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

by Clare Mulley

  It must have been a relief for Hanna to discuss aviation with someone who shared her passion. Once she began to talk, however, she quickly digressed. Eric could see that she was in ‘an emotional state’.49 She had not long since learned of her father’s ‘slaying of all the females in his household’, he bluntly recalled.50 He decided to let her talk on. In any case, ‘when she started talking you couldn’t stop her’, he said. ‘It was a cascade.’51 At one point Hanna ‘gushed out’ information about the key players in ‘ODESSA’, the affiliations of former SS officers who she was sure would eliminate anyone they believed had committed high treason against the Third Reich.52 She was more worried about having said too much to the Americans, she told Eric, than she was about being accused by them of cooperating with the regime. Eric was convinced she had many more contacts than she later chose to make clear; she never mentioned ODESSA again. She also ‘spoke of Udet dispassionately, without any sign of loyalty’, Eric felt, and then told him of her journey into Hitler’s bunker, ‘a saga of pure courage’.53 To Eric it was clear that Hanna’s ‘devotion for Hitler was total devotion’.54 ‘He represented the Germany that I love,’ she told him.55

  Hanna also denied the Holocaust. When Eric told her that he had been at the liberation of Belsen, and had seen the starving inmates and piles of the dead for himself, ‘she pooh-poohed all this. She didn’t believe it . . . She didn’t want to believe any of it.’56 Such denial was painful for them both, but Eric found that ‘nothing could convince her that the Holocaust took place’.57 Hanna was, he concluded, a ‘fanatical aviator, fervent German nationalist and ardent Nazi’.58 Above all, he later wrote, ‘the fanaticism she displayed in her attitude to Hitler, made my blood run cold’.59

  Hanna was now placed under house arrest in her family’s old rooms at the Schloss Leopoldskron. At first Captain Robert Work, the sympathetic head of the US Air Force Intelligence Unit, and his colleagues, simply helped her sort through her family’s possessions. She saved only some of her mother’s poetry, family photographs and letters.* She was also allowed to cycle over to their graves. Once, on learning that her and Melitta’s former colleague, Professor Georgii, was being held just across the German border, she made an illicit trip over to visit him. Not long after, she was moved for interrogation. Before she left, Hanna’s occasional wartime secretary, Gretl Böss, managed to visit her. During their half-hour alone together, the two women exchanged watches so that Hanna’s, a gift from Udet years earlier, would be kept safe. With it, Hanna also secretly handed over her cyanide capsule.

  Hanna was then transferred to another well-appointed villa, where she was gently questioned by Work. She ‘carefully weighs the “honor” aspects of every remark’, he commented. ‘The use of the word amounts practically to a fetish complex . . . and is almost an incongruous embodiment of her entire philosophy. Her constant repetition of the word is in no manner as obvious to her as it is to the interrogator, nor is the meaning the same.’60 For Hanna, ‘honour’ had become the overriding virtue that exonerated any lapse of judgement, however serious, but at the same time it was reduced to a simple code of loyalty. Ironically, this was a code she had often chosen to defy during the war when it suited her, but which she now embraced to rescue her conscience.

  Work also recorded that Hanna still ‘held the Führer in high esteem’.61 Shocked by her impressions in the bunker, she reasoned that Hitler must have suffered a personality disorder in his last months, as a result of medicines prescribed by his doctors. ‘Hitler ended his life as a criminal against the world,’ she told Work. ‘But he did not begin it that way.’62 Hanna had not lost her faith in the early ideals of her Führer. Nor did she condemn the Nazi regime’s fundamental racism. All she conceded was that Hitler had proved a poor soldier and statesman. ‘Strangely enough,’ Work noted, ‘she does not appear to hold him personally responsible.’63 Instead she argued that ‘a great part of the fault lies with those who led him, lured him, criminally misdirected him, and informed him falsely’.64 Ultimately, Hanna argued, Hitler’s unchallenged power turned him from ‘an idealistically motivated benefactor to a grasping, scheming despot’.65 In her analysis, it was essentially the system, and the advisers, who were at fault.

