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

by Clare Mulley

  Hanna was not used to being utterly dependent on others. Momentarily terrified, she drew strength both from hearing the roar of the engines from their forty-strong fighter escort, and from the pistol in her hand. If forced to make an emergency landing in enemy-held territory, she was determined not to fall into Russian hands alive. Minutes later Greim took his seat. Only as they were about to take off did Hanna call out to him, ‘Are you buckled in well?’19 For a moment he was silent. ‘I could feel how emotion and joy prevented him from answering,’ she stated with her usual certainty.20 Then she heard his voice, ‘Kapitän, where are you?’21 She barely had time to explain before they began to bump over the uneven runway, each jolt hammering her harder against the fuselage.

  The regular flight time from Rechlin to Gatow was thirty minutes: Hanna counted down every one on the luminous dial of her watch. They were engaged by Soviet fighters as soon as they approached the outskirts of Berlin. Hanna thought she felt the impact of a few wing shots, before the Focke-Wulf suddenly pitched forward and, ‘with screaming exhausts’, plummeted vertically towards the ground.22 Still tightly wedged into the tail, she was now rocketing down head first, ‘tense in every fibre’, as she waited for impact.23 A few moments later she felt the pilot lift the Focke-Wulf’s nose and they started to level off. They had not been hit, but had dived deliberately to avoid enemy attack. Most of their escorts were still engaged above them. In another few minutes Gatow emerged out of the smoke that billowed across the wreckage of Berlin, and they came in to land through a hail of bullets as Soviet fighters strafed the airfield.

  Pulled from her hiding place as shells crashed around them, Hanna made a dash for the nearest shelter. There, while she stretched and rubbed her aching legs, Greim managed to place a call to the Führerbunker. Nicolaus von Below informed him that all the approach roads into the city were now in Soviet hands. The Führer still wished to see him ‘at all costs’, he added, ‘but had not stated the reason’.24 The only option was to fly a slow Fieseler Storch observation plane, designed for short take-off and landing, from Gatow to the avenue behind the Brandenburg Gate. Just before they were due to leave, their chosen plane was destroyed by artillery fire. At 6 p.m., making the most of the fading light, they took off again in the last remaining Storch at Gatow. They had not slept for thirty-six hours.

  As Hanna had no experience of flying under fire, Greim insisted on taking the controls, keeping the little plane as low to the ground, roofs and treetops as its long, shock-absorbing legs would allow. Hanna was navigating from behind but, instead of strapping herself in, she chose to remain standing. A few minutes later they flew out over the lake at just a few metres’ altitude. ‘Beneath us, the waters of the Wannsee gleamed silver in the failing light,’ Hanna saw, a scene of ‘remote, idyllic peace’.25 Then she looked ahead again, ‘riveted with animal concentration’, as she put it, in case they suddenly had to divert.26 It was not long before a group of enemy fighters appeared, swooping up from the treetops of the Grunewald, the ‘green forest’ on the edge of Berlin, to attack from all sides. As Greim took evasive action, Hanna saw hundreds of Red Army tanks and soldiers below, ‘swarming among the trees’.27 For a moment she looked into upturned faces as they lifted rifles, machine guns and anti-tank weapons to aim at the precarious Storch. Then they began to fire. Immediately the air was filled with explosive puffs and haloes as bullets and shells flew at them from every direction.

  Suddenly there was a rending crash, and Hanna saw a yellow-white flame streak up beside the engine. In the same moment Greim screamed that he was hit; an armour-piercing bullet had smashed through the fuselage, tearing the bottom out of the plane and shattering his right foot. ‘Mechanically I stretched over his shoulder, seized the throttle and stick and struggled to keep the machine twisting and turning to avoid the fire,’ Hanna wrote. ‘Greim lay crumpled in his seat, unconscious.’28 The noise was now deafening as the air exploded around them, and the Storch’s fuselage was repeatedly hit. With ‘a spasm of terror’, Hanna saw dark streaks of petrol leaking from both wing tanks.29 The cockpit soon reeked of fuel and she steeled herself for an explosion. More than once Greim opened his eyes and reached for the stick ‘with convulsive energy’, before losing consciousness again.30 Neither of them expected to make it down alive and the thought that Greim might bleed to death was ‘torturing’ Hanna.31 Miraculously, she remained unwounded and managed to keep control of the damaged machine.

