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Personal history: When he entered the war school in Ludwigsburg (1855), Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin decided to pursue a military career. After his appointment as lieutenant (1858) he was subordinate to the Generalquartiermeisterstab. Commanded to study at the University of Tübingen for a year, he was temporarily transferred to the Corps of Engineers in Ulm after the outbreak of the French-Austrian War (1859) and soon afterwards to the Generalquartiermeisterstab in Ludwigsburg. After various journeys, including to the scenes of the American Civil War, Count Zeppelin was promoted to the Adjutant's Office of King Charles in 1865. At his own request, in April 1868 he was assigned to the tactical department of the Great General Staff in Berlin, but already in the autumn of the following year he was recalled to the Württemberg General Quartermaster Staff. At the beginning of the Franco-German war in 1870/71, Count Zeppelin was assigned to the Württemberg cavalry brigade as a general staff officer. His daring exploration ride through Alsace on 24/25 July 1870 and its distribution in the national press made Count Zeppelin famous and popular for the first time in wide sections of the population. After the war he was entrusted with changing commandos over various cavalry regiments until 1884 when he was appointed colonel of the Württemberg military in Berlin. Allegedly because of an unsuccessful manoeuvre, Count Zeppelin retired in 1890 at the age of 52 as General à la suite of the King of Württemberg. During the American Civil War and in Paris in 1870, Count Zeppelin had become acquainted with the military use of open-air balloons. Already in 1887 he had developed his ideas about the possibilities of airship travel in a memorandum presented to the King of Württemberg. His first airship (LZ 1) ascended on 2 July 1900. In 1906 LZ 2 and LZ 3 started, both designed by the engineer Ludwig Dürr. Graf Zeppelin suffered a severe setback on August 5, 1908, when LZ 4 went up in flames on his 24-hour journey to Echterdingen after loading. Graf Zeppelin achieved the final breakthrough and general social recognition of his idea with the launch of LZ 5, which landed in Berlin on August 25, 1909. With regard to military deployment, Graf Zeppelin had considerably overestimated the possibilities of his airships: 72 of the 96 airships built during the war were lost. Nevertheless, Count Zeppelin accused Reich Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg of obstructing the full deployment of the airships against England. The only letter of Count Zeppelin received in this estate also refers to this controversy with the Reich government that arose shortly before his death (1917). Inventory history: Count Zeppelin's only daughter Hella had married Alexander von Brandenstein in 1909. At least a part of the estate listed here must have been in their possession or that of their heirs, because some archival records were marked with the stamp "Graf von Brandenstein-Zeppelin'sches Familienarchiv". The estate of Count Zeppelin in M 660/157, which comprises 14 archive units (0.1 m), was recorded in September 1994.Stuttgart, in September 1994Dr. Margit Müller