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

by Clare Mulley

  In early April a rather reluctant military policeman had been detailed to collect Nina and her baby from hospital and transfer them to Schönberg, to join the other Sippenhaft prisoners. Because they were travelling together, people often mistook them for a married couple: a misapprehension that both guard and prisoner ‘denied vociferously’.94 Endlessly changing trains, Nina was appalled to see what had become of her country. Cars labelled ‘Flying Court Martial’ were parked at the stations. Dead bodies hung from trees in courtyards, with placards below labelling them as deserters.95 Eventually she refused to go on. Writing her guard ‘a testimonial to the effect that he had done his duty to the end’, she found herself and her child willingly abandoned in a village near Hof.96 Shortly afterwards the Americans arrived and, by chance, Nina had become the first of the prisoners to be officially liberated, if with no means of contacting her family. For a few weeks she stayed with friends, using Melitta’s ration cards and regaining her strength while she nursed her baby. One evening a pair of drunken American soldiers forced their way into her building, threatening to shoot her. In the end one showed her photographs of his family, before they both fell asleep.

  Only after Germany’s official capitulation did Nina judge it safe to travel again. She went first to Buchenwald, searching for her four older children. American forces had liberated the camp on 11 April, following a revolt by prisoners who had stormed the watchtowers, seizing control earlier on the same day. Some 28,000 prisoners had already been forced to march further into Germany, a third of them dying from exhaustion or being shot arbitrarily en route. Yet over 21,000 people had still been incarcerated at the camp. ‘Buchenwald was like a bled out wound,’ Elisabeth zu Guttenberg wrote after also searching for the Sippenhaft prisoners there.97 She and Nina had missed each other by a few hours, both learning only that their families had been moved before liberation, and that there were no records as to where.

  Nina returned to Lautlingen with little hope, except to find a quiet sanctuary where she might care for Konstanze. Instead she was met by her three sons, Berthold, Heimeran and Franz Ludwig, and her young daughter Valerie. Karoline and Mika were also at the schloss, and Alexander had come and left again, searching for information about Melitta’s last days. The terrible confirmation of her death hit Nina hard, but she had known the silence from her sister-in-law did not bode well. Melitta had always been in touch, brought material support, news and comfort, or sent food coupons. Her absence had been palpable. Yet ‘feelings were a luxury that nearly no one allowed themselves . . .’ Nina’s last child, Konstanze, later wrote. ‘It was more important to think about the necessities after the war.’98 The courageous Nina mustered her strength and threw herself into the work of looking after five children, reclaiming her property, and securing an income in post-war Germany. For her, as for so many of the family survivors, the priority was her children, ‘a new generation in whom lives the hope of the future’.99

  Hanna was still in American custody when the surviving Stauffenbergs were reunited. She was now being detained in a series of prisons by the American Counter Intelligence Corps. Forgetting her acceptance of political arrests, imprisonments and executions under the Nazi regime, Hanna considered this move an outrage. Even her journey by jeep to the first prison, ‘over atrocious roads’, as she put it, fed her resentment.100 As Eric Brown saw it, she had grown accustomed to large rooms and fine meals during her earlier ‘soft-hearted’ treatment by the US Air Force Intelligence Unit.101 Internment, by contrast, was hard, and conditions basic.

  Sitting on her straw mattress, Hanna felt the cold October air blow in through the barred window of her cell. ‘The degradation of captivity’, she felt, ‘living between narrow walls through a monotony of days, gazing longingly to where, high above my head, a patch of blue sky could be glimpsed’, was a feeling that Melitta might have recognized.102 Whereas Melitta had learnt of the execution of her family while in detention, however, Hanna was tormented by the murder and suicide of hers. In a sense they were both victims of the same regime, but Hanna could still not accept the truth that would have put her on the wrong side of history. Instead she complained that her guards were unnecessarily antagonistic, and that the Americans had deliberately employed Jewish staff to make life more difficult for the Germans in their custody. Entirely self-centred, ‘I tried to live on,’ she wrote bitterly, ‘enduring the vicissitudes of a High Criminal Person. My offence? I was a German, well-known as an air-woman and as one who cherished an ardent love of her country and had done her duty to the last.’103

