by Clare Mulley
Hanna’s hunger to see action alongside the men could not have been more different from Melitta’s initial desire to place her skill as a pilot at the service of the German Red Cross, but their motivations were similar. ‘When the war finally came . . .’ Hanna’s uncle later testified, ‘she felt the moral duty not to forsake her Fatherland . . . it wasn’t possible for her to see that the war had been started by Germany in the first place.’18
For some time before the war Hanna had been test-flying large prototype gliders at the Research Institute at Darmstadt. These had been designed to gather meteorological data and transport mail, and she had tested their viable load by methodically adding sacks of sand over a series of flights. It was not long before Ernst Udet recognized the potential military applications for such a glider to bring supplies to the front line, or reinforcements to a unit that had been surrounded. Furthermore, as Hanna put it, ‘being noiseless in flight and able to dive at steep angles’, the gliders seemed to ‘offer an excellent means of landing bodies of infantry by surprise behind an enemy’s lines’.19 The institute had soon received a military contract to design a troop-carrying glider, able to transport ten fully equipped infantrymen, plus their commander. The resulting DFS 230 would become the war’s first ‘assault glider’, with a wingspan of seventy-two feet and a top speed of 130 mph under tow.20
In the autumn of 1939 Hanna was selected to demonstrate the fully loaded glider to an audience of high-ranking officers including Udet, Robert Ritter von Greim, ‘Smiling’ Albert Kesselring and Erhard Milch. Once above 30,000 feet she cast off the cable to the transport Junkers Ju 52 that had towed them up, and put the glider into a steep dive. She landed just a few yards from the officers on the ground and within seconds the troops had tumbled out and dispersed, conclusively proving the military potential of the machine. ‘The speed and precision of the whole manoeuvre so fired the Generals’ enthusiasm’, Hanna recorded proudly, that a repeat performance was requested – only with the generals as passengers.21 It was a daunting request for any pilot, but the enthusiastic Hanna claimed she nearly fainted at the ‘truly awe-inspiring responsibility that had been thrust upon me’.22
Hans Jacobs, the glider’s designer, was equally unnerved. After Hanna had landed her ‘precious passengers’ safely back on earth, she caught Jacobs prising himself out from the glider’s tail space. Knowing that, should disaster strike, ‘I might as well be finished too’, he had been unable to resist joining the historic flight.23 It was a ruse that Hanna would remember later in the war. For now, her successful demonstrations further confirmed her standing with the senior military men of the Third Reich.
A German glider assault unit was formed almost immediately, which was intended to support an invasion of France in November 1939. However, the officers in charge of the operation had no gliding experience and while Germany’s leading glider pilots had been recruited, they had no military status or training. Once briefed, these pilots were kept in strict isolation. Hanna pressed General von Richthofen to allow her to join the team, or at least arrange training, but as a woman she was flatly refused. When the invasion of France was postponed to later winter, she and Jacobs again worked together as designer and test pilot, developing brakes to enable the gliders to land on ice. Hanna then demonstrated the solution – lever-operated ploughshares – to the glider unit. It was only when she and the pilot Otto Bräutigam, an impressive man in Hanna’s eyes, ‘radiating with confidence, courage and humour’, made a concerted appeal for better training that Greim consented to the request.24
Hanna had admired the highly decorated Greim, a friend of Udet’s from the Great War, for several years. At nearly fifty, he might not have Bräutigam’s physical magnetism, but he had gravitas, was an excellent pilot and officer, and was greatly admired by his men. Having served in the invasion of Poland, Greim now commanded the Luftwaffe research department. Hanna took the opportunity to secure a private meeting. Her enthusiasm for both the Nazi cause and for flying had made her extremely popular with the Propaganda Ministry and senior generals, but some of her younger colleagues still found her presence at the airfield offensive. Hanna wanted Greim’s support to help her challenge ‘those officers to whom the maintenance of masculine privilege’, as she put it angrily, ‘was more important than the needs of the hour’.25 Greim was not concerned about gender equality but he was interested in Hanna and he supported her requests. Her need to be at once equal and special, however, along with her increasing tendency to appeal to Udet or Greim ‘to smooth my path’, as she put it, would do little to endear her to her less well connected colleagues.26
It was not until May 1940 that glider assault troops were eventually deployed, and then it was not in France but Belgium, in an attack on the reputedly impregnable fort of Eben-Emael near the Dutch border. Swooping down in a silent dawn raid, eleven gliders delivered sufficient paratroopers, Bräutigam among them, to destroy the fort’s defensive armaments before any counter-attack could be launched. They had defeated a force ten times their own number. This decisive action cleared the way for German ground forces to enter Belgium. Rumour had it that it was Hanna who had planted the seed for the spectacular operation in Hitler’s mind when, at an event in 1935, she had commented on how noiseless gliders were. Whatever the truth, Hanna’s personal stock now rose to new heights, and features on her began to appear in everything from the national papers to The Colourful Young Girls’ League Book, where she was somehow presented as a role model for German womanhood between articles on child-rearing and handicrafts.
