were not required, the doctor could conduct airship tours or organize bridge games as a sort of entertainment czar. As doctors were generally good with people, his thinking went, the doctor could also serve as a guest relations go‑between for American passengers and German crew. Passengers had complained on several occasions that the stewards could be a bit overbearing in suggesting they change out of their relaxed daytime traveling suits and into proper dinner attire. DZR had accepted von Meister’s suggestion and hired twenty‑seven‑year‑old Dr. Kurt Rüdiger for the 1937 season.
Another point of contention between passengers and crew was the meals themselves, particularly special requests the kitchen was unenthusiastic about accommodating. “The kitchen,” von Meister instructed Lehmann, “is generally described as ‘difficult.’ A large percentage of Americans either have spoiled stomachs or an ‘idiosyncrasy’ that means they can’t eat this or that.” Each morning, the crew should put out the full day’s menu (in English) at breakfast so that passengers could communicate which foods they could not tolerate. The bar steward, Max Schulze, also needed to be “more courteous in his dealings with the guests,” whose egress to and from the smoking room he patrolled to ensure no one brought anything flammable out from behind the air‑lock door. As a previous passenger who had flown to Rio the year before had quipped, so tight was the security around anything flammable leaving the smoking lounge that “one felt like a boy having a fag behind the greenhouse. I always imagined that Dr. Eckener was waiting for me outside with a birch and mortarboard and gown.” Schulze also needed to “drink less himself and avoid ingratiating himself too much with the passengers.” It was essential that the bar never run out of liquor, especially rye or bourbon whiskey, necessary ingredients in the popular Manhattan cocktail. The bar should also provide a souvenir. “I will send you a small metal ‘skewer’ that is served with the cocktails in the Hotel Waldorf‑Astoria,” von Meister offered.
Finally, DZR needed to concede to Americans where their preferences related to cleanliness and comfort differed. In the four B deck lavatories, DZR needed to supply either a basket of small, single‑use hand towels or disposable paper napkins for drying hands, rather than one large communal towel, which “according to American custom” was “very undesirable.” “The American has a need for freshness” and did not want to “participate in a communal towel.” Nor did Americans like the bedding offered. Rather than one single, fluffy duvet, DZR should switch to the American style of bedding with a sheet and several wool blankets, even though the duvet was far easier for the stewards to shake out and refold in tight cabins. Though it was not the German way, von Meister felt strongly that “these things don’t cost much and are amenities that improve the overall impression of the service.”
Von Meister did have one other suggestion at large, and that was to expand the fire‑protection measures in the passenger compartments. “I’m thinking about the possibility of rapid‑fire extinguishing systems, with compressed carbonic acid, [and] smoke detectors, as used on seagoing ships….It could happen that a drunk passenger starts smoking and is careless,” assuming he got past Max Schulze at the bar. Of course, such equipment, he recognized, could “only be of use in the early stages of a fire.”
None of von Meister’s suggestions were meant to directly criticize Lehmann or any other individual and their work. They were merely a reflection of the reality that “we are dealing with a very spoiled public in the North Atlantic service” who would “only be prepared to use the airship if the entire journey is smooth, comfortable and without unpleasant incidents.”
That such mundane minutiae should frustrate Lehmann was no surprise. He was not a businessman who enjoyed tinkering with inputs to maximize the bottom line. He was a true airman in his heart and soul. Nor was he alone in his frustration over the direction in which his beloved industry had turned. Reflecting on how attitudes toward air travel had changed in the short amount of time since he had first crossed the Atlantic, compared with the millennia that men had spent yearning for the freedom of birds and control over the air above, Charles Lindbergh mused, “Will men fly through the sky in the future without seeing what I have seen, without feeling what I have felt? Is that true of all things we call human progress—do the gods retire as commerce and science advance?”
Since the allegorical days of Icarus, countless men had lost their lives in failed experiments as they strove to achieve the miracle of flight. Now, thanks to the airship and its perfection in the hands of German engineers, Lehmann could proudly say, “The fight to conquer the air has ended in the defeat of the elemental forces of Nature.” And yet, just as quickly as the fight had been won, the beneficiaries of such a triumph of human engineering went back to their newspapers, their card games, and their cheap jigsaw puzzles, their tricky stomachs and their nuisance pets, and had the nerve to be bored.
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From Shadow Before the Flame: The Hindenburg Disaster and the Prelude to War by Catherine Grace Katz. Published on September 22, 2026 by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2026 by Catherine Grace Katz.