At 7.30pm on May 6, 1937, the giant Hindenburg airship approached its mooring mast at the Lakehurst naval station in New Jersey after a three-day flight from Frankfurt, Germany. Without warning it burst into flames, crashed to the ground and was destroyed in little more than 30 seconds as the fire devoured its canvas skin. Thirteen of its 36 passengers, 22 of its 61 crew, a ground worker and a German Shepherd dog travelling with one of the passengers, perished.
Werner Franz, who has died at the age of 92, was the last surviving member of the crew (although at least one of the passengers on the Hindenburg is still alive). He was a 14-year-old cabin boy and escaped entirely uninjured. He was, however, mistakenly listed as missing and had to send his parents a telegram to confirm his survival.
He returned to the wreckage the next day and retrieved a watch that his grandfather had given him. The following week he approached a German official at an inquiry into the disaster and asked him: “When the next Zeppelin is ready, may I fly again with her?” He never did, because the crash of the Hindenburg destroyed public confidence in the rigid, gas-filled airship, rendering it one of the shortest-lived forms of public transport ever invented.
Franz was born in Frankfurt, the son of a hotel switchboard operator. His father’s poor health forced him to leave school early to search for work. After several fruitless months looking for an apprenticeship a friendly hotel manager told him that the Hindenburg needed a cabin boy. He got the job. He later recalled his amazement when he first saw the world’s largest airship, a vessel not much shorter than the Titanic, in its hangar. “I stood in front of what I thought was a grey wall and it took a while to realise that I was standing in front of the ship,” he said.
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The Hindenburg had had its maiden voyage in March 1936. Five months later it flew over the Berlin Olympics with Nazi swastikas painted on its tail. Buoyed by 16 huge bags of hydrogen, a highly inflammable gas, it flew at twice the speed of the fastest transatlantic liners and was considered the height of luxury. Franz joined the crew that October and worked in the crew’s mess. His first flight was to Rio de Janeiro — a 12-day round trip. Returning from his /second trip to Brazil he remembered passing the Hindenburg’s sister ship, the Graf Zeppelin, at midnight in the middle of the South Atlantic. The Hindenburg’s doomed flight to New Jersey was his fourth or fifth to North or South America during a seven-month period that Franz called “the best time of my life”.
The airship was such a novelty that crowds watched from the streets as it circled above New York. “She appeared a conquering giant of the skies but she proved a puny plaything in the mighty grip of fate,” a Pathé newsreel commentator intoned on grainy footage of the Hindenburg gliding over Manhattan. Reporters had also gathered at Lakehurst to watch the Hindenburg land. It arrived late due to bad weather, and had just dropped its mooring ropes when it exploded — a moment immortalised by Herbert Morrison’s commentary for a Chicago radio station: “It’s burst into flames! Get this, Charlie; get this, Charlie! It’s fire . . . and it’s crashing! It’s crashing terrible! Oh, my! ” A spark is believed to have ignited the hydrogen, though the precise cause was never established.
“The start of the catastrophe came out of the blue,” Franz recalled. He was loading crockery into a cupboard at the time. He felt the ship shudder then heard an explosion. A water tank burst, drenching him and offering him some protection against the heat and flames. As the Hindenburg plunged to earth, tail first, he kicked open a supply hatch and jumped just before it hit the ground. He ran into the wind and away from the flames, then stood with other survivors and watched as the wreckage burnt down to its steel skeleton.
“No one could speak, least of all me,” he said. “I was crying until Chief Steward [Heinrich] Kubis came over to me and put an arm around my shoulders and said ‘Come on! Pull yourself together. Go and see if you can help anyone.’ So I ran back to the ship, but of course there was nothing I could do.”
He and the other surviving crew stayed in New York for nine days. He attended a dockside memorial service as the German victims were shipped home, testified before a US board of inquiry, and managed a trip to Radio City Music Hall before sailing back to Germany on the Europa steamship. He reached Bremerhaven on his 15th birthday. He described his escape as a “heavenly gift” that taught him to appreciate life because “I realised how quickly everything can come to an end.” For years afterwards he suffered panic attacks.
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During the Second World War he became a radio operator in the Luftwaffe. In peacetime he joined the German postal service, repairing precision machinery, and indulged his passion for skating by becoming a coach. One of his pupils, Marika Kilius, won two Olympic silver medals (1960 and 1964). He is survived by his wife of 52 years, Annerose, and by several children.
He gave many interviews about the disaster that ended the brief era of the passenger airship. As recently as 2004 he attended the opening of a new museum in Lakehurst with his son Andreas. Before he flew back to Germany he visited the Hindenburg crash site for one last time and left a bouquet of flowers in memory of those who died there.
Werner Franz, survivor of the Hindenburg disaster, was born on May 22, 1922. He died of heart failure on August 13, 2014, aged 92