Hindenburg disaster
The Hindenburg disaster was an airship accident that occurred on May 6, 1937, in Manchester Township, New Jersey, U.S. The LZ 129 Hindenburg (Luftschiff Zeppelin #129; Registration: D-LZ 129) was a German commercial passenger-carrying rigid airship, the lead ship of the Hindenburg class, the longest class of flying machine and the largest airship by envelope volume.[1] It was designed and built by the Zeppelin Company (Luftschiffbau Zeppelin GmbH) and operated by the German Zeppelin Airline Company (Deutsche Zeppelin-Reederei). It was named after Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, who was president of Germany from 1925 until his death in 1934. Filled with hydrogen, it caught fire and was destroyed during its attempt to dock with its mooring mast at Naval Air Station Lakehurst. The accident caused 35 fatalities (13 passengers and 22 crewmen) among the 97 people on board (36 passengers and 61 crewmen), and an additional fatality on the ground.
Accident
May 6, 1937
Caught fire during landing; exact cause undetermined
36
Hindenburg-class airship
Hindenburg
D-LZ129
36
61
35 total; 13 (36%) of passengers
22 (36%) of crew
62 (23 passengers, 39 crewmen)
1
The disaster was the subject of newsreel coverage, photographs and Herbert Morrison's recorded radio eyewitness reports from the landing field, which were broadcast the next day.[2] A variety of theories have been put forward for both the cause of ignition and the initial fuel for the ensuing fire. The publicity shattered public confidence in the giant, passenger-carrying rigid airship and marked the abrupt end of the airship era.[3]
Flight[edit]
Background[edit]
The Hindenburg made ten trips to the United States in 1936.[4][5] After opening its 1937 season by completing a single round-trip passage to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in late March, the Hindenburg departed from Frankfurt, Germany, on the evening of May 3, on the first of ten round trips between Europe and the United States that were scheduled for its second year of commercial service. American Airlines had contracted with the operators of the Hindenburg to shuttle passengers from Lakehurst to Newark for connections to airplane flights.[6]
Except for strong headwinds that slowed its progress, the Atlantic crossing of the Hindenburg was unremarkable until the airship attempted an early-evening landing at Lakehurst three days later on May 6. Although carrying only half its full capacity of passengers (36 of 70) and crewmen (61, including 21 crewman trainees) during the accident flight, the Hindenburg was fully booked for its return flight. Many of the passengers with tickets to Germany were planning to attend the coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth in London the following week.
Cause of ignition[edit]
Sabotage hypothesis[edit]
At the time of the disaster, sabotage was commonly put forward as the cause of the fire, initially by Hugo Eckener, former head of the Zeppelin Company and the "old man" of German airships. In initial reports, before inspecting the accident, Eckener mentioned the possibility of a shot as the cause of the disaster, because of threatening letters that had been received, but did not rule out other causes.[29] Eckener later publicly endorsed the static spark hypothesis, including after the war. At the time on a lecture tour in Austria, he was awakened at about 2:30 in the morning (8:30 p.m. Lakehurst time, or approximately an hour after the crash) by the ringing of his bedside telephone. It was a Berlin representative of The New York Times with news that the Hindenburg "exploded yesterday evening at 7 p.m. [sic] above the airfield at Lakehurst". By the time he left the hotel the next morning to travel to Berlin for a briefing on the disaster, the only answer that he had for the reporters waiting outside to question him was that based on what he knew, the Hindenburg had "exploded over the airfield"; sabotage might be a possibility. However, as he learned more about the disaster, particularly that the airship had burned rather than actually "exploded", he grew more and more convinced that static discharge, rather than sabotage, was the cause.[30]
Charles Rosendahl, commander of the Naval Air Station at Lakehurst and the man in overall charge of the ground-based portion of the Hindenburg's landing maneuver, came to believe that the Hindenburg had been sabotaged. He laid out a general case for sabotage in his book What About the Airship? (1938),[31] which was as much an extended argument for the further development of the rigid airship as it was an historical overview of the airship concept.
Another proponent of the sabotage hypothesis was Max Pruss, captain of the Hindenburg throughout the airship's career. Pruss flew on nearly every flight of the Graf Zeppelin since 1928 until the Hindenburg was launched in 1936. In a 1960 interview conducted by Kenneth Leish for Columbia University's Oral History Research Office, Pruss said early dirigible travel was safe, and therefore he strongly believed that sabotage was to blame. He stated that on trips to South America, which was a popular destination for German tourists, both airships passed through thunderstorms and were struck by lightning but remained unharmed.[32]
Most members of the crew refused to believe that one of them would commit an act of sabotage, insisting only a passenger could have destroyed the airship. A suspect favored by Commander Rosendahl, Captain Pruss, and others among the Hindenburg's crew, was passenger Joseph Späh, a German acrobat who survived the fire. He brought with him a dog, a German shepherd named Ulla, as a surprise for his children. He reportedly made a number of unaccompanied visits to feed his dog, who was being kept in a freight room near the stern of the ship. Those who suspected Späh based their suspicions primarily on those trips into the ship's interior to feed his dog, that according to some of the stewards Späh had told anti-Nazi jokes during the flight, recollections by stewards that Späh had seemed agitated by the repeated delays in landing, and that he was an acrobat who could conceivably climb into the airship's rigging to plant a bomb.
In 1962, A. A. Hoehling published Who Destroyed the Hindenburg?, in which he rejected all theories but sabotage, and named a crew member as the suspect. Erich Spehl, a rigger on the Hindenburg who died of burns in the Infirmary, was named as a potential saboteur. Ten years later, Michael MacDonald Mooney's book The Hindenburg, which was based heavily on Hoehling's sabotage hypothesis, also identified Spehl as a possible saboteur; Mooney's book was made into the film The Hindenburg (1975), a mostly fictionalized account of the Zeppelin's final flight. The producers of the film were sued by Hoehling for plagiarism, but Hoehling's case was dismissed because he had presented his sabotage hypothesis as historical fact, and it is not possible to claim ownership of historical facts.[33]
Hoehling claimed the following in naming Spehl as the culprit: