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

by Clare Mulley

  Alexander was also absolutely dedicated to his career, and increasingly obsessed by the poems of late antiquity. In March, while the Wehrmacht marched further into Czechoslovakia, in pursuit, it was said, of justice rather than war, Alexander’s Würzburg University exempted him from military service, and sent him to Greece on a study trip. With his crisp white shirts and pale trousers, windswept hair and earnest face, Alexander was the epitome of a classics lecturer removed from the action and set down among ancient ruins. Although anxiously following events with the Luftwaffe, when Melitta could secure some leave she joined her husband on the Greek mainland. Unlike Germany’s desperate Jews, she had no problem securing her travel documents to leave the country. A photograph taken by Alexander shows her smiling brightly in the spring sunshine but well wrapped up in tights and scarf, her short chestnut hair now curled and set – it must have felt strange not to have to force it under a flying cap every day. Perched on top of a stony outcrop in the mountains, she seems to be surveying the landscape below, map in hand, like a true navigator.

  Melitta must have spent many hours studying maps that spring. Back at home, the state-controlled news was once again portraying the invasion of a neighbouring country, this time Czechoslovakia rather than Austria, as a welcomed intervention. Soon there was talk of restoring parts of Poland to the Fatherland, including the areas of Silesia where Melitta had grown up and which had been ceded to Poland in 1921. Danzig, where Melitta’s parents, Michael and Margarete Schiller, were now living as part of the German majority in the city, was also being considered.* For once Melitta fully approved of Nazi policy, welcoming what she hoped would be the restoration of her childhood home to German governance. Few outside Germany saw such expansionist ambitions in such a positive light.

  At the end of June, Sidney Cotton and his British co-pilot descended into Berlin’s Tempelhof airport to find it bedecked with black and crimson Nazi flags, and the airfield surrounded by anti-aircraft guns. Watching a dozen armed soldiers running across the tarmac towards them, Cotton thought, ‘Christ, we’ve had it,’ but they were merely being greeted by a guard of honour.31 The next month they flew to the international Frankfurt Air Rally, which was packed with Luftwaffe officers in their grey dress uniforms, including Udet, Erhard Milch, the deputy head of the Luftwaffe, and his chief of administration, Albert Kesselring, a friend of Hanna’s popularly known as ‘Smiling Albert’.32 Despite his nickname, Kesselring had a taciturn, almost rude manner, and bluntly asked Cotton for a flight in the magnificent Lockheed with its painted, all-metal fuselage and heated cabin. Cotton, professionally charming, was delighted to oblige, even offering Kesselring the controls. Once up, he reached beneath his seat and activated the hidden German Leica cameras, the best on the market, focused down on the land below. When Kesselring asked about the unfamiliar green light flashing on the control panel, Cotton explained that it showed the petrol flow to the engines. Soon Cotton was taking a series of generals and colonels on joy-flights a couple of thousand feet ‘above airfields and ammunition dumps, factories and fortifications’, while his hidden cameras clicked away, taking some of the first aerial reconnaissance photographs of the coming war.33

  By the time that Cotton was flying over Frankfurt, neither he, Melitta nor Hanna were in any doubt as to where their countries were heading. Even while signing the Munich Agreement the year before, Chamberlain had agreed to a huge increase in British armament spending, and production levels in German aircraft manufacturing had soared. Britain and France had guaranteed Poland’s independence in March 1939. In August the Greater German Reich and the Soviet Union agreed a mutual non-aggression pact, Nazi German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop flying to Moscow with Hitler’s personal photographer to record the historic moment. Europe was dividing.

