Hanna Reitsch

In 1933, Reitsch left medical school at the University of Kiel to become, at the invitation of Wolf Hirth, a full-time glider pilot/instructor at Hornberg in Baden-Württemberg.[6] Reitsch contracted with the Ufa Film Company as a stunt pilot and set an unofficial endurance record for women of 11 hours and 20 minutes.[7] In January 1934, she joined a South America expedition to study thermal conditions, along with Wolf Hirth, Peter Riedel and Heini Dittmar.[8] While in Argentina, she became the first woman to earn the Silver C Badge, the 25th to do so among world glider pilots.[9]

In June 1934, Reitsch became a member of the Deutsche Forschungsanstalt für Segelflug (DFS) and became a test pilot in 1935.[10] Reitsch enrolled in the Civil Airways Training School in Stettin, where she flew a twin-engine on a cross country flight and aerobatics in a Focke-Wulf Fw 44.[11] In 1937, Ernst Udet gave Reitsch the honorary title of Flugkapitän after she had successfully tested Hans Jacobs's divebrakes for gliders.[12] At the DFS she test-flew transport and troop-carrying gliders, including the DFS 230 used at the Battle of Fort Eben-Emael.[13]

Reitsch in 1936 at Wasserkuppe

Adolf Hitler awards Hanna Reitsch the Iron Cross 2nd Class in March 1941

In September 1937, Reitsch was posted to the Luftwaffe testing centre at Rechlin-Lärz Airfield by Ernst Udet.[14]

Her flying skill, desire for publicity, and photogenic qualities made her a star of Nazi propaganda. Physically she was petite in stature, very slender with blonde hair, blue eyes and a "ready smile".[15] She appeared in Nazi propaganda throughout the late 1930s and early 1940s.[16]

Reitsch was the first female helicopter pilot and one of the few pilots to fly the Focke-Achgelis Fa 61, the first fully controllable helicopter, for which she received the Military Flying Medal.[17] In 1938, during the three weeks of the International Automobile Exhibition in Berlin, she made daily flights of the Fa 61 helicopter inside the Deutschlandhalle.[16]

In September 1938, Reitsch flew the DFS Habicht in the Cleveland National Air Races.[18]

Reitsch was a test pilot on the Junkers Ju 87 Stuka dive bomber and Dornier Do 17 light/fast bomber projects, for which she received the Iron Cross, Second Class, from Hitler on 28 March 1941.[19] Reitsch was asked to fly many of Germany's latest designs, among them the rocket-propelled Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet in 1942.[20] A crash landing on her fifth Me 163 flight badly injured Reitsch; she spent five months in a hospital recovering.[21] Reitsch received the Iron Cross First Class following the accident, one of only three women to do so.[22]

In February 1943 after news of the defeat in the Battle of Stalingrad she accepted an invitation from Generaloberst Robert Ritter von Greim to visit the Eastern Front. She spent three weeks visiting Luftwaffe units, flying a Fieseler Fi 156 Storch.[23]

On 28 February 1944, she presented the idea of Operation Suicide to Hitler at Berchtesgaden, which "would require men who were ready to sacrifice themselves in the conviction that only by this means could their country be saved." Although Hitler "did not consider the war situation sufficiently serious to warrant them ... and ... this was not the right psychological moment", he gave his approval. The project was assigned to Gen. Günther Korten.[24] There were about seventy volunteers who enrolled in the Suicide Group as pilots for the human glider-bomb.[25] By April 1944, Reitsch and Heinz Kensche finished tests of the Me 328, carried aloft by a Dornier Do 217.[26] By then, she was approached by SS-Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny, a founding member of the SS- Selbstopferkommando Leonidas (Leonidas Squadron). They adapted the V-1 flying bomb into the Fieseler Fi 103R Reichenberg including a two-seater and a single-seater with and without the mechanisms to land.[27] The plan was never implemented operationally, "the decisive moment had been missed."[28]

In her autobiography Fliegen, mein Leben Reitsch recalled that after two initial crashes with the Fi 103R she and Heinz Kensche took over tests of the prototype Fi 103R. She made several successful test flights before training the instructors. "Though an average pilot could fly the V1 without difficulty once it was in the air, to land it called for exceptional skill, in that it had a very high landing speed and, moreover, in training it was the glider model, without engine, that was usually employed."[29]

