Ernst Huchel

Crew Member

Age: 31

Hometown: Friedrichshafen, Germany

Occupation: Senior elevatorman

Location at time of fire: Bow, mooring shelf

Died in wreck


Ernst Huchel was born on February 26, 1906 in the village of Satuelle, which was situated northwest of Magdeburg, the capital of the Prussian province of Sachsen (Saxony.) Apprenticed as an engine fitter, Huchel found work at the Maybach Motorenbau, and at Luftschiffbau Zeppelin in the tank/container division. He later completed engineering school and on August 5th, 1930, he was hired by Luftschiffbau Zeppelin as an engineer in the construction office.

In 1935, Huchel was taken on as part of the crew of the LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin, on which he stood watch as a helmsman, gradually training up to become an elevatorman. The following year, when the LZ 129 Hindenburg was completed, Huchel transferred to the new ship as the ship's senior elevatorman. He flew on the Hindenburg's maiden voyage on March 4th, 1936, and on most flights thereafter.

A senior elevatorman, Huchel was also in charge of the Hindenburg's freight, both loading and unloading it, and keeping the freight logs. In addition, he was also tasked with looking after special freight while the ship was in flight. The Hindenburg would often transport unusual items in its freight compartments, including airplanes, automobiles, and even on one occasion in August of 1936, a pair of live pronghorn antelope.

Huchel had married Else Baumann, and in 1936 he became the father of twin boys. He was also, in his spare time, an avid sailplane pilot, serving as a flight instructor, as well as the leader of the local glider club in Friedrichshafen.

On the Hindenburg's first North American trip of 1937, which left on the evening of May 3rd, Huchel served once again as senior elevatorman, the other two elevatormen aboard the flight being Kurt Bauer and Ludwig Felber. He also handled his usual duties overseeing the ship's freight, of which there wasn't a great deal on this particular flight.

There were, however, two dogs aboard – one being sent to a man named Fred Muller in Philadelphia, and the other being shipped by a passenger named Joseph Späh. Huchel, on his standby watch, would walk aft to the kennel basket at Ring 90 to feed and check in on Mr. Muller's dog, usually with one of the stewards. Mr. Späh insisted on feeding and looking after his dog himself.

Ernst Huchel at the Hindenburg's elevator wheel, circa 1936.

Ernst Huchel was off-watch as the Hindenburg came in to land at Lakehurst at the end of its final flight on the evening of May 6th, 1937, and as such he would normally have taken a landing station above the control car, manning the spider lines. However, since the ship was making a flying moor instead of the usual German-style low landing, the spiders weren’t used. Instead, Huchel took a landing station at the mooring area in the bow with along with helmsman Alfred Bernhardt, rigger Erich Spehl, and trainee elevatorman Ludwig Felber.

Ernst Huchel's approximate location at the time of the fire.
(Hindenburg structural diagram courtesy of David Fowler)

When the fire broke out a short while later, Huchel and the others in the bow were engulfed by fire as the blaze shot up out of the nose of the ship and ignited the forward-most hydrogen cell. Huchel seems to have been standing on the lower mooring platform, from which the forward yaw lines had been dropped. While Bernhardt, Felber, and Spehl remained in the ship until it was on the ground, Huchel tried to escape the flames by leaping from the four-paned observation window between the mooring rope hatches. Unfortunately, the ship's bow was still several hundred feet in the air, and Huchel was killed when he hit the ground.

A crewman, probably Ernst Huchel, plunges to earth after having leapt from the tip of the Hindenburg's bow.

Ernst Huchel's body (foreground) after having been dragged away from the wreckage.

Ernst Huchel's body was shipped back to Germany the following week, May 13th, aboard the steamship Hamburg.

Ironically, Jakob Baumann, the father of Ernst Huchel's wife Else had also been killed on a Zeppelin. During World War I, Baumann was chief engine mechanic aboard the German Naval airship SL 11, commanded by Hauptmann Wilhelm Schramm. On the night of September 2-3, 1916, SL 11 took part in a multi-airship bombing raid on London. At approximately 2:30 in the morning, the airship was overtaken and shot down in flames by a biplane flown by Lt. William Leefe Robinson. SL 11 slowly fell to earth, ablaze from end to end, and landed in the London suburb of Cuffley. All aboard, including Jakob Baumann, were killed. The crew was buried in nearby Potter's Bar.


