by Clare Mulley
Melitta and Alexander loved and admired one another. They did not share all their interests, but they understood and appreciated the passion that each brought to their work. The differences between them were ‘happily complementary’, Paul von Handel wrote. ‘She respected his talents and he respected hers.’19 Furthermore, they shared a moral and political perspective, a sense of patriotism, and a belief that the best values of their country were under attack. To marry, they decided, would both celebrate their relationship, and be a quiet stand for decency and humanity. It might also hold more practical benefits. Melitta would become a member of one of Germany’s oldest and most distinguished families, affirming both her national identity and her patriotism. Alexander could silence his critics, and would become eligible for the academic advancement open only to married men. But Alexander also knew that he was marrying a woman whose father had been born Jewish: a bold step in Nazi Germany. ‘Of course it was brave for Alex to marry Litta,’ Claus’s eldest son later commented.20 Under the Nuremberg race laws, it was also illegal.*
Melitta and Alexander married quietly on 11 August 1937, in the Berlin Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf registry office. The story given to the registrar was that Melitta’s family papers had been lost in Odessa. Within a year such excuses would no longer be accepted; the couple had seized the last possible moment for their wedding. Their witnesses were Melitta’s sister Klara, and Paul von Handel. Klara was astounded to discover that she and Alexander had worked for a while at the same university, and Melitta had been visiting him without ever mentioning it. She was mollified, however, by having been asked to act as a witness. The rest of Melitta’s family would only hear about her wedding some weeks later. ‘Many thought this odd,’ Klara later admitted, but added with some understanding that her sister ‘probably just wanted to prevent a fuss’.21
Later Melitta and Alexander also had a small church ceremony on Reichenau, a monastic island on the Bodensee connected to the mainland by a causeway.* Although the island’s ancient estates had long been secularized, three medieval churches decorated with beautiful wall paintings remained, testament to the importance of the site as an artistic centre in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Alexander and his brothers had often come here as young men, as part of the circle around the poet Stefan George. Now Alexander and Melitta retook their vows in front of what they considered to be the Stauffenberg altar in the minster. Then they went on to the Haus am See, the ‘house on the lake’, for a quiet evening celebration, with no photographs.*
Alexander’s father had died in 1936. The rest of the Stauffenberg clan already knew and liked Melitta. Like Alexander, his mother ‘didn’t keep it a secret that she was absolutely against the regime’, and she felt a natural empathy with her son’s unconventional new bride, although she was sometimes surprised by what she considered Melitta’s ‘masculine logic’.22 A comment about Melitta ‘at least’ having a ‘classical profile’ made by Claus’s wife, Nina, was snobbish and may have been subconsciously anti-Semitic, but even these two strong women soon found much to admire in one another.23 ‘She has the brain of a man,’ Nina liked to say, ‘and the charm of a woman.’24 But it was the head of the family, Alexander’s uncle Nikolaus, Count Üxküll-Gyllenband, who was also opposed to the Nazi regime, who set the official tone by formally welcoming Melitta as a new member of the family. ‘One for all, all for one!’ the count closed his toast the night that Alexander brought home his new bride. ‘That is, caught together, hanged together!’ someone commented irreverently, compelling Melitta to add, ‘One could say that!’25 They would prove to be poignant words.
Alexander also had to inform his university of his marriage. Among the papers he signed was one stating that, to the best of his belief, he had no knowledge ‘that my wife might be descended from Jewish parents or grandparents’.26 He then fudged the information about Melitta’s grandfather, altering his name, and the date and place of his birth. As a married man, Alexander was offered a chair at the University of Würzburg and began to earn a salary more than twice the national average.