In October 1944, Reitsch claims she was shown a booklet by Peter Riedel which he'd obtained while in the German Embassy in Stockholm, concerning the gas chambers. She further claims that while believing it to be enemy propaganda, she agreed to inform Heinrich Himmler about it. Upon doing so, Himmler is said to have asked whether she believed it, and she replied, "No, of course not. But you must do something to counter it. You can't let them shoulder this onto Germany." "You are right," Himmler replied.[30]

A Fieseler Fi 156 Storch similar to the one Reitsch landed in the Tiergarten near the Brandenburg Gate during the Battle of Berlin

During the last days of the war, Hitler dismissed Hermann Göring as head of the Luftwaffe and appointed von Greim, to replace him. Von Greim and Reitsch flew from Gatow Airport into embattled Berlin to meet Hitler in the Führerbunker, arriving on 26 April as the Red Army troops were already in the central area of Berlin.[31] Reitsch and von Greim had flown from Rechlin–Lärz Airfield to Gatow Airfield in a Focke Wulf 190, escorted by twelve other Fw 190s from Jagdgeschwader 26 under the command of Hauptmann Hans Dortenmann.[32] In Berlin, Reitsch landed a Fi 156 Storch on an improvised airstrip in the Tiergarten near the Brandenburg Gate.[33] Hitler gave Reitsch two capsules of poison for herself and von Greim.[34] She accepted the capsule.[35]

Shortly after midnight on 29 April, Reitsch and von Greim flew out of Berlin in an Arado Ar 96 from the same improvised airstrip. This was the last plane out of Berlin.[36] Von Greim was ordered to get the Luftwaffe to attack the Soviet forces that had just reached Potsdamer Platz and to make sure Heinrich Himmler was punished for his treachery in making unauthorised contact with the Western Allies so as to surrender.[Note 1] Troops of the Soviet 3rd Shock Army, which was fighting its way through the Tiergarten from the north, tried to shoot the plane down fearing that Hitler was escaping in it, but it took off successfully.[37][38][Note 2]

Reitsch was soon captured along with von Greim and the two were interviewed together by U.S. military intelligence officers.[Note 3] When asked about being ordered to leave the Führerbunker on 29 April 1945,[36] Reitsch and von Greim reportedly repeated the same answer: "It was the blackest day when we could not die at our Führer's side." Reitsch also said: "We should all kneel down in reverence and prayer before the altar of the Fatherland." When the interviewers asked what she meant by "Altar of the Fatherland" she answered, "Why, the Führer's bunker in Berlin ..."[42] She was held for eighteen months.[43] Von Greim killed himself on 24 May 1945.

Evacuated from Silesia ahead of the Soviet troops, Reitsch's family took refuge in Salzburg.[44] During the night of 3 May 1945, after hearing a rumour that all refugees were to be taken back to their original homes in the Soviet occupation zone, Reitsch's father shot and killed her mother and sister[45] and her sister's three children before killing himself.[46]

After her release Reitsch settled in Frankfurt am Main. After the war, German citizens were barred from flying powered aircraft, but within a few years gliding was allowed, which she took up again. In 1952, Reitsch won a bronze medal in the World Gliding Championships in Spain; she was the first woman to compete[47] and in 1955 she became German champion.[47] She continued to break records, including the women's altitude record (6,848 m (22,467 ft)) in 1957 and her first diamond of the Gold-C badge.[47]

During the mid-1950s, Reitsch was interviewed on film and talked about her wartime flight tests of the Fa 61, Me 262 and Me 163.

In 1959, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru invited Reitsch, who spoke fluent English, to start a gliding centre, and she flew with him over New Delhi.[47]

In 1961, United States President John F. Kennedy invited her to the White House.[48]

From 1962 to 1966, she lived in Ghana. The then Ghanaian President, Kwame Nkrumah invited Reitsch to Ghana after reading of her work in India. At Afienya she founded the first black African national gliding school, working closely with the government and the armed forces. The West German government supported her as technical adviser.[49] The school was commanded by J.E.S. de Graft-Hayford, with gliders such as the double-seated Schleicher K7, Slingsby T.21 and a Bergfalke, along with a single-seated Schleicher K 8.[50] She gained the FAI Diamond Badge in 1970.[51] The project was evidently of great importance to Nkrumah and has been interpreted as part of a "modernist" development ideology.[52]

Reitsch's attitudes to race underwent a change. "Earlier in my life, it would never have occurred to me to treat a black person as a friend or partner ..." She now experienced guilt at her earlier "presumptuousness and arrogance".[53] She became close to Nkrumah. The details of their relationship are now unclear due to the destruction of documents, but some surviving letters are intimate in tone.[54]