  In October, Hanna was transferred to the first of the two internment camps where she would spend the end of 1945 and most of the next year. Camp King near Oberursel, north-west of Frankfurt, for a while contained many of America’s most important Nazi prisoners including Göring, Dönitz, Keitel and Kesselring. During the day prisoners could mix freely, and lectures, literary evenings and singing were organized, but it was cold, there was limited food and blankets, and Hanna could only see a process of ‘torment and degradation’.104 The only woman among the leaders awaiting trial, she was soon particularly close to Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk, the regime’s former finance minister. Having enjoyed long conversations ‘about everything’, she told him she could ‘feel your thoughts steadily in me, stronger than any words’.105 When she learnt that her brother Kurt had survived the war, she proudly wrote to him that for many months she had been ‘sitting behind barbed wire, surrounded by the most worthy German men, leaders in so many fields. The enemy have no idea what riches they are giving me.’106 ‘How are you bearing all those terrible things that have happened to our Fatherland, and us personally?’ she went on to ask, before expressing her concern that the ‘degrading and false reports’ of the final days of the regime, stemming from her interrogation, might have caused him ‘shame or anger’ or tarnished the honour of their family.107 ‘We are delivered into the hands of the enemy’, she wrote, and ‘are at their mercy and at that of all their dirty methods’.108

  Alexander spent the late summer and early autumn of 1945 trying to find Melitta’s family. After the official surrender, Klara had cycled over a hundred miles to Würzburg, where she found the ruins of Alexander and Melitta’s home. Neighbours told her that her sister had visited after the bombing, and gave her the address at Lautlingen. It was through mutual friends that she later received ‘the unexpected and devastating news’ of Melitta’s death.109 She soon had more dreadful news. Facing the Soviet advance towards Danzig, Melitta’s elderly father, Michael Schiller, had decided, unlike Willy Reitsch, to stay in his home and confront the Soviet soldiers. He died some weeks later, in circumstances that have never become clear. His daughter Lili believed he met his end either in a shelter, or in the cellar of their old house, and was buried ‘somewhere in the garden’.110 Ill and exhausted, Melitta’s mother Margarete had then headed west with thousands of other refugees, hoping to reach Lili at Neumünster. The last trace of her to reach her family was a letter entrusted to a fellow traveller: she must have died somewhere on the road.*

  Having spoken with Klara, Alexander returned to Straubing, where Melitta had been shot down. He had no doubt that his wife had been flying towards Schönberg to find him, and he hoped to find anyone who had witnessed her last moments. American records were not available, and several witnesses thought the aggressor had been a German Messerschmitt Me 109. Rumours had also spread that, having survived the crash, Melitta had been denied life-saving medical treatment. As a result, many in the family held the Luftwaffe responsible for her death. Melitta’s sister Jutta found it hard to accept that an American plane would have strayed so close to an aerodrome ‘bristling with anti-aircraft armaments’.111 ‘The possibility cannot be excluded that German anti-aircraft weapons had fired under the mistaken belief that a supposed enemy of the people was involved,’ she argued.112 Others went further. Clemens’s son believed Melitta was ‘most likely’ shot down ‘by a German who knew who was in the plane’.113 Nina agreed that,
as ‘there was no warning of enemy aircraft in the area’, it was certainly possible that Melitta, ‘who was an embarrassment, was shot down’ deliberately.114

  Other speculation had developed around Melitta’s last intentions. The wounded serviceman who had witnessed her crash had heard that she ‘was removing important files belonging to the resistance movement’.115 More likely, given that she was carrying her passport and a large sum of money, Jutta felt she was undertaking a ‘bold rescue attempt . . . planned long ago’, to bring Alexander and his family across the border into neutral Switzerland.116

  Needing answers, Alexander sought out Bertha Sötz, the airbase secretary who had arranged Melitta’s funeral. The Gestapo had ordered Melitta’s personal possessions to be sent to their head office in Berlin. Instead Sötz had kept them, and she now handed Alexander Melitta’s money, passport, Gestapo permits, photograph album and other effects. For a while he sat quietly holding Melitta’s wedding ring; nothing could be more familiar and yet seem more out of place.

