What is known about Captain Max Pruss captain of the Hindenberg.?

Answer 1

According to "Faces of the Hindenbug" blog:http://facesofthehindenburg.blogspot.com/2008/12/captain-max-pruss.html

Max Pruss had sustained grave burns over much of his body, particularly on his face, upper body and arms. He was taken to Paul Kimball Hospital in nearby Lakewood, where his chances of survival were judged slim enough that he was given last rites by Rev. George Walsh, a Catholic priest from the neighboring town of Toms River. Pruss' condition stabilized somewhat overnight, however, and the next day he, Sammt and Speck were transferred to to the burn center at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York. This was arranged by an old friend of theirs, a wealthy New Yorker named William Leeds who had flown as a passenger on many of the Graf Zeppelin's flights. Pruss was to remain at Columbia Presbyterian for the next four months, enduring numerous rounds of reconstructive surgery, particularly on his face. Despite the best surgical efforts available at the time, Pruss was badly scarred for the rest of his life, to the point where he had to be fitted with a prosthetic nose. Captain Pruss returned to Germany in autumn of 1937. He spent the next couple of years recovering from his injuries, and thus took no part in the flights of the new airship, the LZ-130 Graf Zeppelin. In January of 1940, Pruss was made commandant of the Rhein-Main airport in Frankfurt. In spring of that same year, when Air Minister Hermann Goering visited the Zeppelin hangars at Rhein-Main to make a final determination as to what to do with the LZ-127 Graf Zeppelin, the new LZ-130, and the hangars, Pruss made an impassioned plea to Goering to support efforts to refit the LZ-130 so that it could be flown again. The conversation turned ugly and degenerated into an argument, with Goering refusing to listen to reason or to see the airships as anything more than a waste of materials that could be better used for building airplanes for the Luftwaffe. Pruss' efforts were in vain, and shortly thereafter, the last two Zeppelins were dismantled and the airport's two Zeppelin hangars were dynamited. During the post-war years, Pruss was unique in that he retained close ties to Friedrichshafen as well as warm ties to his former comrades from the German Naval Airship Division. Pruss and several others, including the Hindenburg's former chief engineer Rudolf Sauter, formed a crusade to try to persuade Luftschiffbau Zeppelin, by then renamed Metallwerk Friedrichshafen, to once again begin producing airships. Pruss' ideal "super-Hindenburg" would have been in the form of an 869-foot, helium-filled, diesel-driven ship to be designated the LZ-132. The oft-repeated slogan that Pruss used in his campaign was, "If you want to get there quickly, take an airplane. If you want to get there comfortably, take an airship."

Once again, however, this was to no avail. Max Pruss would spend the rest of his life hoping against hope that the new Zeppelin would be built and flown, but even moreso his heart lay in solving the mystery of what had caused the Hindenburg to burn. Pruss, perhaps as a psychological defense, had become an advocate of the theory that the ship had been sabotaged and, along with Charles Rosendahl, tended to suspect a passenger from the final flight named Joseph Spah. Spah, a vaudeville acrobat, had been shipping a dog on the Hindenburg and throughout the flight had made repeated, unsupervised trips to the aft freight room to feed his dog. However, an FBI investigation of Spah immediately following the disaster had in fact turned up nothing whatsoever to support accusations of sabotage.

In the last years of his life, Pruss corresponded with a number of scholarly authors, such as Dr. Douglas Robinson, who were interested in Pruss' input on their historical research into airships. A unique example of this, including an audio recording of Pruss being interviewed, can be found HERE. To these authors he gave invaluable information and assistance, as well as the perspective of one who had spent decades of his life flying and commanding airships, and who had been closely connected with the Zeppelin endeavor from its early years straight on through to the end.

However, Pruss was also contacted by an increasing number of journalists who, rather than being interested in preserving Zeppelin history as a whole, were focused specifically on the Hindenburg disaster itself. Perhaps the best known of these was an American author by the name of A. A. Hoehling, who was in the process of writing a book about the Hindenburg's last flight, about which Pruss and Hoehling exchanged a few letters in 1960. The book, eventually published in 1962 under the title "Who Destroyed The Hindenburg?", was based on a sabotage theory that centered around a young Hindenburg crewman named Erich Spehl who was killed in the fire, and whom Hoehling accused of having destroyed the airship at the behest of his anti-Nazi girlfriend. Although airship historians and surviving airshipmen roundly dismissed the theory as baseless and even libelous, the theory was resurrected a decade later as the basis of a big-budget Hollywood disaster movie as well as a tie-in book written by Michael Mooney, and it was many years before this particular sabotage theory was to fade away. Whether or not Pruss, himself having long been of the opinion that the Hindenburg had been sabotaged, would have agreed with Hoehling that the fire had been caused by a member of his own crew is unknown. Max Pruss contracted pneumonia following a stomach operation and passed away on November 28, 1960. He was 69 years old.