Hanna was posted to Rechlin, where Melitta was based, in the spring of 1940, but the intensity of the two women’s work schedules left little time for frosty meetings or even reconciliation between them in the busy canteen or corridors, and they chose not to actively seek each other out. Despite her equally important and dangerous work, Melitta was not considered suitable role-model material. Her father, Michael, had already been informed of his designation as a ‘Jewish half-breed’ when, on 23 May 1940, Melitta received her own letter from the Reich’s German Genealogical Research Board. Their report, dated 7 May, classified her as a ‘half-Jew’ with ‘two racially full-blooded Jewish grandparents’.27 Melitta had known that the letter was coming. One week earlier the Ministry for Education and Culture had informed Alexander’s university that his appointment as professor should be deferred until it was clear ‘whether he would hold on to his marriage . . . or annul it’.28 As he had married after the introduction of the Nuremberg Laws, the ministry had assumed Alexander must have been unaware of Melitta’s Jewish ancestry. He was in effect being given an escape route, on condition that he divorce and disown his wife. Instead he bravely stated that it was the Genealogical Research Board who must have made a mistake.
Over the following months Melitta appealed to Udet for support. Udet’s friendship with her uncle during the First World War had led him to support her when she first started flying, and he had helped to dig her out of trouble when she had briefly landed on the wrong side of the border in 1929. Now she told him about the vital importance to the war of her current work. Alexander applied directly to Göring himself. When his university pressed him, he informed them that ‘the Reich Ministry of Aviation (Colonel-General Udet) sent an appeal to the Reich Minister of the Interior, concerning the indispensability of my wife for the Luftwaffe’s war-important Stuka testing, to order the Bavarian State Ministry of Education and Culture to refrain from taking any further steps at this point’.29 Three months later, in December 1940, Alexander curtly informed the head of the university that ‘the matter is considered closed’.30 With no official paperwork, however, they did not see it that way.
All Melitta could do was keep her head down, and continue working to the highest standard in the hope that this would help her case. Colleagues now noted that ‘she worked quietly and modestly’, the section head even commenting on her ‘aura of unapproachability’.31 Inevitably stories were already circulating about what Hanna referred to
as Melitta’s ‘racial burden’.32 Melitta, Hanna felt, had ‘some kind of inner despair . . . which she meant to keep hidden from work, and in general from everyone’.33 Hanna reluctantly recognized Melitta’s achievements but, irritated, she chose to attribute these to an ‘unhealthy ambition’ caused by concern about her ancestry.34
Not surprisingly, Melitta actively avoided Hanna at Rechlin. When they met by chance, Melitta ‘didn’t want to be included in any conversation’, Hanna wrote with apparent pique, and seemed intent on ‘harshly declining every well-intended offer of help from my side’.35 Above all, Hanna thought it highly suspicious that Melitta ‘avoided the company of certain colleagues’, while ‘on the other hand, she was frequently seen with such colleagues who meant to spoil the atmosphere by constantly teasing and complaining about the government’.36 It seems that Melitta was still critical of the regime among close friends. Hanna, with her dogged loyalty to the state and her vivid imagination, could not help but wonder among her own circle whether there was ‘something wrong’. ‘Does she have a foot in both camps,’ Hanna mused, ‘or does she work for the enemy?’37 Such insinuations were the last thing Melitta needed, and she threw herself ever more furiously into her test flights and engineering work.