  Hanna would later provide a damning condemnation of Göring and his ‘morphine-sickened egotism’, as well as considerable information on her aviation test work.66 Her declarations that ‘the people must know what sort of criminal Göring was, a criminal against Germany and a criminal against the world’, led Work to hope she might become an ambassador for reconciliation in post-war Germany.67 She had, after all, never become a member of the Nazi Party. As a result he treated her with kid gloves, leading Eric Brown to comment that ‘she made a fool out of him’.68 In fact Hanna’s criticisms remained focused on Göring for misusing the Luftwaffe and deceiving Hitler. She did not express any wider disillusion with the regime. ‘Every life lost on either side . . . is, in her opinion, to be unquestionably chalked up against Göring,’ Work closed his report incredulously.69 Even ‘Hitler’s crime, was that he did not possess the necessary insight to realize the incompetency of Göring.’70

  Above all, however, the Americans wanted Hanna to provide confirmation of Hitler’s death. Soviet intelligence had found the charred remains of his body within days of taking Berlin. Stalin was not convinced, however, and stories began to circulate that the Führer had managed a last-minute escape. Hanna dismissed the suggestion contemptuously. She believed he had been too ill to live long anyhow. ‘Hitler is dead!’ she told Work. ‘He had no reason to live, and the tragedy was that he knew it well.’71 Although Hanna refused to provide a report on this, Work believed she answered his questions ‘with a sincere and conscientious effort to be truthful and exact’.72 His interrogation report on the matter would later join the supporting documents at the Nuremberg war crimes trials.*

  Greim was officially arrested on 22 May. If it was a moment to take stock, his position was not heartening. His foot had never fully healed and his health was wrecked. His air force was destroyed, his country in ruins and his cause discredited. Two days later he bit on the cyanide capsule given to him by Hitler. He was dead within minutes.

  Hanna believed that Greim took his life to avoid having to testify at the Nuremberg trials against Göring, the man who had blocked his career, and who he held responsible for the destruction of the Luftwaffe.* ‘I am sure that Greim was not able to reconcile his honour as a soldier with giving the information he would have had to give regarding the despicable traits and blunderings of Göring,’ she told Work.73 Further motivation might have come from the fear he might be selected for a prisoner exchange with the Russians, and face torture and execution.

  Greim and Hanna had planned a joint suicide when Hitler had given them their lethal cyanide capsules. Once they had left the bunker, however, Hanna feared that taking their lives together might imply a romantic relationship, besmirching the honour of both. Hanna’s Austrian cousin, Helmut Heuberger, believed they had a ‘friendship based on deep love, in my opinion the greatest love. But it was never physically consummated.’74 Greim was married, and it is possible that his and Hanna’s sense of honour might have either restrained them, or provided a convenient excuse. Either way, their esteem for each other was certainly absolute. ‘Our gratitude, respect and loyalty to him know no boundaries,’ Hanna later wrote to a friend. ‘His whole being and personality had earned our reverence.’75 Hanna was not with Greim when he chose to end his life, but neither was she surprised by his decision. With almost everyone she cared for gone, she was only waiting a decent interval, she told herself, to avoid the scandal of an apparent suicide pact.

  A few days later, still in American custody, Hanna allowed herself to be driven to Greim’s grave, in the same Salzburg cemetery where her family was buried. In the car, her escorting officers showed her photographs from Dachau concentration camp. Hanna’s immediate response was not recorded. If she thought again of Peter Riedel’s Majdanek leaflet, t
he labour camps at Peenemünde or Eric’s testimony from Belsen, or if she questioned her own complicity with the regime responsible for such crimes, she did not publicly admit it. Later she again claimed not to believe in such atrocities. She then paid her last respects at the grave of the man she had most admired in life. It was a privilege denied many millions of others under the regime they had both supported so fervently to the end.

