PEEBLES PROFILES
EPISODE 212
Alexander Zenzes
Alexander Montanus Zenzes was born in the Saxon town of Chemnitz on July 10, 1898.
His name first appeared on the rolls of Marine Flieger Jagdstaffel II. Flying a Fokker D.VII at the age of nineteen, Zenzes scored his first aerial victory over a British Sopwith Camel east of Avekapelle on June 5, 1918. Over the last three days of the month, he scored five more wins… making Zenzes an ace and winning the Iron Cross, First Class.
On July 22, 1918 (two days after claiming victory number seven) Zenzes was wounded by anti-aircraft fire over Ostende-Oudenburg. Eight days later, he was promoted to Vizeflugmeister (Deputy Flight Master). Then on the first of August, Zenzes received more serious wounds that kept him out of action for a month.
Upon his return, Zenzes added two victories in September… and ten more in October alone! By the end of the Great War, his final tally of confirmed victories numbered nineteen… one short of being considered for the coveted “Blue Max”, the Pour le Merite.
In immediate postwar Germany, Zenzes served in Gotthard Sachsenberg’s Marine Freikorps in the Baltic, battling Communist insurgents. During the early 1920s, Zenzes earned a Ph.D in Engineering. Then in early 1925, he emigrated to the United States, applying for citizenship four years later, eventually becoming a naturalized American in August 1934.
Zenzes and his wife Gertrude lived in San Francisco until World War II. He worked as a clerk and sales manager while simultaneously conducting chemical research. By 1942, the Federal Bureau of Investigation considered Alexander Zenzes “a very clever German agent”, and accused him of engaging in subversive activities in Mexico.
Some years after the Second World War ended, Alexander Zenzes moved to New York City… where he lived out the rest of his life. He died in September 1980 in Middle Village, New York at the age of eighty-two.