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

by Clare Mulley

  As a teenager Hanna came up with a strategic plan: she would, she announced to her parents, become a doctor, ‘not an ordinary one, but a missionary doctor . . . and above all, a flying missionary doctor’.9 Her father was sceptical; her grades so far had failed to support such ambition, and he doubted whether she would have the sticking power. Meeting with unexpected persistence, however, Willy offered Hanna a deal: if she could refrain from mentioning flying at all for the two or three years until she passed her school-leaving examination, the dreaded Abitur, her reward would be a gliding course. Two years later Hanna’s father marked her school graduation by presenting her with an antique gold watch. She had kept her side of the bargain so well that he had forgotten all about their pact. Hanna had not. She watched her father turn pale as she reminded him of his promise and, a man of his word, he agreed to honour it.

  Hanna’s parents hoped that medicine and flying would prove to be only a brief interlude before marriage and children. To prepare her for her domestic future, be it at home or abroad, Emy insisted that Hanna spend a year at the Colonial School for Women in Rendsburg before taking any gliding course. Germany’s formal ties with African territories had been ended by the Treaty of Versailles, but a revanchist movement hoped to encourage ongoing connections. No doubt the colonial aspect of the school appealed to Hanna’s parents, along with the presence of a naval training college not far away, ensuring an abundance of young men in the neighbourhood. Hanna was taught to cook and clean, keep animals, fix shoes, locks and windows, and to speak English, Spanish and one West African language. Her ‘only notable success’, she later wrote drily, was a private experiment with the sanitary training of pigs.

  Hanna was nineteen, ‘full of confidence and hope, shivering with excitement’, when she finally cycled over for her course at the increasingly famous Grünau Gliding School. Like Melitta before her, she was the only girl among the boys, and she was set to soar above the same green slopes, but it was now a clear and cloudless day in 1931, eleven years after Melitta’s first flight. ‘With thumping heart’, Hanna ignored the jeers of the young men around her and climbed into the open cockpit of her glider. First she had to learn to balance as it rested on the grass, quivering at the slightest movement, she felt, ‘like a frightened bird’.10 Then a bungee cord was attached to the nose of her machine, which was stretched out by one team of students while others held the tail. She was meant simply to let the glider slide forward along the ground, but on release she could not resist pulling on the stick a little. The next moment she ‘could see nothing but sky, and then, sky again’.11 Still only just over five feet tall and weighing less than seven stone, Hanna was too light for the team’s powerful start, and with her nudge on the stick the glider had launched steeply upwards. ‘For the first time in my life I felt invisible forces lifting and carrying me, higher and higher, until I was over the ridge and it receded away beneath me,’ she later reported, her eyes shining. ‘It felt like a fairy tale; wondrous.’12 But there was no fairy-tale ending. The glider quickly fell back down to earth, ripping the safety straps and throwing Hanna from her seat. Miraculously, neither she nor the machine was seriously harmed; she could easily have been killed.

  Hanna’s recklessness was a disciplinary offence but she earned the nickname ‘Stratosphere’ from her fellow students, showing that they, at least, were grudgingly impressed. From one among them, the compliment was particularly meaningful. Wernher von Braun, the future pioneering rocket scientist, was less than a week older than Hanna. Inspired by the genius of Jules Verne and Georges Méliès, and encouraged by his parents’ gift of a telescope to mark his confirmation, Braun’s ambition was always to invade space. ‘Don’t tell me man doesn’t belong out there,’ he once commented. ‘Man belongs wherever he wants to go.’13 As a boy growing up in Berlin he had pressurized a prototype rocket with a bicycle pump, and was later cautioned by police after launching the world’s first rocket-powered go-kart in the middle of the fashionable Tiergartenstrasse. Supremely confident, Braun was both brilliant and charming. He was ‘handsome enough to be a film star, and he knows it’, one reporter later noted, while female friends compared him to ‘the famous photograph of Lord Alfred Douglas’, better known as Bosie, the aristocratic young lover of Oscar Wilde.14 Sadly, Hanna’s impression of her fellow gliding student was not recorded, but he admired her courage and vivaciousness. ‘Hanna has an unusually intriguing personality . . .’ he later wrote warmly, ‘she did all kinds of crazy things.’15 Like Hanna, Braun would later claim to have had little interest in politics; what brought them together was their shared obsession with flight. ‘Our minds were always far out in space,’ one friend wrote.16

