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

by Clare Mulley

  In February the prisoners were moved again. Carefully clutching their collection of blankets, nails, one pot, and a rusty stove that the men had dug from the floor at Matzkau, they travelled in turn by truck and cattle wagon, winding through a frozen Prussian countryside disfigured by burned-out vehicles, derailed trains and piles of rubble. Sometimes they heard the noise of gun battles nearby. As rumours came that the invading Soviets were killing SS officials, the dynamic between the prisoners and their captors began to change. Sensing ‘the end coming’, Alexander’s cousin Otto wrote, ‘they were often drunk, especially the women’.12 One female guard ‘took on the brittle expression of someone in a controlled but ever-growing panic’, Fey added. ‘Her sharp voice no longer resonated along the corridors. On the contrary, she became quite obsequious. Her fate was our fate, no better and probably worse.’13

  Even at this point in the war, with Germany seemingly in chaos, refugees streaming between towns, and constant air raids, soldiers were still being disciplined, trained and sent to the front, and the Sippenhaft prisoners were being transported hundreds of miles around the country. When they passed close to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, near Berlin, it became clear that Alexander’s uncle, the increasingly weak Clemens, could no longer continue. He and his wife Elisabeth were forcibly taken from their three adult children, and left behind in the Sachsenhausen medical barrack. They knew they were unlikely to see each other again. As the size of the Sippenhaft group got smaller, so their individual hopes for survival also diminished.

  Eventually, in early March, the ‘stench from the crematory ovens’, as Fey described it, told the remaining Sippenhaft that they were finally approaching Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, 170 miles south-west of Berlin.14 Buchenwald covered an immense site, but its hundreds of barracks were overflowing with thousands of starving prisoners. The camp was ‘indescribably filthy’, one Stauffenberg cousin noted, and ‘there was always an air of abject misery and cruelty’.15 Female SS guards carried sticks and whips with which they frequently beat prisoners, especially if orders – given solely in German – were not obeyed immediately. Those prisoners who began to lose their sanity were locked into a single small room, the doors of which were opened only to allow in half-rations of food, or to bring out the dead. ‘The whole attitude of the SS General Staff towards the prisoners was purposely inhumane and brutal. Prisoners were not regarded as human beings, but as something lower than cattle,’ another Stauffenberg later testified.16 At one point Fey watched a lorry drive past, ‘filled to the brim with naked corpses’. The worst of it was that ‘nobody seemed to notice’, she saw with horror.17 Rumour had it that between 200 and 300 people were dying at the camp every day. Certainly over 13,000 Buchenwald prisoners were registered as having died in the first three months of 1945, and that number did not include executions, arbitrary murders, or deaths from disease, exposure or starvation during transports.

  Fortunately for the Sippenhaft group, they were again given exceptional treatment. On arrival at the camp they were pushed through to join other prominent prisoners being held in the ‘isolation barrack’, separated from the rest of the camp by a high wall covered in barbed wire. Foreign dignitaries being held there included the former French premier, Léon Blum, and his wife, who secretly waved to them as they arrived; Miklós Horthy Jr, the younger son of the regent of Hungary, who had been kidnapped by Otto Skorzeny in October 1944, forcing his father to resign; and the former Austrian chancellor, Kurt Schuschnigg; as well as a number of diplomats, church leaders and British POWs. It was here that Fey finally learned of her father’s execution, as well as of his dignity during his trial, but there was no news of her young children. In these traumatic circumstances, the bond that had developed between her and Alexander grew stronger. His ‘sympathy helped cushion my nerve-wracked mind’, she wrote.18

  While the Sippenhaft prisoners were being transported to Buchenwald, Melitta was preparing to leave Berlin. Germany’s capital had endured ‘incessant bombing’ since February, her sister Klara wrote.19 In response, Hitler had ordered the various schools of the Luftwaffe’s Technical Academy to be dispersed to smaller, regional sites. Melitta was glad. For some time she and Hubertus had agreed that ‘we must, on no account, fall into Russian captivity’, and she and Klara had also quietly discussed fleeing westward on foot, if that were the only option.20 Now Melitta arranged for her ‘Experimental Centre for Special Flight Equipment’ – namely herself, her prototype devices, work papers and a few staff – to be relocated to Würzburg. Klara agreed to drive Melitta’s old Ford Alpha, loaded up with the heaviest equipment. She set out one foggy evening in mid-March, accompanied by Melitta’s assistant with her dog. Melitta’s official passes saw them through the many control points on the roads, and they arrived safely the next day. Melitta still had some work to attend to in Berlin-Gatow, and said she would follow by plane, having filed her travel cost claims and arranged transfer of her food coupons. In fact she was sending what coupons she could to Nina in Potsdam.

