by Clare Mulley
The press covered the story over the next couple of days. ‘Brave Woman Receives the Iron Cross’ ran the typical headline, before summaries of Melitta’s service for the Luftwaffe, the fact that the award was ‘rare for a woman’ and, sometimes, mention of her ‘feminine grace’.108 One piece even reported how her ‘artistic sensibility’ as an amateur sculptor served her well as a pilot, by providing an ‘unerring sensitivity to the aircraft’.109 ‘Her name was on everyone’s lips,’ Jutta would later recall proudly.110 Melitta’s commemorative radio interview ‘was a disappointment’ to her superiors, however, ‘as she was far too modest and spoke of simply carrying out her duty’.111 As the news from Stalingrad continued to worry the population, her story was meant to be inspiring, but Melitta ‘didn’t want to be involved in propaganda such as this’, Jutta wrote.112
Hanna Reitsch and Melitta von Stauffenberg were now the two most highly honoured women in Nazi Germany. But although officially both heroines of the Third Reich, and with their names prominently linked in the press, according to Peter Riedel, Melitta’s award came ‘much to the disappointment of Hanna’.113*
Hanna was still in hospital facing a series of operations, but off the critical list by the time Melitta received her award. Already livid at this further challenge to her status, Hanna believed that Melitta’s part-Jewish heritage made the situation even more insulting. Even years later she would argue that Melitta’s Iron Cross ‘was not valid’, but only something Melitta had bullied her superiors into agreeing to, and which was never correctly awarded.114 It was probably a fear that her ‘racial burden’ might limit her career, Hanna claimed, that had led Melitta to call Professor Georgii in Darmstadt after Hanna had been promoted to Flugkapitän, ‘not to congratulate me, there was not a word about that, but in order to ask Georgii, who was embarrassed by this, how to obtain such a rank’.115 ‘Even more embarrassingly’, Hanna continued, after the award of her, Hanna’s, Iron Cross, First Class, Melitta had visited Darmstadt to again lobby for her own honour. Udet had reported it to Georgii and herself, ‘very excitedly’, Hanna wrote, saying ‘he had done something stupid. He had let himself be persuaded by Melitta’s constant nagging to award her the Iron Cross, Second Class . . . to get rid of her.’116 The head of Women’s Affairs in the Reich, Frau Scholtz-Klink, had telephoned Udet ‘scandalized’, Hanna continued. ‘She had been informed at Hitler’s headquarters that the award had never been authorized. From then on everyone stayed silent, in embarrassment.’117
These were embarrassing claims indeed. Udet had been dead for over a year before Melitta’s award was even considered. Even had Hanna accidentally named Udet when she meant to refer to Milch or another general, there were other witnesses to Melitta’s award proving its validity, as well as the reference made by Göring in his diary that confirmed the honour in writing. Furthermore, contemporary newspapers could not have published their reports, nor could Melitta have publicly worn her Iron Cross ribbon as she did, had the award not been legitimate. Ironically, while Hanna was intensely jealous of Melitta’s honour, Melitta herself was ambivalent. ‘She liked to wear the decoration,’ Professor Herrmann, head of the Technical Academy at Gatow, wrote. It was reassuring for her to know she was valued, and she was proud of her work and that it should be recognized. But she wore it, Herrmann stipulated, ‘in spite of her reservations which were becoming increasingly clear to those who were initiated into her personal thoughts’.118
9
UNDER ATTACK
1943
The Red Army launched a counteroffensive on the Eastern Front in November 1942. Since the Luftwaffe still had no fleets of long-range bombers capable of attacking Soviet factories or supply lines, the Russian advance seemed unstoppable. That winter, the German 6th Army in Stalingrad sat in their holes, anxiously listening for the drone of aircraft engines while trying to anticipate what limited supplies might be sent forward to them. They were in severe need of food, clothing, boots, artillery and fuel – indeed all essential supplies. With the December snows, conditions became unbearable. As the temperature dropped to 20° or 30° below freezing, it became increasingly difficult for any aircraft to fly. With the army unable to evacuate the wounded or those suffering from frostbite, mortality rates rose exponentially. Struggling on starvation rations, the men now supplemented their watery soup, one general recorded, with ‘bones obtained from horses we dug up’.1 ‘Condition of the men is unfortunately shit,’ another reported. The moment is coming ‘when the individual says, “It’s all the shit same to me whether I live or die” and simply allows himself to freeze to death or let the Russians overrun us.’2 When Hitler’s Luftwaffe adjutant, Nicolaus von Below, read out such ‘pertinent extracts’ from reports and letters, he noticed that the Führer only remarked on the ‘profound duty in the struggle for the freedom of our people’.3 Hitler preferred to lose the entire army in the fight, it seemed, than have them return defeated.
