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

by Clare Mulley

  Although unimpressed by Goebbels’ tirades, Greim was not immune from his Führer’s fantastic self-deception. As one of Hanna’s Messerschmitt test-pilot friends, Mano Ziegler, later wrote, ‘the “cause” and “final victory” had become a religion’.71 When Hans-Ulrich Rudel,* the Luftwaffe wing commander with whom three months earlier Hanna had discussed the evacuation of wounded soldiers, telephoned offering to send a plane, Greim told him he had no intention of leaving. Greim then spoke with General Koller, astounding him with his optimism. ‘Don’t despair! Everything will be well!’ Greim reportedly said. ‘The presence of the Führer and his confidence have completely inspired me. This place is as good as a fountain of youth for me!’72 Koller was dumbfounded. Hanna then took the phone, asking him to tell her family that she had had no choice in coming to the bunker, before giving such a ‘colourful and spirited depiction’ of her flight in, and listing her tribulations so thoroughly, that Koller eventually hung up on her, reasoning that the line should be kept free for more important calls.73*

  Later, Hitler summoned Hanna to his study where he presented her with two small brass capsules, each concealing a fragile glass phial filled with half a teaspoon of amber liquid: cyanide. The bottles were designed to be broken between the teeth, and the poison quickly swallowed. News had come that Mussolini had been captured and shot, his body hung by the heels alongside that of his mistress in a public square in Milan.* If General Wenck did not make it through with the German 12th Army, Hitler told Hanna ‘in a very small voice’, he and Eva had decided to take their own lives rather than risk the humiliations of capture.74 After her impressive display of loyalty, Hitler told Hanna that she belonged ‘to those who will die with me’.75 As Hanna understood it, she and Greim were being given ‘freedom of choice’.76 Taking the proffered capsules, she sank into a chair. With tears in her eyes, she asked Hitler to reconsider depriving Germany of his life. ‘Save yourself, mein Führer,’ she pleaded. ‘That is the will of every German.’77 Hitler refused. He had already rejected offers from Hans Baur to fly him out, insisting that he must stand by his post, ready should Wenck yet drive the Soviets back. Hanna felt it was only Hitler’s conviction that his continued presence in Berlin was vital for the defenders’ morale that was keeping him alive. Seeing, with some distaste, that his once famously expressive eyes were now watery and bulging, and his face was ‘flaccid and putty-coloured’, she secretly felt that, even should Wenck arrive, the Führer’s ‘vital energies were by now too depleted to sustain him’.78

  That afternoon Hitler called a conference to ensure everyone knew how to use their cyanide, and had plans in place for the destruction of their bodies. Despite this, Eva kept her phial in the pocket of her elegant dress, telling the women that she wanted to be ‘a beautiful corpse’.79 The meeting ended with spontaneous speeches of loyalty. Caught up in the collective hysteria, Hanna and Greim agreed that, should the time come, they would swallow their poison together, while pulling the pin of a heavy hand grenade held tightly to their bodies.

  The next day, 28 April, Hanna learned that Hermann Fegelein, Eva’s brother-in-law, had been accused of attempted desertion and summarily shot on Hitler’s orders. Although she could accept the idea of voluntary death, Hanna was shocked by this execution of one of their company. ‘Who was betraying whom? Who was against whom? That was the painful question that burnt inside me,’ she wrote.80 It felt as though ‘the very ground beneath my feet was beginning to give way’.81 That afternoon Rudel successfully sent a Junker Ju 52 to collect the new commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe. To Hanna it seemed ‘like a miracle’, but Greim still refused to leave.82

  By evening the Red Army had advanced block by block as far as Berlin’s famous Potsdamer Platz, and the Chancellery building was under direct bombardment. With no sign of Wenck, central Berlin’s defence depended on some 40,000 troops, a similar number of elderly members of the Volkssturm, and around a thousand members of the Hitler Youth.

