All language subtitles for hindenburg.the.cover.up.s01e02.1080p.hdtv.h264-cbfm[eztv.re]_track3_[eng]

NARRATOR: Approximately 7 o'clock pm,
May 6th, 1937,

the massive Nazi zeppelin
Hindenburg,

is completing
its cross-Atlantic flight

from Germany to
Lakehurst, New Jersey.

Due to the weather,
the airship is 10 hours late,

the crew is anxious to
get the behemoth moored

and to trade their departing
passengers for new ones

hoping to make the return trip,
a trip that will never happen.

This is the German airship's
10th trip to the United States.

It is four years prior to
the US entry into World War II,

and while relations with Hitler's
Nazi regime are strained,

the two nations are at peace.

At Lakehurst, WLS Chicago reporter
Herb Morrison is recording

a radio broadcast of
the Hindenburg's arrival.

His eyewitness account will soon
become one of the most famous

broadcasts in radio history.

Conditions were still not ideal.

So, they were in what we might
now call a holding pattern,

waiting for the weather to clear.

WOMAN: Because the Hindenburg was
so late, many of the reporters

and journalists left
the Naval Air Station.

But since Herb Morrison stayed,

he saw as the airship circled
around Lakehurst,

and he was getting
the updates as they were happening.

Like you can see here.

MORRISON: Now, we've been told
that the airship was going to make

an attempted landing in the rain.

And if that is the case,
we're going to have a mighty fine

description of it for you because
the men will have a difficulty

in keeping footing in the sand
and especially since it's wet.

Now, the structure is light and yet
so strong in the Hindenburg.

6:12pm, Charles Rosendahl,

US commander of Naval Air Station
Lakehurst,

radios Max Pruss,
the captain of the Hindenburg.

The wind and the rain
have died down.

The message is clear -
land as soon as possible.

Finally, he got the message,
"Come in as fast as you can.

"The weather has cleared enough
that landing is appropriate."

Pruss turns the ship towards
Lakehurst for its final approach.

MAN: As the ship came in
for landing on May 6,

they were circling the field.

They realised that they had
a tail heaviness situation

and they tried to deal with that,

and they dealt with that
both by dropping ballast

from the ballast board

and also by valving hydrogen
from the gas board.

The crew could correct
the heaviness -

that is tail heavy,
tail light or whatnot -

by simply dropping ballast water.

And so they did this
on this approach to Lakehurst

because the tail was
seemingly heavy.

So they had the tail of the ship
pointed down,

which was visible from the ground.

So there had to be a gas leak.

When that wasn't enough,
they sent six men forward

to try to keep the ship in trim.

As the ship was making
its approach to the mast,

they also had a change of wind.

And so at the very last minute,
instead of continuing on their path,

they realised that
the wind had shifted

and so they had to make an S-turn,
a reasonably sharp S-turn,

to realign the ship so that it would
land at the mast into the wind.

Pruss knows valving hydrogen
near thunderstorms goes

against long-established safety
procedures for hydrogen airships,

but with the turnaround window
closing and pressure mounting,

he makes a bold decision.

World-renowned Hindenburg expert
Dan Grossman

walks through the hydrogen-valving
process using an exact replica

of Hindenburg's control car

created for the 1975 film Hindenburg,
starring George C. Scott.

If you wanted to make the ship
heavier, you went over here.

This is the gas board.

This controlled the hydrogen gas
that filled these 16 gas cells.

And there were individual toggles
for each cell

so an officer could release hydrogen
from a particular cell,

or you could do something that they
did in that last approach on May 6,

and you could "valve at the wheel".

And this is the wheel.

And when you turn this wheel,
gas cells from the front to the back

release gas evenly and
the entire ship becomes heavier...

..and descends in level trim.

We can only speculate what happened
here in those last moments,

but given the high level
of experience

of all of the officers,
all the men who are on this bridge,

who had served for zeppelins
for years,

they had to have suspected
that something wasn't right.

Was there a discussion,
what should we do,

or did they just
continue on on their path?

Dr Eckener instructed crew members,
"Follow this rule.

"Do not blow off any hydrogen
in a thunderstorm."

