The Hindenburg Disaster

Join Kelli as she goes over the Hindenburg Disaster. On May 6, 1937, the Hindenburg Zeppelin exploded and caught fire as it was landing at the Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey. 36 of the 97 people on board died - some in the initial explosion, some from jumping off the airship at height, and some from some horrific burns once they escaped the flaming vessel. It had huge ramifications for the airship industry and the popularity of blimps, zeppelins, and other dirigibles. 

Support me on my Patreon - your support helps keep this podcast going!
A Popular History of Unpopular Things Patreon

Follow the APHOUT YouTube channel!

Intro and Outro music credit: Nedric
Find him on all streaming services and YouTube, and check out his newest album, Sparrow Factory!

Chapters

• 0:28 Intro
• 2:46 Historical Context
• 12:06 The LZ 129 Hindenburg
• 17:49 The Fateful Voyage
• 30:50 Outro

Transcript

Intro
Welcome to A Popular History of Unpopular Things, a mostly scripted podcast that makes history more fun and accessible. My kind of history is the unpopular stuff - disease, death, and destruction. I like learning about all things bloody, gross, mysterious, and weird. 

Just a quick reminder that you can support me and the show on Patreon, just look up either A Popular History of Unpopular Things or APHOUT: A-P-H-O-U-T. And you can also now watch episodes on YouTube - so go subscribe to my channel there! I appreciate all the love and support :)

—

So it feels like it’s been a while since I did an episode on something exploding. When was the last time… the Indianapolis? Yeah, it’s been too long. So for today, I want to talk about the explosion of the Hindenburg Airship in 1937.

The Hindenburg was a type of airship known as a zeppelin. This particular model was commissioned to ferry passengers back and forth between the US and Germany - and more specifically, to the Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey. But on its second of ten planned trips, the thing caught fire and exploded over the Lakehurst base as it was about to land, killing 36 of the 97 people on board.

So today, I want to go over that incident. First, as always, we’ll start with the historical context; when were airships popular, and why? We’ll take a look at the history surrounding the popularization of airships like the Hindenburg Zeppelin to get a better understanding of why people were flying around in these things in the first place.

After we’ve got the historical context squared away, we’ll take a look at the incident itself - how did it catch fire? What happened? Was it human error, or just a horrible accident? And what were the short-term and long-term impacts of the Hindenburg Disaster on flying and the airship industry?

So let’s get started.
Historical Context
So the first question I had was when airships were first built. We can date airplanes to the very beginning of the 20th century, that’s the 1900s, so how about things like zeppelins and blimps?

Well, they actually came first! 

The first airship, also called a dirigible balloon, and in this case a blimp, took flight in 1852. It was a French physicist named Henri Giffard who built and flew it. Now before I get too carried away here, the difference between a blimp and a zeppelin is essentially its guts - a zeppelin has an internal framework, usually made of aluminum so it’s not too heavy, to keep the shape. It’s rigid. A blimp holds its shape through air pressure, much like a hot air balloon, but doesn’t have that metal internal structure. Zeppelins have metal rings to form the shape with crossbars to keep everything in place, and then cotton canvas is stretched overtop.

Now the first airship, the one built by the Frenchie, was steam-powered. It had a 350-pound engine capable of turning a large propeller. Pretty heavy stuff. To counteract this, Giffard put a 144-foot-long bag filled with hydrogen in there; he took off from Paris and went about 20 miles, going at 6 miles an hour. For my metric system friends, he went roughly 30 kilometers at a speed of 10 kilometers per hour. Not crazy fast, but speed wasn’t the point. The ability to fly and control movement in the air was what mattered, and humans had found a way of using machines to go airborne. 

But we also know that the Wright brothers built and flew an airplane in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903, right? Based on the type of flying vehicles we have today, we know the plane made it, but airships didn’t… so why don’t we see as many blimps, zeppelins, and other dirigibles in the 21st century? Well, first let’s take a look at the golden age of airships.

Of the many men who built and/or operated airships, a really successful one was the German  Ferdinand, count von Zeppelin. He built his first airship in 1900, and it was far superior to the earlier French models. His airship, the LZ-1, was 420 feet long, 38 feet wide. It had a rigid aluminum frame and two 16-horsepower engines, which could get it to speeds of around 20 mph. 

Throughout WWI, von Zeppelin continued to hone his aircraft designs, now called Zeppelins, of course named after him, and they saw combat - many Zeppelins bombed Paris and London in WWI.

