by Clare Mulley
Like so many wives in wartime, Melitta was also suffering constant anxiety about the fate of her husband. Alexander was still on his artillery course in northern France, but expecting a new posting to the front at any time. Melitta’s stress was soon manifested in stomach problems, renewed skin rashes and persistent headaches. She was also ‘lonely’, she recorded tersely.15 The Aero Club was a good place to meet Franz, as well as old friends like Paul, and Alexander’s brothers, Claus and Berthold, when they were in Berlin. ‘I often talked to Litta about the conflict . . .’ Paul later wrote. ‘Should the individual carry on . . . to save the country from losing the war,’ he asked her, ‘or by contrast, was the possibility that Hitler could win a victory over Europe not the greatest evil that could happen – and in that case, was the fall of the Reich not a far lesser evil? In other words . . . shouldn’t one contemplate the removal of the rulers of Germany and feel around for others who might think along similar lines?’16 Such conversations were treasonous, punishable by death.
While Hanna and Melitta were quietly considering these questions at the Berlin Aero Club, work on Hitler’s vengeance weapons continued. After the Peenemünde raid, the development and production of the V-2 rocket, the world’s first guided ballistic missile, was transferred to Mittelwerk, a factory complex hidden inside the Harz mountains. Here slave labourers were set to work from the nearby Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, established by the SS as a sub-camp of Buchenwald. This not only kept production costs down, but also helped to maintain secrecy about the site. By October there were 4,000 prisoners, mainly Russian, Polish and French, labouring at Mittelwerk. By the end of November the number had doubled. There were no sanitary facilities and little drinking water. Overcrowded sleeping quarters were contaminated with excrement, lice and fleas. The dimly lit tunnels were cold and damp, and the workers’ thin uniforms quickly disintegrated. Within months, epidemics of pneumonia, dysentery and typhus broke out, exacerbated by the prisoners’ exhaustion and starvation. ‘It was a pretty hellish environment,’ Wernher von Braun later admitted, but he denied having witnessed any brutality and argued that ‘war is war, and . . . I did not have the right to bring further moral viewpoints to bear.’17 In total, up to 60,000 people forced to work on V-2 production died of disease, starvation and maltreatment, giving the weapon the dubious distinction of having killed more people during its production than in its application.*
Hanna would have seen the forced labour camps at Peenemünde, but if she was concerned, or heard rumours about the appalling conditions at Mittelwerk from Braun, Dornberger or anyone else, she did not record it. For a while she was busy touring airfields to demonstrate the Me 109 to trainee pilots. ‘The impression of this new aircraft was really huge,’ one recalled, but Hanna’s heart was not in the work.18 The testing of Me 163 Messerschmitt rocket planes had been moved west to Bad Zwischenahn, not far from the North Sea, and Hanna hoped that there she might still fly a prototype under full power. ‘She intimated that the Führer and commander-in-chief of the armed forces had authorized, and if need be, ordered her to fly any plane in Germany that she wanted to,’ Wolfgang Späte was informed on her arrival.19 Späte did not believe a word of it but Hanna had set to work anyhow. ‘Out on the runway, she’s actually quite friendly and modest,’ one of the ground crew reported, apparently ‘shaking his head, somewhat surprised’.20 Recognizing that his men ‘were proud to be on the same footing as this famous female pilot’, Späte sensed defeat.21 Having secured authorization from Berlin, he finally gave her permission to fly whatever she chose, but whether she flew the Me 163 under power is not verifiably recorded. Her energies were increasingly directed towards promoting Operation Suicide.