  On the evening of Hanna’s first flight and crash, Wolf Hirth, the head of the gliding school, was forced to consider expelling this apparently dangerous student for her own safety. Instead she was grounded for three days, for disobedience. She spent those days watching attentively as her peers did their exercises. In the evenings she practised manoeuvres in bed, with a walking stick to serve as her control column. On the fourth day the students were to take their ‘A’ test. When the most experienced among them went first, and failed to leave the slopes, Hanna was put forward next for her anticipated humiliation. As she was launched down the slope she noted her speed and balance, and directed the glider to lift. It was a perfect flight, nine seconds over the requirement, followed by a perfect landing. ‘I did not stir,’ Hanna wrote, as her classmates came whooping down the slope to meet her, ‘but simply sat there in my beloved glider, caught in a blissful trance.’17 When the course assessor put her achievement down to luck, Hanna happily flew again, passing with flying colours.

  Wolf Hirth visited the school the next morning to assess this girl who had so spectacularly snatched victory from defeat. Hirth was one of the great pioneers of German flight. Having earned his pilot’s licence in 1920, he and other enthusiasts founded the first Academic Flying Club – the society that would later refuse to accept Melitta among their ranks. Despite losing a leg in a motorcycle accident in 1924, Hirth went on to study engineering, toured the world to promote and demonstrate gliding, and designed and manufactured his own machines. A heavy smoker, his trademark cigarette holder was carved from the fibula of his lost leg. To Hanna, Hirth was ‘a demigod’.18 From his perspective, Hanna was pretty impressive too – a natural pilot, woman or not. After observing her faultless gliding, he arranged for her to fly every day under his personal supervision. Over the next few months she learned to turn and catch upwinds, sailing through her ‘B’ and ‘C’ tests.

  In early 1932 Hanna was invited to try out the new glider design usually reserved for instructors. For once allowed to fly to her heart’s content, she sang ‘the loveliest songs I could remember’ while in the air: the joyful response to flying that she would keep up all her life. Hardly noticing the rain and snow, Hanna returned to earth only five hours later when the wind dropped. As she touched down she was surprised to be met by an excited crowd; she had achieved a new world record for women’s gliding endurance. That evening Hanna’s name was broadcast on the radio, and flowers and congratulations arrived from around the country. ‘I found it wonderful – I was young and overjoyed,’ she wrote with winning honesty.19

  Adolf Hitler was also back in the cockpit in 1932. His biplane flight to Berlin for the Kapp Putsch in 1920 had opened his eyes to the potential of flight, and over the next twelve years the Nazi Party had made good use of the symbolism of aviation, as well as the more practical opportunities it presented. Posters with illustrations of Zeppelins branded NSDAP helped to spread the word about growing Party membership and, during the 1932 election campaign, planes circling the main regional cities had sent leaflets drifting down with the message, Unity, solidarity, peace, order and work, and below this, Give Adolf Hitler your vote and he will give you work and bread and freedom.20 Now Hitler was touring the country on his airborne hustings campaign known as ‘The German Flight’; he was the first political leade
r to reach out to his electorate in this way.

