Erich Spehl

Crew Member

Age: 26

Hometown: Göschweiler, Germany

Crew designation: Rigger

Location at time of fire: Mooring shelf in bow

Died in naval station's infirmary


Erich Spehl was born on December 5th, 1910 on a small family farm in the Black Forest village of Göschweiler. His mother died when he was young, his father later remarried, and eventually Spehl was part of a family of nine children. When he was 18 he left the farm and took an apprenticeship with a saddler and upholsterer named Karl Gratwohl in the village of Markdorf, near Friedrichshafen. Spehl spent the next three years learning the saddler's trade. By the time Spehl was ready to go out on his own, however, the Great Depression had hit Germany and like millions of other Germans, he could not find steady employment. He spent the next couple of years as an itinerant laborer, and finally enlisted for a one-year stint in the new Nazi government's labor corps.

After his government service had ended, in 1934, Spehl managed to find a job with the Luftschiffbau Zeppelin in Friedrichshafen. This was likely due in part to the fact that his father had been a member of the Nazi party since the 1920s, and had the connections that such a long-time association would tend to bring. But since Spehl quickly moved from a job in the airship construction facility to a position as a rigger with the crew of the LZ-127 Graf Zeppelin, his success at the Zeppelin Company was almost certainly based primarily on his own merits and abilities. And in fact, a note from his employment record from shortly after Spehl joined the Graf Zeppelin's crew states, "He dedicates himself to his new job with great care and enthusiasm."

Erich Spehl first flew as a rigger on the Graf Zeppelin on a flight to South America in November of 1934. He learned the rigger's trade under the tutelage of Chief Rigger Ludwig Knorr, a Zeppelin Company "old-timer" who had been an airship rigger since before the first World War. The skills Spehl had learned during his saddler's apprenticeship, particularly those involving needle and thread, served him well as a rigger and he learned to maintain and repair the Graf Zeppelin's outer cover, its ballast bags and control cables, and its huge gas cells.

Erich Spehl looking out porthole on starboard side of the Hindenburg's lower tail fin, near emergency control stand.

When the Zeppelin Company completed the LZ-129 Hindenburg in 1936, Spehl was transferred to the new ship where he continued to serve under Chief Knorr. He was aboard the Hindenburg's maiden flight on March 4th, 1936 and flew on most, if not all, of the ship's flights for the remainder of the year, including seven round-trip flights to South America and ten round-trip flights to the United States.

Erich Spehl (l.) and unidentified crewman on mooring shelf of the Hindenburg during a landing at Lakehurst, NJ, 1936.

Erich Spehl (r.) and Chief Engineer Rudolf Sauter (l.) pose atop the mooring mast at Lakehurst, 1936.

Spehl, whose father passed away in 1936, would still visit his family in Göschweiler when he had free time in between flights. A shy young man, Spehl would speak occasionally with his family and closest friends of his experiences on the Zeppelins and of his journeys across the sea to Rio and New York. He was, however, very proud to be a member of a Zeppelin crew.

During the winter of 1936-1937, the Hindenburg made no flights and was instead laid up in its hangar for a winter overhaul. Erich Spehl, along with a number of his fellow crewmates, served out eight weeks of compulsory military service during this time. Because of their position as members of a Zeppelin crew, and since the Zeppelin Company fell under the purview of the Reich Air Ministry, Spehl and his comrades were allowed to do their time at boot camp with a Luftwaffe unit. They were all back aboard the Hindenburg, however, when flights commenced in March of 1937.

Erich Spehl was aboard the Hindenburg for its first North American flight of 1937, which began in Frankfurt on the evening of May 3rd. As usual, Spehl's chief was Ludwig Knorr, and the two of them rotated watches with fellow rigger Hans Freund. The flight proceeded smoothy, without incident. On the evening of May 6th, Spehl finished his last two-hour watch of the flight at 6:00 PM and went to the crew's mess for dinner. The Hindenburg approached the landing field at Lakehurst, NJ about an hour later, and when the signal for landing stations was sounded shortly after 7:00 PM, Spehl went forward to the mooring shelf at the tip of the ship's bow. Here, he would man the telephone extension to the control car and relay orders to the other three men (helmsman Alfred Bernhardt, elevatorman Kurt Bauer, and senior elevatorman Ernst Huchel) who were tasked with dropping the landing ropes and winching down the thick steel mooring cable.

