by Clare Mulley
The newly appointed Mayor of Bad Sachsa came to the home to tell the children that they were officially free, and to register them as local residents a few days later. Standing on a table, he also made ‘a fiery speech’ about how proud they could be of their fathers.8 ‘The words washed over us,’ one of the cousins later wrote. For months they had been told that their parents were criminals, while their enemy had turned out to be the friendly American soldiers.9 Although two nurses were delegated to look after the children, they were now largely left to their own devices. They plundered the stores and roamed the woods searching, like children everywhere, for spent ammunition, Splitter (or shrapnel), and other ‘war booty’, but essentially life continued at Bad Sachsa much as before. They had no idea how to contact their families, and they seemed to be nobody’s priority.
The children had been abducted and detained, but they had never been held in a concentration camp. The Allies had received appalling reports for some time, ever since Soviet forces had reached Majdanek concentration camp in occupied Poland in July 1944. Later that summer, the remains of the camps at Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka were also overrun. Auschwitz had been liberated in January 1945, followed by Stutthof, Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück, at times just weeks after the Sippenhaft and other prominent prisoners had been transferred elsewhere. American forces reached Buchenwald in early April, followed by Dora-Mittelbau, Flossenbürg and Bergen-Belsen two weeks later.
Travelling with the Americans to liberate Belsen was the Scottish pilot, Eric Brown. Now a decorated British test pilot, Eric had been sent to Germany with a team of scientists in the last stages of the war to locate pioneering aviation technology such as supersonic wind tunnels, along with examples of jet and rocket aircraft. He was also to interrogate Germany’s top aeronautical designers, engineers and test pilots. His first lead was that two Luftwaffe pilots fleeing the Soviet advance had flown a pair of Messerschmitt Me 262s south towards Hanover. Eric was flown to Fassberg airfield, where he found the abandoned aircraft. He was ‘immediately struck’ by the ‘complexity’ and ‘sensitivity’ of the jet plane that both Melitta and Hanna had tested during development.10
The US Second Army that had captured Fassberg airfield was also detailed to take the camp at nearby Bergen-Belsen. Although it was not designed as an extermination camp, some 50,000 people had been killed or left to die at Belsen. Among them was Anne Frank, the Dutch teenager who had commented on Claus’s assassination attempt in her diary the summer before. She and her family had been betrayed and arrested just two weeks later. Anne died a few days after her sister, probably of typhus, just weeks before Belsen was liberated. Mass murder was still taking place just days before the Allies reached the camp. Another 13,000 former prisoners were too frail to survive the weeks that followed.
As a German speaker, Eric was called in to translate. Arriving by jeep, he found former prisoners, ‘silent, shuffling ghosts of men’, pacing the yards or standing staring at the ground.11 When he questioned them they were unable even to reply. Over 10,000 corpses lay between the barracks or in open graves. ‘Bodies were piled high. Two-thirds of them were women,’ Eric later testified. More ‘had been bulldozed into pits . . . the stench was indescribable’.12 Inside the huts, each built to house sixty people, on average he found 250 dying of typhus, dysentery and starvation. ‘I had known the Germans, I had been happy in Germany,’ he later wrote. ‘In the war I had made excuses for them, blamed the Nazis. There could be no excuses for this.’13 Eric then helped interrogate the camp commandants, including Josef Kramer and the twenty-three-year-old Irma Grese who refused to respond, but at one point ‘leapt to her feet and gave the Heil Hitler salute’.14 They, and almost two hundred other guards, were later court-martialled and hanged.
