Roelof Domenie, one of the three passengers on the KLM Douglas DC-2 Uiver that made an emergency landing on the Albury Racecourse on the morning of October 24, 1934, escaped possible death by just six months when he flew on the Hindenburg zeppelin, from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to Frankfurt, Germany, from October 29 to November 2, 1936.
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Domenie moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1924 for his employer, the Hollandsche Bank voor Zuid Amerika, and soon became one of its senior officers.
Every two years or so, he returned to the Netherlands on extended home leave, generally travelling by ship from Rio de Janeiro to Hamburg, but on just the one occasion, he travelled to Germany on the Hindenburg.
After arrival in Frankfurt on November 2, 1936, and doing banking business in Germany, Czechoslovakia and England, Roelof proceeded to Arosa in Switzerland for a family skiing holiday.
Roelof’s wife Jakomina and their children Rudy and Johan, sailed on the S.S. Cap Arcona from Rio, arriving at Hamburg, Germany, around November 20, 1936.
They then went by train to Den Haag, the Netherlands, where they stayed with Jakomina’s father and mother, Jacob and Stoffelina Van Hoeflaken, for a short time before again travelling by train, this time to Arosa, where they met up with Roelof for the skiing holiday.
Roelof Domenie needed to let his parents-in-law know when to expect him, his wife and children to arrive in Den Haag. On October 31, while on board the Hindenburg, high over the mid-Atlantic Ocean, he bought a postcard on the front of which was a picture of the Hindenburg’s dining room. He wrote an explanatory note on the back, bought and affixed some German postage stamps, and posted the postcard in the post office on board the Hindenburg.
In June 2011, Johan Domenie visited Albury, and on behalf of the Domenie family, presented Albury mayor, Cr Alice Glachan, with all his father’s Uiver ephemera. That included the postcard written by his father to his grandmother on the 16th Germany–South America–Germany zeppelin flight (see image). That remarkable object is safely held on behalf of the Albury and district community by the Albury Library Museum.
After the skiing holiday, the Domenie family stayed for a time with their relatives in the Netherlands before embarking by ferry for England and returning to their Rio home aboard S.S. Andora Star. The family finally reached home about the middle of March 1937- less than two months before the terminal flight of the Hindenburg.
It was on May 6, 1937, that the Hindenburg came to a disastrous end, when it caught fire and was destroyed during its attempt to dock with its mooring mast at Lakehurst, New Jersey, United States of America. Forthwith, zeppelins ceased to be used as a means of passenger and freight transport.
It was the all-metal land aircraft, like the one that in 1934 made an emergency landing on the Albury Racecourse, that took over as the major means of air transport.