  It was now Melitta finally learned that Alexander and his family had been sent to Buchenwald. Incredibly, she again managed to wring the required visitor permit from Gestapo head office. Then she packed her Storch with rabbit meat, fruit, vegetables and soya-flour biscuits, clothes with little notes hidden inside, even bed linen – anything she could find that might help keep the prisoners’ bodies warm and their spirits strong. Her plane was unarmed, but perfect for the short-distance landing and take-off she might need to make. With a cruising speed of eighty miles an hour at low level, she could hope to arrive in under three hours, even if she took a circuitous route to skirt round the most dangerous areas. Above the clouds hanging over the city, it was a bright day and there was not an enemy plane in sight, but Melitta cautiously kept the Storch low as she headed south-west. Once out, flying over the countryside, the sunshine sparkled in the windows of the houses, and made the rivers and canals shimmer below her. For a couple of fleeting hours, it could almost have been a pre-war morning, and she once again thought of the plane as her ‘little bird’, for which she would have to find a ‘suitable branch’ to perch upon.21

  Everything changed as she reached Buchenwald. Circling low above the rows and rows of barracks, straining to see some sign of where Alexander was being held and the best place to land, Melitta could not have missed the appalling reality of the vast camp, the purpose of the crematorium, or the dreadful stench hanging heavily in the air. Driven by personal desperation, she chose to close her mind to the horrific scale of the mass murder being committed and focus exclusively on the well-being of those she knew and loved. Touching down in a field, as close as she could to the far barracks where Alexander, Fey and the others had been signalling to her with bits of white cloth, she handed her papers to the guards. Then she waited, bracing herself to see the changes in her husband.

  A few minutes later the gate to the privileged compound was unlocked and Alexander walked towards her. The handsome face she had so often carefully considered was tired and sallow. Alexander’s skin had sunk around his chin and cheekbones. He was ‘all eyes’ and shadow. To Melitta he seemed, at best, a poorly sculpted version of himself, unfinished, the layers not built up, every contour incorrect. Even his uniform looked wrong, hanging from his reduced frame and still torn at the shoulders and collar where his marks of rank had been ripped away. Then he smiled at her, bending his head forward characteristically – a habit developed from being so tall, not the mark of a man who had been diminished. He was still her Alexander, her ‘little snipe’, and she longed to give him books, cigarettes and some bottles of good wine along with the bed sheets and dry biscuits. Instead Melitta gave him news about Nina and their friends, and the progress of the war. Alexander told her about their desperate journey, and the dramatic removal of Clemens and Elisabeth. When, all too soon, he went back through the gate, the others caught a brief glimpse of Melitta in the distance. She waved to them, silently pledging her support. A moment later t
hey heard her plane’s engines putter into life, the Storch circled once more over the woods, and she was gone.

  Melitta knew she was in constant danger of being shot down by the Americans who now dominated the airspace over Germany, but this did not prevent her from flying over to Buchenwald and circling above the camp on eight separate occasions. Down below the prisoners nicknamed her the ‘Flying Angel’ and the ‘Angel of the Camp’, each visit giving them the vital hope that came with the knowledge they had not been forgotten.22 Alexander was the only one permitted to speak with his wife, and then only twice. ‘It was very secret,’ Mika wrote, and rather miraculous.23

  After that first visit, Melitta refuelled at Weimar-Nohra, an airfield a few kilometres from the camp, before flying on to Würzburg, only to find that her and Alexander’s home had been obliterated. The RAF had firebombed Würzburg, like Dresden before it. Five thousand civilians had been killed, and the historic city left in ruins. Melitta and Alexander’s home had taken a direct hit. All Melitta’s art, saved since childhood, all her letters and photographs, all their crockery embossed with the Stauffenberg crest, Alexander’s entire library, so carefully collected over the years: all was lost. What had not been destroyed or burned immediately was looted by their desperate neighbours. ‘Everything . . . has been reduced to ashes,’ Klara wrote to their sister Lili. ‘Not even a pin or needle is left.’24 At least no one had been at home.