This ran counter to every precept
that Eckener had tried to drill

into his commanders
from the beginning.

MORRISON: Now they're coming in
to make a landing of the zeppelin.

I'm going to step out here
and cover it from the outside.

So as I move out we'll just
stand by for a second.

Well, here it comes,
ladies and gentlemen,

we're out now outside of the hangar.

And what a great site it is,
a thrilling one.

It's a marvellous site.
It's coming down out of the sky,

pointed directly towards us
and toward the mooring mast.

Spectators and journalists gather
near the landing area.

MAN: We were waiting to see my dad,

and excited because it was
a big, big deal.

The mighty diesel motors
just roared,

the propellers biting into the air

and throwing it back into
a gale-like whirlpool.

No wonder this great floating palace
can travel through the air

at such a speed, with these
powerful motors behind it.

For the moment we've
waited for so long.

The ship is riding majestically
toward us like some great feather,

riding as though it was
mighty proud of the place

it's playing in
the world's aviation.

The ship is no doubt bustling
with activity, as we can see.

Orders are shouted to the crew,
the passengers probably lining

the windows looking down
at the field ahead of them,

getting their glimpse
of the mooring mast.

And these giant flagships
standing here,

the American Airline flagships,
waiting to direct them

to all points in the United States
when they get the ship moored.

There are a number of
important persons on board,

and no doubt the new commander,
Captain Max Pruss, is thrilled, too,

for this is his great moment,

the first time he's commanded
the Hindenburg.

On previous flights, he acted as
Chief Officer under Captain Lehmann.

It's starting to rain again.

The rain had slacked up
a little bit.

At 7:21pm, the Hindenburg floats
at 90 metres above the ground.

The mooring lines are
dropped from the bow.

For the next few minutes,
all is quiet.

All of a sudden there
was an explosion.

Helmut Lau, a helmsman
stationed in the lower fin,

hears a muffled detonation as
a strong jolt runs through the ship.

Crew and passengers
are anxious to land.

Joseph Spah and his dog Ulla

caught a last-minute ride
on the Hindenburg

to make his dates performing
as a professional acrobat

at Radio City Music Hall.

Spah was filming on
the observation deck

for a good portion of the journey.

As they arrived at
Lakehurst airfield,

he stuck his 16mm camera
out the window.

Spah would be filming at the exact
moment the ignition occurred.

He was leaning out
the gondola window filming

when the Hindenburg exploded.

Now, in this rarely seen footage,

witness what passengers saw
from inside the Hindenburg

the moment the massive airship
erupted in flames.

The footage is degraded,
but ground crew can be seen

assembling on the airfield below
moments before the disaster.

And here, for just a few frames,
the moment the fire erupted

is captured on film.

Burning hydrogen illuminates
Hangar One at Lakehurst.

Unfortunately, the camera
wasn't ready to capture

the wide change of exposure
about to take place.

The back motors of the ship
are just holding it

just enough to keep it from...

It burst into flames!

It burst into flame
and it's falling!

(SPEAKS INDISTINCTLY)

Get out of the way! Get this,
Charlie! Get this, Charlie!

There's fire and it's crashing!

It's crashing terrible!
Oh, my. Get out of the way, please.

It's burning, bursting into flames

and it's falling on
the mooring mast,

and all the folks agree
that this is terrible.

This is one of the worst
catastrophes in the world.

You can hear what sounds like
the explosion - you hear a pop -

and then he says,
"It burst into flames."

Just enough to keep it from...
It burst into flames!

OK, I heard it about right here.

It bursts into flames!

Pruss and his men
had just enough time to

see the reflection of the fire
on the large zeppelin hangar

down on the ground
before the ship began to tilt

and they all hung on for dear life.

Fire erupted near the tail
of the airship,

and from that moment the airship had
less than a minute left to live.

Fire raced through
the hydrogen cells,

it raced along the axial corridor,

which was an open area throughout
the very centre of the ship.

And we can see that fire emerging
from the nose of the ship

like a blowtorch.

The ship began to lose
its structural integrity.

The tail began to collapse
and crunch in two.

The ship very dramatically
tipped up vertically.

And this all happened in
a matter of 20 or 30 seconds.