Shortly after the four men arrived at their landing station, elevatorman trainee Ludwig Felber was sent forward on orders from the watch officer, and he replaced Bauer, who climbed down from the mooring shelf and found a spot about a hundred feet aft along the lower keel where he watched the landing through a hatch. About five minutes later, several more crewmen were sent forward to help trim the ship for landing, and several took positions alongside the stairs leading to the mooring shelf, just below Spehl and the others.

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

A few minutes later, the Hindenburg caught fire and almost immediately began to tilt steeply aft. Fire came shooting forward through the gas cells and along the axial catwalk, which ended just behind the mooring shelf. Spehl and the others were right in the path of this huge pillar of flame and were immediately engulfed by the fire. Most of the other men nearby leaped through the burning outer cover and fell to their immediate deaths. Spehl, along with Felber and Bernhardt, somehow managed to hold on and survive the initial crash, and the three men were pulled from the wreck by rescuers.

Erich Spehl, still alive but horribly burned, was taken to the air station's infirmary. As he lay in one of the beds, he managed to communicate to one of the attendants that he wished to send a telegram to his girlfriend back in Frankfurt. The attendant searched through the infirmary for somebody who spoke both German and English, so that the telegram could be written down and sent as soon as possible. Passenger Joseph Spah, slightly injured, returned with the attendant to Spehl's bedside, and copied down the address. Spehl then managed to dictate a two-word message: "Ich lebe." ("I live.") However, as Spah turned to go and send the message, Erich Spehl passed away.

His body was taken back to Germany and buried in Göschweiler.

Erich Spehl's grave in Göschweiler

Approximately 25 years after the Hindenburg disaster, a theory that the Hindenburg had been sabotaged was published in A.A. Hoehling's book "Who Destroyed The Hindenburg?", and Erich Spehl was named as the alleged saboteur. Ten years later, author Michael Mooney, writing a tie-in book for a planned Hollywood feature film about the Hindenburg disaster, repeated and expanded upon Hoehling's sabotage theory. In short, it was alleged that Erich Spehl had planted a time bomb next to one of the gas cells in the aft section of the ship, intending that it detonate after landing (and in front of American reporters) in order to gain international exposure for the German anti-Nazi resistance movement of which, it was further claimed, Spehl and his girlfriend were a part.

The accusation that Erich Spehl was a saboteur who destroyed the Hindenburg was and remains absolutely baseless and without merit. Hoehling based his theory on the thinnest of circumstantial evidence, half-truths, and cherry-picked fragments of eyewitness testimony, all designed to support a sabotage theory that, it was hoped, would sell books. Key figures interviewed by Hoehling subsequently disputed Hoehling's conclusions as well as his interpretation of some of their own statements. Hoehling himself was, in his own book, only able to offer Spehl as a potential saboteur, so shaky was the ground on which his theory had been constructed.

Mooney, despite presenting his book as a work of non-fiction, merely took Hoehling's work and added layer upon layer of fictionalization, effectively turning Erich Spehl into a character from a pulp novel. While Mooney implied that he had done extensive interviews in Germany, it turned out that he had spoken only briefly (and through a translator who spoke very little German) with a single relative of Erich Spehl - a sister-in-law who had married Spehl's older brother some time after the Hindenburg disaster. From this, Mooney concocted a fanciful back story for Spehl that seems to have existed primarily in Mooney's own imagination, and which was once again designed to sell books (and also, given Mooney's movie deal, to sell movie tickets.)

