by Clare Mulley
After this close call with death, Hubertus found a new determination. Calling the Buchenwald administration office, he bluffed about his rank and told the secretary that he had urgent orders from Berlin, signed by Himmler himself, to be delivered to the camp commander. The secretary’s resistance crumbled, and among other things Hubertus learned that the prominent prisoners had been sent to Straubing, a small town just south of Regensburg, three days before.
It had been almost dark, three nights earlier, when three grey Wehrmacht military buses had pulled up outside Buchenwald. Marching into the isolation barracks, SS troops rounded up the first groups to be pushed on board. Alexander, Mika, Fey and the other Sippenhaft prisoners were among them. A last group would follow in the back of a small blacked-out truck, powered by a wood-burning stove. Himmler was selecting prominent prisoners for possible release as a sweetener when negotiating terms with the Western Allies. Like many senior Nazis, including Hanna’s friend Otto Skorzeny, he still believed that a reformed Germany, under new leadership, could join a Western anti-Bolshevik alliance against communist Russia. When it became clear this was hopelessly unrealistic, the prisoners’ stock began to fall. As one of them, Sigismund Payne Best, a British MI6 officer who had already spent four years in Sachsenhausen, later wrote, they knew that ‘at any moment an order might come for some or all of us to be gassed, shot or hung’.37
Alexander and the Sippenhaft group eventually arrived at Regensburg, eighty miles north of Munich, but the camp was too full to admit them. When one of the Stauffenbergs joked that friends in the neighbourhood had a castle and would be delighted to put them up, the guards lost their tempers. Eventually they were incarcerated on the second floor of the town’s prison. After devouring some bread and a thin vegetable soup, they called to each other through the grilles on the cell doors. Later they were joined by other prominent prisoners including Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor famous as a vocal critic of the Nazi regime who had set up the defiant German Dissenting Church. The next morning the cell doors were opened so the prisoners could wash, and ‘there was a great reunion in the corridors . . . introductions and exchanges’.38 To the astonished warders, it seemed like a reception for the crème of German society. Bonhoeffer, in particular, was able to give several of the Sippenhaft prisoners news of their relatives from his detention at Prinz Albrecht Strasse prison. Like many, he thought that they had probably now escaped the worst danger.
Not wanting to risk another encounter with American fighter planes, Melitta and Hubertus stayed at Weimar until dusk. The airfield staff had told Hubertus that his unit was at Marienbad, about halfway to Straubing, so he and Melitta agreed to fly that far together.* As it grew dark they liberated an old Siebel Si 204, with a full tank, from the training school. This was a small transport plane with space for eight passengers, originally designed for civilian use but eventually produced for the Luftwaffe. By the time they had it ready, quite a crowd had gathered to watch. The last officers from the school and the women from the weather station were anxious not to be left behind. Terrified by brutal stories emerging from the Soviet advance, and immersed in the racism of the time, the women pleaded, ‘The Americans are coming; there are blacks among them and they’ll rape us!’39
Half an hour later the Siebel took off with about a dozen passengers, their luggage crammed into its tail. Hubertus was again in the pilot’s seat, with Melitta navigating beside him. The wind forced them to take off westwards, towards the American front. With so much weight, however, the tail dragged ominously as they taxied out. They only made it over the airfield’s perimeter fence when Hubertus pressed his feet up against the control column to maximize his leverage, while Melitta furiously worked the elevator trim-wheel between their seats.
Once in the air they circled round to head south-east, flying as low as they dared in the overloaded Siebel. As night wore on, they reached the Bohemian Forest with its hundreds of single-track rail lines and small streams twisting through the trees: one of the most difficult landscapes to navigate without radio. As their fuel began to run low, they recognized the city of Pilsen on the far side of the forest. Hubertus fired up some red flares, requesting permission for an emergency landing, but was answered by more red flares from below, refusing them. All of Germany was on high alert, and without radio contact the airfield was nervous that theirs was an enemy plane. After a few tense moments and the deployment of several more flares, permission was given, the landing strip lit up, and the Siebel touched down. To celebrate their safe arrival Melitta and the female passengers shared a bottle of sparkling wine before the women slipped away. Then she let herself grab a few hours of much-needed sleep.
