Eugen Nunnenmacher

Crew Member

Age: Unknown

Hometown: Walldorf, Germany

Occupation: Dining room steward

Location at time of fire: Passenger decks, portside dining salon

Survived


Eugen Nunnenmacher was one of the Hindenburg's stewards. He was hired by the Deutsche Zeppelin Reederei in early 1936, and had flown aboard the Hindenburg since her earliest flights.

Nunnenmacher was aboard the Hindenburg on her first North American flight of the 1937 season. On the last evening of the flight, May 6th, while the ship was cruising around over the New Jersey coast, riding out the thunderstorms that were then over the Lakehurst airbase, Chief Steward Kubis had Nunnenmacher bring out a silver tray full of sandwiches for the passengers. Since the landing had been delayed and a full dinner was not scheduled for that evening, the passengers were starting to get hungry. Nunnemacher placed the tray in the starboard lounge, and then set about helping Kubis prepare a table in the portside dining room for U.S Customs officials who would board the ship shortly after landing.

Nunnenmacher and Kubis both noticed one of the passengers, Joseph Späh, nervously pacing the passenger decks, clearly anxious to land. Nunnenmacher tried to placate him, telling him that for safety's sake they had to wait for weather conditions to improve before they attempted a landing. Not long after this, as Chief Steward Kubis was sending Nunnenmacher to collect the empty sandwich tray, Späh became even more distraught, telling them that he'd taken his watch off and accidentally knocked it out one of the open observation windows, and asking if he might be able to find it again when the ship landed. Both Kubis and Nunnenmacher thought Späh's behavior to be particularly odd.

Eugen Nunnenmacher's location at the time of the fire.

Shortly after this incident, as the ship hovered over the landing field and the passengers lined the observation windows, watching the ground crew take up the landing ropes and attach them to the mooring tackle near the mast, Nunnenmacher stood at the middle window on the portside observation deck. Suddenly, he felt the ship shake violently, and lost his footing as the dining room floor tilted aft. He landed between the legs of one of the female passengers, and pulled himself up on the window railing. He saw one of the passengers already sitting up on the windowsill, preparing to jump. Chief Kubis stood at the same window, and Nunnenmacher called to him, "Mr. Kubis! Jump out!" Kubis replied that he couldn't yet jump, as the ship was still too high over the ground.

When the ship neared the ground, the passenger at the center window finally jumped, and Kubis followed several seconds later. Nunnenmacher was right behind Kubis, and finally dropped through the window as the ship's hull collapsed to the ground, falling perhaps 15-20 feet into the sand. Nunnenmacher ran from the ship and as he was running he took off his white steward's jacket and threw it to the ground. He then turned around and ran back to the ship, along with Chief Kubis, joining stewards Fritz Deeg and Max Henneberg under the portside observation windows. Deeg caught the two young Doehner boys as their mother threw them out a window, and Nunnenmacher watched as Kubis helped Mrs. Doehner away once she had followed her boys out the window.

Then Nunnenmacher saw Mrs. Doehner's teenage daughter Irene at one of the windows. He called to her, and she jumped into his arms and the two of them fell to the ground together. She was on fire, and Nunnenmacher tried to douse the flames on her back and in her hair, burning his own hands in the process. Captain Bauer came running up and assisted him, and as they extinguished the flames on the girl's body, somebody nearby called out a warning that the wreckage was beginning to sink down closer to the ground. As Nunnenmacher and Bauer carried the badly burned away from the fire, Nunnenmacher saw Dr. Rüdiger, the ship's physician, crawling away from the fire on all fours and called to him to come and help them. Dr. Rüdiger didn't appear to hear him, and Nunnenmacher didn't realize until later that Rüdiger had broken his leg.

They got the girl into an ambulance, and then Nunnenmacher returned again to the ship just in time to assist members of the landing crew as they led a dazed Otto and Elsa Ernst, two of the older passengers, out of the ship through one of the windows on B-deck. Mr. Ernst was about to collapse, and Nunnenmacher took him by the arm, and along with one of the landing crew he helped the elderly couple away from the wreck.

Eugen Nunnenmacher (right) and a civilian ground crew member (left) assist
passengers Otto and Elsa Ernst after their escape from the Hindenburg fire.

Nunnenmacher survived the Hindenburg disaster with only minor burns. He stayed in the States long enough to testify before the US Commerce Department's Board of Inquiry on May 13th, 1937, exactly a week after the disaster. During his testimony, which was through interpreters Karl Loerky and Benjamin Schnitzer, Nunnenmacher avoided mention of the odd behavior of passenger Joseph Späh, evidently preferring to stick with more basic information. He returned to Germany onboard the Europa two days later, along with the surviving members of the ship's steward and kitchen staff.

He did, however, later concur with many of his old shipmates who believed that the Hindenburg had been sabotaged, and like Chief Kubis, tended to point the finger at Joseph Späh, despite the fact that no evidence was ever uncovered to corroborate this theory.

Eugen Nunnenmacher continued to work as a restaurant host throughout the rest of his life. For a time following World War II, he operated the restaurant at the railroad station in Heidenheim, living with his wife in a converted signal tower beside the train tracks. Eventually, they built a café, with an upstairs apartment for themselves.