On 2 February 1943, Field Marshal Paulus, commanding the 6th Army in Stalingrad, surrendered to the Soviets in defiance of Hitler’s orders. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers had died on both sides, and some 90,000 German survivors were now taken as Soviet prisoners of war.* It was the greatest defeat in the history of the Wehrmacht and a turning point in the conflict. Germany was now on the defensive, no longer fighting to promote a political aim but rather to salvage some remnant of victory. Two weeks later Goebbels proclaimed the advent of ‘total war’, but as one pilot put it, ‘after Stalingrad, the excitement in the Luftwaffe was over. The criticism, especially of Göring, became louder.’4
Melitta followed events from Gatow, desperately glad that Alexander had been injured and sent home before he could be killed or captured at Stalingrad. She regularly faced sleepless nights as Allied raids increased, and sometimes even came across British bombers when testing night-flying equipment above Berlin. Although ‘tired and nervous’, the ‘destruction doesn’t touch me’, she wrote.5 Melitta felt passionately that her own work ‘could never be compared to the immeasurable suffering of the troops’; another reason she was so unwilling to blow her own trumpet in interviews when her Iron Cross, Second Class, was publicized.6 Hanna heard the air-raid sirens from her hospital bed. Unable to do much more than listen to the radio, she noticed a faltering in what had once seemed to be the continual announcements of German victories, accompanied by fanfares and martial music. ‘When the disaster of Stalingrad was announced . . .’ she wrote, ‘the shadows began visibly to descend over Germany, and in spite of official propaganda, which was still turned to victory, the feeling grew that the end was inexorably approaching.’7
Two weeks after Göring had presented Melitta with her Iron Cross, he ordered that she be given a ‘government contract’ with the Ballistics Institute.8 As a woman, Melitta could never become military personnel, but over a series of lunches at the Aero Club she negotiated a remarkable arrangement with the Ministry of Aviation. She would be appointed as a professor, on a good salary, to an academic aeronautical institute. From there she could be seconded to the Technical Academy at Gatow for the rest of the war. The Nazi Party in Würzburg testified to her ‘political reliability’, and official photographs were taken. All that remained was for her to complete her PhD.9 She promptly suggested this be awarded on the strength of two aeronautics projects that she had already completed, and the doctoral thesis she was currently working on.
Melitta was now keeping a small appointments diary to help her manage her hectic schedule. Her many brief but evocative notes, scribbled in blunt pencil, hint at the strains that now characterized her official duties as well as her private life. Alongside references to her dissertation and talks given for the Red Cross, testing with Junkers continued. Her main focus was still Stuka nosedives, but she was also working on adaptations for the Ju 88 to serve as a night bomber, and on cross-country flights over huge distances between Berlin and, among other cities, Königsberg, Dresden and Paris. Her test flights were not wholly without incident. Undercarriage d
oors got stuck, a canopy blew off during a dive, there were problems with instruments and cameras, and a crash while rolling to take-off. On one test she had to bail out when her plane caught fire and on another, she noted simply, ‘windscreen exploded’.10 Once these might have been major incidents, but now they were almost lost among the broader dramas of Melitta’s life.
In addition to her own work, as Alexander recovered Melitta was becoming ever more worried about his return to the front. Surreptitiously listening to British and American radio to follow the progress of the war – a crime now punishable by death – added to her anxieties. The British public had first learned about Nazi extermination camps from the BBC in December 1942, and rumours about atrocities were now widespread within Germany. Melitta was soon suffering from exhaustion, skin rashes and depression. When possible, she tried to unwind by taking Alexander to leafy Lautlingen, and occasionally she took his mother to the theatre. If she was stuck at Gatow, then Klara, Otto and other family members would visit for tea – the Luftwaffe not only had their own branded teacups and spoons but better rations than civilians. But mainly Melitta went sailing on the Wannsee; a pilot’s privilege to which few could aspire during the war.