Although she was now officially ‘Melitta Schenk Countess Stauffenberg’, Melitta continued to use her maiden name at work. At weekends she lived at her and Alexander’s apartment in Würzburg, where she played the roles of both countess and competent housewife, donning an apron to cook a meal or writing up Alexander’s academic notes for him between dealing with her own papers. A photograph, probably taken by Alexander, shows her working serenely at her desk, light flooding in from a nearby window and vases of spring flowers set on the tables beside her. ‘It was probably in self-defence’, Nina wrote, that Alexander ‘emphasized that intellect came before technology, which has to be subordinated’, a view that Melitta, apparently, ‘accepted . . . with a smile’.27 She now joined in energetically with all her husband’s interests and ‘gave him the appearance of only incidentally functioning in her own very intensive profession’, Nina continued with wry admiration. In fact Melitta was happy to defer to Alexander in public because in private he supported her career with ‘constant, understanding encouragement’.28 In any case, Paul noted, ‘in their daily married life, Litta took the lead. Not because she wanted to dominate . . . but because she was hoping to relieve him of the worries of daily life, and he was thankful for this.’29 Each of them felt that, with the other’s support, they could now relax a little, and focus once again on their demanding careers.
While Melitta’s summer had revolved around her private life, Hanna had been constantly in the public eye. In July, Peter Riedel won a series of gliding awards at the Elmira contests in the USA. America, he told Hanna, was a country he was growing to admire in many ways. Despite rising tensions between Germany and Britain, in August Hanna flew first to Croydon aerodrome and then around the UK, attending soaring contests. British pilots generally welcomed their German counterparts, but some of the local papers were less than enthusiastic to see swastikas on their airfields. Hanna was surprised and dismayed by their criticism. She also visited Zürich, with Udet and others, for a gliding demonstration. While there, Udet got hold of a Swiss pamphlet criticizing National Socialism and showed it to several pilots including Heini Dittmar’s brother. ‘It was dangerous,’ Edgar Dittmar later wrote. ‘If one of us glider pilots had said a word in Germany, it would have cost Udet his head.’30 If Udet showed the leaflet to Hanna, she wisely never mentioned it.
That September the crowds at the Nuremberg Rally numbered several hundred thousand. ‘As a display of aggregate strength it was ominous,’ Sir Nevile Henderson reported. ‘As a triumph of mass organization combined with beauty it was superb.’31 A few weeks later, Udet ordered ‘Flugkapitän Hanna Reitsch’ to report to the Luftwaffe testing station at Rechlin near Lake Mecklenburg for duty as a military test pilot. Hanna was delighted. Her brother, Kurt, was already serving on destroyers in the Kriegsmarine, and was sent to Spain twice in 1937 to support Franco’s struggle. Now she too could serve her country.
Karl Franke, the chief test pilot at Rechlin, already knew Hanna and welcomed her to the team, but she felt many of his colleagues believed her very ‘presence on the airfield was an outrage’.32 Her insistence that she be addressed with her honorary title did not help her popularity but she refused to compromise, preferring to call in support from Udet rather than accept anything less than her due.
This was Hanna’s first incursion into the military world, and the difference between the glider airfield at Darmstadt with its ‘slim, silvery birds . . . light as swallows’ and Rechlin’s military bombers and fighters, which to her eyes ‘seemed like lean arrows, straining towards their mark’, made a deep impression.33 ‘To me, who naturally felt these things more strongly than a man,’ she sighed, ‘Rechlin had an air of grim and purposeful menace.’34 Hanna knew that Germany was rearming, but wrote that she ‘saw it with different eyes than the world’. She insisted that she did not want war, but having witnessed years of poverty and insecurity she accepted the Nazi rhetoric about the need for
a ‘just peace’, and the ‘right to self-protection’. It was in this patriotic light, she later claimed, that she considered the military planes she was to test as ‘guardians at the portals of Peace’. Hanna hoped that ‘through my own caution and thoroughness, the lives of those who flew them after me would be protected and that, by their existence alone, they would contribute to the protection of the land I saw beneath me as I flew . . . for it was my home. Was that not worth flying for?’35 In this regard her stated views were similar to those held by many of her compatriots, including Melitta. The difference was that Melitta no longer knew how welcome she was as a citizen, rather than a subject, of Germany, or how long her contribution to her country’s ‘protection’ might be accepted.
