National Geographic: Hindenburg Page #4

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as usual.

Print reporters and newsreel

cameramen were standing by.

Even a radio announcer

was covering the event.

We're greeting you now from the

Naval Air Base at Lakehurst, New Jersey,

from which point we're going to bring

you a description of the landing

of the mammoth airship, Hindenburg.

It was 7:
15 p.m.

The storms had all but ended

and the Hindenburg was cleared

for its final approach.

Here it comes, ladies and gentlemen,

and what a great sight it is.

A thrilling one,

it's a marvelous sight,

coming down out of the sky,

pointed directly toward us

and toward the mooring mast.

Her mighty motors just roared

and throwing it back into

a gyre-like whirlpool.

All of a sudden, there came a call:

Six men to the front,

because the ship was too light

at the front.

I stayed halfway between

the pilot's cabin and the bow.

There was a hole somewhere there.

And I thought, "Well, I'll just

lie down here on the support beam

and I'll watch the landing."

During the landing maneuver,

I was busy at the motor,

so I could observe everything

exactly as it happened.

And I thought perhaps they had brought

the ship down too hard,

too fast, and that something

was torn or ripped.

And so I looked out,

and I saw that the ship from the stern

back to the first motor was on fire.

It burst into flames.

Get this Scotty, get this, Scotty.

It's terrible.

Oh, my! Get out of the way, please!

My father said, "My God, it's on fire.

Run!" We watched it burn.

We could see people jumping out.

It didn't look like anybody

could possibly survive.

I can't really remember the collision,

so I know that the ship must have

hit the ground with a very hard jolt.

I regained consciousness and then

I quickly began to run away

from the side of the motor.

But there was a stream of heat

coming from the enormous flames

above the ship.

Then, while I was running away,

I thought my clothes were on fire.

I put my hand up to my neck

to try and protect it,

and instead of my neck getting burned,

my hand was burned.

I thought to myself: "Now this is the end.

I can't survive the end."

And then it happened like this:

I came down nearly perpendicular with

my legs and landed in some sandy soil.

But almost immediately,

I got up again and I ran away.

I was lucky, because I was

running against the wind,

so none of the flames

from the fire were behind me.

And the thing that impressed me

was the intense noise

created by the collapsing of

the fabric covering

and the roar of the flames

was just a horrendous noise.

In front of me, maybe I was lucky,

a water tank exploded,

and perhaps it was the water

that protected me from the heat.

Now I could make my way to the door

and I kicked it open.

I could already see the ground coming

towards me and I jumped out.

I didn't think about anything.

My mind didn't start working again

until I was back on the ground

and I started running.

And then after awhile it came to me:

And I lost my nerve and I cried.

I wailed like a baby.

I didn't know what to do until

a couple of crew members came up to me

and shook me to my senses and said,

"Get a hold of yourself.

Try to help somebody."

But there was no one left to help.

It's a terrific crash,

ladies and gentlemen.

The smoke and the flames, and

the plane is crashing to the ground,

not quite to the mooring mast.

Oh, the humanity and

all the passengers.

I don't...

I have people and friends out there.

It's...

I can't talk, ladies and gentlemen...

Honestly, it's like mess...

It started from the tail

end between the two fins,

and went into the middle

and the forward section.

Within five seconds,

it was all on fire.

The explosion was so bad and the fire

was so heavy at that particular time.

I guess it looked like hell;

it was like hell on fire.

The ground crew and the people

that did dare to go back,

they were helping to pull bodies out.

Two American Navy soldiers grabbed me

and they took me to an ambulance.

And then little by little,

five or six more people came.

One of them was Max Pruss.

He had no nose anymore-nothing there,

no eyebrows, no ears.

Everything was burned off.

He was burned.

When I arrived there,

the dirigible was still burning.

Raymond Taylor was one of the first

doctors to reach the crash site.

I tried to identify some of

the corpses right away,

but some of them could not be

immediately identified

because they were so badly burned.

Also, a Jewish doctor, Dr. Adolf Tobin,

asked me if he could take care of

Captain Lehmann,

who was in charge of the ship.

His reason for wanting to

take care of him,

because he wanted to show Hitler

and the German people,

that he was very friendly toward them

and that the German people

should be aware that the Jews were

taking care of the injured,

and they should appreciate it.

But no doctor could save

Captain Lehmann.

He would die of his injuries.

And so would Burtis Dolan.

In Dolan's pocket,

they found the charred letter

he had written to his wife,

but never had a chance to mail.

It had taken just half a minute from

the first signs of trouble

to the fiery crash.

Now, 36 passengers and crew members

were dead or dying mostly

from burns and smoke inhalation.

Miraculously, two-thirds of those

on board survived.

My view of it all was entirely

different from the destruction.

Mine was that beautiful thing in the

air and that's what I like to remember.

I've seen the other ships,

but this was sort of the first cause

of excitement like that.

Maybe it was made more so

because of the tragedy.

The next morning,

Americans awoke to screaming headlines

and terrifying photographs.

For the first time, every detail of

a disaster was recorded as it happened,

and relayed to a shocked public.

Adolf Hitler sent a personal telegram

to President Roosevelt,

thanking him and the American people

for their help

in dealing with the casualties.

In New York, the German ambassador

made hasty arrangements

for the bodies of his countrymen

to be returned to the Fatherland.

Their flag-draped coffins would lie

in state on a Manhattan pier,

as local German citizens

paid their respects.

Then the dead were shipped home

on board the liner Hamburg.

But back in Berlin, the government

faced more than an aircraft disaster.

This was a public

relations catastrophe.

The Nazis saw it as a slap

in the face of German technology,

and so it didn't enter the newspapers.

It was sort of like

on the bottom of the page:

"There was a crash of

the airship Hindenburg.

And so many people died.

And here's the survivor's list."

That was about it.

Even the film footage was not allowed

to be shown in Germany to the public,

and most people didn't get to

see it until after the war.

Besides the shock of the tragedy,

and the embarrassment,

there were questions

waiting to be answered,

about what could have caused

this disaster.

German airships had carried

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