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

by Clare Mulley

  Hanna was Melitta’s antithesis, engaged not by conservative tradition but by the revolutionary dynamism of the Third Reich. Thrilled by Hitler’s strong leadership, the way he championed patriotism, apparently legitimized prejudice, and promised a route out of the post-war recession with a great national revival, Hanna saw opportunity where Melitta saw adversity. She was pleased to lend her face, name and skills to the Nazi regime and its propaganda machine, and profit from her collusion. Ignoring the questions and rumours surrounding the deportation of Germany’s Jewish community, she accepted Himmler’s blithe reassurances when a friend showed her evidence of the atrocities at Majdanek concentration and extermination camp. She did not want to know the awful truth and chose to look away. During the final stages of the war, Hanna even proposed and developed military strategy.

  Unlike those sometimes considered ‘bystanders’, caught up in the rapid rise of National Socialism by their own inertia, as a woman in the masculine field of aviation in the Third Reich Hanna’s fight for promotion and active service was far from passive, banal or unconsidered. Later she was felt by some to be a role model for ‘the emancipation of women’.10 At best, it might be argued that ideologically Hanna was blindly self-centred; at worst, as Eric Brown believed, she was ‘a fanatical Nazi’.11 Whatever her precise degree of complicity, her importance to the Nazi regime was incontrovertible. Had Hitler won the war, there is little doubt that she would have been lauded as a heroine. As Robert Harris has imagined it in Fatherland, his novel set in a world in which Nazi Germany won the war, ‘At the Flughafen Hermann Göring, the statue of Hanna Reitsch was steadily oxidizing in the rain. She stared across the concourse outside the departure terminal with rust-pitted eyes.’12

  Yet Hanna was never a member of the Nazi Party. After the war she claimed she had never been political, but was an idealist and patriot whose natural sphere was ‘more above the clouds than on the ground’.13 ‘I have simply been the German Hanna Reitsch,’ she asserted during her denazification process.14 Her actions spoke more loudly than her words. Having internalized the rhetoric of the regime, Hanna used the language of honour, truth and duty as an unassailable defence against questioning the moral integrity of her own loyalties. Honour and truth are admirable when harnessed to the real world but, once detached as lofty ideals, they become conveniently pliable concepts for zealots. Hanna wrote several versions of her memoirs, but never critically re-examined her association with the Nazis or denounced their criminal policies. It takes great courage to face the past and express regret. Hanna found it easier never to do so, never to admit to any knowledge, nor accept the truth. While portraying herself as a victim, she denied the Holocaust until her death over thirty years later.

  The Second World War, as Melitta’s nephew Berthold von Stauffenberg has said, ‘was a time of contradictions . . . not every Party member was a Nazi, and not every non-Party member wasn’t’.15* Few of Melitta’s colleagues could believe that this upright woman, a staunch conservative and patriot, risking her life every day in the service of her country, could have known about her brother-in-law’s plot to assassinate Hitler. Conversely, Hanna was believed by many to have begged Hitler to let her fly him out of the bunker to safety. Even years later, rumours persisted that she had succeeded.

  Although their very different choices took both women right to the heart of the Third Reich, neither Melitta nor Hanna directly perpetrated, or prevented, war crimes. Somewhere between complicit and culpable, they lived, served, compromised, resisted and defied, supported and enabled, suffered or celebrated under the perverting conditions of a terrifying dictatorship and a country at war. Hanna was blindly loyal, and opportunistic. Later she shielded herself with her bespoke sense of honour. Melitta resisted as best she could, while continuing to serve the war effort. Perhaps she subscribed to Claus’s belief that ‘he who has the courage to do something must do so in the knowledge that he will go down in history as a traitor. But if he does not do it, he will be a traitor to his own conscience.’16 Whatever they told themselves, their decisions were not without political consequence.

