by Clare Mulley
If it was with relief that Melitta finally bade farewell to Hagen, it was with trepidation that she eventually arrived at Bad Sachsa that evening with a small Christmas tree and an armful of presents. As their first visitor since the children had been abducted six months earlier, she had no idea how they had fared. In fact all were safe and happy. Some of the staff had even been reading them Christmas stories by candlelight, and there was an atmosphere of warmth, if not plenty. For their part, the children were thrilled to see their aunt. Even the youngest recognized her, and the news that their mothers, although in detention, were still alive, was ‘the best Christmas present we could have wished for’, young Berthold felt.136
Although it was freezing, the next day Melitta played outside with the children. Finding ‘wonderful icicles’ beside a stream, they ‘built up a whole fairyland from them’, before the chill sent them back in.137 When Melitta struggled to carry four-year-old Valerie, Berthold took over, delighted to be of service. Later they decorated their rooms with pine branches, and clipped stubby candles onto the tree before singing Christmas carols. ‘Sweet,’ ‘very sweet,’ Melitta wrote repeatedly in her diary.138
She stayed with the children until Boxing Day. Although there was lots of fun and ‘glorious games’, sometimes they also stayed in bed for warmth, Melitta entertaining them with ‘the most wonderful stories of her flying and her planes’, Franz Ludwig, one of the younger boys, remembered.139 ‘We loved her,’ he said. ‘She was very exciting . . . Christmas was great with her that year.’140 Although toys were hard to get, Melitta had managed to bring a fantastic number with her. There were construction kits to be cut out and glued together; toy cars, naval ships and rowing boats that really floated; paints; books; bows and arrows; dressing-up outfits and dolls. Somehow, she had even managed to appropriate a handful of war medals. Perhaps she had been thinking of those ripped from Claus and Berthold when they were arrested, and thrown into an upturned helmet on the floor. In any case, there was a poignant moment when she pinned the decorations on the boys’ chests.* ‘Of course we felt like real heroes,’ Franz Ludwig later recalled warmly.141 The girls were given pearls.
One of the children, Claus and Nina’s second son, Heimeran, was being kept in isolation with scarlet fever. Before Melitta went to him, a nurse brought in a little tree, sat him up in bed, and blindfolded him. ‘Straight away he felt my decoration and said immediately: “Auntie Litta”,’ Melitta wrote. ‘Afterwards, to my pride, he assured me again and again, the best thing about Christmas was that I had come.’142
Above all, the children asked constantly about Nina, Mika and their grandparents. Melitta gently explained that their mothers could not visit just yet, as one was having a baby and the other looking after the sick, and they couldn’t go home as there were bombed-out families living in their houses. On Boxing Day, after they ‘lit up the tree again’, she reluctantly had to leave.143
Melitta sent news of the children to Nina as soon as she got back. She could not reveal where they were being kept, as this would have resulted in her visiting rights being revoked, but she reassured her that they were healthy, happy and well looked after. It was the first news Nina had had of her children for five months. ‘Berthold is really following in mummy’s footsteps . . . He looks after and trains the younger ones touchingly,’ Melitta wrote.144 Franz Ludwig was ‘sweet and loving as ever, red-cheeked, healthy and strong’, while the girls were ‘blooming and cheerful’, ‘self-possessed’ but ‘well-behaved’.145 All were excited about meeting their new baby sibling. They ‘think it will be a boy, and will be called Albrecht’, Melitta wrote, before adding tactfully, ‘but Heimeran would prefer a little sister’.146 She told Nina all about their Christmas, enclosed a picture drawn by Heimeran, and said how much they missed their mother, but confessed they had ‘played too many games’ to have time for them all to write.147
As soon as she could get away again, Melitta visited Alexander and Mika at Stutthof concentration camp, letting them know that the children were fine. Then she took Nina a fur jacket that had once belonged to Claus, perhaps the one she had worn to Bad Sachsa, along with an emotional letter from the children to their ‘faraway mummy’, which Nina read, crying.148 The children were well, they were together, and Melitta now quietly told her where they were being kept.* Nina was at once desperate and, for the first time since the failed coup, happy.