Special thanks to Michael Pavlovic for helping me to confirm the identity of Ernst Huchel in the wreck photos shown above.

Thanks also to Herr Manfred Sauter of the Freundeskreis zur Förderung des Zeppelin Museums e.V., whose memorial article on the Hindenburg crew members who lost their lives at Lakehurst (Zeppelin Brief, No. 59, June 2011) provided additional details on Huchel's career, and to Dr. Cheryl Ganz for providing me with a copy of the article.

Ludwig Felber

Crew Member

Age: 34

Hometown: Waging am See, Germany

Occupation: Elevatorman

Location at time of fire: Bow mooring shelf

Died in hospital



Ludwig Felber was one of three elevatormen on the Hindenburg's last flight, the others being Kurt Bauer and Ernst Huchel.

Born on September 30, 1903 in Waging am See, a Bavarian lakeside town near the German/Austrian border, Felber was forced to leave his hometown at the age of 22 after fathering an illegitimate daughter. Disowned by his parents, Felber moved to Friedrichshafen, where he married his sweetheart and sought work to support his wife and daughter. He was eventually hired by the Luftshiffbau Zeppelin in 1932 as a riveter, and worked in the ring and framework assembly departments as the company built their new airship, the LZ 129 Hindenburg.

He was eventually hired as a Zeppelin crewman, first serving as a rigger on the LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin under Chief Rigger Ludwig Knorr. When the Hindenburg was put into service in 1936, Felber was assigned to the ship as one of its helmsmen, and he manned the rudder wheel on the Hindenburg's maiden flight on March 4th, 1936.

Ludwig Felber (right, in leather coat) at the Hindenburg's rudder wheel in 1936. (photo courtesy of the Luftschiffbau Zeppelin GmBH Archive)

During the Hindenburg's first North American flight of the 1937 season, Felber was standing watch as an elevatorman trainee, having recently been promoted to that position. On his last standby watch, between 4:00 and 6:00 in the late afternoon of May 6th, 1937, Felber made ready the landing tackle on the mooring shelf in the Hindenburg's bow. He went on watch at 6:00, and was at the elevator wheel in the control car as the ship approached the landing field at Lakehurst, NJ an hour later. However, since the crew was going to have to bring the ship in to land in inclement weather, Captain Albert Sammt, the watch officer on duty, ordered navigator Eduard Boetius, a more experienced elevatorman who was on watch in the control car, to take over for Felber. Sammt sent Felber forward to the mooring shelf in the bow to take a landing station there alongside Ernst Huchel, who was the senior elevatorman aboard. Felber relieved fellow elevatorman Kurt Bauer, who in turn took a landing station along the keel just ahead of the control car.

Ludwig Felber's approximate location at the time of the fire.
(Hindenburg structural diagram courtesy of David Fowler)

When the Hindenburg caught fire a short time later Felber, standing on the mooring shelf and probably assisting with the lowering of the main mooring cable, was right in line with the huge tongue of flame which shot up through the ship's axial walkway and out the bow. Astonishingly, Felber was pulled from the wreck alive, albeit very badly burned. He was taken to nearby Paul Kimball Hospital, where he lasted into the night, and died early in the morning on Friday, May 7th, 1937. His body, along with those of his comrades who died in the fire, was returned to Germany onboard the steamship Hamburg, which sailed from New York a week later on May 13^th.

Two photos of a badly burned crew survivor, very likely Ludwig Felber, being led from the bow of the Hindenburg.

Ludwig Felber, despite having left his hometown in disgrace over a decade before, was buried in the cemetery in Waging am See, laid to rest with full military honors as a hero of the German Reich.

Ludwig Felber's grave in Waging am See.

Thanks also to Herr Manfred Sauter of the Freundeskreis zur Förderung des Zeppelin Museums e.V., whose memorial article on the Hindenburg crew members who lost their lives at Lakehurst (Zeppelin Brief, No. 59, June 2011) provided additional details on Felber's career, and to Dr. Cheryl Ganz for providing me with a copy of the article.

