The Hindenburg Disaster, Rediscovered
Rarely-seen photos taken by a teenager, a courier, an acrobat, and a "Yale Man," offer alternate angles of the doomed German airship.
On the rainy afternoon of May 6, 1937, sixteen-year-old Foo Chu went on a joyride with his buddy in a sleek new Lincoln. On his way out the door he grabbed the family camera — a Leica. Their destination: Lakehurst, New Jersey. The Hindenburg was landing.1
“Like a great feather,” the giant German airship made its final approach. Then suddenly, at 7:25 p.m., it burst into flames. Chu lifted his Leica.
“I took the first shot at f/3.5 at one-tenth of a second, because the light was bad. It was just after a storm,” Chu recalled. “I was too busy shooting to be scared.”2
The silhouetted figures in the foreground, backlit by the explosion, offer a spectator-perspective that other more well-known photos lack. Chu’s photos are gritty and imperfect, slightly out of focus, but instantly recognizable. I’ve been fascinated with these since I first saw them on Projekt LZ 129, Patrick Russell’s outstanding series on the Hindenburg.
Arthur Cofod, Jr. was also in the spectators’ area, also carrying a Leica. Cofod was a courier for LIFE magazine, waiting for a shipment of photos onboard the Hindenburg (they didn’t survive). When the Zeppelin erupted in flames, Cofod didn’t flinch and captured the most comprehensive series of photos of the disaster.
Not having to change plates in a Speed Graphic certainly helped…notice the flames shooting out of the bow.
LIFE published Cofod’s sequence in their May 17, 1937 issue, noting, “The effect on him, as on others, was so nerve-shattering that his hands shook.”
At least twenty-two still photographers and newsreel cameramen were there to cover what was supposed to be a routine landing. It was so routine that Sam Shere was reluctant to take the gig. Good thing he did — Shere’s photo is the definitive image of the Hindenburg disaster.
“I had two shots in my big Speed Graphic, but I didn't even have time to get it up to my eye. I literally ‘shot’ from the hip — it was over so fast there was nothing else to do,” Shere recalled. He then switched to the Leica hanging around his neck. “Only one of these pictures — they were so ghastly, so graphic — was ever used.”3
Shere’s photo is truly iconic, indelibly etched into history and pop-culture consciousness. In 1969, Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page asked George Hardie to create an illustration based on Shere’s photo of the Hindenburg for their debut studio album. Hardie was paid £60 for his work…
…but sold the original in 2020 for $375,000.
New York Daily News photographer Charles Hoff was positioned just to the right of Shere, capturing a near-identical moment.
“I was practically underneath the mooring mast and I was shooting pix every minute when, Bam! — it went up,” Hoff said afterwards. “An explosion, like a hollow boom, maybe like an explosion of a firecracker in a monstrous empty can.”
“I didn’t think of the people on it as I watched…I only tried to keep my hands from trembling as I slid the plates in.”4
Philadelphia Bulletin photographer Gus Pasquarella was positioned to the left of Hoff and Shere, which allowed for a slight separation between the Hindenburg and the mooring mast.
Pasquarella and his rival, Jack Snyder with the Philadelphia Record, were shoulder to shoulder.
Snyder’s version has the flames shooting from the nose of the Hindenburg, nailing the moment just before impact. The Philadelphia Record blew it out on Page One alongside Snyder’s eyewitness account: “Flaming Horror Told By Record Cameraman.”
“There was a whang and a bang and the whole back of the Hindenburg exploded into terrible flame,” Snyder wrote. “She was directly over my head. The heat singed my hair. So I made a couple of shots and got her blazing in the air and then I got out. I ran for my life. And all the while people were jumping out of the windows and screaming in English and German.”5
While it was taken after the others, no other photo from the crash captures the vastness and grand scale quite like that of Murray Becker’s. The tiny, distinct human figures in Becker’s photo emphasize the enormity of the Hindenburg and the helplessness of those on the ground and in the air.
Remarkably, Becker, a photographer with the Associated Press, was able to make four frames with his Speed Graphic in 46 seconds.
“I reacted by instinct, but when it was all over, I sat with my back to a hangar and cried about what I had just seen,” Becker told the Fort Lauderdale News in 1982. “I can still, to this day, close my eyes and see the thing go up in flames.”