Whether you lived or died
was really a question

of where you happen to be
when this fire began.

If you were by a window,
you had a pretty good chance.

If you were deep inside the ship,
you had virtually no chance at all.

As the ship begins to descend,

Ernst Lehmann and Max Pruss
leap from the control car

just as, all around them,

Hindenburg's white-hot frame
crashes to the ground.

"What's the best time to jump?
Are we too high?

"Are we going to get higher?

"If we get lower, will I not have
enough time left?"

Lehmann manages to
pry himself free,

but not before
sustaining severe burns.

Pruss also emerges from
the wreckage burned but alive.

WOMAN: He was burned.

He ran away from the ship,
then turned around

to run back and rescue
one of his crewmen.

And then he kept running back
to rescue other people.

In the result of it being that

eventually, I think
they had to stop him.

He was so badly burnt

that they actually thought
he might die that night.

On the ground,
spectators watch in shock.

Navy servicemen run towards the
wreckage looking for survivors.

For those still inside the ship,
survival is a matter of chance.

GROSSMAN: The youngest crewman,
the cabin boy named Werner Franz,

thought he would be trapped with
flames around him where he was,

and then almost miraculously,
a water tank above his head burst

and drenched him in water

and cleared a path
for him to escape.

So there are so many
different stories of people

escaping different ways.

And of course there are
tragic stories

about people who didn't escape.

There was a family,
the Doehner family,

the father was in his cabin
on B deck,

and the daughter, who was
by a window with her mother

and her sibling, who survived.

And the eldest daughter
decided to go back in

to see if she could find her father
but was so horribly burned

that she died shortly after
in the hospital.

Passengers who did not survive
include five Americans,

five Germans, two Mexicans
and one Swede.

Ages range from 14 to 77 years old.

Among the survivors
is acrobat Joseph Spah,

along with several rolls of film
from his personal camera.

My dad, he just threw the camera
down on the ground,

and the flames were coming up.

It started to burn that gondola
and he hung out the window.

And during his act,

he did a thing that was
on the top of this lamppost,

he hung by one arm

And that saved his life,
believe it or not,

because he had a tricep looked like
a broken piece of rope.

It was so strong from
doing that one trick.

Viewing footage of the crash,
it's difficult to understand

how anyone could have survived
the fire and the heat.

(MORRISON SPEAKS INDISTINCTLY)

Oh, four or five hundred feet
into the sky, it is.

It's a terrific crash,
ladies and gentlemen.

The smoke and the flames now.

And the frame is crashing
to the ground,

not quite to the mooring mast.

Oh, the humanity.

And all the passengers
just screaming around here.

In a matter of mere seconds,

the damage is done.

SCHIRMER: It was 34 seconds.

Burning from the tail to the bow,

totally gone in 34 seconds.

With 97 people on board.

GROSSMAN: People must have stood
with their mouths hanging open,

just hard to believe
what they were seeing.

Everybody remembers
the minute and a half

when Morrison yells,
"Oh, the humanity."

But this recording was actually
close to 40 minutes long.

He was there before,
during and after the crash,

and his eyewitness account of that
day has gone down in history

as one of the most famous broadcasts
in radio journalism.

And here is another man coming in.
He's burned considerably.

Mr Otto Clemens.

Mr Otto Clemens is safe,
although he's burned quite badly.

Now...
MAN: Clemens isn't burned at all.

Clemens isn't burned at all?
Thank you, thank you.

He's sitting right here
as composed...

And is that his mother with him?
No, no. That's his friend.

A friend of his? You tell the folks.

He was on his way to his cabin
when the flash came,

and he jumped out.

He jumped out of the cabin?
Jumped out.

Survivors are rushed to
the air station's infirmary

and local hospitals.

The last passenger dies on May 15th.

The dead add up to 36 in total -

13 passengers, 22 crewmen,
and one man on the ground.

Captain of the Hindenburg,
Max Pruss,

and his Nazi-appointed supervisor,
Ernst Lehmann,

lay badly burned at Kimball Hospital
in Lakewood, New Jersey.

With slim chances of survival,

Pruss receives his last rites
from a priest.

Lehmann's condition, however,
deteriorates quickly.

