by Clare Mulley
Melitta’s reputation within aviation circles continued to grow. Despite her wish for a low profile, she was increasingly photographed on the airfield, cycling across the grass or in discussion with her observer, gloves in one hand, the arc of an anticipated flight traced with the other. She annotated the back of one picture with the simple possessive, ‘My Ju 88’. More photographs show her working at her drawing board, checking the film of her latest test flight or calculating the adjustments needed, a female assistant hovering behind. As word about her work spread, even Göring came to admire ‘the precise evaluation of the measured nosedives [that] were led by Countess Stauffenberg herself’.51
After the Gigant, Hanna was employed in testing a series of different prototypes. A pilotless glider had been developed for use as a petrol tanker, to enable refuelling in mid-air. Sitting with the controls locked, her function was to observe the glider’s inherent stability as it was towed behind its parent plane. It had very little. Rocked around violently with no means of control, Hanna found herself subject to ‘the most primitive and hateful fear’, she said.52 The tanker was abandoned. She then tested warship deck landings, descending into a dangerous mesh of cables. Again the Luftwaffe would eventually abandon the idea, but only after Hanna had narrowly avoided decapitation.*
Her next role was no less dangerous. She was required to fly a Dornier Do 17 bomber, ‘my most beloved bomber’, as she called it, and later a Heinkel He 111, directly into deadly anti-aircraft barrage balloon cables.53 The iconic silver hydrogen-filled balloons now formed an airborne barricade of ‘grey silhouettes or silver blobs, depending where the sun was’, over Southampton, parts of London and other cities, and sections of the English countryside.54 Trailing lethal steel cables like industrial Portuguese men-of-war, these floating blockades had to be navigated by returning RAF planes and British ATA ferry pilots – all flying in radio silence – as well as by enemy aircraft. If forced to fly above the balloons, German bombers had no hope of accuracy, and crashing into one might cause a plane to be ‘tipped up’, even knocking the bombs back into their bays.55 Below the balloons, however, the heavy steel cables that tethered them to the ground were hard to spot at speed, and invisible at night. They could easily, and often did, shear through propeller blades, or even slice the wing from a fast-moving plane, sending it spiralling down to earth.
To combat this threat, Hans Jacobs designed heavy fenders that were riveted onto the nose section of the bombers, and secured with straps to their wing spar. His plan was to deflect any cables down to the wing tips where sharp steel blades would cut them.* It was Hanna’s job to test the prototype cutting devices against cables of various widths. Sometimes these were British cables. When the wind was strong, an unmanned barrage balloon could float to 2,000 metres and occasionally one would find its way to enemy territory where it might be ‘captured’, as Goebbels put it smugly in his diary, and redeployed for test purposes.56 Instruments on board Hanna’s plane would record the results of the impact, so that improvements could be developed. If the fenders did not work, it was feared that broken fragments of propeller might be hurled through the cabin, so a second set of controls was built into the rear gun turret, near to the escape hatch. Although Hanna could neither take off nor land using these supplementary controls, once in the air she could maintain her course with them, and parachute out with her co-pilot if necessary.
Flying deliberately into a balloon cable required considerable courage but, typically, once in the air on her first test run, Hanna’s imagination was caught by the beauty of the lethal lines ‘gleaming silver in the sunlight against a backdrop of blue sky’.57 She then swung her aircraft round, staggered down to the rear cockpit, felt the calm of intense concentration descend upon her, aimed, and flew directly towards her target. There was a sudden jerk as the cable hit the fender, and then the Dornier swept on. Although the design needed improvement, these first trials were encouraging. Greim asked for all the planes fitted with the fender to be transferred to his command, and pilots whose aircraft had been saved began to send back their thanks. Hanna would later present the aim of her work as ‘the saving of human lives’.58 Each test ‘brought us a step nearer to overcoming some of those perils which pilots and aircrews had daily to face in operations against the enemy’, she wrote with pride.59
Hanna was so committed to her work that she continued flying even when she developed a raging temperature towards the end of 1940. Diagnosed with scarlet fever, then a potentially lethal disease, she was forced to spend three months in a darkened hospital isolation ward, seething with frustration at her enforced inaction. By Christmas, Luftwaffe losses had risen significantly, and production levels were scarcely enough to maintain the fleet. Hitler’s priority was now the Wehrmacht and he blithely accepted Göring’s unsupported promises that such weaknesses would be overcome.