Hanna now flew various fighters and bombers at Rechlin, including the Junkers Ju 87 Stuka dive-bomber with which Melitta was also working, and the Dornier Do 17, which was being fitted with dive-brakes, and which she referred to as her ‘most beloved bomber’.36 One day, however, Karl Franke asked Hanna to fly him over to the Focke-Wulf factory at Bremen where he was due to take up one of the world’s first helicopters, the precarious-looking Focke-Wulf Fw 61, for a test flight. Professor Henrich Focke’s pioneering machine had overcome the two fundamental problems facing autogyro and helicopter designers: the asymmetric lift caused by the imbalance of power between the advancing and retreating ‘air-listing screws’, or rotor blades, and the tendency for the helicopter’s body to rotate in the opposite direction to its rotors.37 The solution was to use two three-bladed rotors, turning in opposite directions, which were fixed up on outriggers, like small scaffolding towers, in place of wings. An open cockpit sat below. It was not an elegant design; some papers described it as looking ‘like a cross between a windmill and a bicycle’, but it worked.38
According to Hanna, when she landed at Bremen with Karl Franke, Focke wrongly assumed that she was there to give him a second opinion. Seeing that she was ‘brimming with joy’ at the thought of taking the helicopter up, Franke was generous enough not to disabuse the great designer.39 Franke flew the machine first, as a precaution keeping it tethered to the ground by a few yards of rope. Unfortunately this also trapped him in reflected turbulence, buffeting the helicopter about. Such an anchor did not appeal to Hanna. Before she took her turn she had the rope disconnected and a simple white circle painted on the ground around the machine to guide her.
As Hanna later recounted the story, with typical lack of false modesty, ‘within three minutes, I had it’.40 From now on Franke would argue that, in Germany, Hanna and Udet were the ‘only two people who were divinely gifted flyers’.41 The Fw 61’s vertical ascent to 300 feet, ‘like an express elevator’, with its noisy mechanical rotors literally pulling the machine up through the air, was completely different from the long tows needed by gliders, or even the shorter runs required to generate lift by engine-powered planes.42 To Hanna it was like flying in a new dimension. Despite the heavy vibrations that shook the whole airframe as she slowly opened the throttle, the revolutionary control of her position in the airspace at once fascinated and thrilled her, while the machine’s sensitivity and manoeuvrability was ‘intoxicating!’ ‘I thought of the lark,’ she wrote, ‘so light and small of wing, hovering over the summer fields.’43 Hanna had become the first woman in the world to fly a helicopter.
Later that year Charles Lindbergh returned to Germany, visiting Bremen, and winning ‘all hearts, wherever he went’, Hanna fawned.44 She felt honoured to demonstrate the helicopter for him, rising vertically, hanging poised in the air, reversing and landing slowly, ‘as easy as a bird’.45 Even years later she would glow with pride when recounting how impressed Lindbergh had been. For his part, Lindbergh would describe shaking hands with Hanna, while she kept the helicopter hovering beside him, as ‘one of the most amazing moments’ in his entire career.46 Udet then took him to look round the Luftwaffe’s Rechlin test centre which, although closed even to foreign attachés, opened its doors for this American celebrity whose sympathy towards the Nazi regime was well known. ‘Germany is once more a world power in the air,’ Lindbergh duly reported.47 Hanna’s superiors were delighted. Not long afterwards she demonstrated the helicopter for an audience of Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe generals, after which she was awarded the Military Flying Medal, once again the first woman to receive such an honour.
Although her race status was still unresolved, Melitta’s name was seemingly sufficiently cleared by her marriage into the Stauffenberg clan for her to be employed by the state again. It helped that Hanna had set a precedent, too, being appointed to the Luftwaffe test centre at Rechlin in September 1937. Melitta was not only a test pilot, she was also a brilliant aeronautical engineer. In October she was seconded from Askania to the Luftwaffe’s Technical Academy at Gatow airbase on the edge of Berlin, set beside woods leading down to Lake Wannsee. Here she was charged with the development of bomb-aiming devices and dive-sights for Stukas, the planes in which Udet had invested all his hopes for the Luftwaffe.
