Chelsea Handler

Here's the wild part.

Despite the scale of this disaster, which was huge, out of the 97 people on board the Hindenburg, only 35 were killed.

That's 13 passengers and 22 crew members.

Now, there was also one of the ground workers also perished, which brings the total to 36.

Now, this is obviously still very tragic, but honestly, it's astonishing given that photo we just looked at, right?

Yeah, it's totally incredible.

So what actually happened?

Why did it explode?

The investigations that followed were murky.

The U.S.

and Germany both had strong incentives not to take the blame.

Germany pushed sabotage theories, quietly pointing to crew members.

Others floated the idea that Hitler himself might have ordered it as a way to punish Hugo Eckner for being openly anti-Nazi.

Most historians today agree there's no solid evidence for sabotage

No single cause was ever proven beyond doubt.

The leading theory is that a static charge from the storm ignited a hydrogen leak somewhere in the zeppelin itself.

Yeah, because we wouldn't give them any helium.

No, no, no.

They definitely chose to use the hydrogen and they thought they had enough safety protocols in place.

And to their credit, they had a lot of successful transatlantic flights with this thing.