Melitta woke feeling anxious. Time was passing, nerves were fraying; it was now 6 April and she had still not found Alexander. She could not imagine what value he might still hold for the Nazis at this point in the war and increasingly feared that he was more likely to be quietly executed than released. By eight in the morning she and Hubertus had swapped their Siebel passenger plane for another Bücker Bü 181 Bestmann. Melitta liked this small, responsive aircraft with its good field of vision, which could fly very low, even ‘along every street, close to the ground’, Hubertus felt, letting them navigate by railway signs while staying as hidden as possible. If they were seen by enemy fighters, the Bestmann was slow but, being designed for aerobatics, it could spiral tightly down into any forested area, fly and corner low, and only reappear again when the enemy had sped past.40
They flew first to Marienbad, where Hubertus was to stay. The flight took at most an hour and a half, and passed without incident. In no mood for dawdling, Melitta quickly secured a signed and stamped flight order from the airfield to go on to Straubing. This document records, rather wonderfully, that the same Bücker Bestmann was to be made officially available to Melitta’s Technical Academy, ‘for a special operation, important to the war effort’.41 This unspecified ‘operation’ was in fact a visit to the imprisoned family of the most famous assassin in the Third Reich, and possibly the rescue of Alexander. Melitta was finally looking ahead to the restoration of peace and the rule of law in Germany, freedom for her family, and fulfilling careers for herself and her husband. She just had to keep him alive for a few more weeks, possibly just days, bringing him food and courage and perhaps a way out, while making it clear to the camp guards that these prisoners were valued and under observation, until their surrender documents were signed.
Hubertus sat beside Melitta in the cockpit as she taxied into position, ready for take-off. As they said their farewells and wished each other luck, she suddenly reached into her handbag and passed him the first thing she found, a glass jar of honey. Hubertus was deeply touched. He knew the gift must have been meant for Alexander, but he may have missed the subtle humour it contained. Melitta’s name meant ‘honey-sweet’. She was, symbolically, bringing herself to her husband. There could hardly have been a better metaphor for her life-restoring goodness; it was just the sort of clever gift a classicist and poet would appreciate. Carefully clutching the jar, Hubertus climbed down from the Bestmann. He now wished he could travel on with Melitta, giving her the benefit of another pair of eyes on the sky, but he would have been taking up the precious second seat in her plane. Instead, he watched as she pulled up into the sky, waggling her wings in the fighter-style salute. All being well, by lunchtime or mid-afternoon she would be reunited with Alexander.
But Alexander was no longer at Straubing, or even in close-by Regensburg prison. While Melitta had been securing the onward use of the Bestmann in Marienbad, he and his fellow prisoners had been bussed to an empty school at Schönberg, a pretty village in the Bavarian forest. Here they were locked into classrooms – but the rooms were bright, with fine views down the mountain valley, and there were real beds set in rows, with coloured covers. Their spirits raised, the prisoners started talking again, even laughing. The men turned their backs while the women washed in a small basin. Some wrote their name above their chosen bed.
A few managed to make contact with sympathetic villagers, with the result that some hours later a bowl of steaming potatoes arrived; the next day there were eggs, and a potato salad. None of them knew that they were now en route to Dachau concentration camp, about ten miles north of Munich. Orders for their ‘liquidation’ had finally arrived.
From Straubing, Melitta flew to Regensburg, where she discovered that she had missed her husband by just a few hours. Increasingly frantic, with single-minded determination she managed to secure a Gestapo permit authorizing her to contact the commander at Schönberg the following day. ‘Countess Schenk came here today and was referred to the leader of the detachment in Schönberg,’ this document records. ‘There is no objection to her intended visit to her husband.’42 She spent the night at the Regensburg-Neutraubling airfield, snatching what little sleep she could near the hangar.
