Status Updates From The Hindenburg

“On Friday March 6, the LZ 129 as it was called in Germany, and the Hindenburg elsewhere, made a three-hour trial flight”—p. 78

Wow, Goebbels actually didn’t want the ship to bear the name of “the old grey man of the old regime.”

“Over Western Russia a soldier with an excess of Soviet xenophobia emptied his tommygun at the great silver airship, but only succeeded in puncturing a few gas cells which Chief Knorr easily repaired.”—p. 56

With an American-made submachine gun no less; oh, the irony!

“Although Jews might easily be proved the ‘spoilers of modesty,’ ‘the wreckers of good art,’ and ‘the secret influences behind the new industrial corporations,’ no one would go about hating the occupants of the nearby table, some of whom were, in fact, Jewish.”—p. 46

“If one read what the Socialist newspapers had to say, the impression might be gleaned that before the war, life was poor, nasty, brutish, and short—lived out in the squalor of industrial slums. But the painters had caught the spirit of things more truthfully: their impressions were of picnics in the shade of green trees by city streams…
…When the painters saw sadness, it was bittersweet.
They did not paint despair.”

“The victorious powers [of the First World War, that is] meant to make use of Zeppelin’s invention at Germany’s expense. They expected to enlarge their own air fleets, and at the same time stop Germany from developing airship travel. But the lack of practical experience in airships—especially those of advanced design—resulted in disaster.”—p. 43

—pp. 22-23: “For three generations there would be Parisians who believed that somehow Santos-Dumont had *both* the first dirigible and the first airplane in the air. They just couldn’t accept as a fact the uncivilized Wright brothers’ flight at Kitty Hawk on December 17, 1903…The Paris Herald itself said of the Wrights, ‘They are, in fact, either flyers or liars.’” [emphasis added]