The Hindenburg Murders (26 page)

Margaret Mather had been leaning out an open window, chatting with one of the college boys, who was taking photographs with a Kodak, when mysterious sounds from the engines caused her to grasp his arm and look at him for reassurance.

The second explosion—the first had barely been noticed—rocked the ship and sent many of them, passengers and stewards alike, to their knees.

Chief Steward Kubis picked himself up, saying, “Everything will be all right!”

That was when the ship lurched, sitting back on its stern, and began crumpling into itself, and the sudden tilt took the floor out from under them, stewards and passengers toppling and tumbling, furniture cascading after them.

Lightweight Margaret Mather—wrapped up in a navy-and-white herringbone coat due to the cool rainy weather—was hurled twenty feet into the end bulkhead and soon was pinned
against the projection of a window bench by a crush of German passengers. She thought she was suffocating, thought she might die from the weight pressing on her, but the passengers clambered to their feet and grabbed onto railings and window ledges, hanging there as the floor canted under them.

Relief flowed through her, and then the fire blew in.

Long tongues of flame,
she thought, strangely detached and typically poetic,
bright red and so very beautiful.

Though it was mere seconds, the trip up the back-tilted stairs seemed to take forever, and strained the formidable muscles of the well-toned author’s arms. Charteris had never been more glad that he had never allowed his sedentary calling to keep him from physical activity.

As he reached the top of the stairs, the floor under him seemed to right itself somewhat—the stern disintegrating in flame had allowed the bow to drop. Snatching up a blanket that had draped itself over the stair railing, he moved into the starboard promenade deck, where he came upon a picture of chaos, people and furniture scattered like so much discarded refuse. Some of the people were unconscious, perhaps even dead; others had made their way over and around the furniture and the fallen to get to the windows.

Leonhard and Gertrude were poised to jump, pausing to look back urgently at Hilda, who stood fear-frozen, hands covering her face. As Charteris neared them, fire swept into the room, right past them, not touching them, as if seeking the helpless unconscious and dying in the lounge. Flames jumped and danced and crackled, and the Adelts just jumped. Charteris swept Hilda up in the blanket, bundled her in his arms like a baby; she put up no resistance but her eyes were wild. The hissing of flames was at their back and the screams and yells around them were
like dissonant notes standing out from a hellish symphony. He kissed her forehead, gave her a tight reassuring smile, and waited as long as he could, till the ship had lowered to about ten feet.

Then he dropped her, gently as possible, hoping the sandy ground below would greet her the same way.

Like Margaret Mather, Joseph Spah was on the portside, and the acrobat was climbing out a window, following two men who’d gone out before him and dropped to the ground too soon, crashing to earth, one hundred feet or more, bouncing as they hit, and now lay unconscious or dead, flaming linen and molten aluminum raining down on them.

Sitting on the ledgelike sill, Spah waited, waited, waited, seconds that seemed forever, and would be forever, if he couldn’t find the right moment; all he could think of was, thank God he swung from a lamppost for a living!

Ravenous flames were seething behind him, and he could wait no longer—forty feet now, he guessed. He could do that. He was an acrobat—just keep his feet under him, knees bent, roll when he landed, feet under, knees bent, roll, under, bent, roll….

“It’s too high!” a voice said.

Spah turned.

It was the chief steward, Kubis.

“Too high!” Kubis repeated, his eyes almost crazed.

“No,” Spah said. “It’s too hot.”

And he jumped.

Moments later, so did Kubis.

Leonhard and Gertrude Adelt landed softly in the grassy wet sand, having jumped only fifteen or so feet, collapsing to their knees not in pain but in relief.

Short-lived relief: almost immediately they were enveloped in oily black clouds through which deadly tongues of fire licked
and taunted. They got to their feet, found each other’s hand, but soon parted company, as no path for two could be found in the dangled maze of crumpled wreckage. It was like making their way through a jungle of dangling hot metal wires and glowing cables and jagged debris, under the continued downpour of burning fabric and dripping metal.

Leonhard felt no pain as he bent apart white-hot aluminum framing, to make a door to dive through, into the sea of fire; in shock, it all registered as an eerie dream to him, his body weightless, floating like a star through space.

Then he saw that Gertrude had fallen and some semblance of reality snapped back. He ran to her, hopping red-hot girders, pulled her up and gave her a push—she tottered off like a mechanical toy. He followed after her, but tripped and found himself sprawled on the oil-soaked ground, and it felt good to him, despite the flames dancing all around him; it gave him such a wonderful sense of well-being, to just stretch out on the soft sand and await death.

“Leonhard!”

His wife’s voice.

He pushed himself up, saw her beyond the wreckage, beyond the flames, safe, reaching out to him, calling out to him, and he sprang to his feet and ran for his wife, and life.

Then he was beyond the fire zone, breathing air not smoke, and as Gertrude took his hand, he looked back at the fallen giant, swirling with smoke and flame, cracked in the middle now, forward section reaching for the sky as flames shot out the bow like a monstrous blowtorch.

A husky sailor was shouting, “Navy men stand fast!”

And the same ground crew who had fled the falling, fiery airship were heading back to pull people out of there. And figures
were emerging on their own, as well, running like Jesse Owens, fleeing the flames, or just staggering, some of them with the clothes burned off their bodies, others with eyes seared shut.

“We should help,” Leonhard said, coughing.

“No,” his wife said. “We
need
help.”

He looked at her, her blue eyes pleading, her lovely face smudged with soot, burned black in places, her hair smoking, sizzling.

Then he nodded, and they stepped over a smoldering body, and walked away, hand in hand.

The ship was nearly to the ground when Charteris jumped.

He hit on all fours, a soft sandy landing, then bounded to his feet, sparks and embers falling around him like red snow.