  As the prospect of war looked ever more likely, Germany was gripped by a renewed sense of patriotism. By now both Alexander and Claus had taken part in military exercises, in different capacities. Despite his political dissent, Alexander had been brought up to value the honourable fulfilment of his duty to people and state above all else. As a result, although he considered himself ‘unsuited to being a soldier’, he had served voluntarily in a cavalry regiment as early as 1923, becoming a keen horseman.34 Until March 1934 Alexander had even been a member of the SA, the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party, although he was never a Party member. In 1936 he became a corporal in the Reserve, and it was as such that he participated in military exercises over the summer of 1938. Unlike his brother, Claus was a passionate soldier. Having already seen service in Czechoslovakia, he was now awaiting new orders. Nevertheless, ‘the mass of German people . . .’ Nevile Henderson wrote, ‘were horror-struck at the whole idea of the war which was thus being thrust upon them’.35

  Sidney Cotton finally returned to Britain with the dubious honour of being the last civilian to fly out of Berlin in late August 1939. He carefully photographed the German fleet congregating at Wilhelmshaven as he went over, with Hitler’s personal yacht, the Grille – ‘the cricket’ in English – clearly distinct as a white fleck among the grey. Days later, although officially still a civilian, Cotton flew back to film the fleet again for the British Admiralty, showing which vessels had departed. Soon he was busy establishing a special unit to pioneer military aerial reconnaissance during the coming conflict, eventually accepting a commission with the RAF.*

  Inside Germany, it seems that only the young and then politically naive British pilot Eric Brown, who had partied with Hanna at Udet’s apartment after the Berlin Motor Show, was not anticipating the coming conflict. On the morning of Sunday 3 September 1939, he was ‘shaken’ to be arrested by the SS at the small Munich inn where he was staying.36 Although he had been studying in Germany for several months, Eric had ‘never once felt any real likelihood of war’, he later claimed.37 After an interrogation that lasted three days, he was pushed into a car and driven away. Thinking he was bound for a Gestapo cell or the firing squad, he was surprised to see his own beautiful MG Magnette sports car being driven behind, with the entire head of the large SS sergeant who was behind the wheel sticking up above the windscreen. To his astonishment, both he and the Magnette were deposited at the Swiss border, where he was told to drive on. His arresting officer ‘was standing with a . . . hand machine gun pointing at my back, and the Swiss were standing with one pointing at my front,’ Eric later recounted. ‘I wasn’t feeling too confident at this stage.’38 Within a few hours, however, he was racing across Switzerland for France, his immediate fears of a bullet having been replaced by a nagging worry that everything would be over ‘before I could get into uniform’.39 He was lucky not to have been interned. Britain and Germany were officially at war.

  7

  WOMEN AT WAR

  1939–1941

  The invasion of Poland in September 1939 was known within Germany as the ‘Defensive Campaign’, and accepted by most of the population in this light. As directed by Goebbels’ Ministry for Propaganda, the press had been railing against territorial losses for years, while the early critics of military intervention had long been silenced. Deeply patriotic, and keenly confident in their own abilities, both Melitta and Hanna volunteered for their country the moment war was declared. Hanna’s brother, Kurt, was already serving with the Kriegsmarine. Otto, Melitta’s brother, was an agricultural expert in the Foreign Service. Although still at the University of Würzburg, Alexander reported for duty as a non-commissioned officer in a reserve battery at Ansbach, but was soon released. Claus was on active service during the invasion, as an officer with the 6th Panzer Division. Had they been men, there is no doubt that both Hanna and Melitta would have enlisted with the Luftwaffe, but the only roles for women in the service were in office administration, releasing men for combat duty.

  Undeterred, Hanna immediately petitioned General von Richthofen, whose Luftwaffe commands included the Glider Unit, to be accepted for direct military service. Her request was rejected. Instead, she was retained as a test
pilot at the Glider Research Institute at Darmstadt. Melitta’s first instinct was to request a transfer from research and development for the Air War Ministry to flying air ambulances with the German Red Cross, a ‘more helpful and healing role’, as she saw it.1 She had been inspired both by her mother’s and her elder sister’s work as volunteer nurses in the First World War, and later by learning of the role played by Alexander’s aunt, Countess Alexandrine Üxküll-Gyllenband, who was one of the few women to visit German POWs in Russia under the banner of the International Red Cross. As a result, Melitta had been practising air ambulance flights since at least 1935. At the outbreak of hostilities, however, ‘the only thing that counted’, her niece later commented, ‘was her qualifications’.2 Melitta’s request was also declined. She was seconded instead as an engineer-pilot to develop targeted dive-bombing at the Luftwaffe testing centre at Rechlin, the remote airfield near Lake Mecklenburg that served as the German equivalent of Farnborough. Although not assigned active combat roles, both women would spend the war risking their lives on a daily basis in the service of their country, and sometimes at the same airfields.

  Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and, as such, responsible for erecting military buildings, later recalled that, from the start of the war, ‘the most pressing task was the Ju 88 programme for the Luftwaffe, which was to turn out the new two-motored medium-range Junkers 88 dive-bombers’.3 The Luftwaffe bombing strategy called for pinpoint targeting rather than area bombing, but hitting precision targets from the air was difficult. Dive-bomber pilots were expected to aim their whole plane at a target and they had only a few seconds’ margin in which to release their load before turning. Existing guides included such handy advice as ‘Fly onto target exactly,’ and ‘If there is a strong headwind . . . dive more deeply!’4

  Melitta’s new assignment was to perfect the aircraft technically, to eliminate as much risk as possible. The main task was to evaluate and improve the targeting devices, and in particular the dive-sights for the two-man Junkers Ju 87 Stuka, with its distinctive gull-wing shape, and the popular four-man Ju 88 dive-bomber developed for larger-scale strategic air war. This involved registering the continuously changing angle of the dive, speed and dropping altitude, all without modern instruments. She also worked on developing dive-visors, ensuring that the autopilot levelled off the aircraft automatically when a bomb had left its cradle so as not to put too much strain on the machine’s airframe, and that the automatic pullout sequence functioned at 6G – the point at which most pilots suffered G-force-induced loss of consciousness. As well as Junkers, Melitta flew a range of Messerschmitt and Focke-Wulf planes, and the lighter Fieseler Storch, or Stork. These aircraft were designed to support military invasion but Melitta enjoyed piloting them, she said, ‘quite simply because they are particularly interesting from a flying point of view’.5 She was constantly striving to attain peak performance from herself as a pilot, as well as from the machines she flew.

  Testing dive-bombers was work that required not only patience, precision and considerable physical strength, but also great courage. Every morning Melitta cycled across the airfield from her dorm on her heavy-framed pushbike, before swapping her beret for her leather flying cap, donning her overalls and clambering into a Junkers’ cockpit. She would take her machine up to 4,000 metres before rolling sideways and tearing down again at speeds of up to 350 mph, the engines howling and the surfaces of the plane whistling as the dive angle steepened until it was at least seventy-five to eighty degrees – not far from vertical. As Melitta plunged towards earth, her gloved hands tightly gripping the steering column, the whole frame of her plane would be shaking with the mounting pressure. The vibrations made it difficult to read her instruments accurately, so many of her dives were filmed to provide the detailed information required to enable incremental improvements to the targeting devices. Sometimes she would also release between four and ten cylindrical cement bombs to test her work. At between 150 and 200 metres, just as correction seemed impossible, Melitta would lift her plane’s nose and skim low across the fields before circling back to land.

  After several such tests over the course of a morning, her colleagues would heave her from her cockpit, unclip her parachute harness and help her out of her flying suit, so that she could return to her engineering role. Over desk and drawing board she would now conduct a precise evaluation of the dives, often working late into the night ‘without making any fuss about it’, her colleagues noted, to calculate the alterations required before testing could begin again.6 Undertaking a few such dives without any of the engineering work had been enough to exhaust Udet some years earlier. Even with automatic dive-brakes, trainee Stuka pilots were often sick, and sometimes plunged into the sea. Yet Melitta might complete fifteen such test dives in one day: a performance unmatched by any pilot in history.

  This punishing routine was, Melitta admitted, ‘completely inadmissible from a medical point of view’.7 Not only was she mentally exhausted by the intense concentration required, but enormous physical stresses were also being placed on her body. By 1940, Allied pilots would have the benefit of an ‘anti-gravity flying suit’ which used fluid pumped through tubes and pads to squeeze their legs and abdomen in a kind of auto-tourniquet, preventing their blood from dispersing to their extremities under G-force.* Melitta had no such pressure suit. When she turned her plane into a fast dive, her blood was forced up into her head. As a result, her vision would turn pink, a phenomenon known as ‘red-out’, and the pressure was sometimes enough to cause blood vessels in her eyes to rupture. As air closer to the ground is denser, aircraft will automatically slow as they approach the earth. Combined with the use of automatic dive-brakes, this would allow Melitta’s blood flow to normalize, enabling her to reassert control in time to pull out of a dive. But pulling up too quickly would cause the blood to rush away from her head, towards her legs and feet. With her brain temporarily starved of oxygen, she regularly lost her vision, literally ‘blacking out’, and may even have temporarily lost consciousness on occasion.

