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

by Clare Mulley

  Within an hour Hanna was sitting in the enclosed cabin of the Grunau Baby without goggles or helmet, the parachute harness buckled straight over her frock. Hirth, in his engine-powered plane, towed her up to 1,200 feet before signalling to her to cast off. With not a breath of wind in the sky, Hanna began the gentle drift back down to earth. At 250 feet she was looking for a place to land when she felt the glider quiver. A moment later she was circling back up, swapping warm air currents until she coiled faster and faster to several thousand feet. Now she saw a huge black cloud overhead, formed by the rapid condensation of the thermals she was riding. ‘The sight of this dark monster,’ she wrote, ‘filled me with glee.’31

  Before Hanna had learned to fly, she had gazed up at glorious fluffy white clouds and longed to play among them. Now she knew that she could not reach such clouds without passing through them; they were spectral. Thunderclouds offered more tangible potential for enjoyment. Never one to err on the side of caution, Hanna saw this as the perfect opportunity for her first ‘blind flight’ through heavy cloud. Moments later her glider was completely wrapped in the grey mass and she had zero visibility. With all the confidence of the amateur, she watched her instruments, climbed to 5,500 feet – safely above the level of the nearest mountain peak – and relaxed. Later she spoke of feeling disconnected from the ground, ‘humble and grateful in her heart’, as this was ‘when she knew there existed something, someone, greater, in whom she could trust, who guided and watched over her’.32 It was then that the storm broke.

  The first Hanna knew of the danger she was in was the ‘frenzied staccato, an ear-splitting hellish tattoo’ of rain and hail, drumming on the wings of the glider. With a cracking noise, the cabin windows began to ice over, and she focused again on her control panel. She was still climbing, and rapidly. At nearly 10,000 feet above the earth the instruments began to stick. Soon they were frozen solid. Hanna now had no direct visibility and no functioning instruments to guide her. She tried to hold the control column in the normal position, but without bearings this was impossible to judge. Then there was ‘a new sound, a kind of high-pitched whistle’, and she was pitched forward in her harness, the blood rushing to her head.33 Caught in a downdraught in the turbulent centre of the storm, the glider was now diving vertically. Heaving on the stick, Hanna found herself momentarily hanging from her harness straps; she was soon performing a series of involuntary loops ‘while the glider arrows down, shrieking’.34

  Unable to see anything through the frosted mica of the cabin window, Hanna punched it out, but she was still enclosed by cloud, and now shivering all over, her hands turning blue as she sat in her summer frock, drenched in rain, hail and snow. Hoping that the Grunau Baby might retain some inherent stability, she abandoned the controls, ‘no longer the pilot . . . but a passenger’, and for the first time acknowledged the growing fear inside her.35 Then the lightly built glider was carried up again, rising up through the towering pillar of cloud like a piece of paper sucked up a chimney. Fearing that she might lose consciousness, Hanna repeatedly screamed out her own name to keep her focus. Suddenly she was spewed down and out into the light, flying upside down but safely above the white peaks of the Riesengebirge mountains. Grateful still to be alive, she righted her machine and glided down until eventually she could make out the tiny dots of skiers returning home at the end of the day, and a safe place to land on the slopes beside a hotel restaurant.

  Bedraggled and soaking wet, Hanna hauled herself out of the glider, its fuselage now perforated with holes punched by hailstones, and into the hotel to put a call through to Hirth. It was he who first realized that she had inadvertently entered the neutral zone, close to the Czechoslovakian border. Like Melitta landing without a permit in France, Hanna had committed a major offence that might result in the loss of her licence. Given the time and place, she might even have caused an international incident. Hirth told her to collect as many people as possible to help, and wait until he flew over – risking his own licence – to drop her a starting rope. Half an hour later two teams of hotel guests launched Hanna back into the darkening sky. Hirth, flying above, guided her down to the valley where a landing site had been floodlit for them with car headlamps.

