CHAPTER 14
World War II took the lives of sixty million people, the overwhelming majority of them civilians. The magnificent roar of the propeller-driven engines of Italo Balbo’s air squadrons above the skylines of Rio and Chicago took on a new, terrifying significance in the abyss of war. Once inspiring untold numbers of people to aspire to a better world, they now were associated with death and destruction meted out from the sky. What had begun in Madrid and Shanghai spread first to Barcelona and Guernica; then to Warsaw, Rotterdam, London, Plymouth, Leningrad, Hamburg, Dresden, Berlin, Tokyo, and, finally, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The ideal of the Nietzschean “Super-man” embraced by the futurists and put into action by men such as Italo Balbo and his black-shirted pilots, found its truest expression in the SS and its sinister implementation of Hitler’s final solution to the Jewish “question.”
To a certain extent Italo Balbo was absolved of much of this due to his publicly known discomfort with the German alliance Mussolini had created.1 The former idol of Hitler had become his puppet, and the racial policies in particular that Mussolini now began aping, appalled Balbo. As early as 1937, Balbo publicly proclaimed: “I do not differentiate between Catholic Italians and Jewish Italians. We are all Italians.”2 To his everlasting credit, he made a particular point of inviting a number of Tripoli’s most important Jewish families to attend a dinner he gave in honor of Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering’s visit in 1938.3 He enjoyed seeing the fat man squirm in his white uniform.
When war came in 1940, Balbo did his duty and organized the colony’s defenses against an expected British attack from neighboring Egypt. On June 28, he was personally conducting reconnaissance in the vicinity of the naval base at Tobruk when he was shot down by friendly fire from the guns of an Italian vessel, anti-aircraft batteries ashore, and possibly even small arms—or a combination of all three. The base had just been hit hard by a British Royal Air Force raid, and the all-clear signal had not yet been given. Balbo was unaware of this, and after his trimotor Savoia-Marchetti S.79 was hit, he and all those aboard (including three Italian airmen who had flown to Chicago with their chief in 1933) were consumed by flames. Italy mourned. Conspiracy theories pointing to an insecure Mussolini orchestrating Balbo’s death are unsupported by solid evidence.4 And Mussolini was such a buffoon that it’s difficult to imagine him pulling off something like this, even if he had wanted to. The fact is, this was a tragic accident—a “perfect storm” of miscommunication, poor timing, and the fog of war.
Like Che Guevara (whom he resembled in more ways than one) in another epoch, Balbo died while he was still vigorous and relevant, unlike Mussolini, who had become ridiculous before his grisly demise. But does this absolve him? He allowed himself in his glory years at the Aeronautica to become a tremendously attractive apostle of an ugly ideology, with horrific historical consequences. An ancient column erected behind Soldier Field to the memory of his great 1933 flight remained (and remains) standing in Chicago, but the ideals so many wanted to believe lay in ruins.
Hugo Eckener became an increasingly marginalized figure following the (unwanted) notoriety around the Hindenburg disaster. After returning to Germany, in 1938 his Nazi masters requested that he publicly endorse the Anschluss (“union”) being forced on the Austrian government by Hitler. Within Austria, Hitler enjoyed wide, but not universal, support. Eckener, again, was useful as a recognized moderate voice to help provide a veneer of respectability to the annexation. In his memoir, Eckener clearly struggled with his decision to do as they requested: “I finally decided to give in to the terror, because nothing could now be done about the accomplished fact [Anschluss], and because I would not and could not be torn away from my life work at this critical moment.”5 In retrospect, this self-serving explanation is decidedly unsatisfactory. And to a large degree it informs our understanding of Eckener’s actions during World War II. His life’s work was the Zeppelin Company. He wanted to continue in at least some capacity at Zeppelin, and because of this, the Nazis had him. It’s that simple. It’s also very human. All of us have, or have had, a position, a project, a cause that we feel defines us. Without it, we feel a loss of purpose and identity. If those in charge recognize this, they can force compromise and concession. Pettiness often enters the equation. How much will we stand to keep what we have—or at least some of what we had? Where do we draw the line? That line continued to move further away from where Hugo Eckener had been when he visited Chicago in 1933 at the height of his fame and influence.
The Zeppelin Company, for its part, shifted from building and flying zeppelins to playing an important role in Germany’s wartime armaments program. Like a number of well-known German firms, it was implicated in using forced labor to complete certain projects. Albert Speer, the slick, urbane Nazi chief of armaments, looked to supply Hitler’s armies but also to produce a game-changing superweapon—the V2 rocket. Initially, a secret installation was established on the Baltic coast at Peenemunde to test and manufacture the V1 “buzz bombs” as they came to be popularly known in England (these were the precursor to the potentially far more deadly V2). Once Allied intelligence determined the location of the facility, it was heavily bombed, and Speer made the decision to relocate it to a new underground location in the interior of the country where Allied bombs couldn’t penetrate. The specific location chosen for this vast new complex was inside and underneath a large hill in central Germany. It came to be known as Mittelwerk (the “Central Works”). It was a gigantic effort that utilized masses of slave laborers from the nearby Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, and others. It is estimated that thousands of these forced laborers perished—essentially worked to death in hellish subterranean conditions.6 The Zeppelin Company had become involved in the V2 project, and its facilities in Friedrichshafen, too, were bombed intensively. Hugo Eckener, still nominally in a position of leadership at Zeppelin, appeared to have been flattered when he was asked to consult on the project. Someone like Speer,* and his young protégé, Wernher von Braun, would have appealed to the science-minded Eckener. They weren’t the usual grotesque clown-bully variety Nazi that he had dealt with earlier (Hitler, Goering, Goebbels). How much did Eckener know about the use of slave labor—and its fatal consequences? This is an important question. Some would argue that Eckener had been playing a double game all along, and was in fact much more in sympathy with the Nazi movement than has been widely understood. However, even a selective reading of the evidence we do have from the 1930s points to a pattern that is much more irregular. And even if he did know the worst of what was going on at Mittelwerk and Mittelbau-Dora, what could he have done to stop it? Any genuine influence he might once have exerted had long ago been eroded into irrelevance. He’d done it to himself. So, “continue to go along”; “pretend you’re still continuing your life’s work.” In the final analysis, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Eckener was more pathetic than sinister in the context of Nazi-era Germany and World War II. That said, his association with Zeppelin in its wartime activities was not to his credit. At best, he was a compromised figure. But so was the whole country. That’s the unfortunate truth.
Footnote
* Speer was later tried and convicted at the Nuremburg War Crimes Trials. He served his full sentence of twenty years at Spandau Prison. His sophistication and the contrition that he expressed led to a rehabilitation of his historical reputation, to a certain degree. But was that contrition genuine? He died a relatively wealthy man after publishing his memoirs.