Eduard Boëtius

Crew Member

Age: 27

Hometown: Föhr, Germany

Occupation: Navigator (third officer)

Location at time of fire: Elevator wheel, control car

Survived


Eduard Boëtius (pronounced "Boh-ey-tee-us") was a navigator on the Hindenburg's final flight, along with Max Zabel, Franz Herzog, and Christian Nielsen. Born on the North Frisian island of Föhr in 1910, Boëtius went to sea at age 19, signing onboard the Laeisz Transport Company's four-masted, square-rigged barque Peking. He spent two years serving on the Peking, rated first as an ordinary seaman and eventually as an able seaman. When the Peking was sold in 1932, Boëtius transferred to the Laeisz steamship Poseidon. During his four years as a merchant seaman, Eduard Boëtius made the perilous journey around Cape Horn six times. Having occasionally been allowed to stand at the helm during his time onboard the Peking, and more often when serving on the Poseidon, Boëtius had shown himself to have considerable talent at the wheel of a ship, particularly in difficult waters such as the Straits of Magellan.

In 1934, therefore, Boëtius began studying at the navigation school in Hamburg. After two years of study, he passed his examinations and became licensed as a ship's officer and also as a radio operator. A classmate named Gerd von Mensenkampff, who was employed with the Deutsche Zeppelin Reederei and training to be an airship navigator, convinced Boëtius to look to the future and consider a career as an airshipman. The Zeppelin Company was in the process of establishing an international airship service, and was planning to build a fleet of passenger airships – for which they would obviously need a growing number of trained navigators and watch officers.

Eduard Boëtius was hired by the DZR in May of 1936. His first flight was a short transfer flight on May 22nd, 1936 from Frankfurt to Friedrichshafen aboard the LZ-127 Graf Zeppelin, though he had not yet been assigned duties. Once in Friedrichshafen, he began undergoing training in preparation for a position on the DZR's new ship, the LZ-129 Hindenburg. He would begin as a rigger under Chief Rigger Ludwig Knorr, and move up through the various command crew stations (helmsman, elevatorman, navigator, watch officer) and eventually perhaps even be given a command of his own.

His first flight as a member of the Hindenburg's crew was on June 16th, 1936. The ship had been chartered by the Krupp Company, one of Germany's leading armament manufacturers, for a company outing for various company executives as well as several Krupp family members. During this flight, which was primarily over Switzerland, Boëtius served as a rigger. He progressed quickly, however, and by August of that year he was already standing watch at the rudder wheel in the control car. Shortly thereafter, he shifted over to the elevator wheel, where his natural talents as a helmsman on a seagoing vessel took on a new dimension as he guided the Hindenburg through the vertical plane, using feel and instinct as much as instruments to maintain the ship's pitch.

Eduard Boëtius at the elevator wheel of the Hindenburg.

By the time of the Hindenburg's first North American flight of the 1937 season during the first week of May, Eduard Boëtius had been promoted to navigator. Along with fellow navigators Franz Herzog, Max Zabel, and Christian Nielsen, Boëtius determined the ship's course, drift, position, and speed using the very latest in long-range navigational techniques and weather forecasting methods.

As the Hindenburg came in on its final landing approach to the Naval Air Station at Lakehurst, NJ on the evening of May 6th, Boëtius was in the navigation room in the center of the control car along with Nielsen and Zabel. He sounded the signal for landing stations shortly after 7:00 PM. The still somewhat unfavorable weather conditions over Lakehurst prompted the watch officer on duty, Captain Albert Sammt, to order Boëtius, more experienced and steady-handed as an elevatorman, to take over the elevator wheel in place of Ludwig Felber, who had only recently begun to stand watch as an elevatorman. Felber turned the wheel over to Boëtius with the ship about 3-4 degrees light in the bow and slightly tail-heavy, and then proceeded forward to take a landing station in the bow.

Eduard Boëtius' location in the control car at the time of the fire.