After WWI, more airships were built. Since Germany saw so much success, other countries started to follow suit, notably in the US, the UK, and Italy. And fun fact - I’ve actually (albeit briefly) mentioned this - if you’ve listened to my episode on the deadly Antarctic explorations, you may remember that Roald Amundsen, the first man to reach the geographic South Pole, was also the first man to fly to the North Pole in an Italian airship in 1926. So if anything, this tells us that airship technology was improving over time, still very popular, and used regularly in the early interwar period. An airship named the Graf Zeppelin served from 1928 to 1937, and in those nine years, it made 590 flights. 144 of those were ocean crossings. 

Why did it decommission in 1937? Well, the Hindenburg disaster was in 1937. And it had massive consequences for the world of blimps and zeppelins. But I’ll get to that later.

So the Germans were excellent at building zeppelins. It was a proven military technology in WWI, arguably not anywhere close to the achievement that was the tank, pioneered by the Brits at the Battle of the Somme with their Mark I tank, but it was still a valuable military technology. And so futuristic! Bombing from the air! Which was something new and novel in war. And the military-class zeppelins used in WWI were capable of flying up to 85 miles an hour and could carry up to two tons of bombs.

Now if you ask me, I’d much rather fly in an airplane than a zeppelin. Airplane technology was also a thing, and we know that planes were used in WWI as well. But there was something just so German about the zeppelins - those rigid airships that were pioneered by a great German general and used so effectively in war. Alongside airplanes.

But after WWI, the German zeppelin industry was in crisis. This was because of the Treaty of Versailles signed in 1919, which severely punished and blamed Germany for WWI. And in the Treaty of Versailles, one of many provisions was to limit their military forces - only 100,000 men in the army, 15,000 in the navy, and a restriction on the number and size of ships. And concerning their fleet of airships, article 198 of the Treaty of Versailles states, and I quote, 
“The armed forces of Germany must not include any military or naval air forces ... No dirigible shall be kept.” End quote.

To further illustrate the point, article 202 states, and this time I’m only paraphrasing, that all German airships must be delivered to the Allied forces as part of reparations payments. 

There were some attempts in the ensuing years to build civilian airships, but the Allied powers kept demanding they turn any newly built zeppelins over. Von Zeppelin’s successor, Hugo Eckener, managed to find a way around this in 1924 by building airships for the Americans. They had been building zeppelins of their own, like the USS Shenandoah airship, and were interested in getting Eckener the German zeppelin builder to help them build more. The Germans had to pay for it, which is wild, but they deducted that money from the reparations.

Total tangent - my favorite random statistic about all of these reparations is that Germany finally did finish paying off the 33 billion dollars worth of WWI reparations… in 2010. You heard that right. 2010. That’s 33 billion in US dollars in 1919, by the way. 

But anyway. Even though it was an airship for the Americans, the Germans were happy to be back in the zeppelin-building business. More than back, they were on top. But the bigger picture here is that the airship relationship between the US and Germany had begun. Now, zeppelin flights were regularly going back and forth between the US and Germany.

Here’s an interesting tangent. But this time it’s related, I promise! When Hitler came to power in 1933, he actually used zeppelins as part of his powerful propaganda machine. All German zeppelins had a swastika painted on the tail fin, and they’d occasionally float around above German towns dropping leaflets. One such leaflet, dropped in March 1936, had the following selection from one of Hitler’s speeches. Quote:
“I once undertook a 14-year struggle to get the German people to agree with my ideals. Then, thanks to their trust in me, I was summoned by the honorable General Field Marshall Paul von Hindenburg. But since then I have directed all my energy to achieving the glorious state of consciousness of being inseparably connected to my people, as man and as Fuhrer.” End quote.

And it was more than just a propaganda machine - under Hitler’s Germany, a new class of zeppelin was built - the Hindenburg class of zeppelins. The Hindenburg was the flagship of this new class, named after Paul von Hindenburg, the president of Germany before Hitler’s takeover. You might recognize his swoopy mustache from history class :) 

The LZ 129 Hindenburg
These new Hindenburg-class zeppelins were huge. The largest ever built. I’m getting strong Titanic vibes here - the largest of its type? Totally safe and not going to be a massive technological disaster and display of hubris?

