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

by Clare Mulley

  Melitta had been talking to Rudolf Fahrner, the head of the German Research Institute in Athens, since late 1943, to see if he could secure a position for Alexander, away from the front. Now she also involved the other Stauffenbergs. ‘Conversation about Sch.’,* she had noted in early March 1944, after sailing with Claus, Nüx and other close friends on the Wannsee, now their standard rendezvous for discreet discussions. ‘Decided on next steps.’18 The following day she met Berthold at the Aero Club. An Athens posting for Alexander was now definitely on the cards but causing ‘a lot of fuss’, she wrote.19 Claus was far from happy about what he called Melitta’s ‘protective machinations’ on behalf of her husband.20 Perhaps it was a question of family honour, but he may also have been concerned about drawing any undue attention to the family; within the week an attempt was due to be made on Hitler’s life by one of his circle.*

  Eventually, halfway through April, Fahrner managed to secure Alexander a temporary position lecturing in Athens with immediate effect. The occupied city felt very different from the proud capital that Alexander and Melitta had visited in the spring of 1939. Greece was suffering terribly as the Nazis requisitioned food and other resources. Forty thousand civilians starved to death. Tens of thousands more were killed in brutal reprisals for acts of resistance. Lecturing on ‘Tragedy and State in the development of Athens’, Alexander could hardly have failed to reflect on the cycles of conflict and the fierce patriotism of the Greek people, as well as the commitment of his friends that had brought him there, so far from the Eastern Front.21

  Melitta, still in Berlin, was now less safe than her husband, but she had stopped rushing to the cellars every time an air-raid siren sounded. Sometimes she even sat out raids in a friend’s suburban garden. Once, her sisters reported, they stayed on a balcony, counting twenty-eight planes above the capital before watching ‘the downings’.22 With Alexander out of immediate danger, Melitta felt able to breathe again. She kept up her all-important night-fighter development work with Hajo Herrmann, sat sadly with friends talking about Franz, went to the cinema, darned socks, smoked, and waited for Alexander to return to her.

  On Hitler’s birthday, 20 April 1944, German cinema newsreels broadcast uplifting footage to the nation, opening with a handsome member of the Hitler Youth raising the Nazi flag by the Brandenburg Gate. Military bands march past, smiling women cheer, and huge banners and bunting are strung across the damaged buildings. Hitler, apparently in jovial mood, greets the crowds from his car. Later he meets Göring, inspects some troops and shakes hands with the injured. He is wearing his greatcoat, gloves in his hand, and his own salute is low and fast. A map then shows progress with the war in Russia. There are smiling, well-equipped troops; trucks; cattle and horses with a foal. Steam trains puff ahead, laden with arms and equipment; paratroops descend; men with binoculars nod sagely. In one scene, an injured Luftwaffe pilot bravely climbs into his plane, the propeller purrs and he lifts off to join a formation in the sky. The pilots all have beautifully sewn gloves, and their machines have handsome black dials in the cockpit. The triumphant music starts to crescendo as an Allied plane is hit, and finally the German Eagle fills the screen.

  The war-weary citizens of Berlin must have known this was, at the least, an optimistic impression of the state of the country and the conflict in which they were still engaged. Perhaps to cheer or distract them further, a report on the concert to mark the Führer’s special day was broadcast later. A row of highly polished Nazi top brass sit in a theatre box, their swastika armbands running like a single red ribbon woven through their bulk. The camera then pans down to the handsome young military heroes and celebrities in the audience below. There is no sign of Melitta, but Hanna is there, her pseudo-uniform decorated with the Iron Cross, First Class, her diamond Military Flight Badge catching the light. Hanna’s hair is tightly curled, each strand commanded into place. Her face is soft and rounded, almost fat now, and her eyes look tired. She sits absolutely still as Goebbels gives his speech, which, we are told, is ‘greeted with loud applause’ including from ‘a visibly moved Hanna Reitsch’.23

  Once Hitler had given his approval in principle for Operation Self-Sacrifice, responsibility for development had been handed to the commander of the Luftwaffe’s special duties combat squadron. Seventy pilots were required to sign the declaration: ‘I hereby voluntarily apply to be enrolled in the suicide group as a pilot of a human glider-bomb. I fully understand that employment in this capacity will entail my own death.’24 ‘We were all crazy,’ one later admitted. ‘We would have done anything at all to do our part for German victory and prevent defeat. That included sacrificing ourselves.’25 Hanna was among the first to sign, but ‘was persuaded’ by friends to delay her actual enrolment.26 Not only did she lack combat experience, but remaining outside the Luftwaffe command structure protected her useful ability to appeal to any authority.