  Back on the ground again, for a while Hanna sat silently in her glider, letting her romantic mind reframe her adventure in the terms of the fabulous that she so loved. ‘Earth and sky seem wrapped in sleep,’ she wrote. ‘My glider-bird slumbers too, gleaming softly against the stars. Beautiful bird, that outflew the four winds, braved the tempest, shot heavenward, searching out the sky.’36 She would soon find even more to celebrate in her storm-cloud flight, when she learnt that she had unintentionally soared higher than any glider previously. Although not officially verified, her new world record was widely reported on German radio and in the national papers and, despite her discussions with her mother about humility, Hanna was soon giving a series of effusive talks and interviews. ‘Gliding is a victory of the soul,’ she gushed.37 Hanna claimed not to fly from ambition, but simply for ‘the immense pleasure it gave me’, but hers was now a soul that yearned not only for the pleasure of flight, but for the adrenaline, recognition and honours that seemed to go with it.38

  3

  PUBLIC RELATIONS

  1933–1936

  ‘Women have always been among my staunchest supporters,’ Hitler told the New York Times in July 1933. ‘They feel my victory is their victory.’1 While working to return women to their rightful and respected role, as he saw it, of hausfrau, Hitler had been keen to exploit any support for his National Socialist Party. At times this required rising above a tide of female fan mail and enduring more than one public display of adoration. ‘He was often embarrassed’ by such women, his friend and official photographer Heinrich Hoffmann later remembered, but he ‘had no option but to accept their veneration’.2 Hitler, Hoffmann felt, had ‘a lovely appreciation of women as a political influence’, and before the election he ‘was convinced that feminine enthusiasm, tenacity and fanaticism would be the deciding factor’3 In fact, most women who supported the Nazis did so not for love of the leader or a desire to return to the home, but for the same reasons as men: the prospect of a strong government that could deal with the ‘menace of communism’, wipe out the shame of Versailles, and provide employment and a just redistribution of the nation’s wealth. Nevertheless, appealing to women and harnessing their propaganda value were significant parts of Hitler’s campaign before and after he assumed power. Hanna and Melitta would both soon duly play their part, and come to appreciate the vital importance of public relations under the new regime.

  As Hanna spread her wings, the mood of the country seemed to lift with her. She had turned twenty-one in March 1933 and, for her, the last few years had been a wonderful adventure: leaving home, learning to fly, and setting new world records almost effortlessly. In Hirschberg, as across Germany, there were frequent patriotic marches and torch-lit parades with speeches, singing, and copious flags and bunting. Hitler’s speeches tended to deal with grievances that were familiar to many working people, and had a sort of evangelical simplicity that made them easy to follow. He promised a higher standard of living with a car for everyone, beautiful homes, affordable holidays, marriage loans, respect for mothers and a defence against Bolshevism. People seemed electrified, and everywhere there was talk of ‘the unity of the German people’ and the ‘national uprising’4 With little interest in party politics or current affairs, to Hanna it seemed simply patriotic to support Hitler and his dynamic new regime. At last, the future looked promising, and she was keen to seize every opportunity. When the Führer called on the German people to ‘awake to a realization of your own importance’ in his May Day speech of 1933, Hanna might have been forgiven for imagining that he was talking directly to her5

  Melitta followed the consolidation of Nazi power in Germany from a more sober and critical perspective. She welcomed the prospect of stable government, the pledges for greater safety on the streets, job
creation and the proposed investment in technological research, as well as the restoration of German pride and the countering of communism on the international stage. However, her doubts about the legitimacy and principles of the regime were growing. Where Hanna saw parades and bunting, Melitta saw Germany’s constitution under attack. Hate-filled posters were pasted onto walls, newspapers were thick with propaganda, and trucks full of SA and SS troops were roaring through the major cities, recruiting, collecting names, and occasionally breaking into houses and apartments to arrest and remove not only communists, who Melitta saw as a serious threat, but also social democrats, union leaders and liberal intellectuals. The Nazi plan was to preclude any attempt at organized opposition by removing potential leaders and quietly intimidating the mass of the population. Like many others, Melitta hoped such tactics would soon be replaced by more benign policies. Then, in late May, personal tragedy overwhelmed her.