The next morning, a Sunday, dawned clear and bright. At Schönberg, Pastor Bonhoeffer was leading a service in one of the classrooms. Suddenly a detachment of soldiers interrupted and, ignoring the protests of the others, bundled Bonhoeffer out, to be taken to the camp at Flossenbürg.* Here he would be given a perfunctory and humiliating trial, and sentenced to death by hanging along with Wilhelm Canaris, some men associated with the Valkyrie plot, and other enemies of the regime. The rest of the prisoners were now guarded by members of the Gestapo execution unit that travelled between concentration camps, ‘liquidating’ those prisoners of no further value to the regime, ‘like a pest officer engaged in the extermination of rats’, Sigismund Payne Best observed.43 Clearly they had not been forgotten by the state, any more than by Melitta.
She was in the air again by seven. About twenty minutes later she was hedge-hopping between the Danube River and a nearby road, navigating south towards Schönberg by the Straubing–Passau railway line. Down below, in the village of Strasskirchen, a wounded serviceman on hospital leave was standing at the door of his house, waiting for his wife to return from church. Intrigued by the sight of Melitta’s plane flying at a height of just ten metres, an unusual sight on a Sunday morning, he stayed to watch a while. A few seconds later, an American fighter roared along in the same direction. Lieutenant Thomas A. Norboune of the US Air Force 15th Squadron reconnaissance unit, then tasked with sweeping railway lines for trains, was also following the Straubing–Passau line. Mistaking Melitta’s unarmed Bücker Bü 181 Bestmann for a Focke-Wulf Fw 190 fighter, and unwilling to miss such an unexpected opportunity, he quickly ‘fired two salvos of about five to eight shots’.44*
A retired railway foreman was dressing at his window, when he saw the same encounter. Melitta was flying ‘in a very leisurely and peaceful manner’, he reported, when ‘suddenly, one or two Me 109s [sic] thundered over and shot at the slow-flying machine. A few seconds later, the slow-flying aircraft turned left a bit, and then spun into a field.’45 There was no sound of an explosion, and no smoke. The railwayman grabbed his bicycle and pedalled over towards the site, joined en route by a French POW who had been working in some nearby fields.*
These two men were the first to arrive at the scene. To their great surprise, they saw a smartly dressed woman in her early forties sitting in the pilot’s seat. Judging by her successful emergency crash-landing, the lack of obvious major wounds and her level of composure, the railwayman did not consider her condition to be critical. ‘She just said, “please help me”,’ he reported.46 Offering reassurances, he and the Frenchman freed Melitta from the wreckage and laid her on the ground. One of her legs seemed to be broken, and her other foot was lying, ‘unnaturally twisted’, to one side.47 As they gently pulled her out, several items fell from her bag including chocolate, some tinned food, and her passport. Inside it read, ‘Countess Schenk von Stauffenberg, Flugkapitän’.48
Leaving Melitta in the care of the French forced labourer, the railwayman cycled off to fetch a local doctor. He was pleased to notice some people from the neighbouring village were already walking over, and by the time he returned with the doctor, the local military had taken control of the site. Since Melitta was being tended to by a Luftwaffe doctor, the local men were dismissed. They watched her being lifted into an ambulance, and saw it drive off towards Straubing. The crash site remained under military guard.
Within a few hours of her emergency crash landing, Melitta was dead. The certificate issued by the medical superintendent of Straubing airbase gave the cause of death as a fracture at the base of her skull. Whether she died consciously fighting for life or fading more gently in the fields and the back of the ambulance is unrecorded. She was certainly weakened by blood loss. Further injuries listed include a ‘severing of the left thigh, fracture of the right ankle, left forearm, and minor head injuries’.49 It seemed that Melitta had been directly hit by the American fire, before her forced landing. That she managed to control her descent at all is testament to her great personal determination and skill as a pilot.
