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

by Clare Mulley

  On arriving back at Würzburg with Alexander, Melitta telephoned the Schleissheim airfield to speak with Franz. His plane had crashed a few nights earlier, she was told. He had been killed immediately. ‘Sp. dead, numb and no tears,’ was all she wrote before taking the next train to Munich to learn more from the squadron commander.100 ‘Sp.’ was short for Spätzchen; her ‘little sparrow’. Melitta was devastated. Two days later she started taking prescription sleeping pills. Then her sisters Klara and Lili came to stay with her, taking care of the housework while Melitta worked, mourned, sheltered from air raids, swept up broken glass from her windows, watched a burning bomber crash, and still failed to sleep.

  Franz’s funeral was arranged for 3 February 1944. His family invited Melitta to visit a few days before and Anny, his sister, collected her from the station. They stayed up late that night, talking about Franz. His mother was calm, but his stepfather could not speak without choking up. He had started collecting letters and papers relating to his son, and Melitta transcribed some to keep for herself. As well as bringing a wreath with a stencilled ribbon, she had written a poem for the funeral. The second verse ran:

  It is the wholeness within you that touched me,

  Your heart-rending courage, the love of your personal destiny; an unGermanic tradition,

  Gloriously reborn in you.101

  Melitta did not attend Franz’s funeral, however. Perhaps it was not deemed appropriate that such a well-known woman, whose own husband was still on convalescent leave, should be seen there. Early the day before, she ate breakfast with the family and then quietly took the train back to Würzburg. The following morning she put on a black suit, noted the funeral in her diary, and tried to apply herself to finishing a flight logbook. But her work, and later a film at the cinema, failed to distract her. ‘Useless,’ she commented bluntly.102 Alexander read out Franz’s obituary to her two days later. That afternoon she started a new sculpture, a bust of Franz. She now rarely commented on her test flights in her diary, giving space instead to more personal details. She noted that a friend’s son was missing in action, that an evening gown had arrived by post, and that she would wake up on a wet pillow to find she had been weeping in her sleep. One week later Alexander was posted back to the front. Melitta’s world had fallen apart.

  On 28 February 1944, Hanna was summoned to the Berghof, Hitler’s chalet in the Bavarian Alps. She was due to be presented with a certificate by the Führer, to mark the award, over a year earlier, of her Iron Cross, First Class. Hitler was tired. There were already reports that he could no longer raise his arm to salute the people as he had always done.* His temper was short and his charisma waning. After the formalities were over, he invited Hanna to take tea in the large lounge that offered magnificent views over the Austrian scenery down towards Salzburg. The only other person present was his Luftwaffe adjutant, Colonel Nicolaus von Below.* Ignoring friends’ warnings that any outspokenness could risk her life, ‘I did not hesitate to take this opportunity of putting forward our plan,’ Hanna later recounted. The conversation, however, ‘took a somewhat unexpected course’.103

  Recent developments with the war were not so serious as to justify such drastic measures as suicide missions, Hitler told Hanna. There was no precedent in German history and the German public would not stand for it. To her rising impatience, he then ‘expounded his views on the subject in a series of lengthy monologues, supporting his arguments with numerous illustrations from the pages of history’.104 This was one of Hitler’s standard tactics. ‘The victim found himself muzzled,’ one of his adjutants recalled. ‘Hitler saw to it that he could not open his mouth, launching into long monologues which gave full rein to his own opinions.’105 His stories ‘were certainly recounted in compelling and memorable phraseology’, Hanna noted politely, ‘but on reflection I could see that, while superficially appropriate, they were, in reality, irrelevant’.106