France fell in June 1940. ‘We had marvellous support from the Luftwaffe,’ one Wehrmacht officer recalled. ‘Our Ju 87 Stukas terrified the French just as they had terrified the Poles . . . Many soldiers simply ran away as if the banshees were after them.’38 In the German popular imagination, Stukas now symbolized both the technical and the tactical superiority of the Luftwaffe; their pilots had a particular air of glamour and were lauded as heroes in the Third Reich. When Hitler returned from his victory tour of Paris, crowds lined the streets of Berlin to welcome him, troops paraded through the Brandenburg Gate and church bells pealed across the country. It was now clear that Melitta and Hanna had already made significant contributions to their nation’s victories.
The year had begun well for Hanna. While she was still working on troop-carrying gliders in February, her elder brother Kurt’s wedding had provided an opportunity for the Reitsch family to get together. In April, however, Kurt was posted to the campaign for the north Norwegian port of Narvik, to safeguard the supply of iron ore to Germany. Within weeks Norway had fallen, but Kurt’s ship had been sunk and he was reported missing.
Hanna, like Melitta, now threw herself into her work with ever greater intensity. The success of the glider attack on Eben-Emael had convinced the German Air Ministry to consider a similar stealth approach for the invasion of Britain. For this operation, however, not just men but considerable quantities of arms, ammunition, vehicles, including 200 tanks, would need to be transported across the Channel to form a bridgehead. The proposed solution came in the form of a new wood-and-steel Messerschmitt Me 321 high-wing monoplane glider, appropriately named the Gigant, or Giant.* The wheels alone on the disposable undercarriage of this monster were almost as tall as Hanna, and the cockpit was fully sixty feet above the ground. With doped fabric stretched over its steel-tubing frame, it looked unhealthily bloated compared to the tiny, almost skeletal early gliders in which Hanna had learned to fly.
The Gigant needed three engine-powered planes working in perfect formation to tow it into the air, in addition to eight liquid-fuelled rockets attached to its own wings. ‘What a spectacular affair it was!’ Isolde Baur, the wife of Messerschmitt’s chief test pilot Karl Baur later wrote. ‘Three tow planes in front and a cloud of smoke from the rockets trailing behind.’39 On landing, the Gigant’s clamshell doors would burst open, and 200 armed men could emerge, or a fully equipped tank juddering into action.
Although Hanna was increasingly being selected for the sort of prestige projects that would showcase her talents, it was never expected that she should fly such an enormous glider. Just a few days after the initial test flight, however, she began lobbying to take her turn. Baur resisted. He was ‘immensely worried’ that, with her ‘fragile build’, she would not have the strength for the heavy controls.40 Eventually, however, orders came through to make the necessary adjustments for Hanna to take the Gigant up.
When Hanna finally sat perched in the Gigant’s narrow cockpit, her feet rested on wooden blocks installed to raise the rudder pedal height for her, and a cushion was sandwiched between her and the pilot’s seat. As an extra precaution, the crew flying with her were briefed to keep a close watch. According to the slightly jealous Isolde Baur, ‘sure enough, after she had handled the controls with great difficulty in flight, she yelled for help to the engineers when they approached the field for landing’.41 Hanna did not later mention it, but reportedly one of the tallest men reached over, took the controls, and landed the massive glider for her.