At around ten that morning, the surgeon of Straubing hospital visited his workplace, having heard about Melitta’s plane being shot down. There he watched as ‘a female corpse in pilot’s uniform was brought in by the Straubing ambulance crew’.50 For a moment he could clearly see Melitta’s face, which was unmarked. Her ‘eyes were half open’, he noted, and ‘the facial features not distorted, but peaceful and serious, the mouth closed’.51
In just three more weeks, the war would be over. Against the incredible odds created by Nazi Germany, this official ‘half-blood’, female former prisoner, highly paid and decorated Luftwaffe engineer, test pilot and secret enemy of the regime, had been only hours away from achieving her final ambition. A few miles further south Alexander was comforting Fey as they were pushed back onto the military buses, talking with his fellow prisoners about their likely fate, wondering whether his extraordinary wife would find him again, and lifting his face to watch the clouds scud across the clear blue April sky.
15
LIBERATION AND DETENTION
1945–1946
The shocking news of Melitta’s death reached Alexander four days later. With surprising sensitivity, one of the guards took him into a quiet corridor before informing him that Melitta had been shot down in aerial combat. It was clear that she had been heading towards him at Schönberg. When Alexander rejoined the other prisoners, ‘his face was ashen’, Fey recorded, and he seemed ‘dazed, as if in a trance’.1 She and his aunt Elisabeth sat with him as the reality of Melitta’s sudden death sank in. Alexander had already lost his twin, Berthold, and his younger brother, Claus. The rest of his family was either imprisoned or under house arrest, and his home had been destroyed. His brilliant and courageous wife had been the one person with a good chance of surviving the war. Instead she had been killed while flying to his aid. With so little information, Alexander could only wonder whether she had finally been shot down by an Allied or German attack, whether she was planning a rescue, and whether she had suffered in her final moments.
Unknown to her husband, Melitta was buried the following morning, 13 April 1945. Her body was still dressed in the dark-blue suit she had chosen to put on almost ten days before, and which she had slept in more than once since. The ribbon of the Iron Cross was still on her lapel. Her possessions, including her passport, Gestapo permissions and other documents, a photograph album, and 4,000 Reichsmarks, amounting to all her and Alexander’s savings withdrawn from their bank accounts, were given to the Straubing airbase commander’s personal secretary, Bertha Sötz, for safekeeping. Surprised not to receive any of the jewellery said to have been found with Melitta, Sötz made enquiries and received her rings by return. Any other jewellery had disappeared.
Initially, with no one to claim her body or mourn her passing, Melitta was to be buried in a mass grave with local air-raid casualties. Perhaps out of respect for her contribution as an aeronautical engineer, however, or as the holder of the Iron Cross, Sötz arranged a private burial in the town’s St Michael’s Cemetery. A company from the flying school dug the grave themselves, an
d then attended the interment in the presence of their officers.
Just three days after Melitta was shot down, the US 104th ‘Timberwolf’ Infantry Division reached Nordhausen, the town near the Bad Sachsa children’s home. Nazi-German resistance in the surrounding woods and hills was stubborn. There had been no further attempts to move the Stauffenberg children and their cousins during the confusion of the final weeks of the war, and now they found themselves on the front line. Allied fighters strafed not only the Wehrmacht vehicles in the woods surrounding their buildings, ‘but also the strawberry patch in our garden’, Berthold recalled.2 As the house was exposed, the children took refuge in the cellar where the tools were kept, partially under and along one side of the property. This room reached ground level where there was no hedge or fence, so they found they could watch the planes, ‘mostly American Mustangs or Lightnings – flying past and shooting’.3
Twelve hours later the children heard the sound of big guns, ‘a deep thundering noise’, as Berthold’s younger brother, Franz Ludwig, described it, and knew the American line was advancing.4 Soon they heard fighting nearby and the Wehrmacht soldiers stationed with them shouted that they were going to lose the war. Then, nothing. ‘Finally the door was pushed open,’ Franz Ludwig recalled, ‘and a small soldier came in with his gun ready, looking about, and someone said that there were only children here, and then a second soldier came in and they seemed satisfied. That was it.’5 The Germans had retreated and, after a thorough search, the site was occupied by American troops, staying in every house except the children’s own. The soldiers were ‘awfully nice, and they were all very young’, Franz Ludwig added.6 As well as playing games with the children, they brought them the first chocolate the younger ones had ever tasted, along with other sweets: ‘a luxury for us beyond description’.7
