by Clare Mulley
Melitta spent the next few months commuting between Alexander, slowly recovering in Würzburg, and her work at Gatow. Her new employment contract with the Reich had finally come through, but she was not happy with the terms. Her salary had been pegged to Hanna’s but she felt that any comparison of their duties or performance was misleading. ‘Hanna Reitsch has not studied . . . [and] could only offer flying knowledge,’ she told the ministry curtly.58 She herself, being an aeronautical engineer as well as a test pilot, provided vital technical direction and should therefore be paid the same as ‘officials or male employees of the Reich with equivalent previous knowledge for similar work’.59 She was clearly feeling more secure personally, yet she still added the caveat that ‘the work to be done is . . . so extensive that it will be years before it ends’.60 Melitta’s salary was eventually agreed at an initial 1,400 Reichsmarks, almost a third more than Hanna received, even given danger allowance, and three times Alexander’s university salary. She was also promised a swift pay review, along with a research institute of her own the following year with a 100,000 Reichsmark start-up budget, plus the same again for running costs including salary for eight employees.
Claus and Nina’s eldest son, Berthold, remembers overhearing a conversation between Melitta and his great-aunt Alexandrine, at around this time. Although just nine years old, Berthold was already ‘a regular newspaper reader’ and had often seen Hanna celebrated in the press as a heroine of the Reich, so his ears pricked up at the mention of her name.61 It was with some surprise, then, that he realized ‘it was obvious that [Melitta] did not like her’.62 Melitta and his aunt then started caustically referring to Hanna by her nickname, Heilige Johanna – Saint Joan. The implication was not that Hanna was Germany’s self-sacrificing saviour, but rather, Berthold thought, that Hanna ‘thought herself to be so perfect’.63 The conversation also suggests that Melitta had now heard of Hanna’s suicide-bomber plans.
Despite Milch’s insistence that she drop the idea of suicide squadrons, after witnessing the situation at the front Hanna was more convinced than ever that this was the only way forward. Since her return to Berlin she had raised the idea with colleagues at the aeronautical research institute, and her persistence won unofficial support. That winter a group of naval and aeronautical designers, engineers and technical experts unofficially joined representatives from Luftwaffe fighter and bomber squadrons and medical specialists, to explore the feasibility of the idea.
Milch had expressly forbidden the experimental adaptation of existing Luftwaffe fighter planes, all of which were needed to intercept the growing numbers of Allied bombers. As a result, the informal project team proposed adapting a V-1 missile, soon to be known in Britain as the buzz bomb or doodlebug, for manned flight. But the Messerschmitt Me 328, a single-seater plane originally designed as a long-range fighter or light bomber, proved too appealing. Although it would still require considerable modification to avoid, as Hanna put it, ‘entailing a frivolous and senseless destruction of life’, it was both more suitable than the V-1 and, crucially, it was already in production.64 The next challenge was to secure official approval for the production of a number of test Me 328s and the launch of a pilot training programme. With Göring already ruled out, and Milch unequivocally against the idea, the one authority to whom Hanna felt she could still turn was Hitler. Her Führer, however, was preoccupied.
According to his secretary, Hitler was ‘full of enthusiasm for the V-1s and V-2s’. ‘Panic will break out in England . . .’ he told her. ‘I’ll pay the barbarians back for shooting women and children and destroying German culture.’65 The bombing of Peenemünde had set the vengeance programme back several months, but since production had been transferred to underground sites like Mittelwerk, it was now protected from air attack. No longer able to destroy V-2 rockets at source, British aerial intelligence focused on finding the launch sites. They quickly had their first success. The concrete for the reinforced dome above a huge bunker had just been poured at Watten, in northern France, when the heavy bombers of the US Air Force attacked on 27 August. Ten days later the ruins had set hard in the concrete.* Many more sites were under development, however.