As the Hindenburg floated over the landing field and the ground crew was taking up the landing lines, Boëtius felt the ship jerk suddenly. He looked out a window and saw a reddish glow in the air, but was not immediately aware that the ship had caught fire. As the stern dropped and the bow pointed up at a 45-degree angle, Boëtius clung to his elevator wheel as the rest of the command crew lost their footing. Amazingly, however, Boëtius noticed a complete lack of panic in the control car. He looked out the front windows of the car and saw crew members falling from the bow of the ship, some from a fairly great height. As Boëtius later learned, the fire shot out the bow in a great pillar, killing most of the men who had been stationed there, including Ludwig Felber, whom Boëtius had replaced at the elevator at the last moment.

When the ship's bow began to drop, Boëtius climbed up onto a window just aft of his elevator wheel. He hesitated, not wanting to leap too soon and perhaps break a leg and not be able to run clear of the wreck. Captain Heinrich Bauer, standing behind Boëtius and wanting to use the same window for his own escape, called out "Jump, Eddi!" However, Boëtius knew that the ship was still too high in the air yet. He waited until the landing wheel under the control car touched the ground, and then jumped from a height of 10 to 12 feet. He landed on his feet and ran to portside with all his might to get out from under the descending wreckage.

Eduard Boëtius crouches in a control car window (arrow) preparing to jump. Navigator Christian Nielsen is doing the same in the window just aft of Boëtius.

Boëtius (arrow) lands on the ground after jumping from the control car. Nielsen drops to the ground just behind him, having jumped from the navigation room window a split second after Boëtius.

Boëtius made it clear of the wreck, which collapsed to earth just behind him, and he then ran back toward the ship where he found engineer Raphael Schädler lying unconscious on the ground a short distance from the #4 engine car. Boëtius hauled him over to some sailors who were showing survivors to trucks and ambulances. He then headed for the passenger decks along with Captain Walter Ziegler, steward Fritz Deeg, and fellow navigator Christian Nielsen in an attempt to rescue as many of those trapped in the wreckage as possible. They returned to the wreck several times until the structure had completely collapsed and there was no hope of rescuing anyone else. Boëtius then headed around the bow to the starboard side. There, he found elevatorman Kurt Bauer lying dazed on the ground some distance from the wreck. Bauer got up, and the two of them walked back around the bow to the port side, and saw rescuers carrying a body from the ruins of the ship's nose section.

The next day, Boëtius returned to the wreckage and searched around the general vicinity of his crew quarters, looking for any of his possessions which might have survived the fire, particularly a set of cufflinks that his father had given to him. Normally, Boëtius wore them with his uniform, but since it had been such a warm day as they flew into Lakehurst, Boëtius had opted to wear a short-sleeved shirt under his uniform jacket, and had left his cufflinks in his quarters. Amazingly, he managed to find one of them amid the charred wreckage. He carried it with him for the rest of his life as a memento.

Eduard Boëtius testified before the US Commerce Department's Board of Inquiry into the Hindenburg fire on May 19th, and slightly more than two weeks after the disaster he, along with a number of his fellow crew survivors, sailed home to Germany onboard the steamship Bremen, arriving in Bremerhaven a week later on May 28th. On his return to Germany, Eduard Boëtius was, along with several other crew members, awarded a medal for his efforts in rescuing passengers.

Boëtius continued to work with the DZR, serving aboard the LZ-130 during its short operational life beginning the following year. Not long after this, he was drafted into the German navy, and was made captain of a U-boat supply ship (a converted whaler) in the sea near Norway. The ship was struck by a Russian torpedo while fleeing pursuers, and sank within minutes. After seeing his entire crew into lifeboats, Boëtius leapt into the icy water, and was lucky enough to be picked up before he drowned. It was the second time that Eduard Boëtius had narrowly avoided death.

Eduard Boëtius circa 1984

In an interview with the German magazine "Der Spiegel" in 2000, Boëtius was asked whether he thought it pure chance that he had escaped death twice. He replied, "I think about that to this day. What is chance, what is fate? I can't find an answer, and perhaps that's just as well." When asked if his experiences have affected the way he views death, Boëtius answered, "When the time comes, I'm ready. It's been a long, but never dull life. When I look back, I was always a man who had to do with the end of an era. I experienced the ending of the great sail ships, and then the demise of airships, the end of whaling, and then after the war, the end of traditional parcel service giving way to containerized shipping." When the interviewer remarked that Boëtius sounded resigned to having always come in on the losing end of these things, Boëtius asked him, "Do you know any 90 year-old who isn't resigned?" and continued, "As far as my professional life is concerned, it shows me how rather short-lived so-called progress is."