  Hanna had never been fond of lectures. Nor was she particularly good at controlling her temper. She knew there was no higher authority to which she could appeal, however, and that she had just this one chance to make her case. Intervening as politely as she could, she argued that Germany faced a situation ‘without historical precedent’, which ‘could only be remedied by new and extraordinary methods’.107 Sensing resistance from this brave woman, whose broken face now looked up at him, Hitler diverted onto the subject of jet aircraft, one of ‘his favourite digressions’.108 Hanna had been here before, with Göring, and the conversation had not gone well then. She knew better than anyone how premature Hitler was to pin his hopes on jets, which still needed many months of development, at the least. She had reached the end of her tether.* ‘Hitler’, she could see, ‘was living in some remote and nebulous world of his own.’ Momentarily forgetting to whom she was talking or the respect due to his position, Hanna cut him off in mid-sentence, loudly exclaiming: ‘Mein Führer, you are speaking of the grandchild of an embryo!’109

  In the ‘painful silence’ that followed, Hanna caught sight of Below’s face, ‘glazed with horror’ at this unexpected exchange.110 While secretly pleased that the Führer had heard of production delays from another source, his adjutant knew Hitler was ‘convinced he was infallible’ in military matters.111 Moreover not even his most senior advisers spoke to him as Hanna had just done, and women were never ‘allowed to hold forth or to contradict Hitler’.112

  Almost in panic, a moment later Hanna launched in again. It took a while before she realized that although he retained a conventional politeness, she had ‘quite destroyed Hitler’s good humour’.113 The Führer had no more appetite for the facts than Göring had before him. ‘His face wore a disgruntled expression’, Hanna now saw, ‘and his voice sounded peevish’ as he told her she was ill-informed.114 ‘Totally distraught’ that her interview was evidently at an end, she chanced one last request for permission to at least start experimental work so that, when Hitler decided the moment was right, suicide attacks could be launched without delay.115 Wearily, Hitler gave what Below described as his ‘grudging consent’.116 His only proviso was that he should not be troubled with any issues that might arise during development.

  Ten minutes later Hanna was on her way back to the aeronautical research institute. ‘She left behind a long shadow,’ Below commented.117 Although Hitler refused to accept her word about Luftwaffe production delays, he ‘set very great store by her personal devotion to duty’.118 This was fortunate for Hanna. Had her ideas been ‘expressed by a civilian on a Berlin tram’, they could easily have led to denouncement, investigation and ‘resettlement’ in the east.119 As it was, she returned to work beaming. Hitler had approved her plan in principle, and development work could start in earnest under the more acceptable code name of Operation Selbstopfer, or Self-Sacrifice.

  Hanna was motivated partly by patriotism but, despite her misgivings about certain Nazi leaders, she also had an unshakeable faith in National Socialism. In proposing military strategy and engaging others to sacrifice their lives for the defence of the Third Reich, she became an active accomplice of the regime. Yet Milch, Göring, Goebbels, Himmler – and Hitler himself – had not shared her great passion for Operation Self-Sacrifice. According to Below, despite his apparent acquiescence, privately ‘Hitler was completely opposed to the idea of self-sacrifice’.120 On learning of Hanna’s plan, Goebbels felt that she had ‘lost her nerve’.121 Hanna was ‘a very energetic and feisty lady’, he wrote, but in general, ‘you shouldn’t let women be the lead advocate dealing with such important questions. Even with all their efforts, their sense of intelligence will fail, and men, especially of high calibre, would have difficulties allowing themselves to follow the lead of a woman.’122 For Himmler it was the waste of good pilots that rankled, when the country had so few left. To Hanna’s horror, at one point he suggested recruiting her pilots from ‘among the incurably diseased, the neurotics, the criminals’.123 Göring, conversely, would later try to redeploy the volunteers she had recruited, for Focke-W
ulf suicide missions for which they had no training.124 For Hanna, without the perfect men, equipment or training, the idea of sacrifice became ‘repugnant’.125 If, however, the act was ‘noble’ rather than pragmatic, she was certain it was justified. ‘We’re no lunatics, throwing our lives away for fun,’ she told a friend, in what he called ‘her emotional way’. ‘We’re Germans with a passionate love of our country, and our own safety is nothing to us when its welfare and happiness are at stake.’126 Ironically, this last sentiment was one that Melitta might have appreciated.

