The Women Who Flew for Hitler: The True Story of Hitler's Valkyries

by Clare Mulley

  While the Stauffenberg family was being rounded up, Otto Skorzeny had been busy tracking down the remaining conspirators, and anyone else the regime wanted rid of. Rumour was that it was ‘risky even to look sad. A lot of people have been arrested just for saying “What a pity!”’, one young journalist confided to her diary.48 Eventually almost 7,000 people would be arrested, many disappearing into concentration camps. Others were shot immediately. Some military figures who had fallen from favour, like the popular Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, were forced to commit suicide. Many more were dragged in front of the infamous People’s Court presided over by Judge Roland Freisler. The first trials were held in early August. Hitler, still ‘dominated by the lust for revenge’, as his personal valet put it, ordered those found guilty to be ‘hanged like cattle’.49 The 9th of August was a ‘very black day’, Melitta wrote, alone in her cell. ‘Eight traitors hanged.’50 Hitler, meanwhile, thanked Skorzeny personally for his efforts, telling him, ‘You, Skorzeny, saved the Third Reich.’51

  Berthold’s trial took place the following morning. While Melitta silently washed her shirt in a prison sink, her brother-in-law, forbidden to wear uniform, tie, belt or braces, had to hold up his trousers as he entered the dock. Despite this attempt to humiliate him, Berthold kept his gaze level. He was resolved to meet his fate with dignity. Whenever he spoke, however, Freisler shouted over him so that his words would not make the record. Hitler had decreed that no martyrs were to be made that day.

  Along with eight others, Berthold was sentenced to be hanged that afternoon. Taken to the execution shed at Plötzensee prison, he saw a bare, whitewashed room, furnished only with a guillotine and a steel girder lined with butcher’s hooks for the prisoners, and a small table set with glasses and cognac for the executioners. Rather than being allowed to drop, he was then slowly hoisted into the air by a cord around his neck so that he could be hanged and revived several times before he died. These proceedings were photographed and filmed. ‘Hitler put on his spectacles, eagerly grabbed the macabre images and gazed at them for an eternity,’ one of his inner circle later wrote. ‘The close-up shots of the victims’ death throes were soon being passed from hand to hand.’52

  Although spared such details, Melitta now suffered increasingly dark days. Against 11 August she wrote, ‘Wedding anniversary, very sad.’53 At some point she hid a lock of her hair in a folded page at the back of her diary, perhaps as a keepsake should she be condemned herself. Not long later, Nüx was sentenced to death, having refused to plead confusion due to his advanced age. Next it was the turn of Hans von Haeften, the brother of Claus’s adjutant. Barbara von Haeften, who was also incarcerated in Charlottenburg, wrote that she ‘almost drowned in my tears’ after she heard of her husband’s execution. Her only relief was that he had escaped more torture. Determined to ‘live for my children’, she passed the time in her cell patching Luftwaffe shirts ‘with great zeal’.54 Melitta knew that her value to the regime was the only hope she had of protecting herself, and perhaps to some extent also Alexander, Nina, Mika and the children. Working into the early hours, sometimes she would hear Barbara and other prisoners weeping. She offered comfort when she could, worked on, killed bed bugs, took sleeping pills, and was woken by air raids.

  Melitta’s dreams, when they came, were tortuous. She would be with Franz, and he would suddenly disappear. When she found him, in the cabin of a Lufthansa aircraft, he told her he wanted ‘to go ahead alone’.55 Understanding his meaning, ‘I want to reproach him for his being so thoughtless,’ she recorded, but up in the heavens ‘he says quite brightly, “Just look”, and shows me the new cut of a collar the tailor has designed for him. He is wearing a coarse, bright suit, just a design without its lining. I don’t like the collar, say he should keep to his traditional heavy green jacket . . . I think it is certainly not worth making a new one, because he must die soon. When I asked whether I should go first, he kissed my hand sweetly and said we should go together, as that would be nicer than each of us having to find our way alone.’56

  Opitz visited Melitta that evening, when she woke. After reassuring her that Alexander was well, he broke the news that, on Hitler’s orders, she was ‘not to be released at once’. ‘Should [submit] another plea,’ she wrote. ‘Regard it as futile.’57