German engineers had realized that the best way to achieve accuracy in bombing was for pilots to aim their whole aircraft at the target, and release their bombs only at the last moment. The future role of the Luftwaffe, essentially as long-range artillery able to knock out precise targets such as bridges, railway junctions and airfield hangars ahead of advancing troops, was beginning to crystallize. Much of the initial work was theoretical, but Melitta aimed to prove the validity of her extensive mathematical calculations by undertaking her own test flights. She did not trust any of the other pilots with this work, feeling that she alone would know each machine’s history, its past repairs or usual performance, and so be able to ‘notice the very subtle changes in the plane that were needed to find the solution’ to any given technical problem.48
Although Melitta had the advantage of having already worked on dive-brakes at DVL, her determination to conduct nosedives was met with derision by her male colleagues. When she proved effective, there was reluctant admiration. In true Nazi fashion, Kurt Wilde, the usually brilliant head of the department, even looked to biology for an explanation, speculating whether ‘the blood composition of women – perhaps the ratio of white to red corpuscles . . . is more favourable for such dives than that of males, so that actually women are better fitted for such tests than men’.49 Others, conversely, felt that Melitta must be a very ‘masculine’ type of woman. One colleague, Dr Franks, even felt obliged to defend Melitta’s femininity, describing her as ‘a highly strung artist’ in her private life.50 This was a reference to Melitta’s clay modelling, which she continued with as a way to relax after work, sculpting head-and-shoulder portraits of the pilots and engineers she admired. She showed the results to Alexander, and to Paul von Handel when he visited. ‘They were very impressive,’ Paul felt, ‘of great impact and extremely lifelike.’51 For Franks, such artistry provided another possible explanation for Melitta’s success as a military test pilot. ‘Maybe this has given her the sensibility to fly better than others,’ he pondered. ‘Not just the concentration, but a sixth sense for feeling the subtleties of the plane.’52
In late October 1937, Melitta was finally awarded the honorary title of flight captain by Göring, in recognition of her latest work. She was proud of her new rank, and sent the official photograph to several friends, including Peter Riedel. She looks pleased but rather modest in the picture, the lace collar of her dark dress and the small bows on her shoes emphasizing her femininity. A bunch of long-stemmed roses seem forgotten in her hands. Melitta’s colleague, Richard Perlia, who was also being honoured, understood that the title came with strings as well as flowers. ‘If one wanted to stay working in the wonderful field of aviation, one needed the help of the Herr Reichsminister and supreme commander of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Göring,’ Perlia wrote. ‘It was he who awarded the title Flugkapitän. Refusal . . . would probably have led to immediate punishment with a flight ban, and no one wanted to risk this. By awarding the title, they kept us in line.’53 For Me
litta, however, the honour also seemed to show that, finally, she had been accepted by the new regime.
Melitta now found herself profiled across the German press as ‘no sports girl type, but indeed a scientist and a lady’.54 Such a blaze of publicity went against her nature, but according to her sister Jutta, ‘she bore these ordeals . . . with humour’.55 The story that must have rankled most was the one carried in Askania’s own in-house magazine. ‘In Germany, this high recognition has only been awarded to one woman previously,’ the article opened, referring to Hanna in the first recorded comparison of the two women.56 ‘We are delighted to be able to number [Melitta] amongst our staff,’ the article continued, noting that, as a woman, she was still officially a civilian employee on secondment from their company. Although now ‘entrusted with carrying out particularly complicated flying and applied mathematical special duties’, they added, the company hoped that Melitta would ‘continue to be able to work for us successfully for many years to come’.57
Richard Perlia now reluctantly recognized that, if he was to continue flying, he had to join the Luftwaffe, ‘no matter what I got myself into’.58 Melitta and Hanna, conversely, not only lived to fly but also, as ardent patriots, ached to serve their country – however differently they perceived it. Yet, as women, they could not become official Luftwaffe pilots even though they were designated flight captains, and were not entitled to wear uniform. Melitta usually turned up at Gatow in a dark trouser suit and beret, riding a bicycle across the airfield to the research buildings or the latest plane she was to test. Her new title was therefore an important mark of her authority, but although Melitta preferred to be known as Flight Captain Schiller, rather than Countess von Stauffenberg, she never insisted that either title be used. Her public endorsement by the regime was reassuring, but her self-esteem had never been dependent on such outward markers. Hanna, the only other female pilot working directly with the Luftwaffe, took the opposite approach. She designed a uniform-like dark-blue skirt suit for herself, and had another made in brown. Despite having claimed to despise honours just two years earlier, she was still adamant that she should always be correctly addressed as ‘Flight Captain’.