“In the 20th century, there are events that cut across all our private lives,” says Tom Crouch, a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. “If you were alive on May 6, the day of the Hindenburg disaster, you remember where you were.”
As Crouch points out, there were newsreel film-cameras present and rolling, and WLS Radio’s Herb Morrison was broadcasting the events of the Hindenburg’s initial American landing live to tens of thousands more over the airwaves.
“Even today,” Crouch says, “anyone who hears the phrase: ‘Oh, the humanity,’ knows where it comes from.”
“But,” Crouch continues, “the age of the rigid airship had already passed, anyway.” The Hindenburg disaster, he implies, was merely punctuation.
Still, being the repository for America’s history, the Smithsonian Institution has a strong representation of Hindenburg artifacts and ephemera. In the Institution’s iconic Castle on the National Mall, protected behind glass, is a chunk of a Hindenburg internal-support girder, plus a fragment from one of the airship's drive propellers.
