Shadow Before the Flame

The gripping, definitive history of the Hindenburg disaster, the rise of the Nazis, and the road to World War II as never before told.

In the 1930s, the airship was viewed as the future of transatlantic travel and a brave new era of global connectedness. Germany's safe, fast and efficient airships brought it back into the international fold after its humiliation in World War I. But on May 6, 1937, the Hindenburg airship caught fire in the sky over New Jersey in a blaze that shocked the world and presaged another era of senseless violence.

In Shadow Before the Flame, acclaimed historian Catherine Grace Katz uncovers fresh research that unveils the Hindenburg disaster at a pivotal moment in time, coming as it does at the crossroads of the rising tension between fascist Germany and the United States. Katz traces the experiences of a captivating cast of characters: an heiress, a world-renowned acrobat, a German Jew working to save his family from the clutches of Nazism, a young cabin boy on his first voyage with the crew. Meanwhile, on the ground were two intrepid journalists whose reporting on the Hindenburg would invent breaking news as we now know it.

In a gripping, ticking-clock narrative, Shadow Before the Flame is a story that begins with the promise of a future made bright by technological innovation and ends with caskets draped in swastikas in New York City.

"By bringing new light to the Hindenburg disaster, Catherine Grace Katz has given us an absorbing tale of ambition, technology, culture, and geopolitics. Largely forgotten or only dimly recalled, it is fundamentally a human story that tells us much about the epochal twentieth century and the early hours of what we now call globalization. A stirring read." —Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize-winner and New York Times bestselling author of American Struggle

"The Hindenburg catastrophe was a powerful metaphor for the conflagration was to befall the whole world only twenty eight months later, and Catherine Katz has put the disaster in its historical context superbly, with deep scholarship, a pacy narrative and gripping insights into the effects it had on those passengers and crew who somehow, incredibly, survived. Her tale has the readability of a thriller, but also the factual background of a profoundly researched history book. A remarkable achievement." —Andrew Roberts, New York Times bestselling author of Churchill: Walking with Destiny

About the Author

Catherine Grace Katz is a writer and historian and author of The Daughters of Yalta. She graduated from Harvard with a BA in History and received her MPhil in Modern European History from Christ's College, University of Cambridge. Catherine worked in finance in New York City before a very fortuitous visit to the book store in the lobby of her office in Manhattan led her to return to history and writing. She received her JD from Harvard Law School in May 2023.