In Ghana, some Africans were disturbed by the prominence of a person with Reitsch's past, but Shirley Graham Du Bois, a noted African-American writer who had emigrated to Ghana and was friendly towards Reitsch, agreed with Nkrumah that Reitsch was extremely naive politically.[55] Contemporary Ghanaian press reports seem to show a lack of interest in her past.[56]

Throughout the 1970s, Reitsch broke gliding records in many categories, including the "Women's Out and Return World Record" twice, once in 1976 (715 km (444 mi)) and again, in 1979 (802 km (498 mi)), flying along the Appalachian Ridges in the United States. During this time, she also finished first in the women's section of the first world helicopter championships.[15]

Reitsch was interviewed and photographed several times in the 1970s, towards the end of her life, by Jewish-American photo-journalist Ron Laytner. In her closing remarks she is quoted as saying:

And what have we now in Germany? A country of bankers and car-makers. Even our great army has gone soft. Soldiers wear beards and question orders. I am not ashamed to say I believed in National Socialism. I still wear the Iron Cross with diamonds Hitler gave me. But today in all of Germany you can't find a single person who voted Adolf Hitler into power ... Many Germans feel guilty about the war. But they don't explain the real guilt we share – that we lost.[57]

In the same interview, she is quoted as saying,[41]

I asked Hermann Göring one day, "What is this I am hearing that Germany is killing Jews?" Göring responded angrily, "A totally outrageous lie made up by the British and American press. It will be used as a rope to hang us someday if we lose the war."

• Allman, Jean (February 2013). "Phantoms of the Archive: Kwame Nkrumah, a Nazi Pilot named Hanna, and the Contingencies of Postcolonial History-Writing". American Historical Review. 118 (1): 104–129. doi:10.1093/ahr/118.1.104.
• Beevor, Antony (2002). Berlin: The Downfall 1945. Viking-Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-670-03041-5.
• Brown, Eric (2006). Wings on my Sleeve. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 978-0-297-84565-2.
• Caldwell, Donald L. (1991). JG 26: Top Guns of the Luftwaffe. New York: Ivy Books. ISBN 978-0-8041-1050-1.
• Cook, Joan (31 August 1979). "Hanna Reitsch, 67. A Top German Pilot". New York Times. Retrieved 7 July 2008.
• Dollinger, Hans; Jacobsen, Hans Adolf (1968). The Decline and Fall of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan: A Pictorial History of the Final Days of World War II. Translated by Pomerans, Arnold. New York: Crown. OCLC 712594.
• Hirsch, Afua (16 April 2012). "Hitler's pilot helped Ghana's women to fly". The Guardian. Retrieved 16 April 2012.
• Laytner, Ron (19 February 1981). "The first astronaut: tiny, daring Hanna". The Deseret News. p. 12C.
• Mulley, Clare (18 July 2017). The Women Who Flew for Hitler: A True Story of Soaring Ambition and Searing Rivalry. St. Martin's Press. ISBN 978-1-250-13316-8.
• Piszkiewicz, Dennis (1997). From Nazi Test Pilot to Hitler's Bunker: The Fantastic Flights of Hanna Reitsch. Praeger Publishers. ISBN 978-0-275-95456-7. Archived from the original on 2 March 2012. Retrieved 8 January 2010.
• Reitsch, Hanna (2009) [1955]. The Sky My Kingdom. London: Biddles Limited, Guildford and King's Lynn. ISBN 978-1-85367-262-0.
• Rieger, Bernhard (July 2008). "Hanna Reitsch (1912-1979): The Global Career of a Nazi Celebrity". German History. Norwich. 26 (3): 383–405. doi:10.1093/gerhis/ghn026. ISSN 0266-3554.
• Shirer, William L. (1960). The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany. New York: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 978-0-671-62420-0.
• Slater, AE (December 1979 – January 1980). "Obituary". Sailplane & Gliding. British Gliding Association. 30 (6): 302.
• Trevor-Roper, Hugh R. (1947). The Last Days of Hitler. New York.
• Ziemke, Earl F. (1969). Battle for Berlin End of the Third Reich Ballantine's Illustrated History of World War II (Battle Book #6). Ballantine Books.

• Lomax, J. (1990). Hanna Reitsch: Flying for the Fatherland. John Murray Publishers. ISBN 978-0-7195-4571-9.