Hanna was not impressed. She knew the Gigant was designed to be expendable, but to her mind it was ‘primitively built’, as she claimed damningly in the Nazi-influenced language she was increasingly adopting.42 Many of Hanna’s criticisms were valid. Above all, the manual controls were so stiff that they were almost impossible to manoeuvre. Willy Messerschmitt dismissed her feedback because it came from ‘too small a little girl, not a strong man fit for fighting’, Hanna later paraphrased him angrily.43 ‘What is hard for me in a five-minute flight,’ she retorted, ‘is too hard for a strong man in a one-hour flight’.44 Later twin pilot seats would be installed, so that two people could wrestle the controls together.
Hanna faced more problems on her next test. Two of the three tow-planes released their cables early, but the Gigant’s rocket engines could not be shut down, leaving her ‘hanging on one bomber, that was like a little fly compared to my giant!’45 Having dropped the remaining tow she managed to coast back down, her heavy landing not only kicking up a cloud of dirt, but also breaking both legs of one passenger and sending another into shock. Few pilots were keen to let her have another attempt. She missed two more opportunities when Otto Bräutigam flew the Gigant without her, unwilling, she thought crossly, to share his experience. On the second occasion she was so furious, frustrated and humiliated that she burst into tears. A few moments later the Gigant crashed, killing the pilots of all three tow-planes along with its own six-man crew, including Bräutigam. Not long afterwards another test ended in disaster when the rocket assists on one side of the Gigant failed to fire, throwing it off balance. Again all the pilots were killed, along with the 110 troops being carried.
The Gigant would never be deployed as originally conceived, nor at all against Britain.* From July 1940, Luftwaffe bombers started to attack British shipping, and over the summer RAF airfields, aircraft factories and general infrastructure were targeted, in an attempt to gain air superiority over the south of England. British bombers were also penetrating German airspace, mainly by night, as earlier daylight raids had suffered too many losses. Aerial reconnaissance showed that their bombing was far from accurate. Hitler, incensed, ordered Göring to take countermeasures. On 7 September London was bombed for the first of fifty-seven consecutive nights. Despite the deaths and devastation, towards the end of a ‘grim week’ in that first month of what became known as the Blitz, a ‘numb laugh’ was caused when the storerooms of Madame Tussauds were hit. ‘Heads, arms and legs were strewn around,’ the Daily Express reported. ‘Flying glass had stuck into some of the models’ faces . . . Hitler’s nose was chipped and Göring’s magnificent white uniform was covered in black dust.’46
As the Blitz continued, the Luftwaffe began to suffer heavy losses. Their bombers had inadequate defensive armament and their fighter escorts did not have the range to remain long over Britain, and were frequently intercepted by the RAF using radar. The Stuka’s great strength now became its vulnerability. ‘Once the pilot had started coming down, he was committed to his dive,’ one RAF officer explained. ‘You could see where he was going . . . they were sitting ducks.’47
Distraught at the mounting losses among Luftwaffe pilots, Melitta became yet more committed to her work. ‘She was hoping that with the de
velopment and testing of these weapons . . .’, her sister Jutta explained, she might ‘restrict the war to military targets’, and so reduce civilian casualties as well as the need for repeat raids by German pilots.48 Furthermore, she was in no doubt of German victory and hoped that more effective precision bombing might help to hasten the end of the conflict and so ‘shorten the slaughter’ altogether.49
Melitta now regularly undertook ten or more nosedives a day, as well as watching trials, talking with mechanics, considering the worst scenario and possible chain reactions, before calculating potential performances and going back to prove the theory with another test. One afternoon, her old friend and colleague Georg Wollé, whose motorbike she used to ride before the war, bumped into her unexpectedly near the Aviation Ministry in Berlin. He was in uniform and hurrying to an appointment so they only had a few moments, but Georg was ‘appalled to see how the extreme physical and mental efforts of aeroplane test flights had dug deep furrows into her once pretty, smooth and regular features’.50 Although Melitta was almost permanently exhausted, it was a comment that perhaps spoke more about Georg than Melitta herself.