  Actively or passively, through belief, fear or ignorance, the majority of the German people consented to the Nazi project. Ultimately, however, the dramatic lives of Melitta von Stauffenberg and Hanna Reitsch show both that German civil society was still multifaceted even after the political purges, racial cleansing and imposition of terror and propaganda under Hitler, and also that some choices were still possible. While many people strove to live with honour, interpretations of what this meant varied greatly. Duty, loyalty and self-sacrifice all held ambiguous meaning. Truth was often appallingly, and sometimes willingly, denied. War brought out the worst in many, but in some it also brought out the best. It was not war, however, but the regime and its ideology that led to the worst crimes being committed. What these women’s stories illustrate with absolute clarity is the criminal absurdity of a regime based on the biological premise that women had purely domestic value, and that Jews had no value at all, which then bestowed its highest honours on two women, one ‘Aryan’, the other a Jewish Mischling, for their skills and achievements in defiance of such ‘natural’ laws.

  Footnotes

  * Now Krotoszyn, in central Poland.

  * Now Jelenia Góra in Lower Silesia, south-western Poland.

  * Melitta would have known them as the Riesengebirge, but they straddle what is now the south-west of Poland and the north of the Czech Republic, and are known as the Karkonosze or Krkonoše, which translates as the Giant Mountains.

  * When Melitta had her portrait drawn in Munich in 1924, it was Elk Eber who sketched her face in profile – always her preferred pose, her hair tucked into a bohemian velvet cap. Eber would become a draftsman for the Nazi press, and his war art was later collected by Hitler.

  * Melitta’s new haircut was not necessarily a political statement. Early on, conservative members of Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) pleaded that women with short hair should not be admitted to Party gatherings but, according to his official photographer Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler ‘decided in favour of the bob’. See Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler Was My Friend (Frontline, 2011), p. 142.

  * Now Wrocław, the largest city in western Poland.

  * The Free City of Danzig was a semi-autonomous city state that existed between 1920 and 1939. It is now Gdańsk in Poland.

  * Deutsche Versuchsanstalt für Luftfahrt.

  * Now Guinea-Bissau and Iran.

  * Alfred Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, the boys’ father, served as the last Lord Chamberlain in the court of King William II of Württemberg. Their mother, Karoline, Countess of Üxküll-Gyllenband, was a maid of honour for Queen Charlotte of Württemberg.

  * Deutsche Luft Hansa rebranded as Lufthansa the following year, 1933.

  * The NSDAP achieved 37 per cent of the vote nationally in 1932.

  * Originally the Rhön-Rossitten Society, Professor Walter Georgii’s organization was renamed the German Research Institute for Gliding in 1933, and became the German Research Centre for Gliding (DFS) in 1937. Hanna would start work there in 1934.

  * Rivalen der Luft (UFA, 1934).

  * So adept were these birds at finding the currents that the team caged some to take back to Germany. Not surprisingly, once they had grown accustomed to being fed in confinement, they later refused to fly. Some were donated to Frankfurt Zoo, and one was reported as walking to Heidelberg.

  * In several high-profile cases it was not ‘blood’ but chance that determined race. In 1935 Hermann Göring personally selected the photograph to illustrate a perfect ‘Aryan’ baby for cards and posters that were circulated nationally. The child was Jewish. See the Independent, ‘Hessy Taft: Perfect Aryan Baby’ (02.07.2014).

  * Claus and Nina had honeymooned at Borne in Germany, where they enjoyed an exhibition celebrating Mussolini’s first ten years in power. In doing so they missed the German elections of March 1933.

  * The perfumier behind C
aron’s ‘En Avion’ was Ernest Daltroff, a middle-class Jew whose family came from Russia. In 1941 he escaped Paris for America.

  * Among those boycotting events around the games was British scientist A. V. Hill. ‘I have many German friends,’ Hill wrote, ‘but as long as the German government and people maintain their persecution of our Jewish and other colleagues, it will be altogether distasteful for me . . . to take part in any public scientific function in Germany.’ See David Clay Large, Nazi Games: The Olympics in 1936 (2007).

  * Gliding was officially accepted by the IOC in 1938 as part of an optional group of sports to be staged for the first time at the planned 1940 Tokyo Olympics. Hitler expected all subsequent Olympics to take place in Germany. However, the Tokyo Games were cancelled after the outbreak of the Finnish/Soviet ‘Winter War’.