Unfortunately, these two books and the movie were enough to link Erich Spehl's name with the concept of a sabotage plot in a number of subsequent publications and documentaries - though few (if any) serious students of airship history have ever granted the theory the least bit of legitimacy. Research into the process by which the Erich Spehl sabotage story was originally constructed has shown that the theory was, to put it mildly, essentially an act of libel.

Special thanks 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 Spehl's career, and to Dr. Cheryl Ganz for providing me with a copy of the article.

Ludwig Knorr

Crew Member

Age: 45

Hometown: Kohren-Sahlis, Germany

Crew designation: Chief Rigger

Location at time of fire: Either in bow or on axial gangway

Died in wreck


Ludwig Knorr was born Alexander Heinrich Ludwig Knorr on October 9, 1891 in Kohren-Sahlis, a small town in Germany's Saxony region. He was married in 1914 and was the father of two daughters. As an adolescent, Knorr studied ballooning under an aeronaut named Spiegel in nearby Leipzig, making his first solo balloon flight in 1906 at age 15, for which he skipped two days of school. He sought out Count von Zeppelin in Friedrichshafen in 1908, and by 1912 he was a rigger onboard the DELAG passenger airship, Sachsen.

In World War I, Knorr served aboard Army Zeppelins Z-12, LZ-90, LZ-98 and LZ-120, flying on raids over England, as well as a flight over Africa. After the war, Knorr once again joined the DELAG passenger service for its brief postwar existence, and later served as Chief Rigger aboard the "reparations ship" the LZ-126, and was among the delivery crew when Dr. Hugo Eckener flew the ship to the United States to turn it over to the US Navy at Lakehurst in 1924.

In 1928 the Zeppelin Company built a new airship, the LZ-127 Graf Zeppelin on which Ludwig Knorr once again served as Chief Rigger. On the Graf Zeppelin's first flight to the United States in October of 1928, Knorr was instrumental in saving the ship when a mid-Atlantic storm tore the fabric covering the lower portion of the portside fin. The loose fabric was flapping in the wind, and threatened to foul the elevator along the aft edge of the fin. Dr Eckener, in command of the ship, asked for volunteers to climb out onto the fin to repair the damage. Knorr stepped forward along with Eckener's son Knut, who was one of the ship's helmsmen, navigator Hans Ladewig, and elevatorman Albert Sammt.

Together, the four of them climbed out across rain-slicked girders to the outboard side of the damaged fin. They were lashed together with rope like mountain climbers, with an angry sea 1500 feet directly below them. Using knives and shears, they cut away the loose fabric before it could jam the elevator, and secured the remaining covering to the surrounding framework using rope and blankets.

A rare snapshot of the in-flight repair to the Graf Zeppelin's fin over the North Atlantic. The view is from the hull of the ship looking out into the interior of the fin. Ludwig Knorr is either one of the two men to left or else the man in the center (as the taller man to the right is almost certainly Knut Eckener.)
(photo courtesy of the Luftschiffbau Zeppelin GmBH Archive)

Meanwhile, Dr. Eckener had ordered the ship's engines to be throttled down to prevent the slipstream from dragging the men off of the fin. As the ship picked up rain in the storm, with no forward motion to dynamically lift it, it began to slowly sink toward the ocean. Eckener waited for word from the stern, but when none was forthcoming, he was forced to make the difficult decision to bring the engines back up to speed before the ship crashed.

Minutes later, a message was passed forward: "Work detail safe. Withdrew inside hull when speed increased. Will resume repairs when motors throttled back again." For several hours, this continued, with Knorr and the others climbing out to work on the fin when the ship gained enough altitude for the engines to be idled, and clambering back inside again when the engines were brought back up to speed so the ship could regain altitude once more. Four and a half hours later, the men finished repairs and climbed back inside at last. The Graf Zeppelin flew on to Lakehurst minus about 80% of the lower covering on its port fin, but still airworthy.