So, we're about an hour
after the disaster here.

The tail went up in the air,
and as I told you on previous

occasions, it held up there

long enough for them
to jump from the cabin.

And all I could understand
him to say was that he'd jumped

and evidently was thrown too
at the same time

because the ship was, uh, vibrating.

There were three distinct
explosions, if I remember correctly.

I'll have to check back in the
earlier part of this broadcast

and if that was not right.

I don't remember hearing
three explosions,

so let's go back and see
if we can hear them.

It bursts into flames!

It burst into flame
and it's falling!

OK, so, I'm definitely hearing
an explosion right here.

And then I hear several
other popping sounds,

but it's hard to tell if those
are just artefacts in the recording

or actual explosions.

Morrison recorded this
with a sound engineer,

Charlie Nehlsen, on
a Presto direct disk.

Now, some reports say that
when the explosion occurred,

the cutting head of the recorder
was moved out of place

and Nehlsen had to
quickly correct it.

That could be the cause
of the sound of the explosion,

but it's difficult to say.

GROSSMAN: So, we're at the
Charles Rosendahl Collection

at the University of Texas
in Dallas.

Rosendahl left his entire collection
of papers to the archive here

I think in 1977,
certainly late '70s.

And it's just a wonderful collection
of his complete papers,

and he was really the key figure

in the American
lighter-than-air community.

So this is an absolute
treasure-trove

for anything having to do with
airships in the United States Navy.

So, these are great photos.

This photo shows Hindenburg
at Lakehurst successfully moored

to a low mooring mast in
one of the mooring circles.

And this is how that last flight
was supposed to end,

with the ship safely moored
to a mast at the circle

in front of hangar one.

Of course, it didn't actually
end that way that day.

Some theories claim
that the disaster was caused

by incendiary paint used
on the ship's outer covering.

And this is a great series
of photographs.

This one in particular,
is interesting because you can see

the flame that has pretty much
completely consumed the tail,

but almost simultaneously,
there's also flame coming out

of the middle of the ship.

Which means that this hydrogen fire
burned and spread so rapidly,

and you can really tell that this
nonsensical idea that people have

about the fabric being
very, very flammable

doesn't make any sense.

This photograph sort of
tells that story

because in between
these two areas of flame,

the fabric isn't burning at all.

So, clearly, what has moved
this flame so quickly

is the burning of the hydrogen
that's inside the ship.

This is Folder 13,

in Box 18, here at the UT Dallas

Charles Rosendahl Archives.

And these are supposed
to be photographs of

the Hindenburg disaster.

And, yeah, look at these.

These are photos showing exactly
what the people at Lakehurst saw...

..on May 6th, 1937.

And you can see just how dramatic...

..the destruction of
this airship was.

And you see, actually, spectators,
just people.

I can see that they're on the other
side of the fence, actually.

So these are just
members of the public.

And everyone that we see here
looked at this

and knew that there were
human beings in there.

It's just hard to imagine what
thoughts went through their heads.

On May 6th, 1937, Hugo Eckener,

the face of commercial
airship travel,

is in Austria promoting airships
as the future of aviation.

That night, he receives
an urgent phone call.

When news of the Hindenburg crash
reaches Hugo Eckener

in the middle of the night,

he gets this phone call
from a journalist who says,

you know, "The Hindenburg
has exploded, it is destroyed."

And Eckener is absolutely forlorn.

And it seems that in half asleep,
when the journalist says,

"Do you think it's sabotage?"

Eckener says, "Oh, it should be."

And therein starts
one of the rumours.

Within hours of the crash,

the German Air Ministry
commissions its own team of experts

to represent German interests at
the Lakehurst crash investigation.

Hugo Eckener is made
part of this commission.

But before sailing to New York,
he is summonsed to Berlin

to meet with the Reich Minister
for Air Hermann Goering.

Dr Eckener was under orders
from the Air Ministry in Berlin

not to pursue sabotage
as a possibility.

It would have been incredibly
embarrassing politically,

both for the Germans
and for the United States,

to have had a German airship
destroyed by sabotage

on an American military base.

