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

by Clare Mulley

  Situated on the northernmost tip of Usedom Island on the Baltic coast, the once small fishing village of Peenemünde proved to be the perfect location for weapon research and development. Not only was the area relatively isolated; the 250 miles of open sea to the east provided a missile range, and thick forests supplied cover to hide power plants, workshops, test stands, housing and other facilities. Some of the technicians felt lucky to be posted to such an idyllic location, with its long stretches of sandy coastline. The more apprehensive, however, felt they were in a ‘kind of ghetto for scientists’, as one Peenemünde mathematician put it.69

  At the end of 1942, Britain had dismissed Norwegian reports of enemy missiles as a hoax. Later these reports were corroborated by the secretly recorded conversations of captured German generals quartered in a British stately home, and intelligence reports from the Polish resistance. Peenemünde had been photographed earlier that year but, although the first ballistic missile had been tested there in October, the significance of the site was not at first appreciated.* By April 1943 the threat of V-weapons had been prioritized, and the ‘Bodyline’ organization was convened to develop a response.* Peenemünde was now identified as the principal research facility. Working in shifts around the clock, and largely sustained by Spam sandwiches and coffee, Constance Babington Smith’s team was on alert to look out for anything ‘queer’ that might be a long-range gun, a remotely controlled rocket aircraft, or ‘some sort of tube . . . out of which a rocket could be squirted’.70 Analysing photographs taken in June, Babington Smith found ‘four little tailless aeroplanes . . . taking the air’, which ‘looked queer enough to satisfy anybody’.71 They were prototype Me 163s, ‘little white butterflies’ that showed up relatively well on aerial pictures until the Luftwaffe painted them grey.72 Among other equipment, two V-2 rockets were also spotted lying horizontally on transport vehicles near some elliptical launch sites. The operational importance of Peenemünde had been exposed.

  Tuesday 17 August 1943 was long and hot. Walter Dornberger and Wernher von Braun were stuck in a meeting for most of the afternoon, arguing about the latest deadlines for V-2 production. Having won Hitler’s enthusiasm for their work by screening the colour film footage of a successful test, the pressure was now on to deliver. Hitler was convinced that the V-2 was ‘the decisive weapon of the war’, and wanted 900 produced monthly.73 The men were in mid-discussion when Hanna arrived at Peenemünde, ahead of some Me 163 test flights scheduled for the following day. Pleased not to be needed straight away, she took some time to stroll around the site, enjoying the breeze blowing in from the coast.

  After dinner that evening, Hanna relaxed over drinks with the men, sitting around a glass-topped table in the panelled Hearth Room, which was lit by chandeliers. This was the same room in which Braun and Dornberger had entertained Himmler on his visit two months earlier, discussing Nazi racial policy towards the occupied Slavs until late into the night. On this August evening, however, they and Hanna were joined by one of Peenemünde’s leading scientists, Dr Ernst Steinhoff, and Braun’s younger brother, Magnus, a keen glider pilot who had been drafted into the Luftwaffe but managed to secure a transfer to Peenemünde. Hanna had dressed to impress, with her usual dark-blue unofficial uniform decorated with her Iron Cross, First Class, as well as the glittering diamonds of her Military Flight Badge. After a while, however, she curled herself up in a comfortable armchair, happily swapping old gliding stories as well as discussing more recent test work and new ambitions. ‘Whenever anything brought her to Peenemünde, we were always glad to see her,’ Dornberger wrote.74 For him, ‘listening to the laughter of these young people, who cheerfully took all the surprises of technology in their stride, with their eyes on the future, I felt less oppressed by the serious worries of the afternoon’.75

  At some point during the evening Hanna slipped away, escorted by Braun to the car that was to take her to her dormitory for the night. Braun then strolled over to his own rooms. Dornberger was the last to leave, at about half eleven. All the facility’s lights were already long out. Exhausted by the heat and excitement of the day, Dornberger was slowly walking the few steps that led to one of the residential houses when the air-raid siren sounded, as it quite often did. It was a full moon, but knowing that the RAF often flew over the Baltic en route to bomb elsewhere, he continued on his way and was quickly asleep in bed.

