A Fictional Interview with Werner Franz at Naval Air Station Lakehurst
TRAVEL IN TIME WITH DAN | Lakehurst, New Jersey — Evening, May 6, 1937
AUTHOR’S NOTE: The following is a fictional historical interview. Werner Franz (1922–2014) was the 14-year-old cabin boy aboard the LZ 129 Hindenburg, and would become the last surviving crew member of the disaster, passing away in 2014 at age 92. Many of the details below… the china falling from the cabinets, the ballast tank rupturing over him, his jump from the hatch, his dazed wandering toward the wreckage, being intercepted by Chief Steward Heinrich Kubis, and his broken-English exclamation to the sailors who found him… are drawn from Franz’s own recollections, given in interviews later in his life. The specific phrasing of this conversation, and the reflective tone attributed to him here just hours after the disaster, are imagined for this piece, as a badly shaken 14-year-old would not have spoken with this kind of composure in the moment. He later spent his life as a skating instructor.
SETTING: A cot inside a hangar at the air station, a few hours after the crash. Blankets, borrowed coats, and dazed crewmen fill the room. Someone has found the boy dry clothes. Outside, the wreckage of the Hindenburg still smolders under floodlights.
Dan: Werner, I know this is the last thing you probably want to do right now, but can you walk me through what you were doing the moment it started?
Franz: I was in the officers’ mess, cleaning up the china. We were almost down… everyone was thinking about their bags, about seeing their families in a few hours. Then the ship shuddered, and every last plate and cup came flying out of the cabinets at once. I did not understand yet what it was. I only understood that something was very wrong.
Dan: What did you do?
Franz: I ran. There was no thinking in it — my legs simply moved. The ship was tilting hard toward the stern by then, and I grabbed a girder to keep from sliding into the fire. I hung there for a moment with the whole ship groaning around me, and I will tell you honestly, Dan… I saw my life pass in front of me in that moment, the way people say happens. I did not expect that to be true. It was.
Dan: And then the water came.
Franz: A ballast tank burst right above me. It should have terrified me more than it did… instead it soaked me through, and for one or two seconds it was between me and the flames. I do not know if that was luck or something else, but it bought me the time to reach a hatch and jump clear before the rest of the ship came down.
Dan: You jumped without even pulling the cord to open the cover.
Franz: There was no time to remember which cord did what. I kicked it open and jumped. A boy does not calculate in that moment. He only moves.
Dan: I heard that after you landed, you didn’t run away from the wreck… you started walking toward it.
Franz: That part I am less proud to admit, only because I do not remember choosing it. I simply stopped, some distance off, and stood there. Everything looked unreal to me… men running past looked like ghosts, not people. I could not make my legs decide anything. It was Chief Steward Kubis who found me standing like that. He did not comfort me. He looked at me and told me plainly to stop standing there and go back and help. That was all I needed. It gave my legs something to do again.
Dan: That’s a strange kind of mercy, being told to go back toward the fire.
Franz: Maybe. But being given a task is not the same as being given danger. He gave me a reason to move that was bigger than my fear, and that is a different thing than comfort. Comfort might have kept me standing there all night.
Dan: What happened when you actually reached the sailors on the field?
Franz: One of them grabbed me and tried to order me off the airfield in English I could not follow in that state. I could not find the words to explain myself, so I pointed at the burning ship and said the only English sentence I had ready… that I was the cabin boy from the Hindenburg. It took him a moment to understand a boy who looked untouched had come out of that fire. Then he called the others over.
Dan: Fifty years from now, when people ask you about tonight, what do you think you’ll actually remember… the fire, or the moment Kubis told you to move?
Franz: I expect I will remember both, but I suspect the second one longer. The fire was something that happened to me. Kubis handing me a task was the first thing I did on my own after it happened. I think a person remembers what they did more clearly than what was done to them.
Dan: Thank you for your time tonight, Werner. I know it’s been a long one.
Werner Franz survived the Hindenburg disaster without serious injury, one of 62 survivors among the 97 people aboard. He would go on to become the last living member of the airship’s crew, passing away in Frankfurt in 2014 at age 92, having spent much of his post-war life as a skating instructor. The leadership lesson from Lakehurst tonight is a quieter one than the miracle-of-engineering story usually told about this airship: leadership is not always a grand vision from the front of the room. Sometimes it is a single, unglamorous instruction… “go back and help” … handed to someone frozen by shock, giving them something to do with their body before their mind has caught up. Clarity, offered at the right moment, can be its own form of rescue and leadership.
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