The Flaming Sky

In 1937, passenger airplanes couldn’t carry enough fuel to go long distances. For most people, crossing an ocean meant a long journey on a ship.

A typical Atlantic Ocean crossing took between 5 and 10 days on an ocean liner. Passengers endured stormy seas, cramped living quarters, and endless days with little to do. Seasick passengers vomited over rails, and bored children fidgeted in their hot cabins that stank of sweat and worse.

Imagine, then, the joy of flying across the ocean in a zeppelin instead. The Hindenburg could speed across the Atlantic in just two-anda-half days instead of five.

The zeppelin was gigantic—as tall as a 12-story building and longer than two football fields. Its enormous egg-shaped body was filled with gas that lifted it up into the sky like a balloon. The ship’s four car-sized engines would rev up, and vroom, the zeppelin would zoom across the sky at up to 85 miles per hour—twice as fast as a typical ocean liner.

The ride was famously smooth—nobody ever got airsick. Hindenburg passengers stayed on two floors of beautiful rooms tucked into the belly of the zeppelin’s body. They slept in elegant cabins, snuggled up in silk sheets. They woke to the scent of fresh-baked rolls wafting from the kitchen and feasted on gourmet meals in the bright and modern dining room. There was a writing room for writing letters and reading, and a salon for playing cards and games.

And the views!

Airplanes usually travel at least 30,000 feet above the earth. Look down and you see nothing but clouds. Zeppelins flew close to the ground. Passengers would stand at the ship’s big glass windows and marvel at the dazzling sights beneath them—of great European castles, glittering cities, and starstruck people waving from below. At sea, passengers often saw dancing dolphins and spouting whales.

The journey across the Atlantic had been uneventful. But thunderstorms over the coast of New Jersey delayed the Hindenburg’s landing. Finally, on Thursday evening, the storm cleared and the great zeppelin prepared to land at its airfield in Lakehurst, New Jersey.

Families and friends of passengers lined the airfield. There were also about 90 men from the U.S. Navy. It would be their job to grab hold of the Hindenburg’s landing ropes and actually pull the gigantic zeppelin to the ground.

Slowly, the zeppelin dropped from the sky. Children in the crowd shouted with excitement. Several reporters stood behind movie cameras, filming the landing.

The first sign of trouble was a small flame that appeared at the back of the zeppelin, flicking like a serpent’s tongue. People in the crowd stared. Hearts stopped. A few people started to run away. And then,

Kaboom!

Millions of cubic feet of hydrogen ignited.

Werner heard a muffled explosion. He turned to see a nightmarish sight: a wall of fire racing toward him. He started to run away. But the nose of the zeppelin jerked up, sending him crashing to the floor. He slid back, back, back, straight toward the wide-open jaws of the monstrous fire.

The heat was unbearable; he felt sure he would burst into flames.

But then, splash!

A shower of water from somewhere above drenched him from head to toe. The water cooled his body and cleared his mind.

Werner rose to his feet and staggered away from the fire. Then he saw it, a small door in the side of the ship. With a mighty kick, he bashed open the hatch. He had no idea how far up in the sky the ship was. But he had no choice. Staying on the ship meant certain death.

Werner threw himself through the opening, into the flaming sky. 

It took just 32 seconds for the Hindenburg to crash to the ground in a burning heap. Passengers burst through windows and doors.

Of the 97 people on board, 35 lost their lives. Many more would have perished if it hadn’t been for the Navy landing crew, men who risked their lives to rush into the flames and pull people to safety.

In the coming weeks and months, the Hindenburg disaster remained front-page news. Many Germans were certain that a bomb had caused the fiery crash. There was a thorough investigation. Even today, nobody can be certain what caused the disaster. But most experts believe there must have been a small leak in one of the gas cells. Electricity in the air, left over from the earlier storms, likely sparked the explosion. That was all it took to destroy the grandest airship ever built.

The movie cameras caught every second of the fiery disaster on film.

Within weeks, millions around the world had seen the footage. The Hindenburg explosion not only ended the lives of dozens of people, it also ended the age of zeppelins; nobody ever flew on a passenger zeppelin again.

As for Werner, he had been right all along: He was the luckiest kid in the world. The water that had drenched him had come from one of the Hindenburg’s shattered water tanks, and that blast of water surely saved his life.

The zeppelin was close enough to the ground when he hurled himself through the hatch that he was able to run away. “It was a heavenly gift,” he would later say.

Two weeks after the disaster, Werner returned to his family in Germany. He eventually married and had a family of his own.

He would face other catastrophes in his life, including World War II, which started not long after the Hindenburg crash. But he lived to the age of 92. He never forgot how close he came to losing his life on that fiery night in 1937.

“I was grateful for everything I was allowed to experience after that,” he said.

<sup>Text copyright Lauren Tarshis

This article was originally published in the September 2016 issue.</sup>