  Melitta rescued a few items from the rubble but admitted to Nina that she actually felt relieved by the destruction. It meant she could now focus all her efforts on the prisoners. She quickly arranged for her remaining research papers to be transferred to Weimar-Nohra. ‘There was probably no lever that she did not use to help the prisoners,’ Nina remembered. ‘She employed her importance to the war effort and her personal charms (something which was not in accordance with her inherent, austere reserve) ruthlessly in order to obtain everything possible.’25 Secretly, Melitta also began to organize a refuge within walking distance of the camp, in the hope that the prisoners might be released when the inevitable defeat was accepted.

  A couple of weeks later, she flew over to Sachsenhausen to collect Clemens and Elisabeth von Stauffenberg. Clemens’s heart was very weak, and Melitta had managed to negotiate permission to fly him home, thus preventing him from either dying while in Nazi custody, or falling into Russian hands. The stipulated condition was that she return Elisabeth, his wife, to the Sippenhaft group at Buchenwald en route. After another painfully brief exchange with Alexander at his barracks gate, Melitta flew on with her patient. Calling Elisabeth zu Guttenberg when she landed at Hof, she brought Clemens into the shelter of a wooden shack on the airfield. Elisabeth found Melitta sitting outside, exhausted, but enjoying the feel of the wind on her face. The first of Alexander’s relatives was free. Together they lifted Clemens to his feet. He could barely stand, and ‘looked as though he were dead’, but they managed to get him into a car.26 Melitta then turned to fly on. ‘God be with you always,’ she called. ‘God bless you, dearest Litta!’ Elisabeth yelled back.27 Melitta waved from the cockpit, and her plane lifted off.

  By the end of March the Red Army had penetrated deep into East Prussia. The city of Danzig-Oliva, where Melitta’s parents, Michael and Margarete Schiller, lived, was under threat. Although most remaining telephone lines were reserved for military use, Melitta managed to call her parents, pledging to come and fly them out. But Michael, now eighty-four, could not be persuaded to leave his home, telling her that he ‘trusted in the humanity of the victors’, and Margarete would not leave without her husband.28 Although she was desperately worried, there was little Melitta could do.

  There were now only fourteen children left at the Bad Sachsa children’s home, half of them Stauffenbergs, all living together in one villa. The home had been put under the auspices of military staff from a nearby base. At Easter the decision was taken to move these last children to Buchenwald.* Sent to pack their bags, they were told they were going to be reunited with their families at the camp. Ten-year-old Berthold had heard about concentration camps, ‘if only in whispered tones’, and knew enough to know he did not want to be sent to one.29

  A few days later, the children were bundled into the back of a blacked-out Wehrmacht truck and driven to nearby Nordhausen, where they were to be put on a train for Buchenwald. As they reached the outskirts of the town, a siren howled. The truck pulled over, and the driver and two adults accompanying them threw themselves into a ditch beside the road. Sitting in complete darkness in the back of the truck, the children heard ‘a terrific humming, then suddenly a whistling, and then a deafening crack’.30 Some of them screamed, and a few of the younger ones began to cry. More bombs fell around them, and ‘then it was quiet again’.31 The air raid had destroyed the area around the station, and the station building itself had been reduced to rubble. ‘The Nazis had no option but to take us back,’ Berthold recalled, ‘much to our relief.’32

  In late March, Melitta’s assistant pilot, Hubertus von Papen-Koeningen, had asked his commanding officer at Berlin-Gatow what action they should take in the event of enemy attack. ‘See that you get home safely,’ the general had answered, handing him three or four blank flying orders.33 On Wednesday 4 April, Hubertus and Melitta decided that the moment had come. That morning she managed to telephone Nina, in Potsdam, telling her she had heard that the children were being transported away from Bad Sachsa, possibly to Buchenwald. She did not know that the Nordhausen aid raid had frustrated these plans, but promised to pass on more news once she had it. She also pledged to send Nina her heavy workers’ food supplement ration cards for April, which she posted that afternoon. Amazingly, they arrived a few days later.

