Titanic Post

Karl Boehm-Tettelbach - 2nd From Right

Everett, an old friend and colleague from my Pan Am days in Nuremberg, called last week. We had not talked in over twenty years. Interspersed with our reminiscing, he dropped the question: Did you know who Karl Boehm really was? Well, Karl Boehm was our station manager at the Nuremberg airport and a man whom I greatly admired and who had once helped me out of a very tight spot.

Everett continued that Karl Boehm-Tettlebach was his real name and he had been a high ranking Nazi army officer (Oberstleutnant or Lieutenant Colonel) and aide to Field Marshall Werner von Blomberg and later had served in Hitler’s headquarters during the war. I should have expected something like that, because Herr Boehm was the right age to have been there and everyone then had been involved at one level or another. However, I had not expected what Everett was telling me.

Other than the fact that Karl Boehm had given me that job, and thereby assuring my existence for a few years, he was one of the most kind and understanding men I had ever met. He would do almost anything to help his employees do their work more effectively or with their personal problems. As a result, the Pan Am station was the most pleasant place I had worked up to that point. He affected everyone he came into contact with: the staff, flight crews, Customs, even the BP fuel-crews would go out of their way to help us. This mostly because Karl Boehm was such a likeable man.

Our Operations Supervisor, Alfred Peter, was also affected. ‘Pete’ went on to become the Director of Training for the Frankfurt Airport. In 1971, I went to work there as a trainer. Karl Boehm’s management style was carried on by Pete and we successfully worked together for the next seventeen years.

After the phone call, I googled Boehm-Tettelbach and found several quotes of his. Laurence Rees had produced a documentary film for BBC and had interviewed my old station manager:

Rees asked Karl Boehm-Tettelbach, a Nazi army officer who served in Hitler’Â’s headquarters in East Prussia during the war, how German people could respect Hitler and what he was doing for Germany when Jews were being forced to lose their jobs and leave the country. Boehm-Tettelbach replied:

That never came up. Everybody thought the same, that you were in a big team and you didn’t separate from the group. You were infected. That explains it a little bit… Hitler fixed you with his eye contact, looked at you just a bit longer than anyone else.

Heinrich Himmler, the man behind the Holocaust, sits rather oddly with the picture of the man we see from those who knew him. Many have described Himmler as coming across as a kindly, eccentric schoolmaster. Field Marshall von Blomberg’s aide, Karl Boehm-Tettelbach, liked Himmler more than the other Nazis he met:

He was a very nice and agreeable guest because he always involved younger people like me and would enquire about the air force, how I was getting along, how long I would be with Blomberg, if I liked it, what I had seen the last trip to Hungary and things like that.

That the traits of men as despicable as Adolf Hitler and Himmler, which so impressed Karl Boehm-Tettelbach, are the very same traits that had such a profound effect on me, Alfred Peter, and all those people at the Nurmberg Airport and resulted in the two best jobs of my life calls for a rethinking of my stereotypes and prejudices. I guess that nobody really is all bad or all good. Karl Boehm has been and always will continue to be one of the major influences in my life.