  They were now losing height. As the ground fire slackened, Hanna guessed that the area below was still in German hands. With smoke, dust and fumes swirling around them, visibility was almost nil, but remembering her coordinates Hanna headed for the ack-ack tower near the hospital. From there she could follow the main east–west thoroughfare through Berlin, leading to the Brandenburg Gate.

  Hans Baur, Hanna’s old friend and Hitler’s doggedly loyal personal pilot, was supervising the creation of an emergency landing strip by removing lamp posts and chopping down the trees along the east–west axis. Hearing the failing engine of the Storch in the sky above, he sent out a search party. Hanna eventually landed just short of the Victory Column, with hardly a drop of petrol left in the tank.* Having hauled Greim from the bullet-riddled plane, she tore the sleeve from her blouse and applied a makeshift tourniquet to his leg. When he came to, he was lying on the street between fallen trees, branches and pieces of concrete. Hanna realized that their only hope of reaching the bunker was to flag down a lift, but the whole area appeared deserted. ‘A silent horror seeped from the jagged and gaping pillboxes that lay all around,’ she wrote. ‘The minutes dragged on funereally. Once, somewhere close at hand, came several sharp cracks – then a soundless desolation reigned once more.’32 Eventually a military car appeared, Greim was lifted onto the back seat, and he and Hanna were driven under the gate, along Unter den Linden, through the Wilhelmstrasse and into the Vossstrasse. For Hanna it was hard to reconcile ‘the devastation of rubble and charred wreckage’ around her with the once proud buildings and avenues of trees that had until so recently lined these elegant streets.33 At last she caught a hint of the feeling that so many had been living with for years: ‘It was as if a drop-screen had been lowered,’ she wrote, ‘hiding the familiar reality.’34

  All such thoughts were pushed aside as they reached the entrance to the bunker. For Hanna, who only felt truly alive in the sky, the descent into the shelter, ‘encased’, as Albert Speer put it, ‘on all sides by concrete and earth’, felt particularly unnatural.35 ‘It was . . .’ she wrote, ‘deeply depressing and quiet and still, like a tomb down there.’36 On arrival in the cramped central corridor, she almost walked straight into Magda Goebbels. They had not met before but, as two of the most photographed women of the Third Reich, they immediately recognized one another. For a moment ‘Frau Goebbels’, as Hanna respectfully referred to her, stood staring in amazement, ‘as if in wonder that anything living should have found its way there’.37 Then, overwhelmed with emotion, she started to sob and clasped Hanna in her arms. A moment later Hanna saw Hitler standing further back in the narrow passage. One witness wrote that they ‘greeted each other warmly’, but Hanna recorded that Hitler’s welcome was cool, his ‘eyes were glassy and remote’ and his voice ‘expressionless’.38 His ‘head drooped heavily on his shoulders’, she continued, ‘and a continual twitching affected both his arms’.39

  SS guards carried Greim straight to the underground operating theatre where Hitler’s personal surgeon, Dr Stumpfegger, cleaned and dressed his wounds, and administered painkillers. He was still on a stretcher when Hitler arrived.* With some effort Greim partially raised himself, saluted, and reported the circumstances of his arrival. According to Hanna’s emotional account, this seemed to lift Hitler’s spirits, as he leant down to seize Greim’s hands and then, turning to Hanna, exclaimed, ‘Brave woman! So there is still some loyalty and courage left in the world!’40

  Loyalty was Hitler’s last obsession. He now produced Göring’s final telegram, the uncon
trolled shaking of his hands making it ‘flutter wildly’ as he handed it to Greim.41 As Greim read, tears formed in Hitler’s eyes. Then the muscles in his face began to twitch and ‘his breath came in explosive puffs’.42 Only with an effort did he gain sufficient control to shout, ‘Nothing is spared me! Nothing! Every disillusion, every betrayal, dishonour, treason has been heaped upon me. I have had Göring put under immediate arrest, stripped him of all his offices, expelled him from all Party organizations.’43 Hanna, who had long despised Göring as a grossly incompetent, physically ‘abnormal’, self-deluding morphine addict, was not surprised to hear of his ‘shameful treachery’.44 Himmler had often reported complaints against the Luftwaffe chief, and her resentment grew when Göring had ‘not wanted to share the responsibility for, or command of, the Luftwaffe’ with her hero, Greim.45 When Hanna considered the travails of the Third Reich, she came to identify ‘a long chain of injustice and evil, of which most could be directly traced to the guilt of Göring’.46 Now Göring had deserted the Führer, while Greim was at his side. Hitler promoted Greim to the rank of field marshal with immediate effect, and charged him with the supreme command of the Luftwaffe. This was the great honour for which Greim had been summoned. It was a promotion that could have been conveyed by telegram, and which left him in charge of an air force that had barely any planes.

