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Eric (or Erich) Spehl
- In a popular 1962 book, Who Destroyed the Hindenburg?, writer and military historian A. A. Hoehling accused a crew member of being the saboteur. Based on his own research, Hoehling believed that Eric (or Erich) Spehl, a 26-year-old rigger, had planted a bomb on board, supposedly egged on by his communist girlfriend.
www.history.com/news/hindenburg-disaster-zeppelin-crash-whyThe Hindenburg Disaster: Why the Giant Dirigible Burst Into ...
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Charles Rosendahl, commander of the Naval Air Station at Lakehurst and the man in overall charge of the ground-based portion of the Hindenburg's landing maneuver, came to believe that the Hindenburg had been sabotaged.
- The Hindenburg Crash: 30 Seconds of Terror Seen Worldwide
- Hitler Gets The Bad News
- Conspiracy Theories Pour in
- Decades Later, A New Suspect Emerges
- Official Inquiries Blame Atmospheric Conditions
The Hindenburghad made its first flight from Germany to the U.S. a year earlier, in May 1936. This trip was intended to inaugurate its 1937 season, an event considered noteworthy enough to draw newspaper and newsreel photographers to Lakehurst. They would record unforgettable images of the ship bursting into flames and crashing to the ground as pas...
German Chancellor Adolph Hitlerreceived word of the disaster at his mountaintop retreat in Berchtesgaden, reportedly reacting with “stunned silence.” Hugo Eckener, a German airship pioneer and head of the company that built the Hindenburg, first acknowledged the possibility of sabotage but then backtracked, saying that a stray spark probably ignite...
Unlike the Germans, Americans were under no such constraints, as contemporary newspaper accounts and declassified FBI files show. While the FBI didn’t formally investigate the Hindenburgincident, it assisted in the U.S. Commerce Department’s inquiry and became a contact point for citizens with theories to share. While many correspondents suggested ...
Spaeh would not be the only suspect. In a popular 1962 book, Who Destroyed the Hindenburg?, writer and military historian A. A. Hoehling accused a crew member of being the saboteur. Based on his own research, Hoehling believed that Eric (or Erich) Spehl, a 26-year-old rigger, had planted a bomb on board, supposedly egged on by his communist girlfri...
The U.S. and German governments each conducted inquiries into the crash, releasing their findings in July 1937 and January 1938 respectively. Both concluded that atmospheric conditions that rainy evening had led to the disaster, although they differed as to the exact mechanism. The Americans suggested an electrical phenomenon called a “brush discha...
- Greg Daugherty
At the time, some Germans wondered whether the airship had fallen victim to sabotage, but the possibility of foul play was soon ruled out by investigators in the United States. Zeppelin flights didn’t end immediately with the Hindenburg disaster.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
May 5, 2017 · Speculations arose soon after the accident that the airship may have been taken down by a saboteur, an enemy of the rising Nazi Germany — after all, it was 1937, only two years before the...
May 10, 2012 · During an era of tension between the United States and Germany’s new Nazi government, suspicious minds quickly alighted on the idea that a crew member or passenger had sabotaged the airship,...
- Joseph Stromberg
May 4, 2017 · On May 6, 1937, the German airship Zeppelin LZ 129 Hindenburg burst into flames in Lakehurst, New Jersey, while the airship was landing. NASM, Archives Division. “In the 20th century, there are...
Jul 3, 2019 · People believed that maybe the Hindenburg had been sabotaged to harm Hitler's Nazi regime. The sabotage theories centered on a bomb of some sort being placed aboard the Hindenburg and later detonated or some other sort of sabotage performed by someone on board.