Eric then turned his attention back to locating and interviewing some of the engineers and pilots on his list, who included Wernher von Braun, Ernst Heinkel, Willy Messerchmitt, Focke-Wulf designer Kurt Tank, and Hanna Reitsch. His next lead came from overhearing some Germans in a Lübeck pub one evening. Rumour was that Hanna, that ‘fabulous creature’, as Eric described her, had ‘flown her Fieseler Storch on and off the roof of the German Air Ministry in the last days of the Third Reich’, and was now hiding in Bavaria.15
The rumours were only a slight exaggeration. Hanna and Greim had avoided Soviet anti-aircraft fire on their way out of central Berlin, landing safely at Rechlin at three the same morning. ‘Shivering, weary and oppressed’ in the cold night air, Hanna stamped her feet to get warm while Greim had a conference with the remaining operations staff at the airfield and ordered all available aircraft to the defence of the capital.16 From there they flew to Plön, close to the Danish border, to discover Himmler’s whereabouts from Admiral Dönitz. Because of Greim’s injury, Hanna was in the pilot’s seat of their Bücker Bestmann, the same type of plane that Melitta had been flying over to Schönberg on her own final mission. Like Melitta, Hanna ‘crept rather than flew’, staying as low as possible along the edges of woods and ‘almost brushing the hedges and fences as I passed over them’.17 After the skies proved too dangerous, she drove the last thirty miles, occasionally pulling over to avoid being strafed by Soviet fighters flying overhead.
Hanna and Greim were still travelling when they heard the radio announcements of Hitler’s death, and of the formation of a new German government under Admiral Dönitz. The Führer had died ‘a hero’s death’, Dönitz announced. In fact Hitler and his bride had committed suicide as the Red Army closed in on the Reich Chancellery. Hitler’s pilot, Hans Baur, and others ensured that their bodies were doused with petrol and burned. The dead Führer’s ‘untidy hair fluttered in the wind’, his chauffeur later recorded, while Eva’s dark-blue dress with white frills ‘moved in the wind until finally drenched by the fuel’.18 Other eyewitnesses reported the grisly detail that Eva’s body slowly bent into a sitting position in the intense flames, while Hitler’s shrivelled up in the blaze.
The next day, with the help of Dr Stumpfegger, Magda Goebbels had drugged her six children before they went to bed. Despite last-minute offers to escort the family out, she chose to kill each child in turn with cyanide while they slept. A few hours later, she and her husband left the bunker by the emergency exit leading onto the patch of earth and rubble that had once been the Chancellery garden. There they took their own lives. Their bodies were also burned. Hitler’s Party badge, which Hanna had admired on Magda’s dress in the bunker, was later recovered from her remains, rather melted round the edges. When the story emerged, Hanna would come to believe that the Russians would not have hurt the children she had visited in the bunker. ‘Their lives were wasted,’ she told a journalist, ‘they were innocents’.19
Bormann, Stumpfegger, Below and Baur were among those who finally chose to flee the bunker for the ‘confusion of cables, rubble and tram wires . . . ruins and bomb craters’ that now formed Berlin.20 Bormann and Stumpfegger bit their cyanide capsules when escape seemed impossible. Below was eventually arrested by the British, and held until 1948. Baur was captured by Russian troops, disappearing for a decade in Soviet detention.
When Hanna and Greim finally reached Plön, Dönitz was already at the helm. He greeted them with a speech on the pressing need to continue the fight against Bolshevism. No one remarked on the unspoken policy shift. Later Dönitz called a war council with the remaining ministers of the regime. When Greim spoke to Field Marshal Keitel about the best air tactics to support General Wenck’s long-awaited advance into Berlin, Keitel informed him that Wenck’s army had long since been destroyed. Capitulation was clearly imminent. Their only realistic goal was to contain the Soviet advance for as long as possible, allowing civilians to flee towards the Western Allies in the hope of better treatment.
Waiting outside the conference room, Hanna was shocked to see Himmler arrive. Later she recounted how she demanded to know whether he had indeed independently sued for peace. Himmler was happy to admit it. ‘You betrayed your Führer and your people in th
e very darkest hour?’ Hanna reeled. ‘Such a thing is high treason, Herr Reichsführer . . . Your place was in the bunker with Hitler.’21 Himmler reportedly laughed her off. ‘History will weigh it differently,’ he told her. ‘Hitler was insane. It should have been stopped long ago.’22 ‘He died for the cause he believed in,’ Hanna retorted. ‘He died bravely and filled with . . . honour.’23 When Himmler argued that his own actions had been ‘to save German blood, to rescue what was left of our country’, Hanna was dismissive.24 ‘You speak of German blood, Herr Reichsführer? You speak of it now? You should have thought of it years ago, before you became identified with the useless shedding of so much of it.’25 In the heat of anger more truth had slipped out than Hanna usually chose to voice, but a moment later their tête-à-tête was cut short by an aerial attack.* Hanna would not see Himmler again.*
Berlin officially surrendered on 2 May. The last Operation Valkyrie plotters still imprisoned in the capital had been taken out and shot in the rubble a week before. Now exhausted Soviet troops arrived to find a ruined city engulfed in the smoke from persistent fires. The water and sewerage systems were wrecked; there was no fuel, electricity, transport or communications, and little food. The conquering soldiers stole bicycles, watches, bread and blankets. Many fell asleep in the streets, others in the ruins. The next morning many of the women in Berlin were raped, some receiving food or protection in return, others simply beaten. Hanna and Greim now flew on to Königgrätz where Greim belatedly ordered all remaining troops to hold out against the Soviets for as long as possible. He was now too ill to continue himself, lapsing in and out of consciousness, and Hanna had him admitted to hospital. When he took off his wire-rimmed glasses, the frames left a deep impression in his skin. With the heavy furrows on his forehead and the thin-lipped crease of his mouth below, his once full face looked almost folded and ready to be put away.