In October, all Nazi-held land within a 130-mile range of London was photographed and studied. The next month Constance Babington Smith spotted a tiny cruciform blur on a photograph. At less than one millimetre across, the image was hardly visible to the naked eye but Babington Smith had her pre-war German jeweller’s magnifying glass. The V-1 was ‘an absurd little object’, she wrote, ‘sitting in a corner of a small enclosure’, but nevertheless ‘a whisper went round the whole station. We were all very well aware that this was something fantastically important.’66 British researchers now knew what they were looking for, and ninety-six V-1 launch sites were eventually identified in France, many with ramps pointing towards London. Estimates were that Germany would soon have the capacity to launch around 2,000 flying bombs every day. ‘It seemed that the V-1 attacks, when they came, would be of appalling magnitude’, Babington Smith continued. The sites ‘had obviously got to be bombed’.67
While the Allies were photographing occupied northern France, Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry sent Melitta on a public relations mission to neutral Sweden. Apart from a few radio interviews, Melitta had largely avoided being used for Nazi PR. She had already won reprieves from visiting Stockholm on the pretexts that her husband needed her, and that she did not wish to look as though she were leaving Berlin from cowardice during the air raids. Now, however, Swedish students were demonstrating in support of their conscripted Norwegian counterparts. Needing someone to rally the Swedish establishment, the Reich pressed Melitta, who reluctantly accepted that some public relations work had ‘become unavoidable’.68
Her journey to Stockholm was an adventure in itself. Engine troubles prevented her flying from Würzburg, and the train to Berlin was delayed by three hours of air-raid warnings. In the capital, the Foreign Office had been bomb-damaged and the Swedish Embassy completely destroyed, making visas unobtainable. In any case, as a woman, she was told, she was ineligible for the reserved government seats on the only flight out. The official responsible for this decision ‘gave way of course, within a minute, when he got a reprimand from on high’, Melitta later reported with some satisfaction, but another air raid made her miss the flight anyhow.69 Her phone calls to the Foreign Office went unanswered. ‘The operators simply let me hang on,’ she wrote, ‘and, if I complained, snapped my head off because they took me for a secretary.’70 Eventually she caught a flight to Copenhagen, in occupied Denmark, where she alighted without money or onward papers. ‘Just as I was thinking that at last I had a night before me which would be undisturbed by air-raid warnings,’ she wrote drily, ‘there was a shooting a few steps away from me.’71 A German sergeant had been killed by the Danish resistance: ‘shot by an assassin’, as Melitta reported it.72 A moment later, she heard ‘two big explosions’ caused by sabotage inside nearby factories. Although well used to feeling under siege herself, she was shocked to witness such resistance to Nazi occupation.
Melitta eventually arrived in Stockholm by train the next day. She was received ‘with an audible sigh of relief’ by a representative from her embassy, along with a crowd of reporters, whom she tried to avoid.73 Her phone did not stop ringing, however, until she walked out that evening in an elegant gown, quickly mended and ironed, to address an audience of almost 700 diplomats, Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht generals, scientists, academics and other dignitaries. Among them was her and Hanna’s pilot friend Peter Riedel, who had managed to stay in diplomacy and been appointed air attaché to the German Embassy in Sweden a month earlier, as well as the two sisters of Carin Göring, the first wife of the Reichsmarschall.
Entitled ‘A Woman in Test-Flying’, Melitta’s lecture provided a fascinating picture of her life and career, without going into the details of her current war work which was, she said, ‘naturally of a secret nature’.74 Although she was expected to champion the
regime, at a time of great rhetorical flourish her carefully chosen words were telling in their modesty. ‘I have tried to serve my country in both war and peace,’ she began, framing herself as a patriot rather than a Nazi. Throughout the lecture, she avoided mentioning Hitler and the National Socialist Party, and when she talked of her work as being ‘a commitment to the Reich’ she added the corollary that this commitment was one shared by all fighters and workers, men and women, ‘and, therefore, I am not speaking to you in my own name . . .’75 Rather, she said, she felt herself ‘to be a representative of the thousands and thousands of German women who, today, are involved in fighting and danger, and . . . an ambassador of my “people in arms”.’ While Melitta did not overtly criticize the Nazi leadership or its policies, this was not the usual language of a proud spokesperson for the regime.
