'The air was on fire'

80 years later, last Hindenburg survivor

Werner Doehner — the last living survivor of the Hindenburg — still remembers his final glimpse of his father moments before the explosion, as the massive airship neared its mooring.

The elder Doehner had used a movie camera to film the approaching landing at a Lakehurst, NJ, airfield from the zeppelin’s windowed dining room and had just turned to return to his cabin.

It was the evening of May 6, 1937. Doehner (inset above) was 8 years old.

“Suddenly, the air was on fire,” Doehner told The Associated Press in a rare interview on the eve of the tragedy’s 80th anniversary.

“We never saw him again,” he remembered of his father, Hermann, a pharmaceutical magnate.

Doehner’s father and sister Irene, 14 — who succumbed to her burns in the hospital early the next morning — were among the 35 souls who perished in that accident.

But 62 passengers and crew survived, including Werner Doehner’s mother, Matilde, and his big brother, Walter.

Doehner, now 88, still remembers his mother desperately throwing him and his brother to the ground as the flaming airship jolted and plummeted.

“We were close to a window, and my mother took my brother and threw him out,” said Doehner, who lives in Colorado and rarely gives interviews.

“She grabbed me and fell back and then threw me out,” he said. “She tried to get my sister, but she was too heavy, and my mother decided to get out — by the time the zeppelin was nearly on the ground.

“I remember lying on the ground, and my brother told me to get up and to get out of there.”

Doehner had blistering burns on his face, hands and leg. He’d be in a New Jersey hospital for three months.

“Burns take a long time to heal,” he said, calling the Hindenburg “something you don’t forget.”