All right, we all know what happened to the Hindenburg. I know as a young kid I was fascinated to learn about the Hindenubrg disaster, and it’s certainly a topic brought up in books and movies all the time, and I think it was in at least one history lesson. However, my kids are becoming chrono-journalists thanks to their Byline writing curriculum, and we had to conduct some research about the Hindenburg disaster, so I’ve put together some great Hindenburg disaster resources that we used for our research.
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Hindenburg disaster books
- Hindenburg in Flames– I love the idea of this book and talking about how our view of history is formed by pictures
- Hindenburg: the Fiery Crash of a German airship– a great overview of the facts
- The Disaster of the Hindenburg– the crash through the eyes of a 14-year-old boy, it’s an interesting take on the disaster
- You Wouldn’t Want to be on the Hindenburg– my boys are big fans of this series and used this book primarily for their information
- The Hindenburg Explosion: Core Events of a Disaster in the Air– a good book for materials
- I Survived the Hindenburg Disaster– Similar in style to the earlier-mentioned book, this one is part of a series, and is probably easier to find, so I’ll recommend it
- The Hindenburg Disaster (a True Book)– This is a great book for younger kids learning about the Hindenburg disaster
Hindenburg survivors’ interviews and radio broadcasts
Since the entire point of this writing assignment was to write an article about the Hindenburg crash, and their class talks a lot about using primary sources, I searched up and found several Hindenburg survivor interviews and actual Hindenburg broadcasts.
First, I found a video of the actual Hindenburg crash.
Next we listened to the Hindenburg disaster radio broadcast, this was particularly moving because you can hear his shock at the events.
Then we watched some videos of Hindenburg explosion survivors. I find it interesting when searching the videos, when referring to the ship, it’s called the Hindenburg crash, but for the survivors, it always shows up as Hindenburg explosion survivors.
Then we looked up a few theories on WHY the Hindenburg exploded, as a bit of curiosity.
This is the one my kids particularly liked, however. Their papers referenced this a lot, and I could see influences in how they wrote their Hindenburg disaster paper.
And of course, this all is taking place in the backdrop of the end of the Great Depression and the start of World War 2.
And after spending a week with the kids working on their Hindenburg papers, I had to show them the first episode of Timeless, which prominently features the Hindenburg Disaster, and the perils of time travel. It greatly amused me to have my kids nitpicking the events of the episode and exclaiming loudly, “That’s not how it happened!”
Yes, that made me a very proud homeschool mom.
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