  Like most pilots, Melitta was extremely fit, exercising daily and avoiding alcohol. Already physically suspect as a woman, she was not prepared to risk any doubts about her ability, and she repeatedly denied that she was much affected by G-forces. ‘In me, the disturbance of vision occurs only at very high acceleration,’ she claimed, before suggesting, optimistically, that her ‘intense concentration’ might help to prevent the flow of blood away from her brain.8 More perilous work was hard to imagine, but Melitta refused to let other pilots conduct her tests. Not only did she want to feel every nuance of the aircraft’s performance for herself but ‘above all’, she said, ‘it seems to me simply more decent not to pass the dangerous part of one’s work on to other people’.9

  Dive-bombing proved extremely effective in the campaign for Poland, becoming synonymous with the Blitzkrieg in the process. Some of the Polish air force was effectively destroyed on the ground before it could be mobilized, but Polish fighters based in secondary airfields later shot down over 170 German planes. It was not enough. Having gained air superiority, the Stuka then acted in effect as long-range precision artillery. The planes’ chilling screams, produced by sirens fitted to the wheel covers, would create terror among the infantry and tanks below before they were even within firing range. Perhaps Melitta sometimes thought of Claus with his panzer unit on the ground, supported by the planes she had helped to develop. Perhaps she also thought about the Polish neighbours from her childhood. Once it was safe, Hitler made a flying visit to the front, escorted by several fighters. En route he ‘gazed from the windows without emotion’, his pilot Hans Baur noted, as they flew over ‘still-smoking villages, shattered bridges, and other evidence of the destruction of war’.10 ‘Our air victory is the Führer’s great joy,’ Goebbels wrote the following month.11

  Claus, like Melitta, found satisfaction in doing his job well. With traditional military detachment he saw this as distinct from supporting the Nazi regime, but du
ring his six weeks on active duty in Poland he also came to respect Hitler’s then highly effective military strategy. Like many German nationalists, Claus believed that the invasion of Poland, like that of the Czech Sudetenland, was justified by the need to protect German populations from discrimination. Nor was he without racial prejudice. He described the Poles as ‘an unbelievable rabble’ of ‘Jews and mongrels’, who were ‘only comfortable under the knout’ – a vicious type of whip.12 It is not known how much Claus knew about the murders being committed behind the advancing front line by the Einsatzgruppen – SS task forces specifically charged with killing Jews or other ‘undesirable’ people, as well as ‘eliminating’ the Polish intelligentsia as a preventative strike against resistance. By the end of 1939, an estimated 65,000 civilians had been killed, and few German officers could have been completely unaware of the policy. By November, even the American journalist William Shirer was reporting that ‘Nazi policy is simply to exterminate the Polish Jews’.13 Not surprisingly, however, Claus’s letters home, which his wife Nina dutifully typed up and circulated among the family, made no reference to such horrors.14

  By the following spring, stories of atrocities were widely circulating within diplomatic circles. ‘The SS had taken 1,500 Polish Jews, including many women and children, and shuttled them back and forth in open freight cars until they were all dead,’ Fey von Hassell wrote. ‘Then about 200 peasants were forced to dig immense graves. Afterwards, all those who had taken part were shot and buried in the same place.’15 Fey’s father, Ulrich von Hassell, the former German ambassador to Italy, had been working in vain to keep unofficial diplomatic channels open with Britain, and was already secretly involved in plans to overthrow Hitler. When Claus returned to Germany, Nina asked him whether he too was ‘playing conspirator’.16 He told her he was. Since late 1938 Claus had stopped writing to Nina about what she called ‘his inner conflicts’.17 Instead he kept a notebook in which he scribbled down his thoughts to share with her whenever they met. Meanwhile he and his brother Berthold both tried to keep their mother and Alexander from being too open about their antipathy towards the regime. Claus also continued to serve in the military.