  The election tour was strenuous. Always the first up at this point in his life, Hitler discussed the precise programme for each day over morning porridge and a glass of milk. Coffee had been strictly prohibited, ‘because of its revolting effect in the air’.21 Once the itinerary was set, few changes were permitted. Hitler’s personal pilot, Hans Baur, a veteran of the past war and early member of the Party, sometimes flew between five different mass rallies in one day. Confident in his destiny, Hitler would watch with excitement as Baur flew blind above heavy clouds – sometimes running low on petrol – and once through a hailstorm that had grounded all Luft Hansa flights.* ‘We became “flying humans”,’ the journalist Otto Dietrich wrote, thoroughly enjoying his implicit membership of the super-race team. At every stop the plane would be met by crowds of enthusiastic followers shouting ‘Heil!’ before Hitler was driven into the city in a motorcade. Then, after a speech and a short ceremony, they would set off again, ‘the incredible exultation of the crowd . . . vibrating in us still’.22

  Above all, Hitler liked to fly by night. A master of stage management, he would address the largest crowds at dusk so that they would be lit by a sea of torches, and would then rush back to the airfield where Baur would have the engines running and ready for take-off. As their plane curved around over the dwindling assembly below, Hitler would order the cabin to be lit up. ‘At this moment, the crowd recognizes the glowing fireship up in the air which carries the Führer,’ Dietrich powered on in elation. ‘A deafening cheer starts up from hundreds of thousands of throats, so loud that it even drowns out the roaring of our motors, while the people wave their torches in salute.’23 Hitler would look down over the spectacle in silence, ‘while we experience something new, almost cosmic up here. It is beyond words.’24

  It was in this electric political atmosphere, and as a qualified glider pilot, that Hanna dutifully started her first term at medical school in Berlin. Frustrated, and quickly bored in lectures, she immediately knew that she ‘had only one desire – to fly again!’25 With the money allowed by her parents for college expenses, she enrolled on a training course to fly engine-powered aircraft at Berlin-Staaken airfield.

  Like Melitta, who had studied at Staaken two years earlier, Hanna had to rise early, setting off at five in the morning to get to the airfield in time. Once again, she was the only woman on the course, although there were now several other women flying from Staaken, including Elly Beinhorn who had just returned from her circumnavigation of the world, and with whom Hanna now also struck up a friendship. For Hanna flying itself was simple enough, and she quickly overcame the concerns of the men around her through her skill and dedication. More challenging was trying to understand the mechanics of the machines. At one point she dismantled an old engine under the supervision of the ground mechanics in the airfield workshops, and earned some respect by working through the night to reassemble it.

  Turning to other engines, Hanna befriended the workmen responsible for the airfield vehicles. Soon she was not only learning to drive, she was learning about the men’s war service, the bitterness that met them when they returned after defeat, and their periods of unemployment. Impressed by their stoicism, she promised to get them eye ointment from her father and, from her mother, dresses for their wives. ‘But as soon as the men began to talk politics,’ Hanna sighed, their fragile comradeship fell apart.26 Few of the men belonged to the same party, and each wanted to win her round to his own viewpoint, arguing their case with such passion that they almost came to blows. Hanna was ill-equipped to follow the debates, ‘for though naturally I had been brought up to be a patriot,’ she wrote with youthful naivety, ‘there had never been any question of political divisions in my home’.27 Having automatically accepted her parents’ conservative, nationalistic, racially conscious and casually anti-Semitic standpoint as the natural and neutral one, she did not consider that she already had a political position, or that politics might have any bearing on her own life. What horrified her now was not any particular belief or argument, but the dissent that politics, as a whole, brought to the group; ‘how people who otherwise get on well together can become bitter and fanatical opponents as soon as politics are mentioned’. ‘Depressed and thoughtful’, she walked away not just from the men but, ironically, from the opportunity for learning from and engaging with the arguments.

  If Hanna was apolitical, as she later claimed, it was through choice. Despite her fascination with everything to do with aviation, her memoirs mention nothing of Hitler’s ‘German Flight’ campaign or the elections that took place that July, making the National Socialists the largest party in the Reichstag. And while she often visited her parents, she never commented on the growing anti-Semitism in their part of the country. Breslau, with its large Jewish community, was a stronghold of Nazi support less than two hours from Hirschberg. Here Jewish shops were already being boycotted, their owners legally restricted and socially ostracized. Later, Hanna would say only that she had been completely absorbed in learning to fly that summer.