  Alexander later wrote that he was forced to conclude Melitta was shot down by the Allies. ‘She was trying to find me,’ he added, ‘and would have tried to escape with me to Switzerland.’ Whether this had been Melitta’s intention can never be known. What is clear is that it demanded enormous courage to fly a slow, unarmed Luftwaffe Bücker Bü 181 Bestmann on a private mercy mission above territory under regular attack in April 1945, and Melitta’s sacrifice, as Karoline later wrote, was evidence of ‘her deep commitment to the family’.117

  After months of work, Alexander eventually arranged for Melitta’s body to be exhumed for return to Lautlingen. He then formally identified her remains. Her face was largely unchanged and perfectly recognizable, the children later overheard him telling their mother, Nina. Melitta was not an incorruptible saint or martyr, but she had been buried quickly and her body preserved naturally in the very dry grave. Only her nose had disintegrated; her beautiful profile lost.

  That autumn, Melitta’s coffin was placed on a trailer hitched to a pre-war Hansa 1100 sedan car, owned by the son of the Lautlingen grocer, and driven back for reburial. On 8 September 1945, there was a small service at the local Catholic church, organized in sympathy although Melitta was a Protestant. Few people attended. In the autumn of 1945 there was still no postal service to send news, and travel permits were required even for short distances. As a result it was only Alexander and his closest surviving family: Karoline, Alexandrine, Nina, Mika and the children, who witnessed the mortal remains of Countess Melitta Schiller-Stauffenberg being laid to rest in the family vault.

  16

  REPUTATIONS

  Hanna was sitting on the edge of the sofa in her Wiesbaden apartment, bored and fidgety. Not long released from US custody, she was once again answering questions, this time for a German-born American army private charged with confirming the authenticity of Goebbels’ diaries. For all her brilliance as a pilot, her latest interrogator decided Hanna was ‘politically naive’ and still ‘fanatically devoted to Hitler’.1 Her self-serving mantra about honour and duty, as she struggled to reconstruct her realities rather than reconcile herself to the truth of the Third Reich, echoed the moral illusions that had prospered within the system during the war. Noticing her fingers playing with a brass ‘cartridge shell’ as she wearily answered his questions, the soldier asked to take a look at it.2 Unscrewing one end, he found a delicate glass capsule containing liquid cyanide, typical of the type carried by the senior Nazis at the end of the war. It was Hitler’s gift to Hanna from the bunker. When asked what she needed the poison for, she answered evasively, shrugging, ‘Just in case.’3

  Hanna had been thirty-four when given her ‘unconditional release’ in July 1946.4 She was kept under surveillance for several months. According to US intelligence reports, she had quickly found a room in the same building as her former secretary, Gretl Böss.* Böss was already on their radar, having once worked as private secretary for Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, the fanatical leader of the Nazi Women’s League. It was Böss who had looked after Hanna’s watch and cyanide capsule when she was interned, and had now restored them to her.

  The Americans seemed unsure how to classify Hanna. In December 1945 they had recorded that she was ‘not an ardent Nazi, nor even a Party member’.5 Other memos listed her optimistically as a potential goodwill ambassador or even ‘possible espionage worker’.6 Hanna’s celebrity, and close connections with former Luftwaffe staff and others once high up in Nazi circles, made her a potentially valuable asset ‘with the power to influence thousands’.7 But her stated desire to promote ‘the truth’ was never translated into action. Eventually they decided to keep her under surveillance in an intelligence operation code-named ‘Skylark’. The hope was that she might inadvertently lead them to former members of the Luftwaffe still wanted for trial.

  Hanna started receiving her ‘highly nationalistic and idealistic’ friends as soon as she was released.8 To pre-empt criticism, she cast herself as a victim. She ‘had a worse time [in US captivity] than the people in concentration camps!’ the pilot Rudi Storck wrote in a letter that was intercepted.9 Storck was arranging an event ‘for friends’ at which Hanna was to give a talk. A few months later, British intelligence reported that she was ‘earning a number of free dinners and parties’ through such speaking engagements. ‘She is undoubtedly a very potent propaganda factor,’ they continued, ‘and is almost openly queuing up for der Tag.’10*

  American intelligence then followed Hanna as she toured their zone of Germany and Austria, wrapped up in a fur coat behind the wheel of her sports model Fiat with red-upholstered seats. Aware that she was being watched, she told friends ‘she was tired of everything and everybody; she just wanted to be left alone’.11 When her little car needed repairs, however, she happily asked US intelligence to supply another. Keen to enable her movement, they did. In Salzburg Hanna had her hair permed, visited Greim’s mother, and lit candles at his grave and those of her family. She also visited her old friend and early gliding instructor, Wolf Hirth.