Perhaps the strongest rhetoric in Melitta’s speech, however, was reserved for her thoughts on gender. Female pilots had long been a topic of press and public interest. Naturally conservative, Melitta knew she could speak from the heart on this subject without causing controversy at home. ‘I believe I am able to say this in the name of all German female pilots,’ she announced rather sweepingly. ‘The values characteristic of all womankind have not been altered; for us flying has never been a matter of causing a sensation, or even of emancipation. We women pilots are not suffragettes.’76 Although she had had to fight for her own opportunities and equal pay, and never hid her irritation when she encountered sexism personally, Melitta saw herself not as an agent of change, but rather as the exception to the gender rule. Her argument that ‘woman is no stranger at all to the most masculine activity and harshest self-denial in the service of higher values, while still safeguarding womanly worth and charm’, was quite sincere, and borne out by her own experience.77 She had volunteered for a more feminine ‘helpful and healing’ role with the German Red Cross, she said, and been rejected. Now she spoke of her ‘soldierly effort’ in aircraft development, and test flights undertaken even if they involved ‘sacrificing my life’.78
Melitta’s most poignant words, about the ‘whirlwind’ of war, came as she wound up her talk.79 ‘War in our time has long outgrown the historical, initially incomprehensible, seeming futility of its origins, and outgrown the question of guilt or cause – so that it develops as if independent of every influence of the individual . . .’ she argued. ‘Imperceptibly it has received its terrible objective meaning, which we do not give it, but which towers threateningly before us.’ For Melitta, the horrors of the war, the injuries and deaths of those fighting at the front or in the skies, and the bombing of civilians in their homes, had given the conflict an awful meaning and momentum of its own. Whatever the causes, she was not unaffected and could not stand passively by. ‘Let me end,’ she said after a breath, ‘not with such a pathetic picture, but with the conviction that . . . we shall survive.’80 Whether it was the Third Reich in which she placed her faith, or simply ‘the innermost substance of the people’, as she put it, she did not clarify.81
‘My lecture was exceptionally well received,’ Melitta reported boldly a few days later.82 But despite the warm applause in the room, there was little coverage in the Swedish press. A few days of formal lunches, dinners and entertainment followed, hosted by groups such as the Swedish Aero Club and the Women’s Association. ‘The Swedes were all extremely kind,’ Melitta added, although ‘those who are friendly towards Germany lay themselves open to attack’.83 Before she left, one of Göring’s sisters-in-law sent Melitta ‘a very touching letter’ along with a woollen shawl and two blocks of chocolate for her return journey.84 A few days later she arrived home exhausted, and headed straight back to work.
In mid-December Alexander was discharged from hospital for two weeks’ rest before redeployment. Melitta’s sisters in the countryside sent them parcels of the food it was now impossible to buy in Berlin: cake, vegetables and eggs, some of which survived the journey to Würzburg in their cardboard trays. Not all the post was so cheering. There were funerals to attend, and one morning the shocking news came that Franz’s plane had caught fire after its undercarriage failed to retract. Somehow he survived without serious injury, and Melitta breathed again. The approach of Christmas brought parties and presents to plan. In the evenings Alexander would sing in the kitchen, or recite poems to his wife. At work Melitta was surrounded by engineers and pilots, in front of whom she had to prove her worth. Alexander was different. Their time together gave her the safe space she needed to relax and express her own artistic side, and for this she loved him deeply.