At first Hanna had kept her discussions completely secret. Despite her talk of honour, the concept of suicide missions went against all European military tradition, and smacked of desperation, even defeatism. In the autumn of 1943, any talk that might be construed as undermining the morale of the people was already a serious crime. It would not be long before defeatist talk became punishable by death. Nevertheless, as word of Hanna’s proposed suicide squadron spread, she began to receive discreet enquiries from other zealous pilots, enthused by the thought of sacrificing their lives for Hitler’s Germany. Encouraged, Hanna sought out more volunteers. ‘We found them everywhere,’ she wrote with satisfaction. Most ‘were married and fathers of families and were robust, uncomplicated individuals. As they saw it, the sacrifice of their lives would be as nothing compared with the millions, both soldiers and civilians, who would die if the war was allowed to continue.’22
As the number of people initiated into Hanna’s plans grew, however, she also began to face objections. ‘That we were often misunderstood is only to be expected,’ she commented, before adding grandly, ‘here was required nothing less than the complete conquest of the self’.23 Nevertheless, it seemed wise to gain official sanction for the proposed operation before the criticisms grew more vocal. As Hanna was still persona non grata with Göring, and had in any case lost all respect for the Reichsmarschall, she approached his deputy, Field Marshall Erhard Milch. Milch knew that the Luftwaffe was already facing criticism for ‘too much experimenting’ instead of focusing resources on producing the planes and pilots that were desperately needed.24 No doubt mindful of his personal position, as well as the potential waste of good pilots, he ‘refused point blank’ to consider the idea.25 Bitterly disappointed, Hanna scornfully waved aside his moral objections, suggesting he leave these ‘to the conscience of the individual volunteers, whom, after all, it primarily concerned’.26 Milch was unimpressed, and curtly prohibited the use of any Luftwaffe aircraft or personnel for developing the project.
As Hanna wrestled with official rejection, Melitta was facing her own, more personal, heartache: Alexander had been sent back to Russia in mid-September. ‘Grievous blow,’ she confided to her diary.27 Melitta begged Claus to discover her husband’s route east, so that she might fly out and meet him on the way, but this time her efforts were in vain. ‘Mentally very fragile,’ she scribbled the next day, ‘aching heart . . . all hope dashed.’28 She knew that a posting to the Eastern Front was tantamount to a death sentence and, as the weeks passed with very few letters, she again became sick with worry. To distract herself, she took up sketching, went swimming, sailed a dinghy on the Wannsee with Claus and Berthold when they were around, drank lots more coffee and went on moonlit walks, picking mushrooms and shooting rabbits to supplement her wartime rations. Mostly, however, she just threw herself into her work. Despite occasionally snatching afternoon naps on a sofa, by mid-October she was ‘very tired, depressed’ and ‘exhausted’.29 By the end of the month she had tonsillitis and a fever, her rash was back and she was taking morphine. Soon her work was suffering, too. She was arguing with colleagues including Milch, and even found Franz irritating. He ‘stretched it a little too far’, she wrote tensely.30 One ‘black day’, when she couldn’t find her sunglasses, she had to brave going out with her eyes still puffy from crying.31 Melitta was far from the typical hausfrau of the time but, as for so many women across the world, with her husband at the front and her home city under attack, daily life was becoming almost unbearable.
In November, Hanna was asked to undertake a morale-boosting visit to the men on the Eastern Front. Robert Ritter von Greim was commanding the air fleet in the central sector, but without sufficient aircraft he knew that the Wehrmacht had lost all initiative and there was little hope of them holding their positions, let alone advancing. Hanna was not only a national heroine, but also a symbol of courage and commitment above the call of duty. Attractive, highly decorated and seemingly unstoppable, she was still naturally light-hearted and Greim could think of no one better to rally the troops. Flattered, and inspired by the knowledge that Greim was ‘engaged in a struggle of almost superhuman proportions’, despite the great danger Hanna agreed at once.32
It was icy-cold when she reached Greim’s headquarters in a forested area near the ancie
nt city of Orsha, now in Belarus.* Although under Nazi-German occupation since July 1941, resistance in the area was infamous and several concentration camps had been established in response. An estimated 19,000 people would be killed in these camps. Hitler had given his soldiers free rein to act without restraint in the war in the east, and Jews, communists and other civilians were being murdered on a large scale. Greim would have been aware of these criminal developments, but it is unlikely that he discussed them with Hanna. If she saw any evidence of atrocities, or of the enforced movement of thousands of civilians by rail while she was travelling in the region, she chose not to record it. Six months earlier Greim had received the distinction of ‘Oak Leaves’ for his Knight’s Cross, awarded for his service in Russia. Now morale was faltering but Hanna noted only that Greim was still greatly respected by his men, and indeed regarded almost as a father figure with his clipped white hair, furrowed brow and slightly sad, knowing eyes. ‘I cannot convey to you the pleasure of the soldiers when the General appears,’ she wrote enthusiastically to her parents and sister. ‘They love and honour him greatly – and no wonder!’33 As a mark of her personal respect, she never mentioned Greim without using his title and he, likewise, always referred to her as Flugkapitän.