  * In fact the female pilot Elfriede Riote, who had captained an airship in 1913, might already have received the title Flugkapitän, but this had somehow been lost from the record.

  * Such technology enabled Germany to continue transatlantic flights during the winter months when no other nation could.

  * The approximately 20,000 German Jews married to non-Jews before the Nuremberg Laws were enacted, were categorized according to their ancestry, gender and religious practice. A few were given ‘privileged’ status, but most would later be required to wear a yellow star or ‘J’ on their clothes.

  * Bodensee is the German name for Lake Constance.

  * The Haus am See had been a meeting place of the Stefan George circle. It would later be owned by the poet Rudolf Fahrner, an associate of the circle and member of the Widerstand resistance to Hitler. After the war, several Stauffenberg children would board at a school near the lake.

  * Among the bronze busts attributed to Melitta is a wonderful self-portrait in which her flying cap seems to meld organically with her hair, as if she herself is part-machine. A small plaque states that Melitta presented this sculpture to Claus in 1942, but its provenance is unconfirmed.

  * As Ernst vom Rath was well known to be gay, it has been suggested that Grynszpan acted after a lover’s quarrel. Fears of a scandal prevented a Nazi show trial. Grynszpan insisted his motive was to raise awareness of the persecution of German Jews. Although vom Rath had expressed regret for Jewish suffering, he had maintained that anti-Semitic laws were necessary.

  * Although delighted by the Libyan children, the hospitality, and the ‘dreamy tenderness’ of the women, Hanna’s racism made her fear the men. Her ‘imagination was busy with blood and the glint of curving steel’, and when she accepted a local invitation, she wrote, she found the ‘animal smell, which the Arab carries with him, particularly disturbing’. See Hanna Reitsch, The Sky My Kingdom (2009), p. 173.

  * While in this role, Cotton made friends with an eccentric fur-trapper and his family. Eating in his remote Newfoundland cabin, Cotton asked how his host managed to serve fresh peas. The trapper explained that he filled his baby’s washbasin with salt water and peas, and let the Arctic winds freeze it over. His name was Clarence Birdseye.

  * Although Göring’s house was an Allied target, it was Göring himself who eventually blew it up, on 28 April 1945.

  * Danzig was claimed as part of Germany on 1 September 1939.

  * Cotton’s Lockheed had a long post-war career, and ended up starring in a number of films and television programmes, including Doc Savage and The A-Team.

  * The suit was the brainchild of Canada’s Wilbur Franks, a cancer researcher who had prevented his experimental test tubes from smashing when subjected to intense centrifugal force by placing them in stronger, liquid-filled containers.

  * Junkers’ proposed solution was an entirely wood-built Mammoth glider. Unable to leave the ground successfully, the prototype Mammoth quickly became extinct, and was eventually used only to stoke the boilers of German trains.

  * Eventually the Gigant evolved into a six-engine transport aircraft, employed to ferry freight to the Eastern Front and evacuate the wounded. Heavy and slow, it proved all too simple to shoot down.

  * Eric Brown, with whom Hanna had partied in 1938, also carried out trial deck landings. Brown became Britain’s most decorated Fleet Air Arm pilot, and held the world record for aircraft carrier landings. In total he flew 487 different types of aircraft, more than any other pilot in history.

  * As Germany also used barrage balloons, certain British bombers were fitted with similar devices. Wing Commander Leonard Ratcliff found flying into a cable ‘required much skill, and a steady nerve’. See Sean Rayment, Tales from the Special Forces Club (2003), p. 173.

  * Two women had already been awarded the Iron Cross. Disguised as a man, Friederike Krüger had served in the Wars of Liberation under the name August Lübeck. She was awarded the Iron Cross, Second Class, in 1813. Lonny Hertha von Versen, a nurse in the First World War, was decorated in 1915. Twenty-seven women would receive the Iron Cross, Second Class, mostly for courage while nursing.