Temporarily grounded, Hanna and Greim discussed their possible future in a post-Nazi Germany, and decided they had none. They also cursed both Göring and Himmler for their weaknesses and ultimate lack of honour. At one point Greim confided he had associated doubts about Melitta. ‘It wasn’t just a suspicion of cooperating with Himmler,’ Hanna later wrote, ‘it is a fact that she was in contact with him.’26 Himmler had mentioned Melitta in the spring of 1945, prompting Greim to wonder whether she was involved in ‘espionage’.27 Hanna had long seen how Melitta avoided certain colleagues and criticized the regime to others. ‘The suspicion that Melitta was a spy was not viciously created by others,’ she asserted, ‘but tragically brought up by Melitta herself; for example by her way of avoiding me and harshly declining every well-intended offer of help from my side.’28 Hanna also felt that Melitta’s ‘racial burden’ made rumours that she ‘had a foot in both camps’ or was working ‘for the enemy’, more valid.29 The fact that Hanna and Greim spent time discussing this in the final days of the war is more telling about their preoccupations and resentments than Melitta’s connections and activities. There is no evidence that Melitta, whose sole concern by this point was the safety of her family, had been scheming with Himmler.
A few days later, news that capitulation was imminent spurred Greim on. With Hanna in attendance, on 8 May the injured field marshal was flown over the Alps to meet General Kesselring in Austria, to discuss last orders for the Luftwaffe. Kesselring was not in evidence. General Koller, chief of the Luftwaffe General Staff, was shocked by Greim’s appearance. Even with two crutches, two officers and Hanna accompanying him, he could hardly be extracted from his car. He was clearly in pain, Koller noted in his diary. His face was ‘saggy and almost yellow’.30 Koller organized a quick breakfast with strong coffee. The two officers waited outside the room, but Greim insisted that Hanna stay with him at all times. ‘It’s not easy to speak frankly with the chief of the Luftwaffe . . .’ Koller wrote plaintively, ‘and it’s made more difficult because I can’t get Hanna Reitsch out of the room. I want to but Greim won’t stand for it.’31
Greim and Hanna then recounted the story of their journey from the bunker. Both stressed the pain of not being allowed to die with their Führer. By now in tears, Hanna added that ‘she wanted to kneel at the altar of the Fatherland and pray’.32 ‘Altar?’ Koller queried, unsure of her meaning. ‘Bunker,’ Hanna replied.33 For Koller this was hysterical rubbish. In the published version of his diaries he claims to have told them that the bunker was ‘a monument to the betrayal of Germany’.34 When he proposed that Göring, who had done so much for Hanna, should be protected from the Soviets, Koller was again shocked by Hanna’s retort that Göring was a traitor who should be dealt with. Koller, who had been trying to arrange a meeting between Göring and the Americans, did not find this helpful. Both Greim and Hanna then told Koller that if he were captured, he should shoot himself. ‘You have to . . .’ Hanna made her case; ‘to be captured lacks honour.’35
That evening Greim received a telex informing him that the regime had signed an unconditional surrender and all hostilities were to cease, ‘effective immediately’.36 While most of the remaining senior leadership destroyed their paper records, Greim silently slipped his last orders into the pocket of his uniform jacket. His command was already at an end.