  Shortly after midnight Hitler arrived in Greim’s sickroom and slumped down on the edge of the bed, clutching a telegram and map. His face was ‘ashen-white’, Hanna noticed, ‘like a dead man’s’.83 ‘Himmler has betrayed me . . .’ Hitler stuttered, his voice unsteady as he spoke the name.84 Having left Berlin one week earlier, Himmler had approached the Allies to discuss surrender terms without his Führer’s knowledge or sanction. Hanna was appalled by the treachery of the man she had so admired. ‘I wished I’d never been born,’ she wrote. ‘Where were loyalty and honour?’85 For Hitler the answer was all too clear. Describing Himmler’s negotiations as ‘the most shameful betrayal in human history’, he ‘succumbed to a helpless paroxysm of rage, full of hate and contempt’.86

  Hitler had also received reports that the Red Army was planning to attack the Chancellery in the morning. A two-seat Arado Ar 96 trainer monoplane had managed to get through. Hitler ordered Greim to fly out immediately, and organize a Luftwaffe attack on the most advanced Soviet troops. He hoped this would give Wenck a further twenty-four hours to arrive. For Hanna, the idea that any relief might still be possible was incredible. Below agreed, later writing that this was ‘the high point of [Hitler’s] self-deception’.87 Greim was also charged with ensuring that Himmler should never succeed Hitler as Führer. These orders were given ‘in a voice charged with uncontrollable hysteria’, one army officer recorded, ‘making it quite clear that Greim’s best course would be to liquidate Himmler without delay’.88

  In a volte-face, Hanna now protested against leaving, while Greim argued they had a duty to pursue their orders. While the new Luftwaffe chief made preparations, Hanna visited Hitler in his map room, petitioning him again to let them both stay. He looked at her for a moment, and said only, ‘God protect you.’89

  Half an hour later Hitler bade Hanna and Greim farewell with a cursory handshake. ‘How hard it is to say farewell when one is leaving the other to certain death,’ Hanna wrote. ‘It is impossible to describe the feeling.’90 Greim was carrying several official letters, and Eva passed Hanna a last note for her sister, Gretl Fegelein. For a moment everyone was silent. ‘This pretty woman with her fresh, positive ways commanded the unqualified respect of all those assembled in the bunker,’ one officer wrote of Hanna.91 Then, as she turned to leave, Magda reached out for her, beseeching her to do everything she could to bring about the relief of the bunker. ‘Regaining her wonderful composure,’ Magda then also gave Hanna letters from her and her husband, to be delivered to her son from her first marriage, along with a diamond ring for Hanna to remember her by.92 It was almost two in the morning, and the six Goebbels children were asleep; Hanna did not see them again.

  When Hanna and Greim left the bunker, the latter half-carried, half-hobbling painfully on crutches, they were met not by fresh air but ‘a billowing sea of smoke and yellowy-red flame’, the distant but ceaseless drumming of gunfire and the ‘wail and crash’ of shells.93 Requisitioning an armoured car, they drove through the Tiergarten, now a mostly treeless expanse of mud and rubble, and down to the Victory Column. The same remarkable pilot who had flown them into Gatow was waiting for them near the plane. Hanna crouched behind the machine’s two seats, and they left immediately, while there was still enough good road to serve as an improvised airstrip.

  Russian searchlights were now flooding the main thoroughfares as well as tracking across the skies above the burning city. Once airborne, the Arado faced a hail of fire as the troops of the Soviet 3rd Shock Army fired everything they had at it, fearing Hitler was escaping. As they passed the Brandenburg Gate, silhouetted against the beams, they were buffeted by explosions but never received a direct hit. From about 20,000 feet Berlin was a sea of flames, ‘stark and fantastic’, then the pilot swiftly climbed and the tiny plane was hidden in the clouds.94 When they emerged again the sky was moonlit and clear. Looking down, Hanna saw ‘the blackness threaded with silver-gleaming lakes and punctured with the red dots of the burning villages that everywhere marked the route of war and destruction’.9
5

  With his last orders dispatched, the Führer turned to other matters. Still in his map room, but now with a minor local bureaucrat to officiate and Goebbels and Bormann as his witnesses, Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun signed declarations that they were of Aryan descent and free from hereditary disease. They were then officially married. After a brief champagne breakfast, the bridegroom dictated his last will and political testament while, above, Soviet artillery churned up the parkland around the Chancellery. Blaming the war on Jewish incitement, and defeat on the betrayal of his officers, Hitler ended his last statement with the injunction that his successors should ‘above all else, uphold the racial laws in all their severity, and mercilessly resist the universal poisoner of all nations: international Jewry’.96