  * Eventually Mussolini’s Junkers Ju 52 arrived and Il Duce descended, desperate for the toilet. Pütter showed him the way, and one of his reconnaissance team quietly photographed Mussolini relieving himself. A few weeks later the SS arrived to confiscate the pictures.

  * The Adlon had inspired Greta Garbo’s 1932 film, Grand Hotel. It remained the social centre of Berlin throughout the war. For senior Nazis, however, the Kaiserhof was closer to the Reich Chancellery.

  * Britain’s Eric Brown also carried a (green) cushion around, to raise his height in the cockpit.

  * Dietrich Pütter returned to Germany in 1948. He never met Hanna again but continues to admire her.

  * According to Jutta, Melitta had patented seventy-five of her inventions by 1943, but no records have been found.

  * Melitta sculpted Alexander on several occasions, looking increasingly imperious over time. One version is kept with her bust of Nikolaus, and Frank Mehnert’s busts of Claus and Berthold, at the Stauffenberg schloss in Lautlingen, now a museum.

  * Then occupied territory, Milowice is now in Poland.

  * Two months later Reinhard Heydrich would die following an ambush by members of the Czechoslovak resistance, supported by the British SOE, in Prague.

  * The idea of jet-propelled aircraft was conceived by the RAF’s Frank Whittle in 1929. Although he patented the idea in 1930 and built a prototype in 1937, he failed to gain financial backing. Germany’s Hans Pabst von Ohain had a similar idea in 1936, and within weeks a vast development programme had been launched. Whittle went on to develop the British jet engine during the Second World War.

  * The Me 163 was elegant in its own way. Test pilot Mano Ziegler described seeing it ‘squatting in the twilight of the hangar, as graceful as a young bat’. See his Rocket Fighter (1976), p. 2.

  * Gering may have had his dates confused, as Hanna and Skorzeny became closely associated in 1944.

  * Helen Riedel arrived in Berlin within a month of the declaration of war between Germany and her native USA. She did not speak any German.

  * Alexander would be sent back to the front before he could start at Strasbourg.

  * Michael Schiller did not know that the enforced sterilization of ‘half-Jews’ had been discussed in Berlin earlier that year, so his chosen line of argument was unlikely to carry much weight.

  * Further dangers later faced Komet combat pilots. As forced labour was used in the planes’ production, several examples of sabotage were discovered, including the use of contaminated glue, and stones wedged as an irritant between the fuel tank and its support. Inside the skin of one machine a brave French saboteur had written Manufacture Fermée (‘Factory closed’).

  * Although Hanna described flying the Me 163 under power, it has never been conclusively verified that she did so. When Eric Brown later interrogated her about starting the rocket engine, she ‘stammered and stuttered’ and Eric became convinced that she had only ever flown the Me 163 while towed or as a glider. (Eric Brown, Mulley interview 18.03.2013.)

  * Deu
tsche Luftwacht (German Sky Guard) was among the publications to run an article featuring both Hanna and Melitta in early 1943.

  * Only an estimated 5,000 of those taken as POWs would ever return, and then only many years later.

  * Although defending only so-called ‘privileged Jews’ married to ‘Aryan’ spouses, the Rosenstrasse protest is considered a rare moment when courageous civil disobedience resulted in defeat for Nazi racial policy and practice. However, it may be that these ‘privileged Jews’ were never intended for deportation at this stage, and their release was not related to the protest.

  * Helmut Heuberger was the son of Hanna’s mother’s brother. The two families wrote regularly throughout the war and met when possible.

  * After the war Helmut Heuberger became active in the increasingly violent South Tyrolean Liberation Committee. Although sentenced in absentia to thirty years in prison for involvement in bombings, he became a respected geographer and Alpine researcher, holding several academic posts. He died in 2006.

  * Oliver was popular not only for her hard work, but for her access to real coffee. ‘She would share it round at midnight to keep us going,’ a colleague, Doreen Galvin, revealed. (Mulley interview, Tempsford, 17.05.2015.)

  * On one visit, Winston Churchill glowingly referred to her as ‘Miss Babington Smith of Peenemünde’. (Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge, CHUR 4/460A.)