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On this day in 1937, the German passenger zeppelin Hindenburg caught fire, crashed, and burned down to nothing but its metal frame, at the Lakehurst Naval Air Station, near Lakehurst, New Jersey. The disaster killed 36 people, shattered public confidence in dirigibles, and marked the end of the era of the airship.
The Hindenburg catastrophe is as a long- and widely remembered as it has been because of the spectacular newsreel of the event, which featured actual footage of the zeppelin’s destruction, and because of Herbert Morrison’s famous radio eyewitness report from the landing field, which was broadcast the next day.
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