Subsequent to this, Knorr flew on every flight of the LZ-127 Graf Zeppelin, including the round-the-world flight in 1929. He stayed with the Graf Zeppelin until March of 1936, when he transferred to the new ship, the LZ-129 Hindenburg. As on the Graf Zeppelin, Knorr was in charge of the riggers on board the Hindenburg. Overall, he reported to Captain Albert Sammt (with whom he had helped to repair the Graf Zeppelin's fin eight years before), and on the Hindenburg's first North American flight of the 1937 season, which began in Frankfurt on May 3rd, Knorr's sailmaking crew consisted of Hans Freund and Erich Spehl. According to Freund, there were no major problems or repairs that Knorr and his riggers had to deal with during the flight, the gas cells and outer cover were all in order, and everything was as routine as could be expected.

On the afternoon of May 6th, the final day of the flight, Captain Sammt was making a final inspection of the ship shortly before going on watch at 4:00 PM. He encountered Knorr at Ring 47 just ahead of the lower tail fin. Knorr, who was at this time on standby watch, was filling the aft water ballast hoses on either side of the keel, and Sammt was puzzled that so much water was being pumped that far aft. Sammt asked about this, and Knorr replied that the command to shift water aft had come from the control car. Sammt immediately countermanded that order, and told Knorr to pump several tons of water forward to the ballast hoses at Ring 62, and furthermore to pump enough water forward to fill the ballast hoses at Ring 281 near the bow of the ship. Sammt later said in his autobiography, "The Chief Rigger was a very reliable man, and I am confident that he carried out my order."

Approximately two hours later, Knorr relieved Erich Spehl and took his final two-hour watch of the flight from 6:00 PM onward.

Over the years there has been some anecdotal suggestion that there might have been a last-minute problem with one of the gas cells, and that Knorr was aware of this problem. The story goes that Chief Steward Heinrich Kubis encountered Knorr at about 7:00 PM on May 6, about half an hour before the fire, and Knorr mentioned something to him about a problem with gas cell #4 in the stern of the ship. Knorr was unclear as to exactly what the problem was, but apparently he made a remark to Kubis that they'd have to make some sort of repair before sailing for Germany later that night.

Kubis allegedly told this story to author A.A. Hoehling in 1961 when Hoehling was conducting research and interviews for his book "Who Destroyed The Hindenburg?" In the absence of additional corroborating evidence, however, it is impossible to tell how much of this may have been embellished to support Hoehling's sabotage theory. The implication made in Hoehling's book is that a saboteur somehow damaged the fabric of gas cell #4 while placing an incendiary device.

While it is conceivable that Knorr might have noticed something amiss with cell 4 during his watch inspection of the gas cells, it is highly unlikely that he would have noticed a problem serious enough for him to have bothered to mention it to the Chief Steward (even in passing) and then not reported that problem to the control car. And he certainly would have stayed near the damaged gas cell until the ship was safely on the ground to make sure that the damage didn't worsen. However, he did not do this.

Just after 7:00 PM, the signal for landing stations sounded, and Knorr took his position which, according to Captain Walter Ziegler, was up along the axial catwalk that tunneled through the center of the gas cells, walking along and monitoring the gas valves during the landing maneuver. The official crew locations diagram later assembled for the Board of Inquiry indicates that when the ship caught fire a short while later, Knorr was on the lower keel at Ring 233, near the bow of the ship. It is unknown, however, whether this is where he was standing or whether it was simply where his body was found in the wreckage.

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

Ludwig Knorr didn't make it out of the ship after the crash, and his body was recovered the next day.

Special thanks to Kay Saupe, whose outstanding web page on Ludwig Knorr was instrumental to me in filling in some of the details of Knorr's early life. Kay's Knorr page (which is in German) is well worth seeking out and can be found HERE.

(Kay is also an excellent amateur astronomer, and some of his photos can be found HERE.)

Hans Freund

Crew Member

Age: 31

Hometown: Rothenburg, Germany

Occupation: Rigger

Location at time of fire: Keel walkway, stern of ship, at top of ladder leading down into lower tail fin.