Eduard Boëtius passed away on November 7, 2002, in Schülp, Germany, where he had retired just down the coast from his home island of Föhr. He was 92.


(Special thanks to Siegfried Geist, whose obituary for Herr Boëtius helped me to fill in a lot of information about Boëtius' post-Zeppelin life. I also was able to glean a great deal about Boëtius' earlier life as a merchant marine and his eventual employment with the Zeppelin Company from the book "Phoenix aus Asche" – titled simply "Phoenix" for its English-language release, by Eduard Boëtius' son Henning, who based his book in part on his father's life story.)

Kurt Bauer

Crew Member

Age: 30

Hometown: Buchschlag, Germany

Location at time of fire: Keel walkway, halfway between control car and bow

Occupation: Elevatorman

Survived



Kurt Bauer was one of three elevatormen who flew on the Hindenburg's last voyage, the other two being Ludwig Felber and Ernst Huchel. Originally hired by the DZR on November 1st, 1936, Bauer had previously been a merchant marine, and held captain's patent papers. Bauer was made an elevatorman immediately, and was likely being groomed for eventual promotion to watch officer status in anticipation of additional airships being built for the DZR in the coming years.

As an elevatorman, Bauer was obviously in charge of manning the elevator wheel when he was on watch, maintaining altitude and pitch, et cetera. In addition to this, however, he was also charged with monitoring the ship's water ballast in flight (and replenishing it while the ship was moored) and running the hydrogen inflation lines to top off the gas cells after each flight (and measuring the purity of the hydrogen as well.) He and his fellow elevatormen also had responsibilities as far as making sure the mooring gear was maintained and in place for landing.


Kurt Bauer at the elevator wheel of the Hindenburg
(photo courtesy of the Luftschiffbau Zeppelin GmBH Archive)



The Hindenburg's first North American flight of 1937 was Kurt Bauer's fourth transatlantic flight, in addition to most of the shorter flights within Germany during the off-season. The flight itself was unremarkable for Bauer. On the last morning of the flight, he came on duty at 8:00 AM and as was customary for the elevatorman who took the 8:00 AM watch, Bauer checked the ship's supply of water ballast, estimating that the Hindenburg had between 19.6 and 19.8 tons of ballast aboard. His last watch of the flight was from 2:00 PM until 4:00 PM, but other than the fact that the air was quite bumpy during that time, nothing seemed even mildly out of the ordinary.

Bauer was on standby watch as the Hindenburg came in to land at Lakehurst, and when the signal was sounded for landing stations, he went to his spot on the mooring shelf up in the bow. Once he arrived, he noticed that the mooring tackle was already prepared for landing. As Bauer watched the approach to the landing field through an observation window, fellow elevatorman Ludwig Felber unexpectedly climbed up onto the mooring shelf. Felber, recently promoted to elevatorman, had been on watch in the control car when Captain Albert Sammt, the watch officer on duty in the control car at that time, decided that the inclement weather was such that he preferred to put a more experienced man on the elevator wheel. Navigator Eduard Boetius was called over to take the wheel, and Felber was sent forward to take Bauer's place on the mooring shelf. Bauer, therefore, relinquished his landing station and proceeded back to the off-watch elevatorman's station along the keel above the control car.

Normally, when the ship was making the traditional "low" landing, with the ship being brought down to the ground and walked up to the mooring mast by the ground crew, Bauer's duty would have been to lower the spider lines on either side of the control car. After Bauer reached the drop point for the spider lines, though, it occurred to him that these ropes would not be used in the American-style "high" landing planned for this trip. He had little to do besides simply to find a nearby vantage point from which to watch the landing operations below.