  It was not long before Dornberger was woken by the sound of his windows rattling and gunfire outside. While cursing the anti-aircraft battery who were apparently disturbing his sleep with their tests, he slowly noticed the ‘roaring, hissing double reports’ of the heavy batteries firing along the edge of the airfield and down by the water, joined by the more muffled detonations of the posts on the opposite bank. More anti-aircraft guns barked from the roofs of the higher buildings. Braun had also been woken, but having quickly looked outside he assumed the bombers were headed straight over towards Berlin. Confident that it was not ‘our night’, he ‘strolled back’ to his quarters, but stopped short when he saw a targeting flare dropped by a British pathfinder.76

  Peenemünde was soon being raided with wave after wave of bombers passing over the site without any aerial counter-attack. Leaping from his bed, Dornberger ‘had breeches and socks on in record time’. He grabbed his tunic, trench coat, cap and gloves, even his cigar case, but his boots had been taken for cleaning so he made do with ‘soft slippers’ as he dashed outside.77 At that moment a huge blast wrecked the building. As the doors were torn away, flying glass slashed through the air. Dornberger stood transfixed. ‘The scene that met my gaze had a sinister and appalling beauty of its own’, he later recalled. Through veils of ‘fragile, cottony clouds’ like a ‘rosy curtain of gauze’, he watched the moon light up the pine plantations, the road and bushes, the offices, works and canteen. Everything was covered in fine white sand, and much was already burning.78 Above, the sky was now criss-crossed with the beams of searchlights, while waves of bombers smudged the black bursts of flak cloud that hung in the air. From all around, Dornberger continued, came ‘the continual barking and cracking of the AA guns, the reports of the bursting shells, the thunderous impact of the bombs and the monotonous drone of the four-engined enemy bombers’.79 ‘My beautiful Peenemünde!’ he was heard to moan.80

  British Bomber Command had sent a massive assault force of 597 aircraft to drop between 1,500 and 2,000 tons of high explosives on Peenemünde in Operation Hydra. This was almost the entire bomber fleet – an enormous risk for one mission. Surprise was paramount to mitigate that risk. Once fed and briefed, the RAF pilots had been sworn to secrecy and locked into their hangars. Regular bombing raids on Berlin had been undertaken in the weeks before, in the hope that the Germans would assume this was still the target. A ‘spoof attack’ on the capital by British Mosquitoes was also planned; and fine strips of metal ‘window’ were dropped to blind the German radar.81 Flying by the light of the full moon, many of the crew still felt ‘pretty well naked’ as they approached the German coast, but the preparations paid off.82 ‘They certainly weren’t expecting us,’ recalled Jack Pragnell, a Wellington observer in the first wave. ‘The guns opened up only after we started work. Then we saw the searchlights come on in abundance.’83 Paul Bland, the navigator inside a chilly Lancaster, agreed that ‘they thought we were going to Berlin’.84 Instead, the RAF’s heavy bombs fell in ordered rows over Peenemünde, the smaller ones dropping together in groups, some waggling slightly on release. Pragnell was relieved to ‘see the bombs hitting home’.85 Smashing into the sandy earth from high above, they looked like boiled sweets dropping into a bowl of flour, but the crews all knew the importance of their mission and had been told that if the target was not destroyed they would be sent back repeatedly to finish the job.

  Coincidentally, this was the first night that Hajo Herrmann’s Wilde Sau unit was operating in force above Berlin, using the blind-flying techniques that he and Melitta had developed. One hundred and forty-eight twin-engined and 55 sing
le-engined Luftwaffe fighters searched the night sky in vain for the anticipated bombers, exposing themselves to their own anti-aircraft guns below. It was only after the first wave of bombs had fallen on Peenemünde that the mystery became clear. The Messerschmitts raced north. At half past one they caught the last wave of RAF bombers, shooting down many of those that were still silhouetted against the flames and smoke from the burning buildings below. Altogether the British lost forty aircraft; 243 British aircrew died, and a further 45, who had bailed out, were captured. Those who made it home remembered how ‘the fires of burning Peenemünde made an impressive view behind us’.86

