For context: The Hindenburg was a civilian airship. It crashed in 1937, before the start of the war and 4 years after Hitler took power. The swastica flag was just the flag of the 3rd Reich. You need to understand that everything in the 3rd Reich was controlled by the Nazis and of course many German businessman massively profited by being aligned with Hitlers leadership.
Pretty much all German cooperations that existed back then have very dark histories, from Lufthansa to Mercedes to Dr. Oetker.
That’s the American Navy airship Los Angeles hiding in the background. She was originally built by Zeppelin as war reparations to the US and served safely between 1924 and 1932. She was broken up in 1939.
To be honest I think they really weren’t very practical even besides the accident. To me it’s kind of like saying the crash of the Concorde put everyone off supersonic airliners, but they were also just not profitable and too loud. In the case of these giant airships they were slow, extremely vulnerable to bad weather, and really struggled to carry enough weight to work for the kind of luxury passenger service they would have been good for if I remember correctly. Also requiring ridiculously large hangars for safe storage. I do think it would be neat to keep a handful of really giant Hindenburg-sized ones around as a curiosity but they’re really just probably not practical as a commonly used thing.
This is just my memory of the aviation history here so someone correct me if I’m wrong
They were a product of their time. Airplanes of that period could nominally cross oceans but really weren’t suitable to provide reliable intercontinental passenger service, unlike airships which could regularly fly extreme distances carrying much heavier loads, but the problem was that aviation in general was in its infancy and the market for international flights next to nonexistent. Even by the late 1930s, passenger airships were only just barely beginning to prove the model for long-distance travel, despite a number of setbacks such as the Treaty of Versailles, helium embargo, Great Depression, and so on.
Smaller airships and blimps had been used for advertising and intercity flights before then, but as a means of large-scale transit, there was really not much around at the time. If you wanted to cross an ocean, you took an ocean liner. The Hindenburg did manage to break even in only its first year of operation despite lacking a running-mate on its route and doing a bunch of training and bug-fixes as befitting the prototype lead ship in its new class, but arguably airships were by that time already too early and too late. Too late to benefit from mass production and economics of scale like airplanes, but too early to benefit from the enormous advances in technology, materials, and expertise provided by World War II.
That was very much a problem with aviation in general at the time, which is so astronomically safer now it’s hard to really wrap your head around it.
Ironically, Zeppelin’s commercial airship operations using hydrogen were considerably safer than contemporaneous commercial airplane flights, both per flight hour and per mile traveled, and helium blimps of the time were even safer than that (with Goodyear flying their small fleet of advertising blimps for most of a century without injury or fatality). In 1929, U.S. commercial planes fatally crashed every million miles traveled on average. In modern times, there is a fatal commercial airline crash on average every two billion miles, a 2,000-fold improvement.
"it’s kind of like saying the crash of the Concorde put everyone off supersonic airliners, but they were also just not profitable and too loud"
Or, and this is fairly widely accepted these days, they weren't profitable to build because the US got butthurt about being beaten by the French and British, and implemented some irrational restrictions based on a line of bullshit they came up with to keep the Boeing subsonic airliners competitive. Concorde wasn't that loud, and there were plenty of largely uninhabited air corridors and routes it would have been fine to fly on.
Concorde definitely was profitable to fly. The design & manufacturing program never paid back its costs because only a few were built thanks to the US protectionism/wounded pride.
Anyway, in the end Concorde was grounded because of French embarrassment about BA being able to make profits flying it, while Air France's incompetent leadership kept losing money with it.
The Airbus CEO at the time was a golf buddy of the AF boss, and agreed to withdraw the airworthiness certificate as a favour, even though BA wanted to keep Concorde flying.
Far from the only accident, and far from the worst death toll either. Wikipedia list of airship accidents, see the USS Akron, British R38 and R101, French Dixmude, all in the years prior to Hindenburg, which was really just the final nail in the coffin, not helped by being captured on film.
It's really worth reading Nevil Shute's book Slide Rule about the time he spent working on R100 - the non-government counterpart to R101, which didn't crash.
He's very clearly of the opinion that there was nothing wrong with the concept, the crashes were due to misuse and bad design, and he should certainly know. Also worth bearing in mind that air crashes in general were of course much more common back then, because safety lessons hadn't yet been learned.
Looking at some of the comments here, it's sometimes hard to not argue with people on the internet. Then you reliaze most of these folks don't read books.
It's actually a bit more complicated. The giant swastika flags that were retroactively added to the Hindenburg was part of the Nazis attempt to get the Zeppelin company, of whom they were highly suspicious, in line. Hugo Eckener who was the driving force behind building the Hindenburg is believed to have been quite anti-Nazi, others, including some of the captains, were probably quite open to them. Göring hated airships, Goebbels happily used them in his propaganda and the Zeppelin company didn't resist that strongly.