Even the Berlin air raids had not prepared Hanna for the sense of unremitting threat she now experienced. ‘Throughout the night, even in my sleep,’ she later wrote, ‘I could hear the ceaseless roll and thunder of the guns from the nearby front.’34 At dawn, she and Greim set off in a small Fieseler Fi 156 Storch liaison and reconnaissance plane, flying low to avoid detection, towards the advanced anti-aircraft artillery positions. Although its cockpit was enclosed, the small, leggy aircraft was draughty and uninsulated, and Hanna was soon shivering despite her coat, thick gloves and fur-lined trapper hat. Once within sight of the front, they swapped the plane for an armoured car. The last stretch had to be undertaken on foot, ‘working our way forward in short, crouching runs’, Hanna tightly clutching the handbag she had brought from Berlin and carefully fastened to her sleeve with a safety chain and bracelet.35
No sooner had she reached the first German ack-ack position than the Russians started a heavy bombardment. ‘Automatically everyone vanished into the ground, while all around us the air whistled and shuddered and crashed,’ she wrote. After their own guns had pounded out their reply, a formation of enemy planes began to bomb the Wehrmacht position. ‘I felt, in my terror, as though I wanted to creep right in on myself,’ Hanna continued. ‘When finally to this inferno were added the most horrible sounds of all, the yells of the wounded, I felt certain that not one of us would emerge alive. Cowering in a hole in the ground, it was in vain that I tried to stop the persistent knocking of my knees.’36
When the bombardment was over, Hanna emerged from her foxhole to help tend the wounded. Believing that ‘the men’s eyes light up at the sight of me’, she insisted on visiting the forward gun sites.37 ‘Their astonishment and delight . . .’ she later told her family with typical exuberance, ‘was overwhelming.’38 Over the next three weeks Hanna flew the Storch to most of the isolated Luftwaffe units in the area. From the cover of tanks and trenches, she watched as ‘the earth heaved into the air’ from exploding shells, and learned to distinguish between the sounds of German and Soviet fire. Meeting the men, and sometimes sharing a tin of sardines with them, she answered their questions as best she could. ‘I tried hard not to raise false hopes,’ she made a point of recording.39 But whispering, so that the more senior officers would not hear, she also spoke about the secret ‘wonder weapons’, the V-1, V-2 and Me 163. ‘She actually glowed with optimism and encouragement,’ one young soldier later reported.40
Hanna’s visit to the front was certainly appreciated, but it was no substitute for the supplies or reinforcements that were desperately needed. For Hanna herself, the experience hardened her resolve to serve. ‘I should like to stay out here, and be allowed to fight,’ she wrote to her family.41 She was being romantic. She knew her greatest contribution would not be made in the east, but the emotion behind her declaration was honestly felt. ‘Flying beneath grey skies over measureless expanses of open country occupied by partisans, talking with weary and anxious men in huts and holes in the ground, the hand-claps of those from my own homeland, the agony, the endurance – and the cold,’ she wrote, ‘all this will not fade from my mind.’42 A few weeks later, visiting her Austrian Heuberger cousins, she told Helmut that ‘Stalingrad had been a disaster’, and as the Luftwaffe was no longer in any state to defend Germany, ‘more disasters were on the way’.43 She then insisted on the family singing folk songs down a priority telephone line to Greim, who was still at the front. When the operator interrupted, questioning the importance of the call, the general insisted it was vital for morale.
Although also on the Eastern Front, Alexander was hundreds of miles from Orsha, serving as a front-line artillery observer on, ‘or rather in,’ Melitta wrote wryly, the Dnieper River, near Novo Lipovo, now in Ukraine.44 At the end of October, she learned that he had taken part in a series of assaults against the encroaching Soviets. Touchingly, she spent that evening reading his essay on ‘Virgil and the Augustinian state’, as if his words could bring him closer. ‘The losses were generally high,’ she later wrote sparingly to her sister.45 Indeed, the Germans were estimated to have lost at least 500,000 men and significant territory over the four-month operation. A week later a telegram arrived from Lublin. Alexander had been seriously wounded, his back ripped open by shrapnel from a grenade.