13
IN THE BUNKER
1945
Hitler looked sourly at the candles clipped to the branches of the small tree placed in one of his rooms. Towards the end of 1944 he had decamped to his Adlerhorst bunker complex in the Tanus mountains, from where he hoped to direct a great victory in the Ardennes. This ‘wholly unexpected winter offensive . . .’, one staff officer exclaimed, ‘is the most wonderful Christmas present for our people.’1 Few of the troops sucking at frozen rations while dug into trenches and foxholes along the Belgian front would have agreed. On Christmas morning a wave of Junker Ju 88s dropping magnesium flares led the German onslaught. They were soon answered by American fighter-bombers dropping napalm ‘blaze bombs’ and strafing with machine guns. In the long battle that followed there would be around 38,000 casualties, two-thirds of them German. The Führer’s ‘last gamble’ was already faltering. On 26 December, Hitler talked about ‘taking his own life, for the last hope of achieving victory had gone’, his Luftwaffe adjutant, Nicolaus von Below, recorded. ‘Thus ended 1944 in a mood of hopelessness . . . the Allies had almost total air supremacy.’2
Hanna spent her Christmas in the Luftwaffe hospital at the Zoo flak bunker in Berlin, recovering from concussion and an elbow injury sustained during an air raid. Although Berlin was under heavy attack she had refused to leave the capital, having heard an official radio broadcast in November: ‘Stand fast. Hanna Reitsch endures this with you.’3 The German airwaves were now full of such earnest morale-raising, but Berliners had developed their own ‘Blitz spirit’: ‘Be practical,’ they joked with gallows humour, ‘give a coffin’ for Christmas.4 On Christmas Eve, 3,000 American aircraft bombed thirty-two towns and cities, including Berlin, in one of the biggest raids of the war. One week later Göring sent almost 1,000 planes to attack Allied airfields and destroy their fleets on the ground. The Allies were ready for them. Over a quarter of the Luftwaffe fleet was destroyed in the disastrous operation. Looking at the wounded servicemen in the cots around her, Hanna was filled with a mixture of pride and anguish. ‘I knew we were losing the war,’ she admitted.5 It was too late for Operation Self-Sacrifice, but she wondered whether she could still play a heroic role. ‘I can still fly . . .’ she whispered to Otto Skorzeny, her commando friend, when he visited her after a conference with Hitler. ‘I shall soon be in the thick of it again.’6
At the very least, Hanna decided, she could ‘rescue’ some of the hospitalized servicemen before the Red Army arrived. With the aid of Hans-Ulrich Rudel, a highly decorated Luftwaffe wing commander and committed Nazi, recovering from the amputation of his right leg, she mapped out evacuation routes. ‘Flying in at night and landing in the street beside the hospital’ or, if she could get a helicopter, on the flat roof of a nearby ack-ack tower, she thought she could evacuate several loads of men.7 Once discharged, she flew round the city, memorizing the remaining landmarks through the smoke and snow until she knew she would be able to find the hospital from any direction, regardless of conditions, and without radio guidance.
The war was now entering its final stages. Hitler retreated into his Berlin bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery gardens on 12 January. Two weeks later the Red Army surged forward through what had been Nazi-occupied Polish territory, taking the Wolf’s Lair at Rastenburg, and then liberating Auschwitz, 350 miles further south. Hanna followed the German retreat with helpless rage and despair. Roads and railways were overflowing with returning troops and thousands of civilian refugees, fleeing ahead of the retreating front line. Reports of terrible atrocities at the hands of the Russians were already circulating. M
eanwhile ‘the British and the Americans flew over the western Reich more or less as they pleased’, von Below reported.8 Wave upon wave of planes swept across Berlin every day, sometimes twice a day. Many of the city’s exhausted population now lived in cellars and underground shelters, queuing at the few shops still open by day, and listening to the sirens and ‘moan and crash of bombs’ throughout the night.9 There was as much danger of being hit by falling anti-aircraft shells as from Allied bombs, and occasionally whole buildings would collapse with a sickening crash, sending out sheets of flame and white-hot sparks through the burning wreckage. Clouds of smoke billowed up from the ruins.
