Shadow Before the Flame: The Hindenburg Disaster and the Prelude to War

A gripping, major new history of the explosion of the “Titanic of the Skies,” the rise of Nazism and the beginning of World War II

For thirty-seven seconds on May 6, 1937, the Hindenburg lit up the sky over Lakehurst, New Jersey in an indelible conflagration that shocked the world and brought the airship era to a close.

In this definitive account, acclaimed historian Catherine Grace Katz brings together little-known research that unveils the disaster as a pivotal moment in time, at the crossroads of the rising tension between Germany (where the Hindenburg’s fateful trip began) and the US in the 1930s, as well as a rapidly changing age of aviation in which the airship had been deemed the future of air travel, a technology that would connect the world. While thirty-six people died in the explosion, many others crawled from the wreckage and survived to tell the tale. Katz traces the experiences of a captivating cast of an heiress, a world-renowned acrobat, a German Jew working to save his family from the clutches of Nazism, a young cabin boy on his first voyage with the crew. Meanwhile, on the ground were two intrepid journalists whose reporting on the Hindenburg would invent breaking news as we now know it.

In a deeply researched yet gripping, ticking-clock narrative, Shadow Before the Flame offers a portrait of an era—that brief suspended moment in time before war became an inevitability—tracing the rapid rise of fascism and march toward World War II. It is a story that begins with the promise of a future made bright by technological innovation and ends with caskets draped in swastikas in New York City.