Eighty years ago this week, the airship Hindenburg erupted into flames while nearing the mooring mast at New Jersey’s Lakehurst Naval Air Station. From a nearby hangar, radio reporter Herbert Morrison described the unfolding horror. Thirty-six people died in the Hindenburg airship fire. Morrison, employed by Chicago radio station WLS, had traveled to Lakehurst equipped with a new type of portable recording device, and his emotional description of the conflagration became one of the 20th century’s most famous broadcasts.
Morrison’s recording offered the nation a first glimpse of broadcast journalism’s stunning emotional potential. “Oh, it burst into flames, get out of the way, please … this is terrible!” Morrison cried. “This is one of the worst catastrophes in the world!” A year later, actor Frank Readick listened to Morrison’s Hindenburg broadcast to prepare for his role as panic-stricken newscaster Carl Phillips in Orson Welles’ production of War of the Worlds. Readick’s mimicry of Morrison's performance jolted listeners, just as Morrison’s emotional cry of “Oh, the humanity!” had resonated with those who heard his heart-rending words in real time.
Morrison’s recording structures popular memory of the Hindenburg. But that program’s historical legacy obscures another series of Hindenburg radio broadcasts that remain little-heard and largely forgotten. Those programs, airing on NBC in 1936, dazzled radio listeners in the United States. In broadcasts from Germany, and live relays transmitted from high above the Atlantic, Americans previewed futuristic transportation while peeking in on the lives of the rich and famous. Crossing the Atlantic by airship, in about 2½ days, seemed amazing. Doing so while enjoying sumptuous meals, relaxing in a reading parlor, enjoying cocktails at a bar, or listening to a pianist playing popular tunes, made the experience the apex of Depression-era luxury travel.
NBC’s radio programs celebrating the Hindenburg comprised part of the propaganda campaign undertaken by Germany’s Nazi Party in 1936. That spring, in defiance of the Versailles and Locarno treaties, German troops marched into the Rhineland. A plebiscite ratifying that annexation occurred soon afterwards, and the Nazis used the world’s newest and most sophisticated airship—LZ 129, the Hindenburg—to rally the “Ja” vote by soaring over every big German city. The electoral landslide that followed boosted Hitler’s domestic support.