  11

  OPERATION VALKYRIE

  1944

  ‘Early call, Claus, Berthold, Haeften, finally came to an agreement,’ Melitta scribbled in her little appointments diary on Sunday evening, 21 May 1944.1 Her hair was wet, it was late and she was tired. She knew she had a busy week ahead and should get some sleep, but she wanted to record the moment. Melitta had spent a long day with Alexander’s two brothers and their close friend Werner von Haeften, sailing a dinghy on the Wannsee at midday, sharing a bottle of wine in the afternoon, and then returning with more wine to wash down a rabbit picnic. That evening they had swum together in the dark waters of the lake before heading their separate ways, Melitta walking up through the woods to Gatow, Claus and the others heading back to Berlin on the other side of the Wannsee. Melitta did not expand on their conversation in her diary, but she later confided in Paul. ‘Claus had spoken to her about his intention, and had asked her whether she would be prepared to make herself available to fly him to Hitler’s headquarters,’ he later reported.* There she was to ‘fake an emergency landing’, perhaps due to low fuel, and ‘then wait for him until the deed had been done, and fly him back to Berlin’.2 ‘The deed’ was Claus’s proposed assassination of Adolf Hitler, and the rapid flight back to Berlin was crucial to the plotters’ hopes of success. Although there were numerous potential problems with the plan, and failure would certainly mean the execution of the conspirators, Melitta did not hesitate. ‘She had, of course, agreed to this,’ Paul attested, sighing deeply before adding that he had tried every argument to dissuade her.3

  By the spring of 1944, Claus, Berthold and Werner von Haeften were all key members of the clandestine German anti-Nazi resistance, Widerstand. Claus had first been approached to join a loose network of conspirators in late 1939 by his uncle Nüx. He had declined then, but did not report the incident. Six years earlier he had welcomed Hitler’s appointment as chancellor. He had admired the Führer’s strong leadership if not his middle-class roots, and supported many policies from investment in the military and the annexation of disputed territories, to the restoration of German national pride, as he saw it. A firm believer in ‘natural hierarchies’, Claus was willing to accept some racial prejudice and casual anti-Semitism, but he drew the line at state-sanctioned violence. The brutality of both the Röhm putsch in 1934, when Hitler had consolidated his power by organizing the extrajudicial execution of several SA leaders, and Kristallnacht four years later, had shocked him into questioning the legitimacy of the regime. Over the next year, while counselling Alexander and their mother, Karoline, to keep their criticisms to themselves, Claus had often found himself in sympathy with his brother’s perspective. With the war, however, Nazi Germany’s rapid victories in Poland, France and the Low Countries, combined with Claus’s sense of military duty and oath of allegiance to Hitler, ensured his loyalty to the regime.

  It was 1942 before Claus began to seriously question Hitler’s military leadership, and with it his leadership of the country. The conduct of the campaign in the east had left German forces overstretched, under-resourced and vulnerable to both the enemy and the elements. By 1943 it was clear that the offensive was a disaster and the German position unsustainable. Slowly Claus realized that military strategy had been subordinated to ideology. Only a military coup, he now believed, could bring the leadership change needed to save Germany from the humiliating prospect of unconditional surrender. Claus had also witnessed mass executions, both of captured combatants and of Jewish and other civilians in the villages and densely wooded hillsides of Russia and Ukraine. Fellow officers would later testify that he had protested against these orders, but to no avail.4 Claus was appalled by Hitler’s seemingly insatiable appetite for conflict, his military incompetence, the atrocities being committed and the dishonour brought to himself, the Wehrmacht and the Reich. He finally lost faith in Hitler, and his loyalty to the regime was superseded by his sense of duty to his country. The enforced period of rest that followed his injuries in Tunisia had given him time to reflect. Claus had been in earnest when he had looked up at his wife, Nina, from his hospital bed, his head and hands still bandaged following surgery, and told her with a wry smile, ‘It is time I saved the German Reich.’5

  Able, energetic and charismatic, once Claus had made his decision he became a leading figure in the conservative military resistance. To commit high treason during the last phase of a struggle for what was widely perceived as national survival demanded great moral courage and mental fortitude. At first Claus hoped that a new German leadership would be able to agree peace terms with the west, while keeping their territorial gains in the east.* This required Hitler’s removal but, as a Catholic, Claus clashed repeatedly with those who advocated assassination. ‘Does not the thought torment you, that murder was not our destiny?’ Alexander later imagined his noble-minded brothers asking one another.6 But over time Claus’s position hardened. Tentative discussions showed that many soldiers would feel released from their oath of loyalty only after Hitler’s death. Simply arresting Hitler was not an option; they had to decapitate the Nazi regime.

