05/27/2021

Vintage home movie film provided by New Jersey radio amateur Bob Schenck, N2OO,
was the highlight of a PBS documentary about the Hindenburg disaster. The film,
shot by his uncle Harold Schenck, may provide clues as to what initiated the
disastrous 1937 fire that destroyed the airship Hindenburg and claimed 35 lives
as the German zeppelin was landing at Lakehurst, New Jersey. Harold Schenck
tried to interest government investigators in his film, shot from a different
angle than newsreel footage that begins only after the fire was well under way,
but it was largely overlooked. "Nobody ever asked for it," Bob Schenck explains
in the documentary.

The Schenck film is the highlight of a PBS "NOVA" documentary, Hindenburg: The
New Evidence[1], that investigates the issue in considerable depth in an effort
to unlock the secrets of the cold case. The program aired on May 19 and remains
available for streaming.

"My dad had bought this nifty Kodak camera - a wind-up movie camera, 8
millimeters - and he couldn't come [to the Hindenburg landing] because he
worked," Bob Schenck recounted during the documentary. "So, he asked my uncle
and my mom if they would take some shots and see the Hindenburg land."

Bob Schenck approached Dan Grossman, an expert on airships, including
Hindenburg, in 2012 during a commemoration of the disaster that forever
memorialized radio reporter Herbert Morrison's plaintive on-air reaction, "Oh,
the humanity!" The NOVA documentary not only shares Schenck's footage, which
provided new clues to re-examine the cause of the explosion. The documentary
also reviews scientific experiments that helped investigators come to a fresh
understanding of what set off the fire.

The original investigation concluded only that the fire resulted from leaking
hydrogen ignited by a spark, but it was never determined just what caused the
spark. Witness accounts suggested the fire started near the airship's tail, but
supporting evidence was hard to find until the Schenck footage was examined.

"The Hindenburg remains vivid in our collective memories all these years later
because of the searing images and film of the explosion," said NOVA
co-executive producer Chris Schmidt in a Manchester Patch article[2]. "We feel
honored to share this new footage with the world and to bring the NOVA audience
behind the scenes of this pivotal new investigation into the crash." - Some
information from Manchester Patch; thanks to Pete Varounis, NL7XM 

[1] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/hindenburg-the-new-evidence/
[2] https://patch.com/new-jersey/manchester-nj/pbs-hindenburg-shares-overlooked-footage-explosion

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