  ‘I am terribly ashamed to say that I slept through the whole night,’ was Hanna’s main comment on the raid.87 She had been allocated a room in the officers’ block in Peenemünde West, some distance away from both the scientists’ and technicians’ dormitories and the test facilities where the attacks had been focused. Even so, she could hardly have ‘slept so deeply’ as to have been undisturbed by the sirens, the sound and vibrations of more than 600 planes, or the ‘thunderous impact’, as Dornberger described it, of the bombing itself, which sent shock waves through the ground.88 ‘Unless she had consumed a good double whisky and was wearing earmuffs, she must have heard the crump of the bombs,’ RAF pilot Pragnell later argued, before describing Hanna’s claims as ‘somewhat romantic’.89 Nevertheless, according to her own account, on waking the next morning Hanna was rather surprised to find a heavy mist in the air, and only realized later that this was smoke.

  When Luftwaffe chief of staff Hans Jeschonnek heard news of the destruction, he shot himself in the head with his service pistol. ‘I can no longer work with the Reichsmarschall,’ his last note read. ‘Long live the Führer.’90 ‘Göring, grief-stricken, attended the funeral . . . with tears in his eyes,’ Hanna later reported scornfully.91 For many, Jeschonnek’s suicide represented an admission of the Luftwaffe’s defeat. Erhard Milch succeeded him, employing ever more draconian measures to grow aircraft production, including the increased use of slave labour.

  In fact, although ‘detailed plans of the experimental camp grounds’ had been dispatched to London by Polish agents, the bomb damage was not as well targeted as first believed.92 Several buildings that had been belching out smoke as the pathfinders arrived had made aiming difficult and some pilots had mistakenly dropped their markers two miles south. Later, as ‘the target became a veritable inferno’, according to one British officer, ‘it became increasingly difficult to identify the various features’.93 As a result, a number of the test fields and laboratories, the guidance control buildings and pioneering wind tunnel, were almost untouched while, tragically, many bombs hit the Trassenheide forced labourers’ camp. Trapped behind barbed wire and with no shelters, an estimated 500–600 prisoners and forced foreign labourers were killed, including several Allied agents who had infiltrated the camp with workers from Luxembourg.*

  An aerial reconnaissance sortie the next morning, however, showed that a substantial part of the main site had been damaged, including the experimental works, head office and design block. German casualties included the facility’s chief engineer, Dr Walter Thiel, who died in a shelter with his family while their house remained undamaged. The use of delayed fuses meant that bombs continued to detonate for some days, hindering the German salvage operation. It was, one British pilot concluded, a ‘major disaster’ for the Nazis.94 ‘Nothing remained,’ a German colonel of the V-1 launching regiment reported, ‘other than a desert.’95 ‘The loss was irreparable,’ Dornberger conceded, having inspected the damage while still covered in dust the next morning.96

  Operation Hydra was not only a shock but an embarrassment to the Nazis. The net result was the enforced relocation of the rocket development facilities, causing a critical delay to the delivery of operational weapons. Rocket production moved underground, and some testing moved west – out of the reach of Allied bombers. ‘If the Germans had succeeded in perfecting and using their new weapons six months earlier . . .’ Eisenhower later wrote, ‘our invasion of Europe would have proved exceedingly difficult, perhaps impossible.’97 Certainly the Allied advance through Normandy would not have been possible in early June 1944 had it not been for the bombing of Peenemünde, and the war might have dragged on long enough to give the Nazis time to expand their development of jets and rocket technology even further.

  Melitta had been in her room at Gatow, working late on her PhD dissertation, the night that Peenemünde was bombed. Before she turned out the light, she noted the Berlin air raid in her diary, perhaps wondering whether Hajo or Franz were engaged in intercepting the bombers. She subsequently added that she was late to work the next day, having overslept because of the sirens. Hanna had been present throughout the Peenemünde raid, but effectively dismissed it as almost insignificant in her memoirs. There is no evidence that either of them referred to the episode again, but as the aerial bombing of Germany intensified, civilian morale plummeted and the regime had to apply increasing oppression and compulsion to maintain order. Over the course of 1943, the German courts passed more than a hundred death sentences every week on citizens deemed guilty of defeatism or sabotage. Melitta and Hanna were deeply affected by a growing sense that it was not just the Nazi regime, but their country as a whole, their colleagues, loved ones, and indeed themselves, that were under mortal attack. Both women now began to consider radical new ways to defend the different Germanys to which they had pledged allegiance. But while Hanna strove to find a significant new way to help win the war, Melitta’s focus was increasingly turning to how she could help to end it.