  Technical preparations were placed under the control of the Reich Air Ministry, and Hanna was appointed as a test pilot for the prototype planes. She started with a small one-seater Me 328 at Hörsching, near Linz in Austria. At first, jet engines were added as power units, but this idea was soon abandoned in favour of an engineless version, to be delivered to the target zone on the back of a Dornier Do 217 bomber. The Me 328 pilot would then detach in mid-air, and glide down into the target. Tests were completed in April, and an aircraft factory in Thuringia was awarded the production contract. Not a single plane would be delivered. Despite ever longer working hours and the use of forced labour at many factories, production facilities were struggling to cope with existing Luftwaffe orders. ‘International law cannot be observed here,’ Milch announced grimly, as he approved the execution of foreign workers who were found to have committed sabotage, or who simply refused to work at aircraft factories.27 Hanna’s project was not a priority, and she came to believe that some sort of ‘official sabotage’ was also taking place, to delay or prevent the Me 328s from being delivered.28 When the Thuringia factory suffered a direct hit, the project was postponed indefinitely. Hanna, however, did not give up.

  Alexander’s Greek lecture tour ended in April, and Melitta flew to Vienna to join him as he travelled back. For two days they walked around the old city, visiting the castle, cafes and theatre, and dining under the arches in the cellar of the famous Stadtkrug restaurant. Alexander had brought her presents of silk and other ‘fabulous things’, she scribbled in her diary, her writing now tiny so that she could fit more in.29 When they were alone he read Homer to her, but mostly, she recorded, he ‘speaks a lot about Athens’.30 From Vienna, they flew back to Berlin together. Alexander’s call-up papers had arrived before them. He was being sent back east. As soon as he left, Melitta collapsed. Her brother Otto and sister Klara rushed over to be with her. Litta is ‘completely crushed . . .’ Klara wrote to Lili, their eldest sister. ‘She can’t find any escape in her work, or in the little joys of spring any more . . . worries sap all her energy [and] she always has the darkest thoughts.’31

  Melitta was depressed, but Hanna was angry. For some weeks now she had ‘bitterly regretted’ not having tested prototypes of a manned V-1 buzz bomb for Operation Self-Sacrifice.32 The V-1 programme had its own budget line and production facilities, and its potential was now attracting the attention of several other committed Nazis. Towards the end of April, Hanna received a call from the notorious SS-Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny.

  An early recruit to the Austrian Nazi Party, Skorzeny had volunteered for the Luftwaffe soon after the Anschluss but, at thirty-one, found he was too old. Instead he joined the Waffen SS, forming his own special operations unit, Jagdverbände (Hunting Unit) 502, in April 1943. After the surrender of Italy, Hitler had personally selected him to rescue Mussolini from Allied custody in an isolated hotel in the Apennine Mountains. In a brilliant operation, Skorzeny led a surprise attack by glider-borne paratroopers who overwhelmed the defenders without a shot being fired. Keen to deliver the Italian dictator to Hitler personally, Skorz
eny flew him out in a small Fieseler Storch observation plane – the same type that Melitta and Hanna often flew. The flare of publicity that greeted their arrival in Berlin won Skorzeny instant fame, decoration and promotion. Even Winston Churchill praised the mission for its ‘great daring’.

  Six months later Skorzeny was assigned to work on the development of special weapons. It was while he was admiring V-1 tests at Peenemünde that he heard of Hanna’s proposals for a manned version of the missile. Innovative, and extremely dangerous, the idea immediately appealed to him. Hanna, he laughed, was ‘as brave as a man’, and he wasted no time in calling her to arrange a meeting.33 Although rather surprised, Hanna invited the commando hero round to her Berlin flat.

