From the S&S archives: Hindenburg's cabin boy recalls tragedy

THE HINDENBURG'S 15-year-old cabin boy was cleaning china in the officers' quarters when an explosion in the rear of the 804-foot airship shook it from front to back.

Fifty years-later, Werner Franz remembers exactly what happened.

"All the china came flying out of the cabinets," he said.

Franz ran out into a passageway. There was no time to be scared.

"It happened so fast, it was like a movie passing by," he said. "You act instinctively.

As the ship began to lurch at its mooring, he grabbed a girder and dangled in the air.

"As I hung there, I had a vision of my life passing by," he said.

The Hindenburg was engulfed in flames, the tail crashing to the ground and the nose settling more slowly as Franz made his way, coughing and choking, to the nearest hatch.

Pull cords opened the thick cloth covers of the hatches, but Franz didn't use one. "I just jumped," he said. "The cloth broke through. When the cook (Xaver Meier) saw me jump out of the hatch, he jumped out after me."

Franz stumbled away from the burning airship.

"When I got out, there were so many people running around screaming," he said. "I was in a daze. Some of the landing crew went inside the ship to help the crew and passengers get out."

Franz normally would have been in a landing detail that required several crewmembers to move to the nose of the ship as ballast. "This time six or eight men were sent to the front by the captain — all died," he said.

News of the Hindenburg disaster quickly reached Germany.

"My parents knew right afterwards what had happened — it was on the radio wires," he said. "At first I was on the death list. An hour later they updated it."

Franz and the other surviving crewmen spent 14 days at the air station, living with the Lakehurst airship crew.

The Germans were then driven to New York and put on a ship for Bremerhaven.

"The healthy ones came back first, and the badly burned ones came back later," he said:

Most of the crew transferred to the Graf Zeppelin I, built before the Hindenburg, upon returning to Germany. The Graf Zeppelin made 40 flights, delivering mail and making publicity appearances. It carried no passengers, and was dissembled in Frankfurt in 1940.

Franz chose to work in the airship ticket office in Zeppelinheim, Germany, then started an apprenticeship as an instrument maker. He joined the German air force in 1941.

Now retired, Franz lives in Bad Soden, a town near Frankfurt, with his wife Annarosa and their: 21-year-old son. He said six or eight Hindenburg crewmembers are still alive. All live in Germany, except one man who lives in Austria or Switzerland, he said. Franz keeps in touch with some of them.

"Most have contact, know where the others live," he said. "We had close ties between us all."

Franz said he prefers to remember the thrill of being a young boy traveling by airship to South America rather than the disaster. He was chosen for airship duty by an official of the Luftschiffbau Zeppelin (Airship Construction Company Zeppelin) who looked for prospective crewmembers at the Frankfurter Hof hotel, where Franz worked as a waiter.

When the opportunity to join the Hindenburg crew came, Franz was ready. "It's a one-shot deal," he said. "You don't turn down a chance like that!"

He made three trips between Germany and South America in 1936 and one in 1937. All of the crewmembers were considerably older than he was — the rest of the crew survivors are in their 80s. "But they took me in as one of them," he said.

An official review board determined the Hindenburg disaster to be freak accident. Franz, however, like many others, believes sabotage was involved. "To have the gas released from a hole, then you need a spark, to have all those things at the same time, just as you're landing ..."

But he believes the question is academic now.

"It doesn't really matter," he said. "It's already happened. It will always be a question."