  10

  OPERATION SELF-SACRIFICE

  1943–1944

  ‘Time,’ Hanna decided a few days after the Peenemünde bombing, ‘was not on Germany’s side.’1 With large parts of the Baltic proving ground now under rubble, ash and sand, Hanna returned to Berlin as soon as possible. She might have slept through Operation Hydra, but the implications of the raid weighed heavily on her mind. Domestic papers covering the bombing on ‘the north German coast’ focused on the number of planes shot down, but the foreign press reported that Himmler was investigating the operation personally to discover ‘who had betrayed the position of the Peenemünde plant’.2 British papers even claimed that Goebbels was ‘feeding the wildest lies about Allied defeats to German listeners’, while ‘trying to hearten his own folks and scare ours with tales of terrible new Axis weapons now being mass-produced’.3 ‘There is no doubt that Hitler has been vehemently calling upon his scientific research experts to bring forth some salvation miracle,’ they continued, slightly smugly, ‘but the RAF raid on Peenemünde can not have helped that appeal much.’4

  Unlike Melitta, Hanna had never doubted the aims of the Nazi regime. Even she, however, had now lost faith in the promised certain victory. ‘One after another, towns and cities were crumpling under the Allied air attacks,’ she wrote. ‘The transport system and the production centres were being systematically destroyed . . . the death toll continually mounted.’5 In late August, over lunch at the Berlin Aero Club, Hanna quietly discussed the adverse turn of events with two trusted friends, Captain Heinrich Lange of the special operations Luftwaffe squadron KG200, and the head of Rechlin’s institute of aeronautical medicine, Dr Theo Benzinger. Some radical new action was needed, they agreed, and Hanna believed that she might be the person to lead it.

  Hanna reasoned that her Fatherland could only be ‘saved from disaster’ if the conflict could be brought to a rapid conclusion through a negotiated peace.6 But Nazi Germany would not be able to secure favourable terms unless the military strength of the Allies could be considerably weakened first. ‘This could only be done from the air,’ Hanna, Lange and Benzinger agreed.7 Together they sketched out secret plans for ‘a rapid succession of devastating blows’ at factories, power plants, water facilities and other infrastructure.8 Crucially, naval and merchant shipping was also to be targeted should the Allies move to invade the European continent.
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br />   Hanna knew that the precision of these air attacks was critical to the success of her plan. Melitta’s work with dive-sights and dive-bombing techniques had greatly improved accuracy, but Hanna had something more radical in mind. She wanted pilots, potentially including herself, to guide their missiles right down to the point of impact – without pulling out. With shipping targets, one paper outlined, ‘the plane was expected to shatter upon impact with the water, killing the pilot instantly and allowing the bomb to tear loose from the plane to continue under the keel of the vessel, where it would explode’.9 Although the pilots ‘would be volunteering for certain death’, Hanna added, ‘it would be no task for mere dare-devils . . . nor for blind fanatics, nor for the disenchanted and the life-weary who might see here a chance to make a theatrical exit . . .’ What was needed, she felt, were measured and honourable men, ‘ready to sacrifice themselves in the conviction that only by this means could their country be saved’.10 She named the fledgling plan ‘Operation Suicide’.* Melitta was also having lunch with friends at the Berlin Aero Club a few days after the Peenemünde raid. She too was ‘very pessimistic’ about the war, she confided rashly to her diary.11 Despite her work with Hajo Herrmann and his Wilde Sau group of interceptor fighters, Allied bombers were increasingly seen in the skies above Berlin. In September Melitta gave Franz Amsinck an excellent reference to start night-fighter training. With so many close friends now deployed, she also began to record the details of those who had been killed in action. In early September she noted that ‘bombs are close’, and then ‘bombs on the runway’ at Gatow.12 The raids deprived her of sleep, but were never enough to prevent her work. As a result she was permanently exhausted. Her allowance of pilot’s chocolate, and the coffee that she found as ‘welcome, as after a flight round the world’, kept her going until she could collapse.13 ‘Slept like the dead,’ she scrawled in blunt pencil.14