  Melitta’s closest female pilot friend, Marga von Etzdorf, had been attempting a record flight to Australia when her Klemm aeroplane was damaged in gales, forcing her to land at an airfield in Aleppo, in what was then the French mandate of Syria. Having asked for a quiet room in which to rest, Marga took out a gun and shot herself. She died instantly. It would later emerge that the French authorities had found leaflets for a German weapons manufacturer along with a model machine gun stowed on her plane. It seemed that Marga had been trying to supplement her sponsorship earnings by ferrying arms, in direct breach of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. On hearing of their friend’s death, the DVL engineer Georg Wollé immediately sought out Melitta. He found her in her office, ‘in floods of tears’6 Marga’s death ‘hit her very hard’, Melitta’s sister Jutta recalled, adding that ‘later, she had to mourn her colleagues all too often’7

  Hanna had also had to cope with personal tragedy. In the spring of 1933 she was working as an instructor at Wolf Hirth’s gliding school when one of her students was killed in a crash landing. It was Hanna’s first experience of losing a colleague, as it had been for Melitta. Although deeply shocked, she insisted on informing the man’s family herself. His mother met her at the door, anticipating bad news. She told Hanna that the night before her son had dreamt that he would die. Whether it was a premonition, or just that a sleepless night had affected his concentration, Hanna felt a sense of relief; a little helpful distancing from the tragedy. A few days later she was due to compete in the annual Rhön-Rossitten gliding contests, and she wanted to be focused and show the world what she could do.

  Organized by the meteorologist Walter Georgii, the first Rhön gliding competitions had been held on the Wasserkuppe mountain in 1920. Every summer since, thousands of sightseers had journeyed by train and foot up to the annual rallies held on the bare summit of the Wasserkuppe, the Rhön valley’s highest point. According to contemporary German flight magazines, by the late 1920s the highest slopes of the mountain hosted a glider camp with its own water and electricity supply, hotels, bars and restaurants, a post office with special-edition stamps, and indeed everything, ‘like in the big cities. Even dancing. Even bobbed hair!’8 Perhaps their reporters had spotted Melitta up there among the crowds. Once a regular spectator, she had applied for a gliding course at Wasserkuppe in 1924 and, although not able to take up her place because of work commitments, she still visited when she could.

  By the 1930s, over 20,000 people regularly travelled to the Rhön valley at weekends. On the day of the 1932 Reichstag elections, a temporary voting station had even been set up on the mountain, and Walter Georgii called on the people of Germany to ‘do as the gliders have’. His message was clear – it was time to recognize the forces of nature and embrace a brave new future characterized by technical prowess, a love of freedom and a deep sense of national pride. With the Nazis securing over 50 per cent of the mountaintop vote, the Wasserkuppe fraternity’s support for Hitler was considerably above the national average.* Here, with Wolf Hirth at her side, Hanna enjoyed feeling not only a part of the gliding community, but part of a brave, idealistic, almost moral endeavour, far removed from the partisan politics pursued in the valleys.

  The Wasserkuppe rises 1,300 feet above the plains, and the air currents hitting it are swept forcefully upwards. Here there was ‘wind in plenty’, Hanna noted, and yet on her first competitive flight she failed to find an updraught strong enough to carry her now comparatively heavy and outclassed glider9 Forced to flop straight back down to earth, she had to wait, ‘sitting in the ditch’ as she put it, while the other contestants, including Hirth, continued to soar above her. A second attempt brought the same result and, whether it was the design of her glider, grief for her lost student, tiredness or just bad luck, so it continued throughout the day, and every day of the event. At some point Hanna lost heart, although not the resolve to keep plugging away. Before long she was seen as the comedy contestant, a subject for ridicule, and eventually she was unable completely to fight back her tears. It was with some surprise, then, that Hanna found her name on the rostrum for the final prize-giving. A sponsor had donated a meat-mincer and a pair of kitchen scales – what better to use as a booby prize, not only provoking ‘uproarious laughter’, Hanna noted ruefully, but also serving ‘as a warning to any other forward little girls who might set their hearts on flying!’10

  Melitta’s former gliding instructor, Peter Riedel, was also at the Rhön contests that year, as every year. Peter, who had now applied for Nazi Party membership, was working with Walter Georgii at his gliding research institute,* experimenting with upcurrents and cloud-hopping to achieve spectacular heights and distances. As Hanna was presented with her kitchen scales, he was collecting the Hindenburg Cup, having established a new distance world record of 142 miles. Peter appreciated that Hanna’s award was ‘a crude sort of message that women should stay in the kitchen’ and he was not impressed11 Already astonished by Melitta’s skill in the air, he now openly admired Hanna’s determination and refusal, as he saw it, to let ‘this humiliation divert her from her dedication to flying . . . to her beloved Germany . . . and to Hitler’12 Peter was not alone in this assessment. In his final speech, Oskar Ursinus, gliding pioneer and the founder of the Rhön contests, pointedly declared that ‘in soaring, it is not success but the spirit which counts’.