  Unknown to Melitta, several colleagues at the Luftwaffe Academy and Ministry of Aviation were lobbying on her behalf. ‘There was a special core of people all attached to flying, with a kind of team spirit,’ one of her nephews later wrote. Melitta ‘was known to every flier, to everyone who had anything to do with aviation. She had a number of personal friends in that crowd.’58 Among them was Hajo Herrmann, leader of the Wilde Sau interception squadron and a close confidant of Göring. Hajo had been appalled by the assassination attempt. Although conceding that there had been ‘failures’ and ‘weaknesses of the leadership’, he felt it was ‘our common duty to follow the path that history had marked out for us’.59 Certain that Melitta could not have known about the plot, he remonstrated with Göring that her duty was also at her station. Her equipment was ‘tremendous’, he added, and he refused to fly without it.60

  Opitz was also lobbying for Melitta’s release.* She now added him to her mental aviary of close friends as her Weisser Rabe (White Raven), but she never added the sweet -chen that marked the affection of her nicknames for Alexander and Franz.* In late August, Opitz told her he had offered ‘his own neck’ as security for her release.61 Under pressure from pilots and SS officers alike, as well as the continuing Allied bombardments, Göring finally endorsed Melitta’s release. A week later, on 2 September, she was freed on the grounds of ‘war necessity’.62 She had spent six weeks in prison. Although distraught at leaving friends behind, Melitta now had hope: her release meant she was still of value to the increasingly desperate regime.

  Two conditions were attached to her release. She was to return to work immediately, and she was no longer to use the Stauffenberg name. From now on she was officially known as Countess Schenk. Incredibly, Melitta also issued terms. She insisted on regular visits to all the detained Stauffenbergs, and the right to speak to Alexander at least once a month. Perhaps she had not forgotten Nüx’s warm toast, ‘All for one, one for all!’ when he had welcomed her, half-Jewish under Nazi law, into the Stauffenberg family in 1937.63 But Melitta was inspired not just by a sense of gratitude, but by love. Within hours of her release she had brought food to Alexander. He had written her a poem, ‘Loving Memory’, about the strength they had always found in each other.* Alone again that evening, Melitta sat down with a bottle of red wine and started making phone calls.

  She was back at work the next morning, within twenty-four hours of her release. That autumn Melitta worked with Junkers Ju 88s and Ju 87s, twin-engined Siebel 204s and Bücker Bestmann 181s, as well as training pilots in her night-landing technique. In November she took out a new Arado 96 in spite of heavy fog, and even flew the Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighter, but her heart was no longer in her work. It was ‘only a pretext for helping us’, Alexander told a friend.64 Klara was now officially seconded to serve as Melitta’s assistant. Expecting to help with technical calculations, she was amazed when Melitta set her to work typing up Alexander’s German translation of Homer’s Odyssey instead. ‘Thank goodness no one bothered me at my work station,’ Klara laughed, ‘so no one realized the nature of my “important-for-the-war-effort” work!’65 ‘By night she flies to test blind-flying equipment and in the daytime she rushes around from one office and Gestapo headquarters after the other, trying to help her husband and his relations,’ another friend wrote, noting Melitta’s thin frame and ‘soft, rather weary voice’. ‘I cannot imagine when she ever sleeps.’66

  Melitta’s first visit was to the Stauffenberg schloss at Lautlingen, which had been taken over by the Gestapo. Ostensibly she was going to collect her belongings, but Opitz had secured permission for her to contact Alexander’s mother, Karoline, now living there under house arrest. Melitta suddenly appeare
d with family news, ‘like a miracle, out of night and darkness’,* Karoline wrote, ‘like an impossible fairy-tale gifted by God’.67 When she left, Melitta smuggled out her beautiful busts of Berthold and Nüx, among other things, so that they might be saved for posterity.*

  Melitta had already lodged a petition for Alexander’s release. Now, smartly dressed in a dark suit, with her diamond flight badge pinned above the ribbon of her Iron Cross, she brought him suitcases packed with clothes, food and books. She took parcels of warm clothing to Mika, who had no blankets and whose cell was freezing at night. Mika was terrified that her children might be used for medical experiments, but she still refused to cooperate during interrogations.* Nina, three months pregnant with her and Claus’s fifth child, was being kept in isolation, in what she described as ‘indescribably awful’ conditions.68 Melitta arrived with clothes, medicine, packages of fruit and vegetables, rabbit meat from animals she had shot in the airfield park, and soya macaroons baked by Klara. While they were embracing, Melitta quietly confirmed to Nina that both Claus and Berthold were dead. Later, using her privileged pilot ration cards, she also brought Nina cod-liver oil, a maternity girdle, books, notebooks and a letter from her mother, now in Ravensbrück. Melitta was the only person outside the prison with whom Nina had any direct contact. Melitta also visited the older generation, and brought food parcels every week to other friends in detention but, try as she might, she could not find out where the Stauffenberg children were being held.