  As soon as it grew dark, Melitta and Hubertus prepared the Storch for its final mission. Melitta was wearing a pilot-blue military-style suit under her dark coat, and had fixed the ribbon of her Iron Cross to the lapel. She carried a case packed with food, her washbag and pyjamas, as well as her capacious handbag full of personal possessions, both of which she kept close to her as she climbed into the navigator’s seat. Hubertus was taking the first turn as pilot. He was hoping to rejoin his unit, but as yet did not know where they had been redeployed. The plan was to head first for Magdeburg-East, where the small pilot training school might have information, and then on to Weimar-Nohra and Buchenwald. Shortly before arriving at Magdeburg, however, the little Storch’s engine failed. Hubertus was trained in forced landings. He brought them down gently over a freshly ploughed field, but in the darkness they could not tell in which direction the ruts ran. On touching down, the Storch’s wheels caught in the furrows, flipping it onto its nose before it slowly toppled right over and came to rest belly-up, with both of them still strapped inside. ‘Countess, are you hurt?’ Hubertus asked after a moment. ‘No, not at all,’ Melitta replied, having automatically checked herself over.34 Slowly, they clambered out of the broken plane.

  Half an hour later they flagged down a passing military vehicle. Fortunate to find a lift so late, they hoped for a peaceful night at Magdeburg airfield. As they arrived, however, they were caught in an air raid. In the chaos Hubertus ran towards the silhouette of an anthill bunker, while Melitta found a narrow one-person shelter nearer by, cramming her bags in with her. They met at the airfield mess the next morning. There was no news of Hubertus’s unit but, making the most of their open flight permits, they picked up both breakfast and an unarmed Bücker Bü 181 Bestmann two-seater aerobatic monoplane to fly on to Weimar. As they were now travelling in daylight, they stayed low, mostly only twenty metres above the ground, and hugged every corner of the forests to stay out of sight of enemy patrols. In fact the Americans were only flying over once every few hours, and they arrived in the Weimar valley without incident. From there they flew straight on to Buchenwald, Melitta following the routes she had taken in the Storch.

  Usually, when flying over the camp, she could see people assembled or walking in the privileged barrack’s yard, but this time
there was no obvious movement. Flying lower, she saw with horror that the isolation compound was deserted. The main camp was still functioning in all its misery, but the Buchenwald crematorium had not been able to keep up with the death rate in these last weeks. There were growing piles of bodies stacked against some of the walls. All were stripped, and their skin had turned ‘a dirty grey-green’.35 Even from the air, Melitta could smell the ‘thick and hanging’ odour that clung to the camp.36 She did not know whether Alexander was among the dead, finally executed like his brothers, or whether he had been transported on again. Landing back at Weimar-Nohra, she put through an urgent call to the Buchenwald administration office. The camp commander was not there but a young secretary answered. The prominent prisoners had all been moved, she confirmed, but she was unwilling to say more. Thousands of the prisoners from the main camp were still due to be evacuated before American forces could reach them. It was clear that many were too weak to survive these forced marches, and those who faltered were to be shot. Few people were willing to discuss such matters.

  While Melitta was desperately trying to find out more, Hubertus was outside with some ground staff, rolling the Bestmann under cover. A pair of American bombers, on their way to attack Weimar, saw the activity in the airfield and decided to target the hangars as they passed. Hubertus was retrieving Melitta’s bag and his own briefcase from the Bestmann, when he saw the two planes wheel round. They were Republic P-47 Thunderbolts, large single-engine fighter-bombers, with the American white star painted on their silver fuselage and one wing, and they were heavily armed. A second later the Thunderbolts dived, their Browning machine guns hammering at the Bestmann. The briefcase Hubertus was carrying was shot out of his hands and, with a deafening noise, bullets ricocheted off the stationary plane and around the inside of the hangar. In another moment the Americans had passed overhead. Pulling himself together, Hubertus ran for the relative safety of the airfield buildings as the pair of Thunderbolts started round for a second attack. Later that day he counted 137 bullet holes across the Bestmann’s tubular steel cabin and wooden fuselage: although it had not exploded or even caught fire, it was no longer airworthy. Incredibly, Hubertus himself was unscathed, although two bullets had hit his briefcase, one slicing through the handle, the other lodging in his cigarette tin inside, still carefully wrapped in his pyjamas.