In Search Of... Season 5 # 21, THE HINDENBURG MYSTERY

Lake Hurst, New Jersey, 7:25 in the evening, May 6th 1927. Delayed by storms the airship Hindenburg was finally prepared to land... tragedy is seconds away. The mystery is: Was it an accident or sabotage?

Lake Hurst had been the city of the future. The nearby naval air-station was East-Coast terminal for dirigible trans-Atlantic crossings. Airship travel had become a reality. Germany was the starting point for most of these lighter-than-air-voyages due to the company founded by Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin. In 1924 the company built this dirigible for the United States as part of Germany's reparations for World War I. In 1928 Hugo Eckener, the head of the Zeppelin company, built the largest the airship to date: The "Graf Zeppelin" which circumnavigated the world in 1929. She established a regular schedule of flights from Germany to Brazil. Ocean liners were the only competition.

The "Hindenburg" would be the largest airship ever built: 147 feet high and one 6th of a mile long. Eckener designed it to be filled with Helium, a safe gas. Because Hitler used the Zeppelins as propaganda machines which also might be used in war, the USA did not sell them the Helium. To make it fly at all Eckener hat to change plans and use inflammable Hydrogen. Against his will Eckener was forced to use the Hindenburg for propaganda flights and was removed from his position.

In 1936 the Hindenburg made ten flights from Germany to the United States. Soon afterwards the German embassy received threats of sabotage for the Hindenburg. Miraculously 62 people on board of the Hindenburg escaped from the flames, the death toll was 36. Those were the only victims in Zeppelin flight's 30 year history.