Five days before Christmas, the US Eighth Air Force started to bomb the V-1 launch sites in northern France, to prevent a winter attack. Eventually they would obliterate every one. ‘The first round of the battle against the flying bomb was an overwhelming victory for the Allies,’ Babington Smith wrote with some flourish.85 The bombing of the German capital also continued. Hanna was feeling under siege, but Melitta returned to Würzburg for the holiday. On Christmas Eve she put on a good brocade dress, and she and Alexander decorated a tree together before roasting potatoes for supper. Late that evening Franz knocked on the door. He ended up staying the night, and was still with them for a late breakfast the next day. After he left, Melitta and Alexander cooked a goose and enjoyed a ‘cosy Christmas evening’.86 The next few days were less snug. ‘Freezing cold room,’ Melitta recorded, but they still sang and laughed, and lit the candles on the tree.87 Their best present arrived the next day, when Alexander learned his orders had not yet come through. ‘Won some time together,’ Melitta wrote happily.88
Despite Alexander’s temporary reprieve, he and Melitta do not seem to have spent New Year’s Eve together. Melitta drank sweet sparkling wine alone beside her Christmas tree that evening, and spent much of the next day in bed with a cold. She then headed back to work at various airfields. ‘She was always very busy,’ her sister Klara remembered.89 Klara sometimes visited at weekends for a brief walk or sail on the lake, adding that ‘as soon as we got back to her place she had to get back into urgent work’.90 She would then help with the domestic chores that Melitta ‘hated spending precious time on’.91 This included preparing the rabbits that Melitta shot near the airfield. Klara found her sister’s passion for hunting strange. ‘She would not harm a fly – yet in Gatow she went rabbit shooting,’ she remarked, adding that ‘of course she always felt sorry for the rabbits, but her sporting ambition to hit a moving object would take precedence over sensitivity.’92 Perhaps, Klara thought, this detachment was how Melitta managed to continue her work developing bombsights, while ‘any thoughts about the target and the consequences of dropping a bomb’ were ‘pushed away’.93
Melitta was in fact now working more on the development of night interception technology and techniques – priority work, given the Allied bombing campaigns. ‘One pitch-black night the Countess Stauffenberg . . . landed in a Ju 88 on the small airfield at Döberitz to explain her new night-landing technique to me,’ Hajo Herrmann later recalled.94 Night landing without ground guidance was still hazardous. Hajo’s Wilde Sau group of interceptors were proving increasingly effective, but Hitler, he noted ruefully, did not like the name, ‘preferring the beautiful word chosen by the Japanese for their fighter pilots: “Kamikaze” – the Divine Wind’.95 Nevertheless, Göring rapidly promoted Hajo. At the start of 1944 he was a captain; he would end the year a colonel. Göring also ‘put me up for a higher decoration, which I was then awarded by Hitler’, Hajo later recounted proudly.96 Much of his success and promotion was down to Melitta, and he knew it.
Over New Year Alexander visited his friend Rudolf Fahrner, a fellow academic and head of the German Research Institute in Athens. Fahrner had an isolated house by the Bodensee, where Alexander and Melitta had stayed after their wedding. This had once been the meeting house of the Stefan George circle, and it now proved the perfect setting for Alexander to finish his paean to the great poet, ‘Death of the Master’.* George’s seminal work, Das Neue Reich
(The New Empire), had been published in 1928 and was in part dedicated to Alexander’s twin brother, Berthold. In it George had proposed a future Germany ruled by its aristocracy. This was no democratic vision, more a benevolent system of noblesse oblige that appealed to all three of the rather superior Stauffenberg brothers.* As a result, although many Party members claimed to have been inspired by the poet, by 1943 a significant number in the developing German resistance were also drawn from George’s old circle, including Fahrner, and Claus and Berthold Stauffenberg. Alexander was back at the house again a week later discussing strategies for survival, and the possibility of resistance.
Less than two weeks into the new year, the commanding officer of the Gatow academies, Dr Robert Knauss, officially proposed Melitta for the Iron Cross, First Class. His paper cited her ‘sublime achievements’ and devotion to duty, specifying her 2,200 nosedives and other test flights to evaluate of the impact of wind, speed, height, angle and distance in the development of dive-sights and other innovations.97 The proposal had already been discussed with Milch, who lent his full support.
On the day of her nomination, Melitta was testing a Ju 87 at Schleissheim airfield near Munich, the home of a night interceptor squadron. Unable to cope with the stresses she put it through, the armoured glass cockpit shuddered and cracked during her flight. ‘Ju 87 window broken,’ she noted prosaically. ‘Organized repair, tea, toast, migraine.’98 Melitta spent the next six days at Schleissheim, mainly working with Junkers. In the evenings she ate at the smartest local hotel. She was almost certainly with Franz, whose squadron was based at the airfield. She then flew to Lautlingen, where she met Alexander at the family schloss. Here there were still luxuries to be enjoyed; morning walks in the sunshine, afternoon teas, sparkling wine and cosy evenings with her husband, but her visit was not entirely peaceful. ‘A lot of fuss about Stockholm talk,’ she noted irritably, and later ‘evening tiff with Mika’, Berthold’s wife.99 It seems that many in the family were not happy that she had eventually given way and let the Nazis exploit her for propaganda.