  Hanna’s training plane was an open Mercedes-Klemm with dual controls, one of the few low-powered civil aircraft allowed under the terms of Versailles. Photos show her at the controls in a dark leather flying cap, her whole face lit up by a brilliant smile. After a few weeks she had progressed to an altitude of 6,500 feet, still in the Klemm but now in a fur-lined suit, with her face greased for protection against the sun and cold. Altitude removes a pilot from the world. Even during the group briefing before she took off, Hanna developed ‘the strange feeling that I was no longer one of them’.28 As she flew over the airfield workmen, she briefly wondered whether they were still arguing about politics, but checked herself: ‘I had little time to think of that, for my ear was concentrated on the engine . . . soon the earth below dwindles into insignificance.’29 For Hanna, flying at high altitude was a sublime experience, where ‘the airman feels close to God’ and ‘all that hitherto seemed important falls away’.30

  If Hanna had ever attached importance to her medical studies, it had only been as a means to escape. Now that flight was at hand, she rarely attended lectures and never opened the textbooks she had strapped to her bicycle when she first rode over to Staaken. In the summer recess of 1932, she returned home to resume her gliding training under Wolf Hirth. As an assistant in his workshop, she learnt to build and repair gliders. In the evenings she joined him and his wife at home, studying flight theory, including Hirth’s pioneering work on thermals: the sun-warmed air above heat-absorbing terrain such as heath and roads, which rises naturally, creating currents in which a glider can circle upwards. Hirth had become Hanna’s ‘flying father’: the first in a series of older male mentors to whom she turned for recognition and advancement. In September, Hanna’s own father arranged for her to continue her medical studies at Kiel, a city that offered fewer distractions and had the added advantage of bringing Hanna close to her brother Kurt, now a midshipman in the Kriegsmarine stationed at the city. But Hanna had either lost interest in, or later chose not to comment on, anything but flight, and her memoirs pick up again only on her return to Hirschberg in May 1933.

  By the start of 1933, with six million Germans out of work, people were losing faith in the entire political system. Three chancellors had come and gone within a year, and the simultaneous rise of Nazism and communism led to regular violent clashes on the streets, often deliberately provoked by the Brownshirts of the SA (Sturmabteilung). Along with many others, Hanna’s parents were delighted by Hitler’s nationalist platform, which promised the creation of jobs and the restoration of a sense of security and national pride. In January, after considerable backstage manoeuvring, Hitler was appointed Reich chancellor and immediately set about consolidating his authority. He was backed financially by key industrialists, and diplomatically by President von Hindenburg and the statesman and former chancellor Franz von Papen, who mistakenly believed they could manipulate this popular leader. The next month t
he Reichstag fire provided the Nazis with the opportunity to trade on the Bolshevik threat while imprisoning many communists, as well as the leaders of other parties and the independent press. On 5 May the Nazis won 44 per cent of the votes, providing enough seats to pass the Enabling Act that gave Hitler absolute power to set laws, abolish trade unions, make opposition political parties illegal, and effectively start a rule of terror enforced by the Gestapo.

  Back home from Kiel that month, Hanna’s thoughts were far from the appointment or policies of her country’s latest chancellor. Dressed in sandals and a light cotton frock, she was strolling through the sun-drenched streets of Hirschberg one day, yearning only to be gliding across the clear blue sky, when she ran into Wolf Hirth. Hirth was also full of the joys of spring – he had invested in a Grunau Baby, the very latest type of sleek, single-seat training glider that he had helped to design. The Grunau Baby came with a rudimentary ‘blind-flying’ control panel: a pioneering set of six instruments to indicate airspeed, horizon, direction, climb or descent, turn or slip. Theoretically such tools could enable a pilot to fly safely through clouds or fog when visibility was limited. He wondered whether Hanna might like to take his impressive new glider up.