Two junior officers were now detailed to drive Greim and Hanna to the civilian hospital at Kitzbühel. Halfway there, Greim ordered the car to stop. His duties dispatched to the best of his abilities, he now planned to evade capture. In a meadow by the roadside, Hanna carefully helped him out of his uniform and into civilian clothes. It was a pathetic scene, and yet somehow also intimate. The last commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe was badly injured and exhausted but nevertheless on the run. Instead of an officer, he asked Hanna, the only woman present, to help him change his clothes. Greim then told the officers to shoot him as a deserter. Later, Koller wrote that ‘the situation for these young officers must have been extremely uncomfortable’.37 Eventually they persuaded Greim back into the car, and deposited him and Hanna at the hospital. Even now Greim refused ‘to take anyone with him, except Hanna Reitsch’, who remained by his side.38 He was still being treated when American troops entered the town and, as Hanna put it, ‘we saw the final collapse of all our hopes’.39
Amid ‘the chaos of defeat’, Hanna later said, she had drawn strength from the knowledge that her family were nearby, at the Schloss Leopoldskron just outside Salzburg.40 Now she asked for a pass to visit them. Instead, Koller reported that her parents, her sister and her sister’s three children had all been killed in the last bombing raid on Salzburg, in the very final days of the conflict. ‘She took it stoically,’ he noted.41 Afterwards she lit candles and propped up some photographs of her family in Greim’s room.
Hanna would later learn that her family had been killed in quite different circumstances. Once the Third Reich had fallen, rumours began to circulate that displaced families within Germany would be returned to their home towns. Hirschberg was in the Soviet zone. Goebbels had long exploited stories of violence, rape and looting by the Red Army to support national solidarity in the face of invasion, but Willy Reitsch knew there was some truth behind the propaganda. As a doctor, when providing medical assistance in regions recaptured by the Wehrmacht he had seen the suffering caused by Soviet soldiers. He was terrified that such brutal treatment would be inflicted on those he loved. In time Hanna would come to see and describe her father’s motivations at this moment as ‘an overriding duty to preserve his own family’.42 Willy Reitsch had been traumatized by the presumed death of his only son, the loss of the war, the collapse of the regime he supported, and the fear of a brutal life and death under the communist enemy. In a terrible echo of Magda Goebbels’ extreme beliefs, to the controlling Willy Reitsch it somehow seemed best to kill all the women and children in his family himself.*
When a friend dropped by on 4 May, she was told the Reitsch family was unwell. The next day, the same caller saw a cart outside the Schloss Leopoldskron, its load covered with old blankets. Inside were the bodies of Wil
ly and Emy Reitsch, their maid Anni, and Hanna’s sister Heidi with her three young children. Having failed to fatally poison his family, Willy Reitsch had shot them all before turning the gun on himself. In a final note to Hanna, he told his daughter she must find solace in the knowledge that they were all now safely with their Maker. Her father ‘had seen no alternative’, Hanna later wrote through the lens of self-preservation, ‘but to take upon himself the heaviest responsibility of all’.43
Eric Brown had now heard from his American colleagues that there was a ‘smallish, fair, petite’ woman in her mid-thirties hiding in an American hospital near Kitzbühel, who they believed might be Hanna Reitsch. Eric was asked to find and identify her. When he walked round the women’s ward, Hanna ‘immediately recognized’ him and started ‘feigning a heart attack’, he later reported.44 ‘You know, Hanna,’ he told her, ‘the game is up.’45 Negotiating the right to question her after the initial interviews, Eric handed Hanna over into American custody. When he was finally given access to her again, their conversation provided an extraordinary insight into her beliefs.
‘At first she was very suspicious,’ Eric wrote, but he reassured her that he wanted to talk about aircraft rather than politics, and ‘she began to talk freely’.46 He was fascinated by Hanna’s experiences with a wide range of German civil and military aircraft, including helicopters and the V-1 flying bomb. His priority, however, was to get her to talk about the Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet rocket fighter, a plane that he had developed ‘an overwhelming desire to fly as soon as possible’.47 ‘Although she was reluctant to admit this,’ he later wrote, it soon became evident that Hanna had never flown the plane under power, but only ‘to make production test flights from towed glides’.48 *