GROSSMAN: Someone from
the Air Ministry,

who was there likely to
offer technical advice

but also likely as a representative
of Hermann Goering

and the Nazi regime's Air Ministry

to keep an eye on what people said
and how it made Germany look.

Renowned airship historian
Dan Grossman revisits Hugo Eckener's

first stop in the US.

This is the house where
Charles Rosendahl lived

when he was the base commander
at Lakehurst

in 1937, when Hindenburg crashed.

And Hugo Eckener walked in that door
and talked to his old friend,

old colleague, old flying mate,
Charles Rosendahl.

These two men, who each knew
more about flying airships

and about Hindenburg in particular
than anyone else in the world,

must have talked to each other and
said, "What could have happened?"

And at some point
during that conversation,

Eckener would have had to say,

"I need to tell you what
Berlin wants us to say."

The investigation board includes men
loyal to the National Socialists

who are assigned to make sure
Eckener follows the party line.

The presence of the German
ambassador and a military attache

is meant to be intimidating
for Hindenburg's crew

and keep them from saying
anything deemed out of line.

Two days after the crash,

the twisted and scorched metal
wreckage has finally cooled.

Footage of the fiery destruction
of the once mighty Hindenburg

circulates the globe.

As the Commerce Department
and the German commission

officially investigate
the disaster at Lakehurst,

a new government agency known as
the Federal Bureau of Investigation

begins chasing down its own leads.

Young FBI director J. Edgar Hoover
is eager to prove himself

in the public spotlight.

It's very much a potential
PR stunt for him.

And they wound up coming up with
a fairly lengthy investigation file.

Was the Nazi's premiere airship
the target of a deliberate attack?

In Germany, Hitler and his
warmongering Nazi regime

prepare for further expansion
of German territory.

A growing Nazi war machine
intimidates Eastern Europe.

In one year, they will
invade and annex Austria.

The following year,
they will take Poland.

The investigation of the FBI
alludes to,

of course,
the notions of conspiracy.

Notably, for example,
workers may be colluding

to protest against Nazi Germany.

Some of the early FBI reports
made mention of possibly someone

having shot at the Hindenburg.

Meanwhile, Captain Ernst Lehmann,

head of the airline
that flew Hindenburg,

dies of severe burn injuries.

Before he died,
he expressed his belief

that it had to have been sabotage.

He used a German word
which translates as "hell machine",

often called "infernal machine".

Max Pruss, the captain
of the Hindenburg,

is in the hospital,
badly burned but stable.

My great-grandfather was able
to escape the burning Hindenburg.

He jumped out just
as it was coming down,

but he came away with terrible burns

that marked him for
the rest of his life.

Although he was too badly injured
to testify during the investigation,

Max Pruss also believed
that the crash had been no accident.

In a 1960 interview with
the Columbia University's

Centre for Oral History, he once
again raises the spectre of sabotage.

MAN: So, you don't think it was
lightning that did it?

PRUSS: No.
What do you think it was, sabotage?

(PRUSS LAUGHS)

I mean, it's interesting
to know what you think.

Ja.

I think it was sabotage.

To his dying day, my
great-grandfather believed

that the Hindenburg was sabotaged

and that it was a bomb that
essentially destroyed the ship.

I spend a lot of time
considering why Max was so adamant

about the sabotage theory,
and I think if you consider

that he spent more or less
20-plus years of his life

dedicated to this industry and
to this dream of the airship,

that seeing it crash and burn
like that and coming to an end -

and essentially
the Hindenburg disaster

was the end of
the airship industry -

I think that's something very
difficult to wrap your head around.

I think he truly believed that it
might have not been his wrongdoing,

or at least he was not willing
to look at it from that perspective,

because that would have put

the entire blame of
this disaster on him.

Amid a media frenzy
and public outcry for answers,

the US Navy and
the FBI begin probing.

GROSSMAN: Shortly after the crash,
agents from the FBI

began to show up at Lakehurst
and conduct investigations.

This was early in the days of
J. Edgar Hoover's FBI,

and he was really trying to expand

and grow this relatively young
criminal investigation agency.

FBI agents scour Lakehurst
and track suspicious characters.

Their main focus - sabotage.

Days after the Hindenburg's
fiery crash,

Hoover's FBI investigates
a series of articles

published by communist newspaper
The Daily Worker.