  Unlike most of the senior Nazis whom Hanna had met previously, Skorzeny was physically very powerful. His dark hair was swept back from a handsome face not only well weathered, but bisected from ear to chin by a duelling scar. At over six feet tall, in his black SS uniform and with the Knight’s Cross at his throat, he cut an impressive figure. Hanna was not intimidated. She hated bravado and expected the famous man to be, in her words, a ‘blind, ambitious political fighter’.34 When he arrived at Hanna’s flat, ‘she surveyed me critically with her big, flashing blue eyes,’ Skorzeny wrote, and ‘gave me her views quite frankly.’35 Skorzeny went out of his way to be accommodating and Hanna was soon won round, developing an almost unique perspective on the Nazi hero. He was, she said, ‘an individual whose deeply warm-hearted soul and whose altruistic, kind helpfulness stood in strong contrast to his personal appearance’.36 Skorzeny’s tough, dark looks made a good foil for Hanna’s fair slightness but, as the scars on both their faces testified, they had much in common beneath the surface. Both were immensely brave, impatient and determined, and they shared a passionate and unconventional approach to getting the job done. ‘Otto was the male Hanna Reitsch . . .’ the Scottish pilot Eric Brown, who had attended Udet’s wild parties with Hanna before the war, later pronounced. ‘Brash and brave’, and both were ‘dyed-in-the-wool Nazis’.37

  Skorzeny and Hanna soon formed a deep and lasting friendship, and Skorzeny lent his considerable energy and influence to Operation Self-Sacrifice. Like Hanna, he had little respect for the protocols of the command structure. He glibly swept aside all objections to a manned V-1 test programme on the pretext that, as Hanna paraphrased it, ‘Hitler had vested him with full powers and had expressly called for a daily progress report.’38 Hanna did not mention that Hitler had explicitly told her not to trouble him with updates. Skorzeny’s words, gender and status quickly had the desired effect. Within a week, a team of engineers had secretly converted a V-1 into a manned prototype with a single-seat cockpit, no engine but ailerons controlled by joysticks and foot pedals, and cushioned metal landing skids. It was designated the Fieseler Fi 103-R, the ‘R’ standing for its code name, Reichenberg. Hanna, Skorzeny recorded proudly, was ‘overjoyed at my victory over bureaucracy’.39

  Hanna’s operation was back on track, but it was Melitta’s work, developing the techniques and equipment to intercept Allied bombers, that had won the support of Göring and the Reich Air Ministry. Melitta had completed her PhD at the beginning of the year, and had since been working with Hajo Herrmann, Helmut Lent and several younger pilots to develop her ideas.* After she introduced her new night-landing procedures, the Luftwaffe was able to use single-engined night fighters as bomber-interceptors. Although they never had sufficient aircraft available, the results spoke for themselves. It may have been the greatest practical contribution either woman made to the German war effort.

  In May, Melitta was appointed the technical director of a new Berlin-based ‘Experimental Centre for Special Flight Equipment’, with ten staff and a significant budget, as well as considerable equipment and vehicles. Her mandate was to further develop night fighters, with visual night-landing procedures, dive-sights, blind bomb releases and aiming devices for attacking large enemy bomber formations, among other ‘pressing problems’.40 Although there were six people on the board of the new centre, including Hanna’s old gliding friend Professor Walter Georgii, Melitta’s employment contract stated that she would ‘retain complete freedom in the conduct of the duties and the planning of her work’.41 She was to report directly to Göring. It was the pinnacle of the most extraordinary career for a woman in Nazi Germany.* ‘They built a pilot test-station for her,’ Klara wrote years later, still almost incredulous.42

  The doors of the new centre officially opened on 23 May 1944, two days after Melitta had reached her most secret agreement with Claus, Berthold and Werner von Haeften. ‘I have got my own little experimental centre,’ she proudly told her sister Lili, happy to be able to write openly about something.43 Among other distinguished guests, Walter Georgii, Hajo Herrmann and Paul von Handel arrived to sign the centre’s statutes and, in Paul’s case, have a coffee with Melitta. Paul was also in Claus’s confidence and the two old friends had much to discuss. When Paul had to leave, Melitta accompanied him back to the station, prolonging their private conversation for as long as possible.