They probably left it out because we were in elementary school at the time… and the “nazi” part wasn’t particularly relevant to the lesson they were teaching us.
I read Night by Eli Wiesel when I was in the 5th grade and could have read it prior. I think the horrors of war and reading that book are why I am unable to vote like an asshole, or have easily compromised morals
It's tough but kids need to know. We have absolved ourselves of the luxury of protecting children. Our world is at risk, and actual kids are being blown up
It amounts to nothing less than wanting to hide the rise of Nazi Germany from school children of the time. Now more than ever kids need to learn and be supported, but it requires people taking a hard look at the world today and most would rather numb out or hope it ends
I’m confused why your answer is to keep teaching about the Nazi airship, but hide the Nazi part, instead of just not teaching children about the Nazi airship where tons of people died in a horrific accident in the first place.
Because not everything that was labelled with the Nazi flag, during the Nazi regime, is contextually related to the horrors the Nazi regime caused, and building nuanced thought is important.
Are you the kind of person that would remind their mechanic that volkswagen was a brand under the nazi regime every time they take it for maintenance? Or do you remind everyone when you board a plane that part of the high altitude knowledge we have today was obtained when the Nazi regime made unconsencual experiments?
I'm all for reminding people how horrible humans can be, and how we must not repeat history (including the parts where Nazis did horrible shit), but not everything happening in Germany between 1936 until 1945 is necessarily related in every topic of conversation.
VW, Mercedes, bmw, and similarly problematic brand owners/enthusiasts have criticized my vehicle choices on several occasions somewhat recently, and I can’t help but point out the sick irony attached to their dubious sense of moral superiority.
My specific vehicle model was literally designed and built for the expressed purposes of fighting fascists and war criminals, chasing down and crushing the predecessors to vehicle models produced by those manufacturers, and leaving a wake of smoking scrap metal and emptied jack boots strewn across Europe and Asia. That, and providing emergency medical treatment and extraction to the victims whose suffering was delivered by one of the inferior wagens made by those other volks.
It did these things with the Star of David prominently displayed on its grill, at a time when Gm was busy racing to outpace the war’s death toll by giving all living creatures lead poisoning and lowering humanity’s collective IQ, and Henry Ford was exchanging love letters with his führer. Both companies scoffing at the concept of 4wd.
Toyota was facilitating unspeakable crimes against humanity, kidnapping girls and treating them like military rations on a scale that makes Epstein island seem almost tame, victimizing civilians and unarmed soldiers across China, Korea, Taiwan, along with the numerous Russian p.o.w.’s that were subjected to horrific and ultimately fatal experimentation, and on at least some occasions literally treating civilians and foes as military food rations.
Mitsubishi and Subaru evenly split the production of the Mitsubishi designed “zero” planes we are all most familiar with amongst the WW2 aircraft of Japan.
Yeah… I can definitely see why most people would prefer to downplay the significance of some periods throughout their favorite automaker’s long histories.
It’s still a bit puzzling how some people can give Tesla a pass while at the same time passionately denouncing its ceo as an existential threat to civilization. If that’s your take maybe don’t contribute to his unprecedented accumulation of wealth, and the corresponding power it affords.
Your car was built out of suffering, torture, and mass murder for the promotion of cruelty and hatred.
Mine was built to stop it.
I don’t care if you think it’s too big, or you don’t like it because your unpleasant redneck uncle drove something superficially similar.
Those people and their feelings about an article discussing statistics that neither they nor the author understood don’t represent a compelling argument from a serious person.
Edit: "smoking scrap metal and emptied jack boots across Europe and Asia" is the funniest thing I have read all day (legit, not like "you're stupid funny". Hearty chuckle from me on that one.
IDGAF if children are shown and taught the Nazi symbol, I was taught about Nazis being bad before I was even in elementary school.
What I want is for teachers to be able to tell kids "Yes, this airship was made during that horrible time, but this lesson is about something else that happened".
Real life isn't Twitter or Reddit, where every conversation has to be a hot take reminding people about a particular feature.
They aren’t teaching you about the disaster exactly. They’re teaching you about modern air travel and explaining nazis to elementary school kids is a lot more difficult than aircraft.
Plus It’s just a very pivotal moment, caught on camera in the in the 1930s so it’s an easy thing to show instead of just tell
Who’s to say it’s not? Learning about what people have done to each other historically is at the root of a lot of character; I would attribute a lot of mine to that. There’s probably a too young, but by the time you’re ready to learn about a catastrophe, you’re ready to learn about the flag on its tail fin.
Most children are definitely capable of understanding the nazi regime. I’m not sure about you but I started learning about it at home around 5 years old and I fully understood how fucked up it was. It’s more so that most parents think teaching their kids about messed up stuff like that isn’t good for their child’s mental development, which makes no sense whatsoever.
My older cousin and I had got into some history books his parents kept around the house. To be fair I don’t remember exactly how old I was, 5 years old is just a guess.
