Nearly 88 years ago, on the evening of May 6, 1937, the Hindenburg passenger airship met its fiery fate. The German dirigible, which had departed from Frankfurt days earlier, was moments away from landing at a naval air station in Lakehurst, N.J., when it burst into flames. Of the 97 people aboard, 35 were killed; a member from the ground crew was also killed.
The harrowing incident was famously captured on newsreel and in a number of photographs. The late city edition of The New York Times on May 7, 1937, featured an image of the crash, credited to The Associated Press, on its front page.
Several New York Times images of the burning craft, and the crash’s aftermath, were tucked away in the edition’s inside pages.
One vertical image, above, shows the flaming Hindenburg striking the ground, illuminating two shadowed figures who appear to be running near the wreckage; it was captioned “The blazing airliner as she settled slowly to the ground.”
Another photo that appeared inside depicted a large crowd gathered around the smoldering debris. Those two photos, and others, also appeared in the paper on Sunday, May 9, 1937, as part of a special picture section.
The photos are now stored in the morgue, the newspaper’s archival library.
The Hindenburg crash effectively brought about the end of the commercial airship industry. Werner G. Doehner, the disaster’s last survivor, died in 2019, at age 90.
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