by Clare Mulley
It is not hard to imagine Melitta and Alexander’s thoughts as they listened to this story in the Prague of 1942. The first transports of Jews from the city to Łódź had taken place in November 1939. In 1941 Reinhard Heydrich had been appointed ‘Protector’ of annexed, occupied Czechoslovakia, and that October he attended a meeting in Prague to discuss the deportation of a further 50,000 members of the Jewish community. Heydrich had been one of the minds behind Kristallnacht, and was directly responsible for organizing the Einsatzgruppen, the task forces that travelled behind the advancing Nazi German front line, murdering Jews and others deemed undesirable. His round-up of Czechoslovakian Jews and the appalling reprisals exacted for any domestic resistance had led him to be known as the Butcher of Prague. The following January Heydrich chaired the secret Wannsee Conference, to discuss implementing the Nazi plan for the extermination of the Jews through systematic genocide. Melitta, Alexander and Escher would have known little of these events, but it must have been notable how few Jews they encountered as they wandered through old Prague, while any they had met would have been wearing a yellow star and awaiting deportation to Theresienstadt concentration camp, where 33,000 people would eventually die.* ‘We warmed ourselves in a low dive off a gloomy lane,’ Escher continued. ‘A blind harpist sang Czech folk melodies. It almost confirmed the Yiddish romance of the place.’25 He also commented that Alexander and Melitta ‘sit together and cuddle a lot’, but he did not say whether they clung together for romance, blithely unaware of the attacks on the community around them, or for consolation.26
Alexander came from an aristocratic conservative elite that had a history of anti-Semitism, and his brother Claus had certainly absorbed a good deal of racism – and displayed it. Yet Alexander was vehemently opposed to Nazi discrimination. Melitta had found herself aligned with a people she had never much considered previously, and with whom she now feared sharing an identity. Alexander once told Escher that ‘in flying clothes and crash helmet’, Melitta ‘looked like the Archangel Michael himself’.27 He had chosen an interesting simile. Michael is an archangel not only in Christian theology, but in Islam and Judaism, too, and he is widely considered a protector, a healer, and an advocate of the Jews, as well as the patron saint of the airborne.
The friends then found a bar and settled down to discuss their own likely futures. Escher wondered whether he and Alexander might volunteer for the Norwegian coastal artillery, but Alexander believed they would be sent to the Eastern Front. Although aware of the hardships there, he tried to keep their spirits up, laughing that ‘we will have to see where the ancient Goths wandered about!’28 Melitta said nothing to dissuade her husband from ‘the Russian adventure’, as Escher put it, but he noted that ‘her anxiety showed itself as we parted: “Please keep an eye on Alexander”,’ she exhorted him; ‘“he is totally unmilitary!”’29
In early March, shortly before the men’s transport left, Melitta managed to meet them again, this time at their camp in Milowice. Alexander had arranged for her to stay at a local guesthouse; he was so unworldly he did not realize that it also served as the troops’ brothel. Word quickly spread about his faux pas, and new rooms were found at a farmhouse. It was clean but cold, so Escher arranged for two sacks of coal to be brought over from their own stocks. He and Alexander also liberated a heavy case of French sparkling wine, which they dragged across the snow to the farmhouse.
The moon was already up when Alexander, Escher and Melitta met for a last night together before the men left for the front. In honour of the occasion, Melitta wore an evening dress with some old family jewellery. The farmhouse stove was glowing, and the painted furniture, woven chair covers and red-checked bedding made the room feel warm, safe and snug, but thoughts of death could not completely be chased away. Alexander read out some of his most recent poems, which were personal but also full of portent: ‘Whoever thinks about the worst, about death, attracts it,’ he had written.30 Eventually, though, warmed and wearied by wine, they found themselves gripped by a ‘lasting peasant-type jollity’.31 Admiring Melitta’s ‘remarkable inner reserve’, Escher decided that ‘true serenity is the best protection for the soul, and the nerves’.32 For all her ‘robust attitude’, however, it was clear to Escher that Melitta was struggling to ‘overcome and forget the conflict between her gruelling service under a tyrant . . . and her growing insight into the criminality of his regime’.33 Despite her ‘shy smile’, he wrote, ‘she could not hide a slight, latent melancholy’.34
That spring was hard for Melitta. Alexander and the 389th Infantry Division saw action almost immediately after her return to Berlin. Casualty figures were high. Yet Melitta’s work and day-to-day life had to continue much as before. Sometimes Claus’s beautiful wife, Nina, would visit Melitta with her children in tow, and the two women would talk about their husbands away on active duty, the letters they sent back, and the direction of the war. As a distraction, Melitta also took Nina out sailing on the Wannsee, as was her habit with close friends. Once, a lady beside them on the same jetty dropped her handbag, which fell into the lake. Without a second thought, Melitta pulled off her jacket and dived in after it. Moments later she returned the bag to its owner, deeply impressing Nina’s six-year-old son, Heimeran von Stauffenberg. It was typical of the spontaneous and slightly daring nature that made Melitta so popular with the children.