Desperate to be of use, Hanna did not hesitate when the besieged city of Breslau, the capital of her native Silesia, sent a radio request for her to fly in to collect urgent dispatches for Berlin. Two weeks later, when Breslau was surrounded, she flew in again. This time she brought Nazi State Secretary Werner Naumann, an assistant to Goebbels in the Ministry for Propaganda, in an attempt to raise morale among the beleaguered citizens. Touching down for fuel and news en route, they received a telegram from Hitler, ordering them to turn back. With typical aplomb, Hanna decided that as a civilian employee of the Research Station at Darmstadt she was ‘not subject to military orders’, and ignored the message. Flying low to stay out of sight, she safely delivered Naumann to the last operational airfield before exploring the besieged city for herself. Seeing ‘the pale, fear-ridden faces of the women and the old men’, quietly awaiting their ‘terrible fate’ at the hands of the Red Army, she decided Naumann’s job was hopeless.10 Neither he nor Hanna spoke much as they flew back to Berlin.
Hanna’s father, Dr Willy Reitsch, had been deeply disturbed by the stories of rape and violence he had heard while offering general medical help to refugees fleeing the Soviet advance. Fearing the worst, he and his wife, Emy, had abandoned their home in Hirschberg just seventy miles west of Breslau. Taking Hanna’s sister Heidi, her three children and their maid Anni with them, along with as many possessions as they could carry, they headed south by train through occupied Czech territory and into Austria, where Emy had relatives. More fortunate than most of the refugees pouring in from the east, they found sanctuary in the attic rooms of Salzburg’s Schloss Leopoldskron.* This elegant eighteenth-century mansion had been appropriated from its Jewish owners in 1938, to be enjoyed by senior Nazis as a summer residence and guesthouse.
The 20th of April 1945 was Hitler’s fifty-sixth birthday. Although it was an established national holiday, there were few celebrations that year. Nazi flags were raised above the ruined centre of Berlin, and a group of Party leaders gathered in the echoing rooms of the Chancellery, many unable to sit down as the fine furniture had been packed away. After a few speeches, the Führer decorated a delegation from the Hitler Youth in the once handsome Chancellery gardens before returning to his bunker for the daily situation report. Four days earlier, citizens in eastern Berlin had been woken by vibrations ‘so strong’, one woman wrote, ‘that telephones began to ring on their own and pictures fell from their hooks’.11 The Red Army had arrived. Straight after midnight, on 21 April, their offensive on the German capital began. The bombardment left craters in the Chancellery garden, and the air filled with dust and smoke. Hitler’s most senior officers recommended he leave while he could, and direct the war from a safer redoubt. Hitler dithered. His inner circle was more decisive. That evening Himmler, Speer and Göring all left Berlin. Only Goebbels insisted on staying, broadcasting to the nation that ‘loyalty is the courage to face destiny’.12
Two days later Hitler exploded in a violent rage. Nuremberg, the Nazi Party’s sacred city, had been overrun by American troops. In Berlin, the Waffen SS counter-attack Hitler had been depending on had failed to materialize. Soviet shells were raining down on the city and their troops were expected to move in any day. All was lost, Hitler screamed bitterly, he would meet his fate alone in Berlin. In fact Hitler was far from alone. He still had a retinue of military guards, liaison officers, secretaries, doctor, cook and his private secretary, Martin Bormann, with him in the bunker. Recently his long-term mistress, Eva Braun, had also joined him, as had Joseph Goebbels with his wife, Magda, and their six children. Although he retained absolute authority, Hitler’s nervous collapse was evident to all. When the Luftwaffe general Karl Koller reported Hitler’s disintegration to Göring, the Reichsmarschall sent a telegram to his Führer. Göring had been nominated as Hitler’s successor by decree in 1941. Now in Obersalzberg, he was better placed to direct the conflict, he wrote. Unless he received instructions that night to the contrary, he would assume that Hitler was dead or captured, and take over leadership of the Party and the Reich. Hitler, manipulated by Bormann, was incensed; to him it seemed the ultimate betrayal.