  Hanna had always been captivated by abstract concepts of honour, duty and loyalty, using these as excuses not to seek to question or understand the motivations of others, or the implications of her own beliefs. Hitler’s ‘may have been right or wrong leadership’, she once told her brother; ‘it is not my place to pass judgement or condemn’.47 She knew that Greim shared the same values, and it bound her to him closely, in something more complicit than pure admiration. To Hanna, their shared sense of honour seemed almost spiritual, reaffirming their own righteousness. Watching him now, ‘tight-lipped and motionless’, she guessed that Greim’s personal code of honour, so ‘entirely immutable and selfless’, as she saw it, meant that his promotion ‘could only have one meaning – to stay here, in the Bunker, with Hitler, to the end’.48 In that instant Hanna decided that, if Greim stayed, she would also ask Hitler for the ultimate privilege of remaining with him. Some accounts even have her grasping Hitler’s hands and begging to be allowed to stay so that her sacrifice might help redeem the honour of the Luftwaffe, tarnished by Göring’s betrayal, and even ‘guarantee’ the honour of her country in the eyes of the world.49 But Hanna may have been motivated by more than blind honour. She had worked hard to support the Nazi regime through propaganda as well as her test work for the Luftwaffe, and there is no doubt that both she and Greim identified with Hitler’s anti-Semitic world view and supported his aggressive, expansionist policies. Hanna ‘adored Hitler unconditionally, without reservations’, Traudl Junge, one of the female secretaries in the bunker, later wrote. ‘She sparkled with her fanatical, obsessive readiness to die for the Führer and his ideals.’50

  With Hanna’s immediate audience with Hitler at an end, Magda Goebbels invited her to her room so she could wash. As the wife of Joseph Goebbels, Magda had elected to remain in the bunker with her husband and her Führer. She had also chosen to keep her young children with her. As Hanna stepped through the door, she found herself ‘confronted with six little faces peering at me with lively curiosity from their double-decker bunks’.51 Helga was twelve, quiet, tall and clever, and adored her father. Pretty eleven-year-old Hilde was known as Goebbels’ ‘little mouse’. These sisters were Hitler’s favourites. Their only brother, Helmut, ten, had braces on his teeth and was considered a bit of a dreamer. Holde, ‘like a little angel’, her father wrote, was eight, while Hedda and Heidrun were aged six and four.52 All three were even blonder than their older siblings, and had big sagging bows in their hair. Lively children, they played, joked and squabbled. Only Helga, the eldest, ‘sometimes had a sad, knowing expression in her big brown eyes’, one of the secretaries thought, and possibly ‘saw through the pretence of the grown-ups’.53

  All the children were delighted to see a new face, and they bombarded Hanna with questions. Although exhausted, she was happy to answer. Perhaps she was thinking of her sister’s youngsters, whom she had hugged goodbye in their own shelter just two days earlier, or she may simply have been pleased to momentarily escape into the children’s ‘own lively little world’, as she put it.54 From then on Hanna often visited the children, teaching them Tyrolean yodelling, and part-songs which they later sang for Hitler. Like Melitta entertaining the abducted Stauffenberg children, Hanna also told fairy tales and stories about her own flying adventures and the ‘strange lands and peoples’ she had seen.55 ‘Each of them was a delight,’ Hanna felt, ‘with their open-hearted naturalness and bright intelligence.’56 Most touching of all was their concern for each other. When the crash and thunder of the shells bursting above frightened the younger ones, their older siblings would reassure them that this was just the sound of their ‘Uncle Führer’ conquering his enemies.57 The contrast between the children’s ‘little oasis of happiness and peace’ and the crumbling world outside ‘caused me more suffering than anything else’, Hanna claimed.58