Survived


Hans Freund was one of three riggers onboard the last flight of the Hindenburg, the others being Erich Spehl and Chief Rigger Ludwig Knorr. Freund had been flying on Zeppelins since 1930, having made a number of shorter trips on the LZ-127 Graf Zeppelin between 1930 and 1932, and then made 16 transatlantic flights on the Graf Zeppelin as a rigger between 1932 and 1935. After the Hindenburg was commissioned in 1936, Freund transferred to the new ship and thereafter made every trip, save one.

As the Hindenburg came in to land at Lakehurst on May 6, 1937, Freund was on standby watch and stationed on the keel walkway aft, near the top of the ladder leading down into the lower tail fin. It was his job to lower the stern landing lines through hatches a meter or so to either side of the walkway. Shortly after he reached his landing station, he lowered several meters of the starboard spider line at Ring 62, just beneath the access ladder leading up the gas vent trunk between gas cells number 4 and 5. He then proceeded to Ring 47, and was in the process of lowering the portside steel landing cable, which during flight was stored down in the lower fin, when the manila rope used to haul the line up from the fin snagged between two bracing wires. He called to helmsman Helmut Lau, who was manning the variometer at the auxiliary control stand in the lower fin, to clear it. Lau climbed partway up the ladder out of the fin and worked the rope loose for Freund, who went back to lowering the steel cable out the belly hatch at Ring 47. He got perhaps a meter or two of the cable lowered.

Hans Freund's location at the time of the fire.

Suddenly, Freund heard "a muffled detonation, a whoom!", and was almost immediately "surrounded by fire... a living Hell." He instinctively leaped down into the lower fin, away from the flames, though later he would not remember anything between the time the fire broke out and the moment he climbed out of the lower fin. As the ship's tail hit the ground, Freund fell on top of Lau as the lower fin collapsed onto its left side. Chief Engineer Rudolf Sauter, who had been supervising the aft landing procedures, yelled at them to climb out the hatch on what had been the starboard side of the fin. Mechanic Richard Kollmer, who had been manning the landing wheel in the lower fin, climbed out first, and Freund followed right behind him, turning to give Lau a hand as he emerged. Freund stumbled clear of the wreckage, and was soon followed by Lau and Chief Sauter. The wind was blowing all the flames and smoke towards the starboard side, and they couldn't see anything. Together, they ran around the stern of the ship to the port side, and were preparing to go into the wreckage to rescue comrades who were trapped in there, screaming. They were restrained by sailors, who were afraid that more fuel tanks would rupture and explode before they could get back out of the wreck.

Hans Freund in the hospital after his escape from the Hindenburg fire.

Amazingly enough, given his proximity to the origin of the fire, Freund escaped with burns on his cheek, his neck, and the back of his head. He was hospitalized for a couple weeks at Royal Pines Hospital in Pinewald, NJ, but was released long enough to give two separate testimonies to the Board of Inquiry convened by the US Department of Commerce. The first, on May 15, 1937, primarily dealt with his landing duties before the fire, the arrangement of the aft landing lines, etc. The second, on May 17, 1937, included his statements on the disaster itself.

Willy von Meister (l.) translating for Hans Freund (r.) at the first of Freund's two appearances before the Board of Inquiry, on Saturday, May 15, 1937.

Hans Freund explaining the locations of the Hindenburg's various landing lines, using a diagram of the ship as a reference, as Willy von Meister (center) and Commander F. W. Knox (left) look on. From Freund's first appearance before the Board, May 15, 1937.

Freund returned to Germany approximately two weeks after the disaster, onboard the steamship Bremen along with a number of other crew survivors, arriving in Bremerhaven on May 28th. He resumed his duties as rigger in September of 1938 when the Hindenburg’s sister ship, the LZ-130 Graf Zeppelin, made its maiden flight.

Hans Freund survived the war, and opened a pub, Der Cafe und Weinstube, in the small, walled city of Rothenburg.