“Help us!”

A woman’s voice, behind him.

Glancing up, he saw the two terrified little boys, the Doehners, climbing out the sill. Their frantic mother pushed them out, one at a time. Charteris caught the boy, and in one fluid motion flung him with all his force, the child sailing in an arc, landing beyond the fire zone. The other boy landed in the sandy earth, not so near by; another passenger—it was the cotton broker, Hirschfeld!—snatched up the lad by the hand and sprinted with him through the obstacle course of flames and debris.

Charteris had seen Hilda drop like a bundle, get to her feet, gather the blanket around her like an Indian and dash into and through the flames.

Now it was his turn to navigate the gauntlet of flaming framework and burning linen and glowing beams and red-hot wires. Covering his head with his sport jacket, he ran a zigzag path through the wreckage; around him others were doing the same—some falling to the earth screaming, burning.

But Charteris emerged from the smoke and flames fairly unscathed—he’d sucked in smoke, and his hair and mustache were singed, though his monocle was gone.

The Saint might have gone back in, looking for it.

Charteris, a ground-crew member taking him by the arm and leading him away, would let it go.

Margaret Mather had watched the men and women leaping from the promenade windows, but she just remained where she’d fallen against the bench, lapels of her coat shielding her face. Flames were flitting all around her, like butterflies, and occasionally they’d land on her sleeves and she would brush them off with her bare hands. The scene around her seemed out of a medieval picture of hell, and she had remained detached, composed, while all around her gave in to hysteria.

She kept her eyes covered and decided that she agreed with whoever it was who was screaming, “
Es ist das Ende!
” and quietly waited to die, hoping it would not be too prolonged and painful an experience, waiting for the crash of landing.

Then someone was yelling through the window: “Come out, lady!”

She opened one eye, then another.

Framed there in the window was an American—a sailor boy!

She stood primly, looked around for her handbag, finding it between two corpses; then she did her best to crawl out the window in a ladylike fashion, the sailor helping her down.

And then the nice young man walked her out through the bits and pieces of burning this and that.

All but one of the officers in the control car walked away from the burning wreck. Captain Pruss emerged from the curtain of smoke, hatless, his hair burned away; badly burned, but alive.

Charteris—who was wandering the periphery, looking for Hilda—saw Ernst Lehmann stagger from the black billowing smoke, looking stunned but not seriously harmed. The author ran to the dying ship’s former captain, to see if he needed help. Lehmann was walking along as if strolling through a park, or so it might have seemed if his face hadn’t been fixed in such glazed confusion.

“Are you all right, Ernst?” Charteris asked.

Lehmann looked right through him, eyes unblinking despite the smoke, saying, “I don’t understand…. I don’t understand…”

Then the director of the
Reederei
moved past Charteris, revealing that the clothes had been burned from the back of him, leaving the naked skin from the top of his head to the heels of his feet a charred black blistered mass.

An American officer ran to Lehmann’s side and walked him to the waiting ambulance.

Charteris turned to look at the ship, whose linen skin was almost gone now, fire erasing the Gothic red letters spelling
Hindenburg,
leaving a glowing skeleton trailing white-hot entrails and streaming smoke as black as the coming night.

Somewhere, within that colossal smoldering corpse, were the cremated remains of Colonel Fritz Erdmann. And probably those of Eric Spehl, as well.

Then, coughing, he sought out one of the navy boys, to see if he could hitch a ride to the base hospital.

Maybe Hilda was there.

SIXTEEN

HOW THE HINDENBURG SMOLDERED, AND LESLIE CHARTERIS BURNED

A
T THE
L
AKEHURST
N
AVAL
A
IR
Station’s small, single-story hospital, Charteris roamed the corridors like a man in a trance. His sport jacket had been lost en route, and his yellow sport shirt and tan slacks were scorched and torn; he looked like a hobo who’d had a particularly rough night of it.

The scene was one approaching battlefield horror. Doctors, nurses, and orderlies swarmed like white blood corpuscles fighting infection, hallways lined with burn victims on stretchers; in small doorless rooms, other casualties slumped in chairs and sat on examining tables, as doctors had a look and nurses dressed wounds. One somewhat larger room had badly burned bodies littering the floor like unearthed mummies.

Some of the victims had “M’s” written on their foreheads with grease pencil—an orderly with a syringe the size of a Roman candle was administering morphine, and hastily marking those who’d had theirs. Screams and whimpers and howls and moans resounded, and men with bloody burns, clothes in charred tatters, wandered vacant-eyed like zombies, looking for friends and loved ones. The wounded cried out, in German mostly, for
their mothers, their wives, their husbands, their priests. And a priest was threading through the carnage, delivering last rites like a postman does the mail.

The smell of burned human flesh and burned clothing hung like a foul curtain; odors of alcohol and Lysol added to the nasty bouquet. Charteris began to cough—apparently he’d inhaled more smoke than he realized—and suddenly a gentle hand was on his arm, as a nurse shuffled the dazed author into an examining room and onto its white-papered table.

A fleshy, bespectacled, kindly-faced doctor in his thirties gave Charteris a quick exam.

“You’re one of the luckiest I’ve seen,” he told Charteris, who was putting his scorched shirt back on. “The nurse will apply some picric acid to your hands—couple of nasty little burns.”

“Is everyone being brought here?”

“To the first-aid station? Yes, but we immediately shuttle the worst cases to Paul Kimball Hospital—it’s close by in Lakewood.”

“Does anyone have a list?”

“Of who’s injured and who’s survived?”

“Yes.”

A commotion in the hall, accompanied by louder howls, signaled the arrival of more injured, who were still being carted over from the crash site by ambulance and auto.