With Alexander now deployed, Melitta also started spending more of her free time at Lautlingen, the Stauffenberg country home where Nina also liked to escape the air raids of Berlin. Melitta loved the grand old house and the surrounding hills, thick with forest, where she would go shooting with Alexander’s uncle Nüx. She arrived not just with Scho-ka-kola for Nina’s children but also model Junkers aircraft made from cast metal, precious gifts during wartime when chocolate and new toys were rare. Her nephews and nieces adored her and sat entranced by her flying stories, just as she had with her uncle Ernst during the previous conflict. They all found her much warmer than their academic uncle Alexander. When they were with Alexander, ‘he was always writing poems which we children didn’t read,’ Claus’s eldest son, Berthold, remembered. ‘We liked him very much, but he was a bit unworldly.’35 Not quite eight, but clever and mature for his years, Berthold had always enjoyed watching the adults and felt that, although they clearly loved one another, Melitta had tended to ‘mother’ Alexander.36 His admiration for his aunt, however, was boundless.
On the rare occasions when Claus was home on leave, he and Melitta would also have long conversations at Lautlingen. Claus was serving in Vinnytsia, in Ukraine, where the mass graves of 10,000 men murdered by the Soviets just before the war had been uncovered in 1941. Later Nazi atrocities committed in the area included the murder of around 28,000 people, almost the entire Jewish population of the town. ‘These crimes must not be allowed to continue,’ Claus had reportedly sworn to officers at the General Staff headquarters.37 Such words were worthless. Although seven-year-old Berthold did not know what his father and Melitta were discussing, he saw that ‘they were close friends’, and he understood that all was not right.38
While Melitta was developing aircraft technology at Gatow, and Alexander and Claus were on active service, Hanna was seconded from her glider research institute to work with the pioneering rocket-powered fighter plane, the Messerschmitt Me 163. Hanna had already tested several of Willy Messerschmitt’s prototype gliders, including the Me 321 Gigant. Now Messerschmitt and his design team were focused almost exclusively on developing engineless jet-powered aircraft. Their designs were revolutionary. The Me 262 Schwalbe, or Swallow, would become the world’s first operational jet fighter.* The stubby Me 163b Komet, a small egg-shaped machine with wings designed by Alexander Lippisch, would be the only operational rocket-powered aircraft.* Lippisch was also a veteran of the glider research institute, and had joined Messerschmitt at his base in Augsburg in 1939. His designs naturally reflected his experience. The Me 163 was made of fabric-covered wood, and while it flew at near sonic speed
s under rocket propulsion, once its fuel was burned it coasted back down to earth as a glider.
From the summer of 1941 tests on prototypes of these incredible aircraft had been carried out both at Augsburg and at the top-secret proving ground at Peenemünde on the Baltic coast. Messerschmitt’s chief test pilot was Heini Dittmar, the gliding champion who had travelled to South America with Hanna before the war to study thermal winds. Unfortunately he and Hanna had since fallen out. Hanna now had a reputation for demanding access to whichever aircraft she chose, sometimes delaying desperately needed trials. Furthermore, when she undertook test flights her reports were not always conclusive. ‘She flies with her heart and not with her brains,’ one pilot complained, or ‘at least without critical understanding of her work’.39 More than once, deficiencies were found in aircraft that Hanna had signed off. This ‘was a little humiliating for her’, noted Wolfgang Späte, the head of the operational test unit.40 Although ‘not a very talkative person’, Heini happily shared his blunt opinion of Hanna.41 ‘There are women who just can’t stand it when there is a new man in town, and they haven’t got him into bed yet,’ he claimed. ‘With Hanna it’s the same, but about planes. Whenever there is a new prototype she becomes obsessed with it, and is not satisfied until she has flown it.’42 Heini even threatened to leave the team, should Hanna be invited to join them. The other test pilots, including Rudy Opitz, a veteran of the Eben-Emael attack, supported him.