Hanna returned to work immediately after her discharge from hospital in the spring of 1941. Jacobs’ fender design had now been replaced by a lighter strip of razor-sharp steel, fixed to the leading edge of the test plane’s wings. Udet was en route to a conference with Hitler when he stopped off to watch the tests. That day Hanna was due to fly into a short length of cable attached to a balloon that had drifted over from England. To connect with this cable she had to fly at low level – too low to bail out should anything go wrong – so this time she flew alone. It was a blustery day, and the balloon was twisting on its moorings, dragging the straining cable at an awkward angle. Had Udet not been watching, the test might have been aborted. As it was, nobody wanted to disappoint a general.
When Hanna’s bomber hit it, the cable simply ripped apart, whipping through the air and slicing the edges from two of her propeller blades. Metal splinters shot through the cockpit, and the starboard engine began to race, threatening to tear itself loose from the wing. ‘Hearing the crack of the parting cable and seeing the air filled with metal fragments’, Udet watched as the crippled plane disappeared behind the treetops, and waited for the inevitable and all-too-familiar sound of exploding fuel tanks.60 Nothing happened. Incredibly, Hanna, who was uninjured, had managed to switch off the crippled engine and perform an emergency landing. When Udet reached the scene he stood transfixed while she climbed out of the damaged plane and even managed a weak smile. Having flown on to his conference, Udet described the incident in vivid detail to Hitler.
A few weeks later, on 27 March 1941, Hanna found herself invited to visit Göring at his lavish Berlin home. Dressed in his famous white uniform, replete with gold braid, buttons and medals, the commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe was all set to present Hanna with a special women’s version of the Military Flight Badge in gold with diamonds, for her courage and service. This was the first time that Göring had given much consideration to Hanna’s person, and when she entered the room he continued to stare over her head towards the doorway. After a few moments Udet drew his attention to the fact that the guest of honour had already arrived. ‘Göring’s amazement was great,’ Hanna laughed in her memoir. ‘He planted his bulk squarely in front of me, his hands resting on his hips, and demanded, “What! Is this supposed to be our famous Flugkapitän? Where’s the rest of her? How can this little person manage to fly at all?”’ Insulted, but evidently quite comfortable in the company of the senior Nazi leadership, Hanna made a sweep of her hand roughly corresponding to Göring’s girth and asked the Great War ace and Nazi Reichsmarschall, ‘Do you have to look like that to fly?’61 Fortunately for her, Göring and his entourage laughed. Hanna proudly wore the golden wreath, through which a diamond-encrusted eagle carries a swastika, on her tunic for the rest of her life.
The following day, 28 March, Hitler himself was to receive Hanna in the Reich Chancellery, to confer on her the Iron Cross, Second Class, in recognition of her act of valour beyond the normal fulfilment of her duty. She was the first woman to be so honoured during the Second World War.* An adjutant led her down the long marble hall, ‘polished like a mirror’, towards the Führer’s stud
y.62 Hitler’s ‘manner of walking was always measured, almost ceremonial’, his secretary Christa Schroeder reported, knowing that he used such personal restraint, like the length of the hall, to intimidate.63 But Hanna wrote that ‘Hitler greeted me with friendly warmth’, while Göring stood beside him, ‘beaming’, she felt, ‘like a father permitted to introduce a prettily mannered child’.64 She was then invited to sit between the two Nazi leaders at a large round table, the surreal nature of the moment enhanced by the vase of early sweet peas set in front of them.
