THE HINDENBURG DISASTER: A HISTORY from BEGINNING to END (kindle) by Hourly History

Published in July of 2025 by Hourly History.

Hourly History specializes in little histories that take about an hour to read. For me, an hour of reading about the Hindenburg is about right. 

The Hindenburg Disaster is a short history that details the beginnings of zeppelins/blimps through the tragedy of the complete destruction of the German zeppelin Hindenburg in just 32 seconds in New Jersey in 1937. 

Germany was a focal point for building blimps/zeppelins during World War I and before World War II. The blimps went from being potential military airships to being experimental ways to travel. One has to remember that airplanes were even more experimental way to travel.

Any sort of air travel was going to be prohibitively expensive - only the richest of the rich could afford it. Blimps/zeppelins offered a stately, luxurious ride - planes were seen as a noisy and cramped and inferior alternative.

This short history chronicles the struggles of the blimp/zeppelin industry during the 1920's. When the Nazis took control of Germany, they saw zeppelins as a way to demonstrate German technical excellence and as a way to flout restrictions on German airships. One can see now that the idea of taking a blimp into a World War II fighter plan dogfight would be suicidal, but that was not always clear in the early 1930's.

Eventually, the German government decided that zeppelins were a great propaganda machine inside and outside of Germany. They are attention-getting, massive, and the Nazis slapped a big Nazi swastika on the side of them to generate publicity.

This history does a good job of describing the technical reasons for the Hindenburg disaster - including the surprisingly small number of deaths for such a massive fireball. But, it does a rather poor job of telling the story of blimps/zeppelins after the Hindenburg. This disaster practically destroyed the idea of luxury travel in zeppelins and the book gives the impression that that disaster sort of wiped out the entire concept.

But, any American sports fan knows that this is simply not true - the Goodyear Blimp shows up at every major sporting event and provides "aerial coverage." It used to be accompanied by the Fuji Film Blimp, although I haven't seen that one in a while.

The fact that this history spent so much time detailing the history of zeppelins prior to the disaster and tells almost nothing about them after the disaster is a major oversight.

Fun fact that I discovered while writing this review: A successor company to the company that operated the Hindenburg operates the Goodyear Blimp in Europe. Mentioning this fact would have been a great way to end this short history. 

This history can be found on Amazon.com here: The Hindenburg Disaster: A History from Beginning to End by Hourly History.