Bauer walked a short distance back towards the bow and climbed onto a platform on the starboard side just above one of the two triangular ventilation hatches which flanked the keel walkway just forward of the captain's cabin. A few minutes later, six of his comrades passed by on their way to the bow, having been ordered forward so as to help trim the ship using their body weight. One of the men, a ship's cook named Alfred Grözinger, took a spot just across the keel walkway above the other ventilation hatch, and together they watched the two trail ropes from the bow drop to the ground below.

Kurt Bauer's location at the time of the fire.
(Hindenburg structural diagram courtesy of David Fowler)

As Bauer watched the ground crew working the port yaw line and saw the steel mooring cable beginning to descend from the nose cone, he suddenly heard a "cracking shock" which originated aft of his position. Almost immediately, he saw yellow flames over his head up in the axial walkway. Then the Hindenburg sank down by the stern, and Bauer felt the ship crashing to earth far behind him. Turning his attention back to the triangular vent hatch once again, he looked outside the ship and saw, along with burning fabric and bits of debris, a body falling from the bow. With the ship still tilted at a steep angle, Bauer managed to hold on to a girder and wait for the ship to descend, while several of the men who were standing forward of him, like the man whose body he'd just seen, simply chose to leap to their deaths rather than burn alive. He turned his head and looked aft and saw the main frame wiring of Ring 218 pushed through from aft towards the bow and break.

Realizing that his portion of the ship would be nearing the ground soon, Bauer watched for his opportunity to jump while the ship was still high enough that he could land and run to safety before the burning framework fell over him. He was surrounded by flames, which were particularly close above him as the fire blazed away up in the axial walkway and the gas cells overhead. Pieces of girder-work and other bits of wreckage were falling from above Bauer, and he assumed that these must be chunks of the axial girder melting and breaking loose in the fire. He noticed no heat, however, and he later attributed this remarkable bit of luck to the inrush of fresh, cool air being drawn up through the vent hatch over which he was standing. He felt the ship begin its final crash to the ground, and as the structure began to collapse around him he lowered himself through the triangular ventilation hatch below him, dropped to the sandy ground below, landed safely, and ran as fast as he could to get clear of the falling wreckage before it trapped him. As he ran off to starboard, he felt as though the ship was pursuing him. Bauer suddenly felt sharp pains in his chest, and as he heard the wreck finally collapse to the earth behind him, he fell at last to the ground.

Kurt Bauer (circled) hangs from the starboard air vent just forward of Ring 218.

Bauer drops to the ground as the Hindenburg's hull begins to rebound slightly back into the air.

Bauer runs to safety as the Hindenburg's framework begins to collapse to the ground.

Bauer rolled himself over on his back so that he could get a look at what was left of the ship. It was covered in flames and thick black smoke from end to end. He estimated that he was about 60 feet away from the remains of the ship's bow, and as he lay there several members of the landing crew came up to him and told him to stay lying where he was on the ground. He stayed there for some time, stunned. Suddenly Bauer saw his friend Eduard Boetius coming around the bow from the port side. Boetius, ignoring the landing crew, helped Bauer get to his feet, and together they returned to the portside of the ship where other crew survivors were gathering. As they passed by the bow, they saw rescuers carrying a dead body out of the wreck.

Miraculously, Kurt Bauer made it through the disaster without being seriously injured. Had Ludwig Felber not been ordered to take his position up on the mooring shelf, Bauer would have almost certainly been killed, as Felber was. In fact, other than Bauer, only two men survived out of the dozen stationed in the bow at the time of the fire: electrician Josef Leibrecht, who had been standing a short distance forward of Bauer, and Alfred Grözinger, the cook who was standing directly across the keel catwalk from Bauer. The other eight men stationed in the bow all died, either in the fire or in nearby hospitals over the next day or so.

Bauer testified before the US Commerce Department's Board of Inquiry on May 19th, almost two weeks after the disaster, recounting his experience for investigators. In the course of his testimony the Board specifically asked him, among other things, to clarify his statement that he'd seen fire burning forward along the axial catwalk before the ship tilted aft, and he confirmed that this was precisely what he'd seen. A couple of days later, Bauer returned home to Germany onboard the steamship Bremen along with a group of fellow survivors.

Kurt Bauer served in the German military during WWII, and reportedly died during the parachute assault on Crete, on or about May 20, 1941.