NOVA

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Narrator

A new piece of the Hindenburg puzzle has surfaced. Ironically, it was available from the beginning, but no one had been interested at the time. I was here at Lakehurst for the 75th anniversary, we had a memorial service, and a guy comes up to me and says, "I've got some film on the Hindenburg disaster. You probably don't really care, but this was taken by my uncle, and if you want to see it, I'll show it to you." So this is right where we met. This is right where we met. In 2012. - Yeah. Where you showed me this film on your laptop. And if you remember, I was so excited I took my cellphone and I took some photos, I asked your permission, and I took photos of the film on your laptop- Yeah. Yep. - Because it was like, "This is special." - Yeah. My dad had bought this nifty Kodak camera, a wind-up movie camera, 8 millimeter. And he couldn't come because he worked, so he asked my uncle and my mom if they would take some shots and see the Hindenburg land. And as soon as I started looking at it, I realized it looked really different and it looked really interesting. -

Narrator

And yet Harold Schenck's film, which starts earlier and is shot from a different angle than all the other photographers', is never seen by investigators. It was, at the time, publicly put out that he had it. Nobody ever asked for it. There was plenty of footage taken by the newsreels and nobody really cared, I guess, about angles. -

Narrator

But perhaps this new angle will make a difference. After 80-plus years, might this footage show something new? And what could a closer inspection of the film reveal? To learn more about the film's history, Dan Grossman brings it to Colorlab, a world-class facility that restores historic film for the Library of Congress, National Archives, and others. -

Pat

I'm excited that you have something for me to look at, right? I'm excited for you to look at it. So here is the film we've been talking about. -

Pat

Wow. And I also brought you the camera that it was filmed on. Oh, wow. -

Narrator

Film archivist Pat Doyen is an expert in preserving and restoring rare vintage film. Good provenance here. And you believe that the film was shot with this exact camera? Yes, I do. I can see that this is the kind of box that this film would've been packaged in. I can see that you had it processed by Kodak. There's an address. There's a stamp from the time. So this is all really good information. And when we look at it over the light table, there's a few things we can tell. Now, there's a number here, 36814- Oh, okay. - That was written on the box. And you can see it's also on this leader. And who wrote that? Would Kodak have written that? Yes, they would've been for processing. Okay. So right now I'm going to look for what they call a date code. So Kodak put some symbols on the film to tell us when it was manufactured. So I'm looking at the date code and I see a triangle square. So how do you know what a triangle and a square means? So there's a reference to check that out. And we can see this film was manufactured between July to December 1936. -

Narrator

1936, the year before the accident. When someone would buy a film for 1937. Great. We can see the aperture plate, that little cutout on the left side. -

Narrator

The camera's aperture plate defines the frame of the picture where the image extends in between the sprocket holes. This one here, which matches our film, has the square in between the two perforations in that here. -

Dan

Is that exactly what we're seeing right here? Oh yeah, of course. It looks just like your book. It tells us that it was shot with this model of camera, the Cine-Kodak 8 Model 20. -

Narrator

A year before the disaster, in an eerily prophetic ad featuring the Hindenburg, Kodak suggested using their cameras to film "moments that make history." It also tells me that it was camera-original. -

Narrator

Camera-original. This film was exposed in a camera. It's not a copy. If it was a print, you wouldn't see the circles or the squares because the printer blocks that off. -

Dan

So what's your verdict on the film? So it's a little shrunken and it's got some aging here, it's got a little silver mirroring, which tells me that it's an old film. This doesn't happen right away, overnight. It takes years and years, sometimes decades. So all of this taken together, I can't say with 100% certainty, but everything points to this film being an authentic film. - Wow. -

Pat

That it was shot at that time. -

Dan

This is a good day. (suspenseful music) -

Narrator

After digitally scanning the film, Dan and Pat take a look on a large screen. This is the first time this footage has been widely seen. Wow! Look at how much detail we get from this scan. -

Narrator

The roll of film will last only two minutes. To conserve it, Harold Schenck shoots brief moments. The ground crew assembling. The giant ship passing over the hanger. The landing lines are the last thing Harold Schenck records before disaster strikes. And as it exploded, he had the camera at his side. And it was a wind-up camera, so he had the presence of mind to switch the switch on and pick it up at that moment. (grave music) Thanks to that aperture plate, you actually see the nose and the tail at the same time. Is that unusual? - Yes, it is. -

Narrator

The spring runs down. After rewinding, he rolls again, getting the aftermath. You can see details of the girder structure. Where the gas cells were. Be a lot of information for us about how this flame progressed.