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Ambulances and fire-trucks were now clanging in from every direction. Commander Rosendahl's splendid Navy discipline kept confusion at a minimum. The flames began to subside, but dense black smoke still poured from the twisted heap of redhot girders and the smoldering pud- dle of fuel oil. Not until next morning was the wreckage cool enough for men to pry out all the crisped bodies within, many of them only tentatively identifiable. The dawn score of deaths stood at eleven passengers, 21 crew, while 28 passengers and 49 crew miraculously escaped. One member of the ground-crew— Civilian Allen Hagaman—also died of burns. Most survivors were badly burned and three more crew and one more passenger presently perished. One of the first to go was Captain Lehmann. Just before he died he said: "I intended to stay with the ship as long as I could, until we could land her, if possible. But it was impossible. Everything around me was on fire. The windows were open in the central control cabin and I jumped about 100 ft. My clothes were all ablaze."
Other survivor stories were equally terse, equally terrible. Passenger Otto Clemens, who jumped safely, told how Passenger John Pannes refused to jump until he found his wife. Mr. & Mrs. Pannes both perished. Mrs. Hermann Doehner related in a husky monotone how she tossed two of her children out of a window, then scrambled out herself with the third. One child died, as did her husband. The others had chances of pulling through. Stewardess Elsa Ernst got away by sliding down a rope. Said she: "I could hear my hair crinkling as it burned." Passenger Herbert O'Laughlin, who ran black-faced into the hangar looking for a telephone to call his mother in Chicago, said: "I was in my cabin . . . packing . . . when I felt a slight tremor. . . . There was very little confusion among the passengers, no screaming, hardly any noise." Captain Pruss said nothing, held incommunicado by doctors who gave him "a 50-50 chance to live."
In Germany it was 2 a.m. when the telephone tinkled by Adolf Hitler's bed at his mountain nook at Berchtesgaden. After he heard that Germany's greatest transport pride was no more, he paced his room nightlong, too upset to say anything.
Reached at Graz, Austria, Dr. Eckener nearly broke down at the body blow to his life's work. Voice husky and goatee aquiver, the Jieavy old man sagged like one of his airships short of gas as he hurried back to Berlin.
At Friedrichshafen, where a larger sister of the Emdenburg is nearing completion, stunned workers doggedly kept at work though even Dr. Eckener admitted: "It is impossible to foretell what effect this acci- dent may have on the future of the airship."
Everywhere in Germany flags went to half-mast. German newspapers unanimously exhorted the people to bear up, saying that "young and strong nations" can bear such tragedies. Chancellor Hitler tarted a fund for the bereaved families with a gift of $12,000. General Goring declared: "We men of German aviation will till show the world that the idea and the enterprising spirit of Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin are upheld. . . . We bow to God's will and at the same time we face the uture with an unbending will and passionate hearts."