  ‘Raids . . . constant phone calls . . . too much,’ she wrote in her diary that evening.44 The experimental centre was ‘making a pile of work’, but it was work directed primarily at improving the survival rates of the Luftwaffe pilots trying to intercept Allied bombers, and at preventing the destruction of German cities.45 Melitta was proud of her contribution, and saw no contradiction in joining the clandestine fight against Hitler, the man who had led her country into such a desperate situation. ‘With people whom she could trust not to pass on her dislike of Hitler, she didn’t hold back on her opinion that he needed to disappear as soon as possible,’ the test pilot Richard Perlia later wrote.46 ‘She didn’t make a secret of her oppositional views; she had the best connections to “the top”, to the head Nazis, who had “to be eliminated”.’47*

  It was a warm, clear day when Hanna flew Skorzeny over to Lärz to watch the first manned V-1 test flight. They had to fly low, ‘hedge-hopping’ over the fields to avoid detection by any enemy aircraft prowling overhead, but Hanna was in fine spirits. ‘I could hardly believe my ears when she began to sing, at the top of her voice, the folk songs of her native Silesia,’ Skorzeny later recalled with amusement.48

  Various test and training versions of the manned V-1 had now been developed. Some had twin seats and dual controls for instructor and student, while others were single-seaters. Most had power units and all had landing skids, but landing even an unarmed V-1 remained extremely hazardous. ‘Pilots of an average ability could never be certain of surviving the attempt,’ Hanna wrote bluntly.49 The final, operational, model was powered by the standard pulse-jet engine housed just behind the pilot’s head, and had almost 2,000 pounds of high explosives packed into the nose. This version had no flaps or skids, as it was not designed to land. ‘Its first flight’, as Hanna put it, ‘would also, inevitably, be its last.’50 At best, a pilot might hope to parachute out at the last moment, but essentially it was a suicide weapon, a manned version of an early cruise missile.

  By the time that Hanna and Skorzeny reached Rechlin, a prototype V-1 was already ‘nestled’, as Skorzeny described it, under the wing of a Heinkel He 111 bomber, ready for take-off.51 All went well as the Heinkel lifted from the ground and began its ascent. When the V-1 pilot detached his machine from the bomber, Hanna watched it ‘drop away . . . like some small, swift bird’.52 The V-1 flew at twice the speed of its Heinkel mother-plane, tearing away through the sky. After a few wide circles it began a smooth descent. Suddenly the pilot lost control. Moments later the V-1 crashed to earth, its point of impact marked by ‘a column of black smoke rising in the summer air’.53

  While most of the observers still stood watching in horror, Skorzeny impatiently called for another test pilot, before striding off.54 ‘Always a gentleman . . .’ Hanna later defended him: Skorzeny ‘demanded more from himself than from his men . . . [and] won the hearts of the soldiers committed to his care’.55
Incredibly, although badly injured, the V-1 pilot had survived. The crash was blamed on manual error. A second attempt, the next day, brought a similar result. According to Skorzeny, when the Air Ministry ordered an end to the programme, Hanna ‘could scarcely hold back her tears’.56

  She would later claim that her initial offer to test the V-1s herself had been rejected on the grounds that ‘this was a man’s job’.57 Now that the men had failed, she volunteered again. Few pilots had her experience of landing dangerous high-speed gliders like the Me 163, she told Skorzeny, and the project engineers were prepared to let her fly without official clearance. ‘Nothing doing, Hanna,’ he told her. ‘If anything happened to you, the Führer would tear me to pieces himself!’58 But Hanna was determined and Skorzeny, the SS special ops hero, was shamed by her courage. The next day she was strapped into the V-1 cockpit, ready to be taxied into the air.* ‘I do not think I was ever in such a fluster . . .’ Skorzeny wrote, as when ‘the airscrews began to turn’.59

  Despite her rubber-lined leather helmet, Hanna must have been deafened by the noise of the Heinkel’s engine and the battering of the slipstream on the V-1 as she was dragged into the air. Nevertheless, her release was perfect. As the V-1 engine began to stutter, Hanna dropped from her host and pushed the tiny missile to its cruising speed of around 375 mph. ‘The handling of the machine and its beautiful circles soon showed what an amazing pilot this girl was,’ Skorzeny noted in admiration.60 Nevertheless he still broke into a cold sweat as Hanna brought the V-1 spiralling down. Since the missile was not designed to land, once the engine cut out she found it cumbersome, gliding down steeply, ‘like a piano’.61 Moments later she managed a fast but smooth touchdown on her skids, blowing up clouds of dust across the tarmac. ‘Nothing wrong with it at all,’ she proudly told the engineers who rushed up to meet her.62 Milch reportedly ‘turned pale’ when told of the unauthorized test but, as Skorzeny emphasized, ‘both the idea and the machine had been vindicated’.63 ‘Passed without incident,’ Hanna recorded simply in her flight report.64 She and Skorzeny were jubilant, and the project was given clearance to proceed.