Späte was ‘a dedicated Nazi’, who had a reputation for arrogance.43 He had known Hanna since their glider competition days when she had often outperformed him. Now he agreed that Hanna could be difficult. ‘Her pride would neither tolerate accepting us as equal colleagues, nor even asking for our professional advice,’ he wrote. ‘She was number one, and she knew it!’44 But Späte and Lippisch also recognized that Hanna had the support of Greim and other senior Nazis, and they hoped that her connections might draw extra funding to the project. Since Udet’s death, the Me 163 had had to compete with rival super-weapon projects, such as the V-1 and V-2 rockets. ‘Now and again, human nature and personal feelings tended to play a role,’ Späte argued, ‘and arousing the emotions of people in decision-making positions was one of Hanna’s strong points.’45 Späte negotiated a compromise. Heini and the team would continue their work at Augsburg, developing the aircraft as an interceptor to split up enemy bomber formations before attacking them individually. Hanna was sent to the Messerschmitt aircraft factory at Regensburg. Here she became the first woman to fly the rocket plane, undertaking at least four flights to test alternative landing equipment. To her intense frustration, however, none of her work required the use of rocket power; she was simply towed into the air and released to glide back down.
None of Hanna’s colleagues at Regensburg doubted her courage or skill as a pilot, but a female flier was still a novelty. Although far from being the youngest test pilot at the base, Hanna had to work hard to maintain respect and generally keep the men in line. ‘She was not an unattractive woman,’ the pilot Hein Gering decided, but he understood that she was ‘the girlfriend’ of the Waffen SS’s Otto Skorzeny.46 Hanna did not yet know Skorzeny, although she would later work with him, and this may have been one ruse of several she adopted to keep men at bay.* Another was her habit of wearing a white angora sweater, ‘so you could never put your arm around her because your uniform would be covered in white goat hair, and then everyone would know’, Gering admitted.47 But Hanna was not above appealing to the men for help when occasion demanded. ‘There was one thing she was scared of,’ Gering discovered, and it was not the Komet plane, the SS, or even the enemy.48
One evening a few of the pilots were sitting around in the officers’ mess, chatting, when Hanna said she was hungry and headed to the kitchen to ‘scrounge some food’.49 ‘All of a sudden we heard the most ear-splitting scream,’ Gering remembered. The men immediately rushed into action, expecting to find someone trying to murder Hanna. ‘Instead we saw her standing on the table in a state of great agitation, screeching at us to do something. Each of us looked at the other, not quite sure what to do . . .’ Eventually they found the source of the commotion: ‘a little mouse quivering in fear under the table’. Although it was quickly removed, ‘no amount of reassurance would settle Hanna, and we had to make a bridge of chairs so poor Hanna could step from one to another before bolting through the door and into the darkness.’50
When the USA had entered the war in December 1941, Melitta and Hanna’s gliding-champion-turned-air-attaché friend, Peter Riedel, was first interned, and then sent back to Germany via Lisbon. Arriving in Berlin with his American wife in May 1942, Peter feared he might be transferred to active service with the Luftwaffe.* In the hope that Melitta might be able to help him secure alternative work as an aeronautical engineer, he sought out ‘the young Countess Stauffenberg’, as he respectfully referred to her, and they arranged to meet at Gatow.51
To Peter, Melitta seemed unchanged from 1932, when he had first taught her to fly gliders. ‘The title of Flugkapitän, or similar honour, didn’t seem to have gone to her head at all,’ he noted with admiration.52 Melitta had changed, however. She had learned to be suspicious of her colleagues, and to completely distrust the state she had been raised to feel so dutiful towards. Peter was bursting to talk. Having been based in Washington for some years, he felt he appreciated the extent of American air armament ‘basically better than anyone else in Germany’, and he had no doubt about the impending ‘disastrous outcome of the war’.53 Before he could say much more, however, Melitta suggested they take a boat out on the lake; it was only a short walk through the woods at the edge of the airfields, and the weather was too good to miss. Only when they were on the water and ‘away from unwelcome witnesses’ did Melitta start to ask questions.54 This ‘seemed to be the habit’, Peter quickly realized, ‘so that we could talk without fear of microphones’.55