  Magda told Hanna that every evening, when she put the children to bed, she never knew whether it might be for the last time. In response, Hanna started to sing to the children ‘Tomorrow and it will be His Will, the Lord shall wake thee once again.’59 Several staff members had already pleaded to accompany the children to a place of greater safety, but Magda was resolute that they should stay. Now Hanna added her voice, offering to fly the entire family out. Magda still declined, saying they preferred to die together. Hanna was impressed by her courage, self-control and cheerful manner in front of her children, and decided she could do no more.* She also admired Hitler’s Golden Party Badge, which the Führer had taken off his jacket after fifteen years to pin on Magda’s dress in recognition of her loyalty. In turn, Magda saw Hanna as an ally. ‘My dear Hanna, when the end comes you must help me if I become weak about the children,’ she told her. ‘You must help me to help them out of this life. They belong to the Third Reich and to the Führer and if those two things cease to exist there can be no further place for them. But you must help me. My greatest fear is that at the last moment I will be too weak.’60

  Over the next few days, the Soviet army pushed through Berlin until they were within artillery range of the Chancellery. Hanna spent much of her time in Greim’s sickroom. Sometimes she dozed on the stretcher that had carried him in, but essentially she was a full-time nurse, washing and disinfecting his wound every hour, and shifting his weight to help reduce the pain. Any sustained sleep was now impossible as the bunker shook, lights flickered and even on the lower floor, fifty feet below ground, mortar fell from the eighteen-inch-thick walls. A stink from the blocked latrines, combined with the general body odour of around twenty exhausted staff and soldiers, polluted the air. The bunker had never fully overcome its teething problems with damp, diesel fumes and ventilation, and even without bombardments the atmosphere had been almost intolerably claustrophobic. Now, as shells and buildings crashed above them, Hanna heard ‘deep sobbing’ coming down the corridors.61

  When she emerged from the sickroom, she met other residents of the bunker. Nicolaus von Below, Werner Naumann and Hans Baur she already knew. Among the others were Hitler’s long-term mistress, Eva Braun; Hermann Fegelein, Braun’s brother-in-law and the long-standing liaison officer between Hitler and Himmler; the secretary Traudl Junge; and Martin Bormann who, Hanna noted, spent most of his time ‘recording the momentous events in the bunker for posterity’.62 Baur had flown alongside Greim in the last war, and the two talked at length. He and Below both liked and respected Eva Braun, at once so pretty and so brave; ‘an example to us all in her conduct’, Below asserted.63 Hanna, however, considered Eva a pathetic figure, constantly bemoaning Hitler’s lot while fussing over the state of her hair and nails, checking her face in her silver, swastika-embossed hand mirror, and
changing her elegant outfit every few hours. The most theatrical resident of the bunker, however, was Joseph Goebbels. Hanna described him as incensed by Göring’s treachery, ‘muttering vile accusations . . . with much hand-waving and fine gestures, made even more grotesque by the jerky up-and-down hobbling as he strode about the room’.64* When not railing about Göring, Goebbels held forth on how his own death would be an ‘eternal example to all Germans . . . that would long blaze as a holy thing from the pages of history’.65

  One of those Hanna did not recognize was Bernd Freytag von Loringhoven, the staff officer responsible for preparing intelligence reports for Hitler. Freytag von Loringhoven’s cousin, Wessel, had provided the detonator charge and explosives for Claus’s assassination attempt. When the plot failed, he had committed suicide. Although not directly involved, Bernd Freytag von Loringhoven had only narrowly avoided being implicated and was keeping his head down. As Hitler’s communications staff deserted the bunker, he secretly started to base his reports on information gathered from the BBC and Reuters. Unknown to Hanna, he thought it insane that Greim, that ‘crony’ of the Führer’s, with such ‘limited ability’, had been brought in at enormous risk ‘simply for the pleasure of receiving the halo of loyalty from Hitler’.66

  Whatever their perspective, everyone in the bunker was ‘on constant alert’.67 Hanna believed that ‘all of us knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that the end was coming hourly nearer’.68 Traudl Junge felt the same. ‘Those few of us in the Führerbunker know that Hitler withdrew from the battle long ago and is waiting to die . . .’ she wrote. ‘The Führerbunker is a waxworks museum.’69 But as tensions mounted Hanna saw that Hitler and his inner circle increasingly chose to delude themselves that final victory might yet be possible. Hitler had not ventured above ground since his brief visit to decorate members of the Hitler Youth a week earlier. Now he strode round the bunker, waving a disintegrating road map in his sweaty, twitching hands, while directing the city’s defence with an army that no longer existed. He and his closest advisers were ‘living in a world of their own’, Hanna told Greim, ‘far removed from the reality outside’.70