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Question 29: Baroness Blixen and the Hindenburg?

Q. I have a picture of Tom Hamilton coming down the gangway of the airship Hindenburg in 1936. With him, in the UPI photo, is the Baroness von Blixen-Finecke. Is this the same Karen Blixen you wrote about--or a relative?

A. By 1936, Bror von Blixen-Finecke was married to his third wife, a Swedish woman, Eva Dickson, who had a reputation for daring-do. (She had learned car racing from her first husband.)

According to The Man Whom Women Loved, a biography of Bror Blixen by Ulf Aschan, Eva "agreed to navigate for a Swedish aviator, Bjorkwall, on an Atlantic flight from New York to Gothenburg. In July 1936 she boarded the Zeppelin Hindenburg at Frankfurt, landing five days later at Lakehurst, New Jersey. From contemporary newspaper cuttings, her arrival, arm in arm with the millionaire playboy Thomas Hamilton, caused quite a stir" (p. 205).

The account does not go into further detail but it appears that Eva Blixen never took up flying but went back to automobile racing. She soon began preparations for a transcontinental drive across Asia. She was killed when her car crashed in India in 1938.

Copyright © 2000 by Linda Donelson. All rights reserved



Photo courtesy Chaz Hitz