  Walter Georgii noticed all the attention that Hanna had attracted. He was planning a research trip to study the powerful thermals in South America, and had already recruited Wolf Hirth, Peter Riedel and another of the Wasserkuppe competitors, a boyishly handsome pilot a year older than Hanna called Heini Dittmar, who was flying a glider he had built himself. Now Georgii invited Hanna to join the team as an extra pilot and, he quietly hoped, as a potential publicity hook for the institute and for Germany’s reputation overseas. Hanna was thrilled – the only catch was that she would have to pay her own, considerable, travel expenses.

  As a courageous pilot, with her vivacious personality, fashionable looks and brilliant smile, the truth was that Hanna had been attracting plenty of attention ever since she first stepped into a glider. After her record-setting storm cloud flight, the nationalist film studio, UFA, had invited her to act as a stunt double in a film about gliding. Now Hanna accepted the offer, on the proviso that they paid the 3,000 Reichsmarks required for her South American passage.

  Rivals of the Air* was an early Nazi propaganda film designed to inspire young men to become pilots, and was produced by Karl Ritter, a Great War veteran pilot and committed Nazi himself. The plot revolved around a young gliding enthusiast, played by Heini Dittmar, who persuades a female college friend to learn to soar with him. Failing the course, the female student is disqualified from entering the Rhön contests. However, ‘being a small and rather energetic person’, in Hanna’s words, ‘she has some ideas of her own’13 The young fräulein, clearly modelled on Hanna, borrows a glider and sets off in pursuit of the men, only to be rescued from storm cloud disaster by her older gliding instructor, in the form of Wolf Hirth. After much talk of courage, spirit
and virility, the older instructor gets the girl, and the younger man wins national honours in the contest: everyone is happy – particularly Hanna who, apparently unconcerned by the politics behind the film, thoroughly enjoyed the chance to repeatedly ‘crash’ her glider into a lake, while getting paid for the privilege.

  Hanna set sail for South America, her first venture out of Germany, in early January 1934. With four leading lights of the gliding scene – Walter Georgii, Wolf Hirth, Peter Riedel and Heini Dittmar – at her side, it was another dream come true. Perhaps encouraged by their on-screen romance, Heini flirted with Hanna, but she was not interested, and only complained to the tall, more brotherly Peter that their colleague was rather a nuisance. Perhaps bitterly, Heini later told a mutual friend that he was ‘quite sure’ that Hanna was a lesbian14 Peter had found romance elsewhere. He never found Hanna sexually attractive, ‘too small, for one thing’, he joked, but he considered her, like Melitta, ‘a great friend’15 In any case Hanna had no desire for a passionate romance that would inevitably curtail her freedom. Like her film double, her real admiration would always be reserved for older men, father figures like Wolf Hirth.

  Everything else about the voyage, however, charmed her: the lights on the water; the captain’s permission to climb the mast; ‘the driving ice floes which broke up on the bow with a sharp tinkle like a toast from a thousand glasses’; and later dolphins, flying fish, and ‘half-naked black boys, supple as fish’, who dived for the coins they threw from the ship’s rails16 Hanna, like many of her contemporaries, had absorbed – and helped to perpetuate – the casual racism of her times, often admiring from afar but at closer range finding the black men of the Spanish Canary Islands ‘dark and sinister-looking, sending an involuntary shudder down the spine’17

  As soon as the expedition team arrived at Rio de Janeiro they embarked on a PR campaign, with a series of press conferences, dinners and speeches. Walter Georgii had been astute: pretty and petite, and typically dressed entirely in white from flying cap down to tights and shoes, Hanna made a striking figure and was soon generating considerable publicity. She was not just the only woman, but also the most junior member of the team. ‘The presence of a girl . . .’ she now realized, with rather mixed feelings, ‘naturally increased . . . interest and curiosity.’18 Every day ‘hundreds and thousands’ of spectators trekked over to the airfield to watch Hanna perform aerobatics, while the men took the lead in the cross-country flights that were the official raison d’être of their visit.