Like previous zeppelins, the Hindenburg had a massive metal frame with canvas stretched overtop. Inside were 16 large latex bags designed to be filled with helium. But the Germans couldn’t get helium because it is a non-renewable resource that was more or less only being extracted in the US, and the US wasn’t trading it internationally at the time. So instead, the German zeppelin industry was using hydrogen.

Which was a major red flag.

You see, helium is not flammable. Can’t burn. Which is great for your floating airship.

Hydrogen is flammable, which you might have already known if you’ve listened to my previous episode on Fukushima - the explosions at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant were hydrogen explosions. And hydrogen is also much cheaper to produce en masse to fill airships with, which is why many European nations used it. The US used to use it too, but they had their own airship explosion in 1921, so they switched to helium.

But Germany didn’t have that luxury, so they used hydrogen gas.

Now since the Hindenburg was built as a passenger airship, it had quite a luxurious design for the time. It could accommodate up to 70 passengers. In the lower decks, it had cabins that were 5 x 8 feet with two bunks, arranged like bunk beds. Each cabin also had a stool, a wash basin with plumbed in cold and warm water, a shelf, and a standing closet. The walls were made of percale [purr-kale], a woven fabric that is often used to make sheets. 

Also on this lower deck were the the showers, toilets, a bar, and a smoking room, which is the last thing I’d want to go on an airship that floats because of a flammable gas, thankyouverymuch.

Side note on the smoking - passengers would have anything that could potentially ignite taken off them during takeoff, including camera equipment with their hot flash bulbs - they’d get it back when they cleared any land. But why give it back at all? That seems like an oversight. I feel like it should have been kept for the duration of the flight.

But anyways.

There were horizontal windows around the edge of the lower decks so passengers could get a good look straight down. The view is not for those afraid of flying. How terrifying.

Above these lower decks were the dining room and lounge - these were pretty posh for the time, actually. Can you imagine flying in a plane, but having the space to sit dozens of passengers at actual tables and be served a proper hot meal?

And if you couldn’t already guess, this was travel for the rich. Each ticket for the Hindenburg was about $450 US dollars, which in today’s money, adjusting for inflation, is around $9,800. We know the price because they recovered a slightly charred passenger ticket from the wreckage. Fascinating! The ticket holder, Dolan, unfortunately, didn’t make it. 

The surname Dolan does not have much luck on the APHOUT podcast. I’m thinking specifically of Patrick Dolan from the Donner Pass episode. Go listen to that one if you haven’t already… it’s episode numero uno :) 

Now the windows on the upper decks were slanted, not horizontal. But you’d be able to peep over the side rails of the restaurant deck and look down towards the ground, which is still pretty terrifying I’d imagine. And for those on board with steel stomachs, they gave tours of the cargo deck - the underbelly, if you will. Here’s a quote from an account from one of the passengers who did this tour. Quote:
“Led by one of the engineers, we were led through a vestibule and then a door, and found ourselves upon the ‘Cat Walk,’ really the keel of the Ship. It is a plank about one foot wide extending from tip to tip. The circular ribs of the Ship are bound together by wires and cross members with the walk as sort of a spinal column. Along this path, we walked with nothing between us and the ocean far below except the fabric skin of the hull and a few wires and a rope, at which we clutched grimly. Past crew quarters, repair stations, gas and oil tanks, water cisterns, and storage sections we crawled. The roar of the motors increased, and beyond, and quite unexpectedly, our guide pulled a cord. Like a window shade, the skin of the ship opened and there we were looking down 3,000 feet to the sea.” End quote.

Y’all. Now I’m not afraid of heights, I’ve been skydiving and loved it, it’s not a problem for me. But if I’m flying in a hydrogen balloon made of metal, and they open the bottom flap up for me to stare down upon my potential imminent death? I’d probably be more than a little anxious.
The Fateful Voyage
On May 3, 1937, the Hindenburg departed for its second of ten scheduled trips between Germany and Lakehurst, New Jersey. In addition to 36 passengers were the Captain, Captain Max Pruss, and 60 other crewmen. I also want to mention here that of the 36 passengers, three of them were children… *look at camera with a knowing look* 

It was a relatively easy flight; there were some strong headwinds, but nothing outrageous. But it did delay the zeppelin a bit - normally it only took 4 days, but with the winds, the zeppelin was about 8 hours behind. But that didn’t make much of a difference - they flew across the Atlantic, flying over massive icebergs in the north, Newfoundland, Boston, and even New York City. The City wasn’t in the plans, though; strong winds and storms forced the captain to reroute over New York, and I imagine people were quite intrigued by the sight.

