The Hindenburg Disaster: Sabotage or Accident?

The Story

On the evening of May 6, 1937, the airship Hindenburg finally reached Naval Air Station Lakehurst in New Jersey, hours late because of headwinds and thunderstorms. The Commerce Department's investigators later reconstructed the timeline from the station log: the ship was sighted at 6:15 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, dropped its bow landing ropes at 6:21, and 'was first observed afire at 6:25 P.M.'

Witnesses on the ground told investigators the first flame appeared on top of the ship near the tail. One ground crew leader said that a couple of seconds before the fire he noticed 'a noticeable fluttering of the outer cover' near gas cell No. 5, 'more like an action of gas inside pushing up, as if gas was escaping.' The fire raced forward through the hydrogen-filled hull. Of the 61 crew members, 22 died. Of the 36 passengers, 13 died. One member of the ground crew also died of his burns.

'To date, there is no evidence to indicate that sabotage produced the grim result.'

Sabotage was an obvious question. The Hindenburg was a flying symbol of Hitler's Germany, and the investigators said the possibility of a 'premeditated or willful act has received active attention.' They looked at outside attacks, from an 'incendiary bullet' to a 'high powered electric ray,' and at the possibility of 'a bomb or other infernal device' hidden on board. Their conclusion: 'To date, there is no evidence to indicate that sabotage produced the grim result.'

Instead they concluded that a leak near cells 4 and 5 let hydrogen mix with air in the upper stern, and that 'the theory that a brush discharge ignited such mixture appears most probable.' A brush discharge is a form of static electrical discharge. The investigators stopped short of certainty, and the exact spark has never been proven.

That uncertainty left room for the sabotage theory. In 1962 A. A. Hoehling published Who Destroyed the Hindenburg? According to a federal appeals court's summary of the book, its last chapter argued that every explanation except deliberate destruction was unconvincing, and named as 'the most likely saboteur' Eric Spehl, a rigger who died in the disaster. Hoehling suggested Spehl could have planted a device made of dry-cell batteries and a flashbulb. Ten years later Michael MacDonald Mooney published The Hindenburg, which also made Spehl the saboteur, and Universal turned it into a 1975 film.

Hoehling sued Universal and Mooney for copyright infringement. He lost. In 1980 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that the protection of copyright 'has never extended to history, be it documented fact or explanatory hypothesis,' so his theory was free for others to use. The court did not decide whether the theory was true.

Spehl died in the fire and never answered the accusation. The official investigation found no evidence of a bomb, and none has surfaced since in the records cited here. What it did find was a highly flammable gas, a probable leak and a stormy evening.