Even if you were slightly older. Learning things like that @5-7 is definitely not good for a child’s mental development. But according to you that “makes no sense at all” explains all I need to know.
It wasn’t like the nazis themselves designed or planned for the Hindenburg. It was built and designed before the Nazis were even in power. The only reason it has a swaztika was because it was a German ship in the late 1930s and that was the flag of Germany at that time
It was partially built but the company had run out of funding. The project was completed with funds from the Nazi government in 1935. So while the Nazis didn't design or build it, they did pay for it.
That’s fair, but I still don’t think it’s a “Nazi” airship. As in it’s not something the Nazi’s specifically used for Nazi activities. I’d say it’s a German airship personally.
They saw no use during the war. The last zeppelin flight was in 1939 shortly before the invasion of Poland. So with the exception of that one failed reconnaissance flight, they had no role in the war at all. The airships were all dismantled with the materials used to build traditional aircraft.
They weren’t teaching you about Nazi shit. They were teaching you about end of airships and the beginning of modern air travel.
It’s weird to dehumanize people at the end of the day, these are people who died who cares if the airship got repainted five years in to service. They weren’t Nazis They were Germans and one American
Also keep in mind how this particular story ended, and why it’s the most notable zeppelin aside from maybe “Lead zeppelin”… both based on inadvisable menu selections from the periodic buffet table.
They need to bring this form of travel back obviously without explosive gas. If you're not in a huge hurry, you could actually have quite a nice spa on board one of those things.
Welders and astronauts and backyard grill artists love it! Everyone else just puts in the tank behind their head and speeds around the roads with it all day feeling somewhat like a badass.
yeah, when you look at the story of R101 they just kept trying to make it lighter and cutting amenities out (because of their weight) all for the airship to literally fall out of the sky during its first "proper" voyage
They’re working on it. The first large rigid airship to be built since 1938 has been doing test flights around San Francisco lately. It’s a 2/3 scale model of the production version.
“High masts” were already known to be something of a gimmick or publicity stunt even in the late ‘20s and early ‘30s. The convenience of being able to haul around a temporary “low mast” to any given field as needed, plus being able to simply leave the ship on the ground unattended instead of needing a skeleton crew to constantly “fly” the ship at a high mast, made the choice obvious. For instance, here’s the Graf Zeppelin moored at a temporary mast an empty field in Los Angeles during its 1929 circumnavigation flight:
The problem wasn’t just the permanent infrastructure presence of a large tower as opposed to a mobile mast, since you could just put a high mast on an existing tower or building, but rather the fact that skyscrapers aren’t exactly designed to be aerodynamic. Something like the Empire State Building’s gargantuan slab-sides and height creates huge, unpredictable eddies and vortexes of wind all around it, and an airship is least maneuverable at slow speeds when there’s little to no air moving over its tail fins, hence why the concept was nearly unworkable in that case, albeit hollow, rounded high mast towers were sometimes used elsewhere.
Funnily enough, the obvious alternative solution to mooring airships in the middle of cities—which is to simply land airships on fairly flat, large roofs like a large helipad—was successful and practiced as early as 1903 in Paris by Alberto Santos-Dumont, who flew his one-person airship Baladeuse between his home, his friends, and his favorite restaurant, and later by Goodyear’s blimps during various promotional flights over the decades.
In all the images of the disaster, the back caught fire first, so the swastikas don't show in the pictures. Of course it was German, but I never thought of it as a Nazi airship. Till now.
I actually went and looked it up, because of that reason. All the photos I recall the back was engulfed and I didn't recall the giant flags on the back.
From 1933, German aircraft were meant to show horizontal stripes of black, white and red on one side of the tail, the swastika on the other. In 1935, the Nazis made the swastika the only flag that could be shown.
When Graf Zeppelin visited the World Fair in Chicago in 1933, Hugo Eckener ordered her to be flown in a pattern to hide the side with the swastika from the audience as much as possible.
A lot of photographs were airbrushed in the postwar era to remove any sign of the swastikas, so a lot of old books will show Graf Zeppeljn with only a silver tail.
Fuck you. That flag was as valid as the star spangeled banner in 1937. 36 people died and you reduce them to what that flag became years later. Shame on you.
The Swastika flag was always the Nazi Party flag that they adopted for the whole Nation to symbolise that they are in control. It never was some "neutral German flag".
An interesting discussion of an air ship devolves into a tired and absurd musk is a nazi convention. What’s more, people actually believe it’s some insightful and brave position to take.I can’t think of anything more not interesting
It saddens me, I really think hydrogen derigables should have found their niche.
Helium is okay some modern ones are nice but just to have ships of that scale or smaller ones with mixed airplane and lighter than air elements that never really got played with using modern materials.
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u/Responsible_Baby8648 7h ago
Idk he seems to be regular size