As the Hindenburg got closer to Lakehurst, the weather was still a problem. It was too stormy to land, so the Hindenburg had to make another pass around to eat up some time. It took a joyride down the Jersey shore, which many passengers enjoyed, the kids especially. 

At 6:22 pm, Captain Pruss got a notification that the storms near Lakehurst Naval Air Station had ended, so he turned the zeppelin and headed for base. 

By 7:00, the Hindenburg had arrived at its destination, and although the storms had stopped, it couldn’t land right away - the ground crew wasn’t ready, and there were still some strong headwinds, making it hard for the Captain to keep the airship steady. So he made another pass to wait it out. In the meantime, he dumped a bunch of water from the stern, used as ballast, to help lighten the load in preparation for landing.

At 7:21, the mooring lines were dropped. These would be picked up by the ground crew and secured, so the airship could safely lower to the landing target without blowing away. By this point, the passengers were all excited and ready to get off, and then head on to their final destinations. As part of the Germany-US zeppelin deal, passengers would be taken to Newark airport, and then flown off to wherever they needed to go. 
At 7:25, a blue flash erupted in the sky - this was noted by several people, both on board and waiting on the ground. As soon as the blue flash was gone, there was an explosion, and a fire broke out. It quickly spread across the entire hull of the airship, which was now shaking violently in the air. Within seconds, the whole thing was engulfed in flames.

Any people - crew or passengers - in the nose of the ship were killed instantly. Same for anyone in the lower decks, so the rooms, the bar, or the smoking lounge. Most of those in the upper decks survived, though some succumbed to some serious burn injuries.

How did they survive an airship, still in the air, on fire?

They jumped.

Now those who jumped when the airship was still too high up died on impact. Splat, right on the ground. But when the fire weakened the hull of the ship, extra water and fuel fell to the ground, making the remaining framework of the Hindenburg much lighter, so it actually fell down to the ground… relatively softly? For a metal and canvas structure on fire, that is.

Those who jumped when it was closer to the ground survived. Most of them, anyways. Some, as I mentioned, died from massive burns.

But I want to talk about those kids.

So there was this lovely family - the Doehners. *Look down and laugh* Why does it have to sound like the Donners. Anyway the Doehner family on board was the father, Hermann, the mother, Matilde, and their three kids - 14-year-old Irene, 10-year-old Walter, and 8-year-old Werner. The kids had had a really enjoyable trip, running around like kids do, seeing all the cool things they’d go home and brag about to their friends.

Until, of course, it was engulfed in fire.

The mom was with her three kids in the dining room on the upper deck. The father was not with them. Mom had a choice - look for her husband, or get out with her kids? She chose to get her kids to safety. She first threw the youngest child, Werner, out the window. Don’t worry - it was low enough to the ground by this point, so they didn’t get smooshed on impact. And also keep in mind this is an active military base with a ground crew there to help.

Anyway, the little’un went first. Then Mama through 10-year-old Walter out the window. Then it was Irene’s turn, but she was 14 - too big to throw. And poor Irene was hysterical - she wouldn’t go without her father. So poor mom had to make a Sophie’s choice here - do I stay with my daughter to try to get her to jump or find her dad, or do I jump out the window to make sure my boys are alive and have a parent to care for them? Do I choose the boys or the girl?

And, uh spoiler for the movie, just like with Sophie’s Choice, she chose the boys. Sorry for the spoiler, I guess, but to be fair it’s been more than 40 years since that movie came out.

So Mama Matilde jumped out the window and dragged her sons to safety, as far away from the burning wreckage as possible. They were all burned, but they lived.

Irene, the 14-year-old daughter, was later found in shock on the upper deck of the airship, on fire. Not the ship on fire. Her. She was on fire. Her hair and clothes were burning. Others managed to get her up and out of the zeppelin, but she later died in hospital. 

The father’s body was found the next day. The only way they knew it was him was by the inscription on the inside of his wedding ring; otherwise, he was burned so badly that he was unrecognizable as anything other than a charred corpse.

And to really drive the point home here, of how awful the scene was, he’s a quote from one of the survivors. Quote:
“A moment or two later, as the wrecked ship sank downward, I jumped. The framework of the dirigible pinned me down. I lay flat in the tangle of wreckage, but my body wasn’t crushed. I worked frantically to get myself out of the wreckage… I stood up, dazed. The shock had been so great I didn’t know what I was doing. I was navigating without thinking. All around me was the smell of burning flesh.” End quote.