  ‘Everybody who was formerly prominent in the German air force and . . . air industry has visited Hirth’s place,’ the Americans noted.12 This included Hanna’s old friends Elly Beinhorn and Hans-Ulrich Rudel, both now regarded as ‘fanatical Nazis’.13 Hirth later reported that Hanna felt ‘all prominent persons in German aviation were honour-bound to assist her in creating a secret organization which for the time-being would have to be completely undercover’.14 Her aim was to secure Germany’s future air force, at a time when anything other than scheduled civil flights was forbidden and many of Germany’s surviving pilots and air experts were leaving the country.

  Rudel was among those hoping to emigrate.* Claiming to fear a communist Europe, he hoped ‘to build a nucleus of the German air force’ with friends in Franco’s Spain.15 Hanna’s name was on his list. Intercepted letters included lines such as ‘it would indeed be fortunate if somebody could take mail across the border. I expect you understand what I mean, dear Hanna.’16 The Americans concluded that not only was she a member of a covert organization of former Luftwaffe personnel, but that she was ‘acting possibly as an organizer or courier’.17 Hanna may have been sympathetic to Rudel’s aims, but her own belief was that mobilization should take place on German soil. She often stated that now was not the time to leave the country ‘in the hands of the crippled, the sick, the uneducated, the inexperienced, to those without morals . . . nor to the Communists who will surely remain’.18

  While Hanna had been interned, the Allies had been running various ‘denazification’ programmes. These included the investigation and prosecution of individuals, as well as public talks, radio broadcasts and screenings of documentaries about the concentration and extermination camps. Hanna had missed much of this but, having been a prominent figure in the Third Reich, she was given her own denazification hearing. ‘As my profession as a pilot made me move more above the clouds than on the ground, I have never belonged to any organizat
ion or party . . .’ she wrote in her own defence. ‘I have simply been the German Hanna Reitsch.’19 Yet it was undeniable that she had courted and enjoyed a close association with senior Nazi leaders during the war. Before her hearing, Father Friedel Volkmar, the Catholic priest at the Oberursel internment camp, organized testimonies in support of her good character. Another friend, the later author and journalist Horst von Salomon, wrote of her ‘absolute integrity, her enthusiasm, extreme modesty, her absolute love for the truth’, and insisted that Hanna ‘is and was apolitical’. ‘For her,’ he continued, ‘National Socialism was a powerful concept that was successful for Germany externally, and united the great majority of all Germans domestically. She didn’t see any context.’20 Such statements were commonly known as Persilschein, or whitewash certificates, and largely discounted. The testimony that carried most weight came from Joachim Küttner, the Jewish pilot Hanna had helped find work overseas in the late 1930s. She had clearly been aware of state anti-Semitism, but her response in his case meant her name was cleared.*

  By the late 1940s German public interest in Nazi crimes was waning, as much of the civilian population tried to let the shock and horror of the recent past sink into oblivion. For many, the priorities were still securing sufficient food rations and safe shelter for themselves and their families. Hanna, whose well-being was secure, chose not to face the truth. Like Hitler’s former Luftwaffe adjutant, Nicolaus von Below, who later proudly asserted that ‘I am not a member of that choir which now condemns vociferously what they once so admired,’ she considered it more honourable to stick to her beliefs than to re-evaluate them.21 She also remained deeply suspicious of efforts to establish civil society and democracy within Germany. She soon found she was not alone. Friends sent hand-drawn cartoons of ‘Infant Democracy’ soiling his sheets, and of Hanna being roasted on a spit by two devils and a witch drawn to represent Jews.22 ‘We will somehow pull through,’ Elfriede Wagner wrote more discreetly. ‘I have not lost my faith in the things that matter.’23 While ‘perhaps, after all, opportunity will come to us who are left behind with broken wings . . .’ Greim’s nephew told her. ‘You know that we would give up anything for our great love. It was, it is, and it will be like that forever, as long as there are human beings who have the same ideals.’24