Technical subjects were known to ‘enthral’ Hitler and, with little preamble, he began to question Hanna about her work.65 It seems the Führer was in a cordial mood that day. At such times his eyes were often described as expressive and searching, and his conversation as animated. ‘Undoubtedly he knew how to charm a person under his spell during conversation,’ Schroeder wrote. ‘He could expound even the most complicated subjects clearly and simply . . . he fascinated his listeners.’66 Hanna was pretty charming herself. When she talked about planes her eyes lit up and she bubbled with enthusiasm, waving her arms around to illustrate her anecdotes. Later she cautiously wrote that ‘it was impossible to gain any deeper insight into Hitler’s personality and character’, as they only discussed aircraft, but his technical knowledge and ‘the searching pointedness of his questions’ struck her as ‘remarkable for a layman’.67
Over the next few weeks Hanna was delighted to find herself the subject of numerous articles in the German and international press.68 She received so many congratulatory letters that she was assigned a part-time secretary to help manage her correspondence. She would grumble rather proudly about her ‘mountains, mountains, mountains’ of post ever afterwards.69 At the start of April she returned to her home town of Hirschberg to be welcomed as a heroine, and as a rather unlikely role model for German womanhood under the Nazi regime. ‘As soon as we reached the Silesian border, the villages were decked with flags, people at the roadside threw flowers or waved . . .’ she wrote triumphantly. ‘We had to stop several times while the schoolchildren sang songs, shook hands . . . and presented me with gifts.’70 At the town hall she was presented with a Scroll of Honorary Citizenship, a distinction previously only bestowed on the poet and playwright Gerhart Hauptmann, a founder member of the 1905 German Society for Racial Hygiene. That afternoon, at her old school, she was amused also to be given a bound volume of those pages from the school class book that recorded the ‘rich harvest of black marks’ against her own name – at one stroke these had been neatly removed from the school’s own records.71 Above all, Hanna wrote, she was touched to look into ‘the sparkling, eager eyes of the girls’ in which she seemed ‘to catch a reflection of my own youth’.72 That evening she received another gift, a Grunau Baby glider, which she named ‘after the unforgettable Otto Bräutigam’ and donated to the local gliding school.73
Although she could not visit often, Hanna felt deeply connected to Hirschberg. Her mother, Emy, wrote almost every day, encouraging Hanna in her patriotic duty to her country while optimistically exhorting her to remain humble, and finally, lovingly, entrusting her to God. Emy prayed constantly for Germany, and for protection for those advancing the German cause, as she saw it. Like her mother’s, Hanna’s belief in God and the Fatherland was absolute. ‘She herself thought she was a Nazi,’ her uncle later testified, but she never joined the Party, perhaps because, as a Freemason, her father would not have been admitted.74
Hanna now saw how much her parents had aged. Emy’s hair was grey and twisted back into a bun at the nape of her neck, and they both looked exhausted by worry. Hanna’s brother, Kurt, had survived the sinking of his ship but was already back on active duty. Emy and Willy must have known that the odds of both, or even either, Kurt or Hanna surviving the rest of the conflict were slim. They found strength in their belief in the honour of their country, and the cause for which their children were fighting. It was their younger daughter, Heidi, who was their greatest source of comfort, however. The summer before, Heidi had given birth to twins, a boy and a girl, to keep their three-year-old brother company. Now she was pregnant again. Hanna loved playing with the children, often singing the Austrian songs that her mother had taught her and Heidi as children.
While Emy and Willy Reitsch were enjoying a rare family moment with both of their daughters at home, Melitta’s equally proud and patriotic parents, like hundreds of thousands of German Jews, were facing the very real prospect of transportation to an unknown land or camp in the east. The first deportation of German Jews had taken place in January 1941. Initially Michael and Margarete were protected by the fact that Margarete was not Jewish, along with the influence of a close friend with the right connections, but they knew they could not rely on such support. In March, Goebbels noted that ‘Vienna will soon be entirely Jew-free . . . now it is to be Berlin’s turn.’75 As their situation grew yet more precarious, ironically it was the suggestion that Melitta should be dismissed from Rechlin that would provide her entire family with a lifeline.