These articles had warned of an
imminent attack on a German airship.

RUSSELL: The FBI was well aware

of the fact that
there were publications

such as The Daily Worker that
were generating anti-Nazi sentiment

among German Americans
here in the States.

They wanted to investigate
whether some of these people

maybe tried to sabotage
the Hindenburg.

Both Rosendahl and Pruss go
to their deathbeds never letting go

of the belief that the
Hindenburg was sabotaged.

Their main suspect - the man
with the dog, acrobat Joseph Spah.

GROSSMAN: One of the things
that the FBI looked into

was the suggestion that Joseph Spah,
who was on board the ship,

that he might have had access to
the crew areas of the ship

and that he might somehow
have planted a bomb.

There was never any evidence
to suggest that that was the case,

but there are plenty of pages
in the FBI file

in which they talk about this as
something that they looked into.

One of the reasons people
were suspicious of Joseph Spah

was because he was an acrobat,
and it would have been easy for him

to climb and move around

the internal structure
of Hindenburg.

RICHARD SPAH: My dad
was a suspect for years

because, first of all,
he was a survivor.

Second of all, he was
up in amongst the bags

where the explosion happened.

The kennel was up there and he got
to walk the dog every day.

The FBI actually
investigated Joseph Spah,

interviewed his neighbours
and did a full write-up on him,

came to the conclusion
he was a family man.

My dad never let it bother him.

He was sensible enough to realise
that he'd be a suspect

because of all the circumstantial
evidence against him.

The FBI saw absolutely
no reason to suspect

that Joseph Spah had
sabotaged the Hindenburg.

Before the FBI can explore
any further,

the investigation is interrupted

and taken over by the
US Department of Commerce.

GROSSMAN: The FBI was not
the official investigating body.

The FBI did not do an official
Hindenburg investigation report.

The official investigation
was conducted by

the US Department of Commerce and
the German Investigation Commission.

RUSSELL: Dr Eckener was not opposed
to discussing at least privately

the possibility that the Hindenburg
had been sabotaged,

but he was essentially under orders
from the Air Ministry in Berlin

not to pursue sabotage
as a possibility.

If you are able to prove the thesis
of a bombing, of a terrorist attack,

then this suggests that the Nazi
regime is not so solid as it seems.

And that's why you still have
a controversy that exists today

between people who say
there may have been a bomb,

there may have been a conspiracy,
and people who say,

"Nonsense, it was
a technical failure."

In this interview,
Captain Pruss suggests

that Lakehurst commander Charles
Rosendahl may hold the answer.

PRUSS: I think Admiral Rosendahl,

he's writing now on a book.

MAN: He's what?
MAN 2: He's writing a book.

Yes. And he said to me that
he would bring new evidence.

Oh, he will bring...
Yeah.

..proof, new evidence.

Rosendahl completed
but did not publish his book

before he died of natural causes
in 1977.

His manuscript, which he donated
to the University of Texas Archives,

provides no evidence of sabotage.

But sabotage was very much
on Rosendahl's mind in 1937.

Captain Wittemann went up
to Commander Rosendahl and said,

"I need to speak with you
at your earliest convenience."

And Wittemann told him that Lehmann
had had a bomb threat letter

in his pocket.

"We really need to look
and see if somebody

"sabotaged the Hindenburg."

The letter was never mentioned

during the Board
of Inquiry investigation.

Captain Pruss was not even made
aware of this letter's existence

until 1938, so it was not something
that was discussed at the time.

And to be perfectly honest,
the Board of Inquiry

and the German
Investigation Commission,

neither of them really wanted to
pursue sabotage as a possibility.

That would have opened up
a whole can of worms,

they would have had to launch
a major investigation.

They didn't know
what they would find

if they went down that rabbit hole.

Both Rosendahl and Wittemann
knew of the bomb threat,

both testified during
the investigation,

and Rosendahl was an adviser to
the investigating board,

but, in over 1,000 pages
of sworn testimony,

neither mentioned the bomb threat.

And when asked at the end
of their testimony if either had

anything else to add, both said no.

It is unknown if the bomb threat
letter still exists

or if it has been lost to history.

