Hugo Eckener at his desk, 1937
The white-haired airship pioneer telephones, lights his pipe and goes over drawings with a younger colleague in his papered office.
In an office with striped floral wallpaper, framed paintings and a curtained window, Dr. Hugo Eckener, heavy-set and white-haired, talks into the telephone with a pipe in his hand, strikes a match and draws on the pipe, gestures with its stem as he speaks, and bends over papers that a younger man in a tweed jacket spreads out on the cluttered desk.
Eckener had flown the Graf Zeppelin round the world in 1929 and across the South Atlantic on scheduled services; he was the face of German aviation abroad. He never joined the party, and when in 1936 he declined to support the Rhineland plebiscite, Goebbels ordered his name dropped from the press. The airships themselves had passed in 1935 to a new company run by Göring's air ministry and Lufthansa.