  Bad Sachsa is a small town near Nordhausen in the Harz mountains, almost 200 miles from Berlin. In 1944 it was also a stronghold of support for the Nazi Party. Most of the children of the key conspirators, including all of Claus’s and Berthold’s children, had been taken to an orphanage on the outskirts of the town. Their older cousins, over thirteen, were sent to a concentration camp near Danzig. Travelling by car, truck and train, the younger children sang patriotic folk songs to keep up their spirits, and made friends with strangers, some of whom gave them buttered buns to share.

  The orphanage itself comprised seven traditional wooden houses, each designed to hold thirty children segregated by age and gender. On arrival, Claus and Nina’s eldest son, Berthold, had found himself the only child in one house, and from then on the siblings and cousins met only ‘occasionally, and by chance’.69 A week later the children of other ‘traitors’ started to arrive. Many were traumatized, having been torn from their families. Without radio, newspapers, schooling or church, they had no contact with the outside world. ‘It took us a while to trust,’ young Berthold recalled. The strict director ‘exuded authority’, with her Nazi Party badge permanently pinned to her dress, and would organize ‘parade drill’.70 Other staff were warmer. Sometimes the children even played tricks on them, with surprise midnight piano recitals and bombardments of home-made clay pellets. Altogether, Berthold felt, they were ‘well, even lovingly, treated’.71 Away from the bombing raids, they spent long days reading, inventing games and exploring the estate.

  Effectively, the children were in limbo, stolen from their families but their final destination still unknown. Their guardians’ role was simply to keep them safe until they could pass on their responsibility. As a result they were adequately clothed, and fed with stewed beets, like those used for cattle feed. The children hated it, but it stopped their hunger. When they became ill with chickenpox or tonsillitis, they received good treatment. After some weeks Franz Ludwig, Claus and Nina’s third son, picked up an ear infection. Taken to the local doctor, he refused to budge when a nurse called out ‘Franz Ludwig Meiser’. The name ‘Stauffenberg’ was no longer acceptable, he was told, so a new ‘neutral name’ had been agreed ‘to avoid any needless hostility’.72* ‘But I am a Stauffenberg,’ he insisted.73 He was six years old.

  Melitta kept up her visits to the adult prisoners as the weather turned colder. Alexander’s cousin, Elisabeth zu Guttenberg, whose husband had also been arrested, visited Melitta at Gatow where she admired her friend’s ‘fine, sensitive face’ and the sun ‘shining on her lovely red-gold hair’.74 ‘There were high aviator’s boots on her feet, and a leather jacket thrown over her shoulders,’ Elisabeth wrote. ‘She had a gun in her hand, and I looked in astonishment at two dead rabbits, fastened to her belt.’75 Seeing Elisabeth’s surprise, Melitta explained that the rabbits ‘make good eating for our prisoners’.76 Together they then took more clothes and food to Nina. ‘That day the temperature was far below freezing . . .’ Elisabeth later recalled. ‘The prison was like an ice-box, damp and without heat. Nina looked like death, but she was wonderfully calm.’77 ‘It is amazing what these days make of people,’ Melitta said, shaking her head as they left. ‘Heroes and saints!’78

  A few weeks later, Nina was transferred to a Gestapo-run annex of Ravensbrück. She would spend the next five months in solitary confinement, in the windowless cells of the so-called ‘bunker’. Sometimes her mother caught a glimpse of Nina through a crack in her door, but she could not get a message to her. In some ways Nina was privileged. Many pregnant prisoners were subjected to ‘medical experimentation’, and nearly all the women were brutally exploited as forced labour, many making components for aircraft, V-1s and V-2s, before being killed when too weak to continue. Nina was isolated but kept alive. With extraordinary fortitude, she filled her time darning socks, practising shorthand, making playing cards from cigarette boxes, and recalling literature and music. When given paper, she wrote to Melitta who sent fruit and vegetables, as well as larger, warmer clothes as Nina’s pregnancy developed over the winter. It was here that Nina wrote her will. In the event of her death, she wanted her children kept together. Her new baby should be called Claus or Albrecht, if a boy, and if a girl, Konstanze. Alexander was to be the godfather and provide intellectual and religious education and, if their professional commitments allowed, he and Melitta were to take care of the children. Melitta had already given her word to do all she could to find them.