Melitta’s extraordinary work with dive-bombers had not only proved her worth; she was increasingly considered to be irreplaceable. ‘This woman’s achievements . . .’ Dr Georg Pasewaldt from the Aviation Ministry later testified, could ‘scarcely have been performed by anyone else’.76 Although officially her racial heritage was never discussed at Rechlin, not only the ministry but Göring himself now personally intervened to ensure Melitta’s work was defined as ‘war-essential’, and her position was secure. As a result, on 25 June 1941, less than a month after Hanna had received her Iron Cross, Second Class, Melitta received something even more valuable – her Reichssippenamt, a certificate from the ‘Reich Kinship Bureau’, to confirm both her ‘German blood’ and her official status as ‘equal to Aryan’.
‘This special position saved her life,’ Melitta’s niece, Konstanze, later asserted, but Melitta was not satisfied.77 Reasoning that if her work was considered war-essential, her requirements should be as well, she immediately risked everything she had gained by applying for ‘equal to Aryan’ status for her father and siblings. Lili was still fairly safe at this point, being married to a high-ranking Party official. Otto, an expert on Soviet agriculture, had gained almost unique value to the regime after the invasion of the Soviet Union a week earlier, although now rumours about massacres of Russian Jews began to filter back to Germany. Michael Schiller, and Melitta’s younger sisters, Jutta and Klara, were all still extremely vulnerable.
Between 1935 and 1941, some 10,000 German descendants of Jewish families applied for ‘equal to Aryan’ status. Fewer than 300 would be successful, and all knew that their status could be revoked at any time.78 In 1942, Martin Bormann, Hitler’s fanatically racist personal secretary and head of the Party Chancellery, decided that only exceptional new applications would even be considered. None of the family could feel ‘completely secure’, Klara wrote, ‘until the decision was made’.79 Melitta’s timely application may well not only have saved her family from deportation but, although she did not yet know it, ultimately prevented their murders. From this point on, Melitta knew that her Rechlin work was of vital importance not just for her fellow pilots, or even her country, but directly for the safety of her own family. She could not afford to take any unnecessary risks, but neither could she afford to be anything less than exceptional.
Among the pilots serving on the Eastern Front was Dietrich Pütter, a lieutenant in a long-distance reconnaissance unit based at the historic city of Berdichev in northern Ukraine. Pütter flew a Ju 88, ‘a pilot’s aircraft’, as he described it, ‘the best in the world at the time’, high above the Caucasus Mountains, providing aerial photographs of the passes in preparation for the German advance.80 On a morning when he was the highest-ranking officer at the base, he spotted the Führer’s sleek four-engine Condor approaching to land. Hitler had arranged to meet Mussolini at Berdichev and sat on Pütter’s desk waiting for his guest, swinging his legs while the young lieutenant answered
his questions about injection pumps, and the best routes through the mountains.* ‘Hitler was impressive . . . he was so normal . . . and relaxed in the presence of his soldiers,’ Pütter later recalled. And ‘his political view was not so wrong’.81 Berdichev had only been occupied since 7 July. At that point about a third of the Jewish population, including many Polish Jewish refugees, had managed to get out. Within a few months a ghetto had been established for the rest. Four hundred male ‘specialists’ were removed to provide labour. Between the summer of 1941 and June 1942 the remaining Jewish population was massacred.
In August 1941, Pütter returned to Berlin to deliver a box of Black Sea caviar to Göring, who he knew quite well, having trained with his nephew. Pütter was staying at the luxurious five-storey Adlon Hotel at the top of Unter den Linden, then the hotel in Germany and just round the corner from the Ministry of Aviation.* At breakfast, to his great delight, he found himself sharing a table with the now famous Hanna Reitsch. Hanna was dressed in one of the outfits she had designed for herself, and which reflected her position so appositely: ‘like a kind of uniform, but not a uniform’, as Pütter saw it.82 Both of them also wore their Iron Crosses. At nearly six foot, Pütter towered over the tiny Hanna, and the two of them were soon laughing at how she sometimes had to take a cushion into the cockpit.* ‘She was very charming . . . with a winning smile,’ he later remembered, but when he mentioned his coming appointment Hanna was suddenly appalled. ‘Give me your jacket,’ she said urgently, ‘you can’t go like that to the Reichsmarschall!’ One button was hanging loose. Hanna searched in her handbag and found needle and thread. Then she deftly sewed the button on, still sitting at the breakfast table. It was ‘very motherly’, Pütter laughed.83