  Despite the importance she always swore she attached to personal honour, at some point during their flight out Hanna read the last personal letters entrusted to her care. Joseph Goebbels was defiant. ‘Alive or dead,’ he told his stepson, ‘we will not leave this shelter unless we leave it with honour and glory.’97 Believing that his vision of a Nazi Germany would yet be manifest, Goebbels felt that the personal sacrifice being made by Hitler, and himself, would prove an inspiring example for future generations. ‘The lies will one day break under their own weight and the truth will again triumph,’ he had written with typical flourish. ‘The hour will come when we will stand pure and undefiled as our beliefs and aims have always been.’98 Magda Goebbels’ sentiments were no less adamant, but she framed them as an expression of love for her children. ‘To end our lives together with [Hitler] is a merciful fate,’ she comforted her son. ‘Is it not better, more honourable and braver, to have lived a short and happy life rather than a long one under disgraceful conditions?’99

  Reading these declarations of honour, loyalty and sacrifice, Hanna understood they had been written not so much for Magda’s son, as for posterity. She was not sure that she wanted to deliver either, but she kept the letters carefully. Eva Braun’s last note, ‘so vulgar, so theatrical’, elicited less sympathy from her.100 Although written to her pregnant sister, it did not mention the execution of Hermann Fegelein a few days earlier. Instead Eva had written that her life had ‘already been perfect . . . With the Führer, I have had everything. To die now, beside him, completes my happiness.’101* Hanna and Greim considered the sentiment, like its author, immature; a pathetic bid for glory as a Nazi martyr that had no place, they felt, in the narrative history of the Third Reich. They had no idea that Hitler was now toasting his new bride, and Hanna later doubted any such marriage took place, commenting that ‘the circumstances in the bunker in these last days would have made such a ceremony ludicrous’.102 Nevertheless, while Frau Hitler sipped champagne at her wedding breakfast, officially by the side of her Führer at last, Hanna was tearing up her last message and letting it fly out into the darkness.

  14

  FINAL FLIGHT

  1945

  A lone Fieseler Storch reconnaissance aeroplane circled in the sky, high above Buchenwald concentration camp and the surrounding beech woods after which it was named. Its stiff-legged silhouette was distinctive as it turned. Alexander, Mika and the other Sippenhaft prisoners arrested after the Valkyrie plot ‘rushed outside’ from their barrack into an enclosed yard, their fellow prisoner Fey von Hassell recorded, ‘and waved with handkerchiefs and bed sheets’.1 It was mid-March 1945, and Melitta was at the little plane’s controls. Seeing the prisoners signalling to her through the foul-smelling smoke blowing across the camp from the crematory chimneys, she circled round once more, looking for a place to land her ‘wing-weary little bird’.2 The Storch’s long legs splayed a little to absorb the shock of impact as she touched down in a neighbouring field. Her own shock at the sight and smell of this vast camp, with its thousands of starving prisoners, was cushioned only by a sense of relief at having finally found her husband.

  Over two months had passed since Melitta had last seen Alexander. He had then been held in Stutthoff concentration camp, in East Prussia, and she had been able to pass on news of the children to him, Mika and their grandmother, as well as food and blankets. Four days later, the Soviets had launched their winter offensive, and Alexander and the other Sippenhaft prisoners were transported away from the approaching front line. None of them knew where they were being taken. Travelling in achingly slow, freezing train carriages, with huge drifts of snow blowing in through the broken windows, the group had to count themselves fortunate. Behind were open cattle cars packed with hundreds of less valued prisoners. At night, the temperature dropped to minus 30°. As people died from exhaustion and exposure, their bodies were pushed from the wagons to join the snow-blown corpses of horses and mules below. Stumbling along beside them were long columns of refugees, many leaving their own dead beside the tracks, the others ‘silent and grim’ as they pushed their way west.3