  Alexander, Karoline, Mika and others were then suddenly transported out of Berlin. Left without news, Melitta was terrified that her husband had been sent to Plötzensee for execution, like his twin before him. In fact they had been sent to an isolated hotel in Bad Reinerz, a mountainous area in southern Silesia. Some Stauffenberg cousins and the wives and elder children of other members of the domestic resistance were already at the hotel, amazed at the luxury, having spent the months since July as prisoners in Augsburg and Nördlingen. One had arrived from the camp at Dachau. ‘Nothing but skin and bones’, his head had been shaved and he had been put to work at the camp’s medical station, witnessing appalling atrocities.79

  Although Gestapo officers patrolled the grounds, the prisoners were, temporarily, relatively free. Discussing the plot, they found that ‘everybody’s accounts were slightly different’, Fey von Hassell noted, but ‘the broad outlines were clear enough’.80 As the former German ambassador to Rome, Fey’s father, Ulrich von Hassell, had been an important member of the conspiracy in Berlin, and might have served as foreign minister in a post-coup government. Arrested at his desk in late July, he had been tried in September, and hanged two hours after sentencing. Fey, who had been forcibly separated from her young children during her arrest, ‘felt instinctively close’ to the Stauffenberg family and was particularly drawn to Mika, whom she described as ‘a beautiful woman’.81 The two mothers intuitively understood that, whatever the other might be doing, their thoughts were always with their missing children. ‘The person I grew to admire most,’ Fey wrote, however, was Alexander.82

  Fey noticed Alexander as soon as he arrived, still in the officer’s uniform he had worn to leave Athens. He was ‘very tall, with hair that was never properly combed and a constant twinkle in his eye’, Fey thought, ‘full of charm and warmth . . . a most attractive person’.83 Alexander was reading Dante’s Inferno in Italian, using his knowledge of Latin and an English translation at the side of each page. Fey had lived in Italy when her father was the ambassador there, and had married an I
talian. She now gave Alexander language lessons, shyly at first, because ‘Alex seemed so much older and more cultured than I.’84 Soon they were taking daily walks through the woods, talking in Italian. To Fey, Alexander personified ‘the perfect German of my imagination: tall, manly, very much the gentleman’.85 Their ‘growing friendship became of inestimable value and consolation,’ she wrote, ‘certainly to me, but I think to both of us’.86 Although he was at times melancholic, Alexander’s courage in facing the future with optimism, the history lectures he gave for the prisoners, the poetry he could recite by heart, and his mischievous, ‘boyish’ sense of humour, often directed against the guards, were a source of strength to them all.87 One of the teenagers among them, Eberhard von Hofacker, later testified that without Alexander’s encouragement and example, he simply ‘could not have survived’.88*

  The deep bonds formed over their month at Bad Reinerz helped the Sippenhaft prisoners survive ‘the long and painful months ahead’, Fey wrote.89 At the end of November they were transported by rail straight across the Russian front to Danzig. Sleeping on stone floors in icy-cold transit stations, with little to eat or drink, several of them fell ill. The cynical comments made by the ‘grim-faced SS’ officers escorting them led Fey to believe ‘they were convinced that we would shortly be liquidated’.90 Alexander and one of his uncles, still in their uniforms, were ordered to cut off their epaulettes, collar tabs and other marks of rank, suggesting that the SS did not want people to know that they were guarding German officers. When they refused, ‘the SS men began screaming insults . . . ranting and storming about in almost hysterical rage’.91 Later such scenes would become commonplace, but now they were all deeply shocked. Their fears proved correct. Their destination was the brutal Stutthof concentration and extermination camp where over the course of the war more than 65,000 prisoners would die of disease and starvation, be gassed with Zyklon B in the small gas chamber, or killed by lethal injection.