  Claus never considered advocating a return to complete parliamentary democracy. ‘Leadership should be according to natural ranks (as there is inequality by nature)’, was the way Alexander later summarized his brother’s position.7 But unless there was to be military dictatorship, the Widerstand needed to supply suitable men to take civil office in a transitional administration. Berthold was advising on legal issues to ensure legitimacy; others were trying to create consensus and momentum. In September 1943 Claus was appointed chief of staff of the Reserve Army under General Friedrich Olbricht. Together with Ludwig Beck, Carl Goerdeler and Henning von Tresckow, Olbricht had been developing plans to exploit the existing policy, code-named ‘Valkyrie’, for the Reserve Army to seize control of the state in the event of a civil emergency, such as Hitler’s death.* Under the conspirators’ direction, these reserve forces would not only arrest certain SS officers and other criminal elements in the Nazi elite across the Reich and occupied territories; they would also provide the stability required to push through a full revolution.

  In October, Nina visited Berlin to attend a wedding. When she returned to Bamberg, the picturesque Bavarian town to which she had moved with her young family in order to be with Claus’s mother, she brought a rucksack stuffed full of resistance papers that needed to be burned.* Understanding that the less she knew, the better, Nina did no more than glance at the documents, but one she later remembered was a leaflet by the ‘National Committee for a Free Germany’.8 She now knew that Claus was involved in a major conspiracy against the regime. Later they talked about ‘the necessary assassination’, but Claus never discussed the details.9 Nina understood that Melitta also ‘knew about the plan’.10 ‘The members of the resistance needed support from strong women,’ Claus’s daughter later wrote; women ‘who stood behind them, no matter what’.11

  On 23 December 1943, Claus travelled for the first time to the Wolfsschanze, or ‘Wolf’s Lair’, the windowless mass of concrete that served as Hitler’s military headquarters in the forests of Rastenburg, East Prussia.* His visit provided him with a clear picture of the size of the site, its layout, meeting rooms and existing security measures. Then he travelled to Bamberg to join his family for Christmas. From now on, Nina felt the planned coup ‘always hung over me, like the sword of Damocles’.12 She was almost relieved when her father died at the start of Janu
ary, as she felt it would have been terrible for him ‘to discover that his son-in-law was at the centre of a conspiracy’.13 Some weeks later, she decided to get rid of the 1938 notebook Claus had written for her, full of his early misgivings about the regime. ‘This notebook seemed to me so explosive’, she later related, that she gave it to a friend to hide, ‘together with the post-revolution plans’ that had been prepared.14* Except for Melitta, Berthold and his wife, Mika, there was no one to whom Nina could speak openly, and she was feeling increasingly insecure and isolated.

  How far Alexander was aware of his brothers’ involvement in the resistance is not known. There had never been much doubt about his political views. ‘He was always openly against the regime and had to be cooled down a bit by his brothers,’ Nina later recalled.15 He may even have encouraged Claus and Berthold to resist, but Nina believed that they considered Alexander ‘too much of a security risk’ to include him in their plans.16 In any case Alexander had few useful contacts, so there was little reason to endanger him or others through his involvement. ‘When an overthrow is planned . . .’ Paul later explained, ‘it is a basic rule that nobody should speak, not even a brother to his brother, a son to his father, a husband to his wife, if these people are not active participants.’17 Nina seems to have been an exception, as she had to burn key papers. It was better to get Alexander safely out of the way.