  While in the Salzburg cemetery, Hanna recognized another woman at the gravesides. Leni Riefenstahl was the film director who had become Hitler’s most famous chronicler of the Third Reich. Hanna had first met her at the Berlin Olympics in 1936 when Riefenstahl was making her remarkable film about the games. They had shared a growing status as Nazi female celebrities ever since. When Riefenstahl came over, Hanna took some crumpled papers from her pocket and pressed them into her hands. ‘Read this letter,’ she said. ‘It may be taken away from me, and then no one but me will know what it says.’76 It was one of the Goebbels’ last letters from the bunker. Hanna was now determined to ensure that these made the historical record. Riefenstahl then asked whether Hanna, who she described as a ‘small, frail woman’, had really intended to be a suicide pilot.77 Hanna proudly confirmed it. She then reported Hitler’s objection to the operation as being that ‘every person who risks his life in the battle for his Fatherland must have the chance for survival, even if it is small’.78 Hanna was still defending her Führer’s ideals. She could not accept that he and the regime had betrayed the German people, any more than that they had been responsible for war crimes.

  Looking at Greim’s final resting place, and talking with Riefenstahl about their country and the decisions and reputation of the regime, Hanna came to a decision. As she hugged Riefenstahl goodbye, she decided she would not, after all, take her own life. She had always believed herself to be part of a solution, a force for good. Now she decided she would give herself once more to Germany, to help restore some national dignity and pride in the weeks, months, even years after defeat. Hanna now told her US interrogators that she planned ‘to tell the truth about Göring, “the shallow showman”; to tell the truth about Hitler, “the criminal incompetent”; and to tell the German people the truth about the dangers of the form of government that the Third Reich gave them’.79 But Hanna was either incapable of telling the truth, even to herself, or she was cynically lying. When the Americans organized a press conference for her to publicly repeat her denunciation of Hitler’s military and strategic leadership, she instead defiantly asserted that she had willingly supported him, and claimed she would do the same again.

  Alexander’s elderly mother, Karoline von Stauffenberg, had spent the last months of the war under house arrest at the family schloss in Lautlingen. French forces arrived in mid-April and, after some desultory fighting, the town surrendered. As the unofficial head of the local community, Karoline received the French commanding officer in her little dressing room, between the sink and a table. At his request, she agreed to a small clinic being installed at the house, and the Red Cross flag was raised above the roof. When more French troops arrived, shops were looted and there were reports of rapes, Karoline provided refuge for the terrified villagers. She was also required to host a large number of evacuated Gestapo families.

  In early June, Karoline’s sister, Alexandrine, the children’s great-aunt and a former Red Cross nurse, persuaded the French military commander to lend her his official car with French number plates and a precious tank of petrol. She then drove over three hundred miles through two Allied zones to Bad Sachsa, the last place where Melitta had reported the children were being held. When she arrived, on 11 June, she found the home empty. It was only when she reached the last villa that she heard young voices. All fifteen of the missing children were there. They ‘cheered and surrounded their [aunt] immediately’, Konstanze later wrote.80

  Bad Sachsa would soon be transferred to Soviet control. ‘The Russians were the key word for terror,’ Franz Ludwig recalled. ‘They were a menace . . . a cause of absolute fright.’81 The irrepressible Alexandrine quickly stowed Berthold, Heimeran and Franz Ludwig in the French car, and organized a bus, powered by methanol, to follow behind with the other children. A few hours after they left, the Soviets moved into Bad Sachsa, prohibiting any further movement.

  Driving back, Alexandrine passed the notorious Dora labour camp and the Mittelbau factory where the V-2 rockets were assembled by prisoners forced into slave labour. Berthold would never forget the entrance to the underground works so close to where he had been living, where so many had died for the Nazi vengeance-weapon programme. Alexandrine then told the boys about the actions taken by their father, uncle, other family and friends. Berthold and Heimeran already had a vague idea, but for Franz Ludwig it was ‘quite astounding’.82 All the children were also astonished by the devastation of their country. This was not a Germany they could recognize. The following day, against all the odds, the children of Hitler’s most famous would-be assassin arrived safely home, thanks to two aunts: one a determined elderly veteran of the Red Cross, the other a courageous part-Jewish holder of the Iron Cross.