Melitta and Peter talked for some hours. ‘As I knew her and trusted her, I told her freely that I was very pessimistic about the outcome of the war,’ he later recalled.56 Melitta gave Peter a few work contacts but there was no obvious job for him at Gatow, so that very afternoon he and his wife visited another old friend doing well in the sector. Hanna ‘had been like a sister to me in the past’, Peter felt, not just on their ‘wonderful soaring expedition to South America’ in 1934, but also on her pre-war visit to the USA.57 She had even helped to clear the way for Peter’s marriage to Helen the year before, pulling a few strings with Udet and others.58 Hanna now had a modest apartment in the Aero Club building, next to the impressive Ministry of Aviation in Berlin’s Prinz Albrecht Strasse, which had once been home to Germany’s upper house of parliament. Rather than meeting in one of the two beautifully furnished lounges at the Aero Club, under lifesize oil paintings of Hitler and Göring, however, Hanna kept their meeting to the privacy of her own small flat. Like Melitta, ‘she was much more conscious of security than others I had met’, Peter noted.59
‘As usual, Hanna was full of energy,’ he later wrote, and she was delighted to meet Helen. After the initial warm greetings, Peter mentioned that he had just come from seeing Melitta. To his shock, Hanna ‘made an extremely rude remark’.60 When he tried to interject, she carried on, using ‘a very crude term’, and even ‘alleged that the Countess had made some sort of pass at her’.61 Stepping back, Peter could hardly believe what he was hearing. Homosexuality was classed as a ‘degenerate form of behaviour’ in Nazi Germany, and lesbians were seen as ‘antisocial’ as well as being deemed ‘non-Aryan’. Anyone found guilty of an ‘unnatural sex act’ was likely to be sent to a concentration camp, and trumped-up charges had been used to remove many people who had upset the Party hierarchy. But Hanna continued furiously, telling Peter that she had ‘already rejected’ Melitta twice and ‘wanted nothing more to do with her’.62
It is unlikely that Melitta was attracted to Hanna. If she considered her at all, it would have been rather condescendingly as ill-educated, uncultured and
politically naive – not the sort of person she would have invited sailing on the Wannsee, nor risked any close association with. Hanna may have felt patronized by Melitta, disdainful of her old-school conservatism and irritated by her cool lack of regard. She was certainly jealous of the respect generated by her work, and ‘obviously furious’, Peter realized, at her invasion of Hanna’s space as the female pilot of note in the Third Reich.63 Perhaps she did even feel rejected personally. Whatever the reasons, Hanna had taken offence, and the anger that stemmed from her keen sense of injustice and moral outrage at any perceived slight – a trait that had coloured her character from childhood – was now directed at Melitta.
Hanna did not stop there, however. According to Peter, she now used Melitta’s Jewish ancestry ‘as an opportunity to insult her in the nastiest way’.64 ‘This was the first time that Hanna Reitsch disappointed me as a person,’ he later recalled. ‘She spoke of Melitta in such a sharp and ugly way.’65 Although Hanna’s family had accepted and adopted the casual anti-Semitism prevalent in pre-war Germany, she herself had been horrified by the violence of Kristallnacht. But Hanna had not let this experience effectively challenge the fundamental racism with which she had grown up. Thoroughly attached to the Nazi regime that was providing her with both opportunities and honours, Hanna had willingly accepted both its propaganda and its policies, and allowed these to colour both her judgements and her friendships.
Neither Hanna nor Melitta knew about Nazi extermination camps, nor that the gas chambers quietly built and tested at Auschwitz, in annexed Polish territory, became fully operational that same month. The Third Reich now started to murder Jews, communists, Roma, homosexuals and other ‘enemies of the state’ on an industrial scale. While Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS, spent part of his summer visiting Auschwitz to ensure that the system was running efficiently, Hanna and Melitta, like most German civilians, still felt that theirs was essentially a just war. The increasingly heavy bombardments of cities such as Berlin and Cologne reinforced the public mood of resistance and resolve.