  Melitta had been working at Berlin-Gatow airfield when her husband and his family disappeared. Despite desperately calling everyone she knew, she found that no one was willing to talk. Rumours had begun to circulate about Melitta’s loyalties, always suspect, and even valued friends were now cautious about being seen to help her. ‘When the news came that your sister-in-law had gone over to the enemy, I had to distance myself,’ Paul Opitz, the Gestapo official who had helped Melitta so much in prison, later told Mika.4 For weeks, the most Melitta learned was that the prisoners had likely fallen into Russian hands, and ‘had probably not survived’.5

  Officially Melitta’s role was still to instruct pilots in the use of her optical night-landing equipment. She had also been commissioned to develop similar technology for the Messerschmitt Me 262, the world’s first jet-powered fighter, and had been assigned a new young pilot to help with the test flights. Hubertus von Papen-Koeningen was the nephew of the former German Reich chancellor, Franz von Papen. He had lost both of his older brothers in Russia and, like Melitta, he was firmly anti-Nazi. Hubertus warmed to Melitta from the moment he knocked on her door, marked Countess Schenk, and realized she was not allowed to bear the Stauffenberg name ‘because her brother-in-law was the assassin’.6 They quickly came to trust one another, and often talked about the regime and the conflict behind closed doors. Neither of them believed the war could last much longer. While Hubertus carried out all the Me 262 tests, using a closed and concreted stretch of the autobahn as his runway, Melitta’s energies were entirely directed towards finding and helping her family. ‘Flying, as well as her technical development work, was completely in the background,’ Hubertus later recalled. As far as he was concerned, ‘one just had to win time until the end of the war’.7 But Melitta knew that for Alexander and the other Sippenhaft prisoners, now witnesses as well as enemies of a desperate and brutal regime, the last days of the war were likely to be the most dangerous of all.

  Melitta’s one comfort was that she could still support Claus’s widow, Nina. Until early January, the heavily pregnant Nina had been kept in isolation at Ravensbrück concentration camp. As her due date approached she was moved, under armed guard, over a hundred miles south to a Nazi maternity home in Frankfurt an der Oder. A few days later the home was evacuated, but a bed was found for Nina in a private Berlin clinic. Here, under the pseudonym of Frau Schank, Nina gave birth to her and Claus’s last child, a daughter called Konstanze, on 27 January 1945.* As soon as she could get away, Melitta cycled over from Gatow with some roasted joints of rabbit and other smoked meat, a pair of men’s trousers and some shoes. As she did not have the required Gestapo visitor’s permit, she pinned the ribbon of her Iron Cross firmly to her jacket. Luckily the ‘astonished’ senior doctor had once served with the Luftwaffe and, recognizing Melitta as an aviation heroine, he let her in.8 A power cut meant that the two women sat talking in the dark, but Melitta was delighted to meet her new niece and Nina gratefully stowed her gifts in the dilapidated hatbox that was now her only baggage. Eight days later both Nina and her baby had caught a raging infection and were moved again, still under guard. Una
ble to stand, Nina was ‘bundled out like a crate of goods’, and sent to a hospital in Potsdam.9

  Unknown to Melitta or Nina, as the war ground interminably on, Himmler had come to regard Alexander and the other Sippenhaft prisoners as possible bargaining chips and ordered that, for now, they be kept alive. Their journey from Stutthof was soon broken at Danzig-Matzkau penal camp, built for Waffen SS officers charged with misconduct. Too weak to walk, they were dragged through the snow and into the yard by existing inmates, and fed on SS officers’ rations. A few days later, they were told they were to have hot showers. Ushered into an enormous room in a barracks at the far end of the camp, they were ordered to strip naked. Again they were spared. The doors were left open and searingly hot water poured from the taps; there was no gas chamber at Matzkau. Even so, it was here that the first of the group died.

  Nina’s mother, the courageous Anni von Lerchenfeld, had survived Ravensbrück, where she had briefly witnessed her pregnant daughter’s solitary confinement. Nina had written to her mother, but had not known where to send the letter. Anni had then survived Stutthof, even though, as Fey von Hassell noted, being from the Baltics ‘she was especially hated by the Nazis’.10 Now the once noted society beauty walked around with her hair unbrushed, wearing shabby clothes and with huge slippers on her feet. ‘People tended to avoid her,’ Fey wrote, ‘because she was so talkative.’11 She finally died at Matzkau from a combination of pneumonia, typhus and dysentery.*