From the archives: photos and the case of Dr. Hanns Klemm

I'm still working on that archive project. It never ends!

This is a picture of a snowy Böblingen road, circa 1948, taken by my father with his Retina.

(Click on photos to enlarge them.)

Back in 1997 or so, my brother Ron and I took a trip up 395 and then west across the Sierra Nevada. This is a photo of Bodie, California, a very cool ghost town near the Nevada border, not far from Bridgeport.

My late grandfather, Otto, was a friend of an aircraft designer and manufacturer named Hanns Klemm. Opa, a wood worker, was with the R&D unit (Klemm was a great believer in wood construction and made significant contributions to wood construction and glue). Like my grandfather, who was a communist, Herr Klemm badmouthed the Nazis, and that finally got him into trouble. I do believe he was arrested toward the end of the war. I seem to recall coming across an article about Herr Klemm's fate. I'll try to dig it up. (See below.)

According to my father, Klemm asked Opa to run a factory for him, and Opa decided not to take the job, a decision which created problems for his marriage.

This photograph seems to be from about 1928.

I'm guessing that the plane is the L20. It's predecessor, the L15, was powered by a Harley-Davidson motorcycle engine! (Klemm's first plane, conceived when he worked for Daimler, had an Indian engine.) After the war, Germany was not allowed to develop aircraft with motors, and it was reasoned that the addition of a little 12 hp motorcycle engine wouldn't count.

Grandpa is the guy on the far right. Yeah, this is an L20 all right. Probably an L20b1. The L20 was first flown in 1923 and was in production until 1928.

Yep, that's me, circa late '57 or early '58.

My Aunt Ruth, in Germany, c. 1955

Crossing the Sierra Nevada, Nikon in hand

The view from Mono Lake

Opa, late 30s?

Re Opa's friend and employer Hanns Klemm, I found the following brief biography:

Hanns Klemm: the man who resigned from the Nazi Party and lived to tell about it 

     …[T]he Klemm company [which developed out of Hanns Klemm's association with Daimler, in Böblingen, in the mid-twenties] earned the reputation of being very innovative and commercially very successful.
     Hanns Klemm's vision was to build aeroplanes which, like cars, would allow a much wider circle of people to buy and run a plane.
     That meant a plane which was easy to manufacture and cheap to maintain, and ideally also fit in a garage. All development had to be subordinated to this primary goal.
     For this reason Klemm aircraft were not spectacular as far as horsepower and speed are concerned, but they were spectacularly economical and practical. Almost every flyer in Germany in the 20's and 30's learned to fly in a Klemm.
     In 1932 production reached 25 planes per month! Subsidiaries were formed abroad, among other places in the USA, Great Britain, and Sweden.
     In 1933 the National Socialists came to power in Germany and Hanns Klemm too, enthused by the spirit of national resurgence, joined the Nazi party in 1933.
     In 1934 the influence of the Nazis over the economy was growing. As an entrepreneur, Hanns Klemm was no longer free to determine his company's fortunes, and the Air Ministry set a starkly reduced monthly salary.
     A new factory was built in Halle on the Saale in 1934/1935 under pressure from the Air Ministry, and Director Klemm had to transfer to it a number of employees and the design of a two-engined machine, the FH 104. It then, after Hanns Klemm transferred this factory in 1937 to his one-time friend and company representatitve Friedrich W. Siebel, again under pressure from the Air Ministry, became the Siebel Flugzeugwerke.
     The Nazis interfered more and more in the running of the company and in the appointment of top positions, valued Jewish employees had to be dismissed, and piecework for other companies, for example the fuselage of the Messerschmidt Me 163 jet [sic; it was a rocket plane], had to be built at Klemm. Hanns Klemm refused the directives from Berlin, was subjected to an investigation for sabotage, and had to resign as head of the company -- Hanns Klemm was no longer boss of his own company.
     Hanns Klemm was a practising Christian and regular church-goer, and his growing distaste at the goings-on immmediately around him and in Germany made his membership of the Nazi party appear increasingly perverse. Also his inability to keep quiet about incidents which came to his notice meant that in 1937 he was considered politically unreliable, and declared to be "unfit to occupy a party position".
     In june 1943 Hanns Klemm dared the unimaginable, he resigned from the NSDAP [the Nazi Party]. The reason he gave on 26th May 1943 was: "I consider my membership of the NSDAP to be no longer compatible with my belonging to the Christian community". [Note: this was about the time that my grandfather was secreted to the Wehrmacht, keeping him out of the reach of the authorities.]
     The reaction to this resignation from the NSDAP was not long in coming.
     Hanns Klemm, to save his fortune, had to transfer his company to his wife. The Böblingen Tax Office, assessing Gift Tax at 330%, demanded 50,000 RM.
     Hanns Klemm was arrested by the Gestapo and after a fierce interrogation was delivered to the Bürgerhospital lunatic asylum in Stuttgart. The doctors, however, didn't consider him mad and so let him go home.
     On the 12th of June 1944 his company was requisitioned and a commissar appointed.
     In March 1945 he was arrested again by the Gestapo, interrogated, beaten-up, and his case handed over to a summary court. Only the arrival of the French army on 28.4.1945 saved Hanns Klemm's life.

Klemm next to a KL26

Charles Lindberg, flight testing a Klemm L20 in New York, 1928