Sailing also gave Melitta the chance to talk with Alexander, his brother Berthold, Paul von Handel and other trusted friends without risk of being overheard. All of them had learned to be cautious. Full names are rarely given in Melitta’s diaries and there are no comments on the aims or direction of the war. She did not even mention events such as the much-publicized arrest and execution of Munich’s ‘White Rose’ students, Hans and Sophie Scholl, who had distributed anti-war leaflets stating that 300,000 Jews had been killed in annexed Poland. The round-up and deportation of Berlin’s Jews, even the extraordinary Rosenstrasse protest in February and March, which seemed to have secured the release from detention of the Jewish partners, mainly husbands, of ‘Aryan’ citizens – men in the same position as her own father – all passed without comment, although Melitta could hardly have failed to hear about and reflect on such events.*
In mid-March 1943 Melitta learned that Alexander was being sent on a training course in historic Jüterbog, in north-eastern Germany. Seizing this opportunity to avoid giving a Propaganda Ministry lecture in Sweden, she set out to visit her husband instead. Arriving late, in the dark Melitta stumbled on some filthy stairs, badly bruising her shin. ‘Fainted, terrible, sick, crying fit,’ she noted in her diary. ‘Schn. very concerned.’11 Schn. was shorthand for her pet name for Alexander, Schnepfchen or ‘little snipe’, although sometimes, she noted ruefully, with his dark army cape he now looked more like a black woodpecker. Melitta and Alexander managed to meet several times, heading out to bars and casinos. Once they even made use of Göring’s box at the opera. Often Alexander was ‘moody’ when they met, but shared evenings made them both ‘radiant with happiness’, Melitta scribbled in her diary, before adding later, ‘Schn. not that radiant any more, due to alcohol’.12 At about the same time, news that not everyone at the barracks would be moving out caused elation: ‘maybe some people will be spared!’ Melitta wrote.13 Alexander, however, received new orders before the end of the month.
Hanna spent five long months in hospital. After her condition stabilized, a series of pioneering operations included surgery to give her a new nose. Although she would always have a faint scar, and people who met her noted it was ‘evident something had happened there’, the reconstruction work was excellent.14 Hanna was only ever matter-of-fact when mentioning her facial reconstruction, simply waving her hand towards her nose when words ran out, which took another kind of bravery. What she found harder to accept was the assumption, by both doctors and former colleagues, that her flying days were over.
In March, Hanna was discharged for a long period of convalescence. Although offered her choice of sanatorium, she chose instead to stay at a friend’s isolated summerhouse, high up in the Riesengebirge mountains where she had hiked as a child, and above which she had often glided. ‘She withdrew into a nutshell,’ her colleague Wolfgang Späte wrote, ‘and shut herself off from the rest of the world.’15 But after a few days of ‘timeless peacefulness’, interrupted only by her mother bringing meals, Hanna set about planning her return.16
Still suffering from headaches and severe giddiness, her first priority was to recover her sense of balance, without which she knew she could not fly. The summerhouse had a flight of narrow steps running from the ground up to the steep, gabled roof. Hanna climbed them cautiously until she could sit astride the ridge of the roof with her arms firmly clinging to the chimneystack, and look around without losing her balance. After a few weeks her vertigo began to ebb and she risked letting go of the chimney. Within a month, through pure determination, she could ease herself along the entire length of the ridge without feeling giddy. She built up her strength by walking, then hiking, through the forest. Despite setbacks and some despondency, in time she began to climb the pines, branch by branch, ruefully recalling the days of her childhood when ‘no tree had been too high’.17
Hanna’s perseverance paid off. After a couple of months, the head of a local military flying school unofficially agreed to let her take up a plane. After managing a glider in a towed flight, she progressed to powered aircraft. Diving down on each flight from a greater height, she tested how much her head could tolerate. In time she practised steep turns, spins and, eventually, aerobatics. When she finally had a full medical check-up, the doctors were astounded at her recovery, ‘but to me,’ she wrote, ‘all that mattered was – I was fit to fly again.’18