Hanna had been sent back to Breslau. Although her family had already left, this time she stopped at her old home town of Hirschberg. A few years earlier, when she had been given the freedom of the city, the streets had been lined with people waving flags, and the papers full of her gliding lessons with local schoolchildren. Now the school was empty and the streets deserted. Hanna suddenly felt lonely. Recalled to Munich to reconnoitre emergency landing grounds for hospital planes, she decided to visit her family at Salzburg first, just across the Austrian border. Her father was faltering, but her mother was stalwart, caring for them all, and Heidi was quietly talking of marrying again. ‘Though overcast by the gathering clouds of the national tragedy,’ Hanna wrote, ‘we were as happy as ever in our reunion.’13
The next day, 25 April, as Soviet troops broke into the Berlin Olympic Stadium, Greim asked Hanna to report immediately to Munich for a special assignment. Greim and Koller had been summoned to a conference ‘on a highly urgent matter’ in the Führerbunker.14 As Berlin was now surrounded Koller refused to go, instead defending Göring’s actions. Greim, however, was determined to honour his Führer’s command. In 1920 he had been the first pilot to fly Hitler, taking him into Berlin for the Kapp Putsch. Now, a quarter of a century later, he thought he might repeat the role, flying Hitler out of the capital.
The best way in, Greim decided, was to take an autogyro helicopter directly to the Chancellery gardens. Hanna knew how to fly a helicopter and, having practised the routes, she also knew the landmarks of the devastated city better than anyone. Aware that they were unlikely to survive such a dangerous mission, with the formality of a suitor rather than a commanding officer, Greim first asked Hanna’s parents for their permission to deploy her. ‘This they gave without hesitation,’ she recorded proudly.15
It was midnight when Hanna pinned her Iron Cross onto her black roll-neck sweater, checked her hair, and went to say farewell to her family in their cellar air-raid shelter. She hugged Heidi first, and then each sleepy child in turn. Her proud parents followed her up to the waiting car, ‘standing straight and motionless’ as she climbed in and drove away.16 Deeply moved, she resolved to keep a daily record of her personal impressions for her parents, ‘so as to keep communicating with them in thought’.17
Hanna and Greim left Munich for Rechlin at half past two the next morning. Looking out into the clear, starlit heavens, Hanna saw that for once there was no sign of the enemy planes that had dominated the skies for weeks. They landed safely less than two hours later. The news at Rechlin was not good, however. The helicopter that Hanna and Greim had intended to land in front of the Chancellery had been destroyed in an air raid. If they were to continue it would have to be by plane. Gatow, the last of the capital’s airports still in German hands, was surrounded and under continual artillery fire. No one knew whether there was sufficient good runway left for a safe landing. In any case, for forty-eight hours not a single plane had successfully penetrated the Russian defences.
Despite the huge risks, Greim ordered the Luftwaffe sergeant who had flown Speer into Gatow two days earlier to now repeat the journey with him. The same fast Focke-Wulf 190 was quickly readied. Although a single-seat fighter, this particular machine had been fit
ted with a second seat in its baggage space. The pilot was to deliver Greim to Gatow and return immediately, as the Russians were expected to take the airport at any moment.
Even should the plane reach Gatow, Hanna was worried about how Greim would get from the airfield to the Chancellery building right in the ruined centre of Berlin. As he was getting ready, she quietly asked the pilot about the feasibility of joining the flight. When she was told that her weight wouldn’t matter but there was simply no space for another passenger, even one as small as herself, she got the ground crew to thread her in horizontally, feet first, through a small emergency hatch in the rear fuselage of the little plane. There she lay in total darkness, wedged between the accumulators, oxygen cylinders and other gear. ‘Compressed like a worm’, as she put it, she could not even ease her arms or legs as they pressed painfully against the hard metal spars of the airframe.18 If they were hit, she knew she had no means of escape, as the hatch could be opened only from the outside.