Despite his injuries, Alexander did not want to leave his unit and had to be forcibly moved back from the clearing station for transfer. Eventually he was sent to ‘a very nice military hospital’ in Würzburg, with Melitta calling in favours all the way.46 As soon as she had leave, she cycled over early to the train station to visit him. It was dark by the time she returned, and with blackout in operation there were no lights to guide her way. When her bike hit a rut she was thrown from the saddle, hitting the ground hard and staying there, cursing the world while she caught her breath. ‘All a bit much,’ she later commented.47 Alexander’s injury ‘was a grenade splinter which went deep into his back and is still there,’ she wrote in anguish to her sister Lili a few days later.48 But Alexander had again been lucky. The shrapnel had missed his ribs and lungs. Doctors agreed it could be safely left inside him, and the wound was healing well. As the hospital was near their apartment, soon he could even go home in the afternoons. Melitta joined him whenever possible; the rooms that she had found ‘bleak’ and ‘depressing’ without him were once again her home.49 The only heating came from the stove and they no longer had a maid, but ‘although we have come down a peg’, she wrote, this had ‘the comforting advantage of not always having a stranger in the limited space’.50
Occasionally Franz visited Melitta at the apartment for tea or dinner when Alexander was there, and sometimes he stayed until the early hours. She had now given her young admirer the pet name Spätzchen, or ‘little sparrow’, rather as she secretly called Alexander her Schnepfchen, or ‘little snipe’. She clearly loved them both, although they occupied different places in her heart. Franz was certainly Melitta’s friend, rather than Alexander’s, but Alexander was ‘okay with it’, Melitta noted briefly, before grumbling about his occasional ‘wallows’.51 Whatever arrangement the three of them had come to, Alexander knew that his wife loved him deeply and, so long as her husband was out of danger, Melitta felt that everything else was somehow manageable.
Melitta yearned to stay longer with Alexander, but she was needed in Berlin. As well as her work at Gatow, she was due to be presented with the Military Flight Badge that Göring should have given her with her Iron Cross ten months earlier and which was finally back from the jewellers. The presentation was set for 19 November. Just before first light that morning, Melitta was woken by the deafening rumble of 440 four-engined Avro Lancasters flying in from the west. The RAF had arrived on their first major bombing offensive of t
he German capital. With the city hidden under heavy cloud, damage was limited, but the threat of further action was clear. Nevertheless, ‘on the very afternoon of the first big attack’, Melitta wrote to Lili, a private room was made available at the Gatow airfield mess and the commanding officer presented her with her honour.52 A bottle of sparkling wine and a box of cigarettes were then passed around. When Melitta asked whether she might save her cigarette for her wounded husband, the whole box was quickly pushed her way. ‘The cigarettes please me far more than the diamonds,’ she whispered to the adjutant who had brought them.53 A moment later the siren sounded again; the ‘little celebration’ was over and they headed to the cellar.54
A few days later the RAF made their most effective raid on Berlin, causing huge destruction to the inner city, including several residential areas. Many bombs also fell on the city zoo. One afternoon there were six female elephants and one calf doing tricks with their keeper; a few hours later all seven had been burned alive. Polar bears, camels and ostriches were all killed, while the snakes, whose enclosure was damaged, reportedly ‘froze in the cold November air’.55 The only comfort for the zoo’s stricken staff was that at least these bombs had not fallen on housing. Between January 1943 and May 1945 350,000 Germans were killed by Allied bombing, as well as tens of thousands of forced foreign workers and POWs.* ‘The longer the war lasted and the more fearful the air raids on the Fatherland became,’ Hitler’s photographer Heinrich Hoffmann recorded, ‘the more intolerable grew the atmosphere in Führer headquarters, where the deepest pessimism reigned supreme.’56 For Melitta, the scale of the terror and devastation was unbearable, and she was proud of her part in developing the planes, equipment and techniques needed to intercept the bombers. She often showed her new decoration to friends like Claus’s wife, Nina, who would hold it up for her ‘very impressed’ children to admire.57