What we do know is the contents
of the letter were not mentioned

or discussed during
the investigation,

nor seen anywhere
in the official reports.

It would seem this clue
was deliberately concealed

by both the US and German witnesses.

If the idea of sabotage
was deliberately omitted

from the testimony given
during the investigation,

it raises the question of what else
was left out by witnesses.

Negligence or any hint of a mistake
made by the German crew

would have been far more embarrassing
to the Nazi regime than sabotage.

With the Nazi airship
12 hours behind schedule

and pressure mounting
on the captains and crew,

the landing was made in haste.

Were safety protocols overlooked?

German airshipmen had developed
strict rules over the years

for the safe and efficient operation
of hydrogen-filled zeppelins.

They knew never to valve hydrogen

or land in an area undergoing
thunderstorms,

and they knew the dangerous effects
of electrical charges

at different altitudes.

But under pressure to land,
those concerns were set aside.

One of the ideas that people talk
about with regard to the Hindenburg

is that during that final last turn,

when the ship had to reorient
its direction

so it would land into the wind,

that perhaps a bracing cable snapped
and slashed a gas cell.

One of the biggest problems
with that concept is that the timing

doesn't match because a lot
of the efforts that were taken

to address the tail heaviness
situation

occurred long before
that final turn.

So if hydrogen was leaking
from the tail,

it wasn't as a result
of a turn that happened later.

With an airship coming high,

the higher it is,
the more electricity,

static electricity,
it has collected.

So there was a thunderstorm
that Hindenburg went through.

That was lots of negative
and lots of positive,

or vice versa, on the airship.

And so the captains -

Pruss should have known that,
Lehmann should have known that,

and, of course, Rosendahl
should have known that,

and none of them talked about it.

The Hindenburg crash certainly
involved two elements.

There was a source of ignition
and then there was leaking hydrogen.

We don't know, and we'll
probably never know for sure,

why the hydrogen was leaking.

We'll never know
for absolute certainty

what the source of ignition was.

It seems that hydrogen WAS leaking,

but did any member of the crew
notice a problem during the landing?

In his book My Zeppelins,
Hugo Eckener recalls

how Rudolf Sauter, quote,
"stated most positively

"that immediately before
the catastrophe

"he had noticed that one of the stern
cells had risen very high

"and had apparently lost
a lot of gas," end quote.

Yet at the inquiry, when asked
if anything unusual happened

before hearing the detonation
and seeing the fire,

Sauter answered, "No."

As chief engineer, Rudolf Sauter
was one of the airship's

most senior officers, and as
a general in the Sturmabteilung,

also known as the Brownshirts
or Storm Troopers,

Sauter had an especially
strong incentive

not to embarrass Germany or himself.

Sauter and other crew members

were sat across the investigator's
table from representatives

of Hermann Goering's Air Ministry.

Knowing they would be returning home
to Nazi Germany in just a few days,

the German crew testified,
one after another in lock step,

that everything about the landing
was perfectly normal.

But it was anything BUT normal.
The ship burned.

Was this a massive cover-up
orchestrated from Berlin?

The problem is that now the zeppelin
is a compromised symbol

because it has burned to the ground
with its swastikas.

And so it's basically
a difficult symbol to handle now,

it's no longer going to be
front and centre

in the context of German propaganda.

More than eight decades ago,
broadcaster Herb Morrison provided

remarkable insight as a witness
that still bears up to this day.

We have not yet been able to find
out what caused the explosion,

but it's very evident
that there was a spark

set the nitrogen on fire.

There wasn't any electricity,
there was no electrical storm.

It was raining previously to that,

but no electricity
could have set it on fire

unless it was static electricity

because we had had a thunderstorm,
a very light thunderstorm.

But there was a lot of electricity
in the air, so maybe a spark jumped

from one of the beams
in the tail surfaces across.

That would be a logical
interpretation of it,

inasmuch as they were coming
in close proximity to the ground.

The static electricity
may have increased

and caused an explosion like that.

Wow. It's amazing that just
an hour after the explosion,

he already has such a clear
understanding of what happened.

And it's incredible that his theory
is what the investigation committee

ultimately decided is what happened.