Hanna reported back for duty that spring. At first she was given public relations work. A 1943 propaganda film, Hirschberger Fliegerjugend, shows her glider arriving at her home town, where she is met by a froth of pretty girls, all blonde plaits and ankle socks, and strapping young lads who help her jump down. It was not long before she was back in the cockpit of an Me 163, however, testing the gliding descents. Hanna’s fellow test pilots were much affected by her ‘keenness and courage’, but they knew that her safety was now a national concern.19 Collectively, the pilots had an illicit store of eighty litres of brandy, which they kept in an enormous glass balloon protected by a wickerwork basket, hidden in Hanna’s dorm cellar. When one of the team was killed or injured, they decanted a few bottles to give to the family with the bad news, as well as toasting them themselves. Hanna would help, sometimes laughing and joking with the men as brandy fumes gradually filled the small room. But everyone knew that it would take more than brandy to ease the news of any further accident that might befall Hanna. ‘She was the one and only Hanna Reitsch,’ as her colleague Mano Ziegler put it, ‘a symbol of German womanhood and the idol of German aviation.’20
Given two theatre tickets one evening, Ziegler decided to offer one to Hanna but found her in her room, ‘crying her eyes out’.21 Wolfgang Späte had cancelled her first rocket-powered test flight. ‘It’s all so mean!’ Hanna told Ziegler petulantly, in his account. ‘He knows very well that I have longed for this take-off ever since my accident. And now he slams the door in front of my nose. It is so unfair!’22 Hanna accused Späte of sexism, which was almost certainly true, but the fact still remained that she now held a unique position in the Reich. Späte was simply not prepared to take responsibility for her safety. According to Ziegler, Hanna’s response was to stop her tears and start packing. ‘I shall go straight away to see Göring – today, now!’ she declared, and Ziegler believed her.23 ‘She had a will of iron and was not beaten yet,’ he commented, ‘even if she had to appeal to the highest in the land.’24
Whether by coincidence or design, Hanna soon received an invitation to join Göring and his wife, Emmy, at their Obersalzberg house in the Bavarian Alps near Hitler’s own home, the Berghof. Over lunch they talked about her crash. To her horror, Hanna suddenly realized that Göring believed the Me 163 was already in mass production. ‘I was astounded,’ she later reported. ‘I knew that at that very moment we did not have a single
163 ready for combat and, at the very best, we could not expect a single craft to be ready before the end of the year.’25 Uncertain whether Göring was joking, or perhaps trying to reassure his wife, Hanna managed a half-laugh as she chipped in, ‘That would be fine, if it were true.’26 Göring demanded to know what she meant.
With ‘stupefied amazement’, Hanna started to give some realistic production figures to the commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe. But ‘Göring flew into a rage and, viciously pounding his fist upon the table, screamed that I didn’t have the slightest idea . . . and strode angrily out of the room.’27 Although Emmy eventually succeeded in calming him, it was clear that ‘Göring did not want his comforting illusions to be disturbed.’28 Now Hanna knew why no one dared to tell him the truth. Further attempts only confirmed that she had fallen from grace. She was, she later said angrily, ‘never again called to see him or consulted on aeronautical matters’.29
Hanna was appalled and insulted by Göring’s behaviour. She knew he was a morphine addict and now, with typical Nazi disgust at social deviance, she identified what she called his ‘abnormal physical condition’ as the source of his problems.30 ‘His feminine manner’, she felt, was in stark contrast to his ‘apparently iron commands’, and ‘his manner of dress, his use of cosmetics, his personal vanity, his perfume-drenched person and clothing, all created an actually decadent impression’.31 A year earlier, Goebbels had been more forgiving. Göring’s dress is ‘somewhat baroque’ and could strike one as ‘laughable’, Goebbels had written, but ‘one must put up with his idiosyncrasies; they sometimes even have a charm about them’.32 By 1943, however, with defeats in the east and the continued destruction of German cities from the air, Göring’s star was on the wane. Milch argued that he had ‘fallen asleep on the laurels won by the Luftwaffe in 1939 and 1940’.33 Even Hitler was ‘exceedingly angry’ about the state of the Luftwaffe, expressing himself in the ‘most furious and unrestrained language before the generals’, and ‘not even sparing the Reichsmarschall’, Goebbels noted.34 ‘It appears that the Luftwaffe has lost much of its popularity,’ he added with some relish.35 Yet when confronted with uncomfortable truths, Göring ‘would rant and fume’, Hanna wrote, while continuing to delude Hitler with ‘an entirely erroneous picture of his air strength’.36