Becker’s photo fronted The New York Times the following day.
Becker even scored a bonus from the AP for his hustle. The $500 check, an “Honorarium for remarkable work on the Hindenburg pictures,” is part of the Photographic History Collection at the National Museum of American History.
Side note: Becker’s first photo of the Hindenburg erupting in flames captures a critical detail missing in other images — the Nazi swastika on the tail.
The Hindenburg was essentially a Nazi propaganda tool — the Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda had even suggested naming the airship after Adolf Hitler.
The only color photos of the Hindenburg disaster were taken by Gerard Sheedy, the “Staff Color-Cameraman of the Sunday Mirror.” Any other color images found online or in documentaries are colorized fakery, historical blasphemy, and should be forever ignored.
What did it sound like? Few audio recordings in history are as visceral and raw as Herb Morrison's emotional narration of the crash for WLS radio in Chicago. Oh, the humanity!
Notably, the iconic broadcast was not transmitted live, but painstakingly recorded in the field with a bulky Presto disc recorder.
Newsreels of the Hindenburg crash, taken by William Deeke, Al Gold, James Seeley, and Thomas Craven, have become etched in our collective memory. Yet, none offer the unique perspective captured by Joseph Späh — a passenger on the Hindenburg.
Späh, a vaudevillian acrobat a.k.a. Ben Dova, was returning to the United States after performing throughout Europe. His sixteen-second film clip is haunting.
“I focused my camera on the ground crew as the first rope was cast down,” Späh told a reporter after the crash. “There was a blinding light, then an explosion…We were a mass of shrieking, crying people.”6
Another passenger aboard the Hindenburg, Peter Belin, made this ominous and foreboding photo as the airship floated over Manhattan shortly before the accident. Look closely and you’ll see the words “Safety First” written on the ground.
Belin, a Yale graduate on his way home from Europe, barely survived the crash, stuffing a roll of film in his pocket before jumping. He gave only one interview, an exclusive to the Yale Daily News: “Yale Man Leaps from Hindenburg.”
“A terrific explosion in the rear of the ship was the first notice we had of anything being wrong. The rear crumpled, and the cabin I was in lurched into a 45-degree angle. We were all thrown towards the back of the room, though two stewards and I caught hold of posts which kept us from being thrown in a heap with the others,” Belin told the newspaper.
“When we got within 30 feet of the ground, after a look towards the back of the cabin where about twelve passengers were crowded helplessly together on their backs, the two stewards jumped and I followed. We landed in a sandy place without hurting ourselves, and ran from under the ship, which had now burst into flames and hovered above us, ready to fall.”7
Belin's photos went unseen until a 2011 article in The Washington Post and, later, were part of a Smithsonian exhibit.
Foo Chu, the teenager who borrowed the family Leica, didn’t sit on his photos for decades. After the smoke cleared, Chu took his undeveloped film to the New York Daily News and cut a deal — five of his photos ran the following day. His payment? $25 per photo. The Daily News kept the negatives.8
Wisely, Chu became a doctor.
George Gilbert, “Fifty Years Later, An Amateur’s Leica at the 1937 Hindenburg Disaster,” Viewfinder, Vol. 20, No. 4, 1987, 21.
Robert Mann, “How To Make The Front Page,” Photography, Vol. 30 No. 2, 1952, 56.
Joanne Kash, “Interview with Sam Shere,” Art Voices South, November/December, 1980, 41-42.
“Camera Man's Own Story Of Tragedy,” Daily News, May 7, 1937, 94
Jack Snyder, “Flaming Horror Told By Record Cameraman.” Philadelphia Record, May 7 1937, 1.
“Survivors Describe Jump From Blazing Hindenburg.” The Pittsburgh Press, May 8, 1937, 2.
“Yale Man Leaps from Hindenburg,” Yale Daily News, May 7, 1937, 1.
George Gilbert, “Fifty Years Later, An Amateur’s Leica at the 1937 Hindenburg Disaster,” Viewfinder, Vol. 20, No. 4, 1987, 22-23.
Best thing on Substack by a mile
Outstanding piece.