Yikes.

Within 60 seconds of the first explosion, the zeppelin was on the ground and completely engulfed in flames.

36 people of the 97 on board died. Many died instantly in the explosion, but some died from fall damage and others from their extreme burns. And you can only imagine how bad burn care was in 1937. They pretty much just offered morphine for the pain.

To his credit, Captain Pruss stayed on his burning airship until it was virtually on the ground. And he rushed right back into the wreckage to find survivors and help before he himself was taken out and brought to a hospital. He recovered from his injuries and helped with testimony later on. There was and is no evidence to suggest he made any critical errors.

So then what happened? How did this zeppelin just explode right before landing?

One of the survivors, Joseph Spah, was accused of sabotaging it. He didn’t, by the way. But why was he accused? He was seen going into and out of the cargo hold. Why was he going into the cargo hold so much? He was traveling with his beloved dog, and he went down there to care for his beloved pet whenever possible. The poor baby didn’t survive; nothing from the cargo or lower decks did. And again, there was no evidence to corroborate the rumors that Joseph sabotaged the ship.

Another man, a worker, was then blamed for planting a timed bomb to destroy the airship after it landed, but because of the delays, it went off with the passengers still on board. This was also just a baseless rumor and rampant speculation.

In essence, nobody wanted to take the blame, so they blamed anyone or anything. The US blamed Germany. Germany blamed the US. The Captain blamed a mysterious saboteur, the airship builders back in Germany blamed it on sabotage or human error. Nobody wanted to take responsibility, because nobody really knew what happened.

The final report had no evidence of foul play or wrongdoing. Instead, they concluded it was a combination of a leak in one of the hydrogen sacks and a spark from the turbulent weather. There was static in the air after the lightning and storms, and that, coupled with the leaking hydrogen, was enough to cause an explosion and then the fire.

Some even blamed it on a phenomenon called St. Elmo’s Fire - not the 80s Brat pack movie - which is a blue, glowing, electrostatic discharge of sorts that can happen around and near thunderstorms or volcanic eruptions. Essentially, the electric field caused air molecules to ionize, producing a blue glow around metal objects and such. This could have happened, given the static charge in the atmosphere after the storms. Alone, not an issue. With leaking, flammable, hydrogen? A big problem.

The disaster was covered extensively - it was even filmed and the footage is shocking. The canvas surrounding the shell just… disappears. So as a result, public opinion on the zeppelins and airships in general turns. Other German zeppelins were decommissioned. Despite zeppelins collectively and safely logging over 1 million miles of travel, this one incident, again filmed for everyone to witness, completely turned people off to travelling by airship.

The German era of airships was now over, from this one horrific, terrifying disaster. A few more zeppelin-style airships and blimps were built by the US and the Soviet Union afterwards, but the industry was dying. It didn’t help when a Soviet airship crashed into a mountain two years later, in 1938, killing 3 of the 19 people on board. 

American airships were used in WWII - they had 10. There wasn’t a clear plan of attack for the airship fleet, but they were used to help find submarines and be convoy escorts for our naval squadrons. 

But in the years after this, I suppose, golden age of airships, and in the postwar period, commercial airships were no longer a thing. Airplanes had more than taken over as the primary airborne passenger transport, though you will still see blimps used for advertising, surveillance, and research. Like the Goodyear Blimp!

It was a horrific disaster, a complete fluke really, but one that completely ended an entire industry for Germany and changed the fate of our air transport. Now we just fly on airplanes. But honestly, given the choice, I’d rather be in a plane than a zeppelin. Especially if it’s a zeppelin filled with flammable hydrogen. 
Outro
Thanks for joining me for this episode of A Popular History of Unpopular Things. My name is Kelli Beard, and I hope you’ve enjoyed the story of the Hindenburg Disaster. Thank you for supporting my podcast, and if you haven’t already checked out my other episodes, go have a listen!

You can also support me and the show on Patreon - just look up a popular history of unpopular things. And subscribe to APHOUT on YouTube! 

Go listen to Nedric, my editor and the genius behind my intro and outro song, Yello Kake. You can find his stuff wherever you get your music! There’s a link in the description to his website.

Be sure to follow my podcast, available wherever you listen, so you know when new episodes are dropped. And stay tuned to get a popular history of unpopular things.