It seems like witnesses do have
theories of sabotage,

but they never mentioned it.

From the very start,
it was always just a spark.

Surprisingly, however,
the Hindenburg tragedy,

in and of itself, did not
deliver the death knell

for the airship industry.

DE SYON: Eckener's attitude
once the Hindenburg is destroyed

is to keep on fighting.

It's almost like
a fortress mentality.

The sense that you are right,
you have the right answer,

and you can keep on showing them
with the sister ship of Hindenburg,

which becomes a Graf Zeppelin II,
LZ 130.

What really ends it all for Eckener
is the start of World War II.

LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin

and LZ 130,
also named Graf Zeppelin,

are moved to a hangar in Frankfurt.

GROSSMAN: Hermann Goering,
as an aviation expert,

understood the limitations
of airships.

He understood that they
were militarily useless.

He was afraid that the airship
program would take resources

that he needed to concentrate

on heavier-than-air developments
for the German Luftwaffe.

He didn't like the idea
that airships were competing

with a dying technology

when he was trying to build
a modern German Air Force.

Hermann Goering personally
made sure that the airships

would never fly again
by ordering the destruction

of the airship hangars so that
none could ever be built again.

On the third anniversary
of the Hindenburg disaster,

the era of the airship
officially comes to an end.

DE SYON: On May 6, 1940, the order
comes from the Air Ministry

that both airships
are to be dynamited.

They'd been emptied, of course,
of their hydrogen prior to that.

And that the scrap metal is to
be put into the war industry.

Officially, the German Air Force
needs this area for its army base,

and no matter what
zeppelin officials do,

they are forced to accept
this destruction.

As far as Goering was concerned,

when they pleaded with him,

he reportedly heard the noise of an
airplane engine in the background

and turned towards it and said,
"This is what I prefer to hear."

For generations to come,
only the iconic images

of Hindenburg's destruction,

along with the words
"Oh, the humanity"

are all that remain of
the passenger airship enterprise.

DE SYON: Hindenburg belongs to these
great machines of the 20th century

that did not work out.

It's not the first one
and it wasn't the last.

We actually were exposed to sort
of the fragility of technology.

We like technology,
it gives us a sense of power,

but we realise that it is only
as strong as we design it to be.

Titanic met its doom
because it came up against

a rather gigantic
and fairly immovable object.

Hindenburg was probably destroyed
because of a tiny spark.

This great, giant,
physically large symbol

of German and Nazi supremacy

was most likely taken down
by a spark

that's no bigger than when
you walk across a carpet

and you touch a doorknob.

And that's all it took to bring this
2.5-football-field-long aircraft...

..to burning ashes
in less than a minute.

The Hindenburg cover-up
has little to do with

what caused the Nazi airship's
fiery demise.

Instead, it's a tale of
what happened

the days and weeks
following the crash.

The lacking cross-examination
of what appears to be

highly coordinated testimonies,

and a letter threatening sabotage
that goes unmentioned at the inquiry.

Why? Who benefited?

DE SYON: So, we are stuck
in many ways

with this image of the Hindenburg

being a German machine,
a great machine,

but also a deeply flawed one.

One could say that in some ways,
the Hindenburg culturally becomes

a metaphor for the Nazi regime.

Conceived as a weapon of war,
the airship evolved

into the ultimate means
of travelling the world

in luxurious comfort and style.

Hindenburg - the grandest and
most romanticised of them all -

served as a magnificent symbol
of all that was possible

in an exciting new era
of engineering marvels.

The Naval Air Station at Lakehurst
was Hindenburg's home

when it travelled to
the United States.

The colossal hangar
was where it was berthed.

And this field is its
final resting place.

Here, a memorial ceremony
is held each year

to mark the tragedy.

This was the final event

for as safe as possible
passenger travel.

It finished the travel of people,

mail, packages, whatnot,

over the whole world.

May 6th, 1937,

was for all practical purposes

the final day of passenger travel
in lighter-than-air.

In the end, the story
of the Hindenburg is a reminder

of human fallibility,

of the fragile line between
the grandest of dreams

and the most humbling of nightmares.

Captions by Red Bee Media
(c) SBS Australia 2023