  A few months earlier, after the news of Melitta’s death had reached Alexander in April, the Sippenhaft prisoners had been moved on again, eventually arriving at the gates, watchtowers and high-tension wire fences of Dachau. Here the men were lined up against the wall of a brick building to be drafted into the Volkssturm, the people’s militia created in the last months of the war for civil defence. Several of the women cried as the men were taken away. It was obvious that such weak people could not form an effective fighting force and they feared they would simply be executed.

  By the time Dachau was evacuated ten days later, the Sippenhaft prisoners had been reunited. Together they watched column after column of prisoners marching out of the gates in their wooden clogs. Some were too weak to walk and collapsed onto their hands and knees. If they did not get up when the guards shouted at them, they were shot through the back of the neck. The prisoners were then herded onto buses and driven in convoy across the Alps into Italy. Their SS guards had orders to shoot them should there be any risk of their falling into Allied hands.

  Eventually they arrived in the southern Tyrol, where a delicate ceasefire had been negotiated. Here some of the prisoners managed to make contact with a few senior Wehrmacht officers, who sent a company of soldiers to disarm their SS guards and claim responsibility for them. ‘At times it was not quite clear who was planning to shoot whom,’ one of the prisoners later wrote. ‘Would the SS shoot the prisoners, would the soldiers shoot the SS, or would the Italian partisans, who were beginning to appear along the ridges and hillsides, shoot the whole lot of us?’83 A week later the first American troops arrived, and the SS disappeared in the night.* ‘Within a short time the entire place was crawling with jeeps and young American soldiers in their clean uniforms,’ and the prisoners were handed over.84 It was 4 May. Their liquidation, they discovered, had been set for 29 April, and the last, oddly shaped vehicle in their convoy had been a mobile gas chamber, able to poison passengers with the carbon monoxide from its own exhaust fumes.

  The Americans had little idea who it was they had saved, but they understood they were VIP prisoners of the Nazis, and ‘showered us with cigarettes and chocolates and . . . hundreds of tins of good American food’, Fey wrote.85 ‘We couldn’t quite join in the victorious mood of our foreign friends and the American soldiers,’ Anna-Louise Hofacker, another of the group, later recalled. ‘At the same time we were free, and on the side of the defeated.’86 Driven first to Verona in the bright May sunshine, they were then flown to Naples before being transferred to the Hotel Paradiso in Capri. Here they were kept under guard for over a month while their stories were verified.

  Walking round Capri together, Fey felt that she and Alexander at last found ‘a kind of inner peace’.87 Towards the end of their enforced stay, Alexander suggested they visit the small chapel. As he sat playing the organ, Fey found she could not stop her
tears. She knew that she would soon be rejoining her husband, and she still hoped to find her sons, but ‘the thought of leaving Alex, who was in many ways so helpless and who had lost so much, made me immensely sad’, she wrote.88 Fey later confided to a close friend that theirs had been a ‘love affair’, and Alexander had hoped to marry her.89 When he said farewell, he gave her a last poem: ‘You are mine, I shout it to the winds,’ he had written.90*

  Alexander and Mika eventually arrived in Lautlingen the day after the Stauffenberg children returned, astounding everyone by pulling up in ‘a great Mercedes car’ loaned to them by the cardinal of Munich.91 Mika and her children were overwhelmed to be together again, and Alexander was deeply moved to see all his nephews and nieces. With him he brought the shocking news of Melitta’s death. The children now grieved for their ‘shot-down aviator aunt’, as well as for their fathers, uncles and great-uncle Nüx, all executed by the Nazis.92 It was only when they were at their peaceful Lautlingen home again that the reality of what had happened sank in. Perhaps worst of all for Berthold, Heimeran, Franz Ludwig and Valerie, there was still no news of their mother.

  Nina was alive, but since July she had been stranded in a small town in Bavaria, near the Czech border. It was another month before she managed to reach Lautlingen. She walked up to the house dressed entirely in black, still with her battered hatbox but now also carrying her young baby, Konstanze, in her arms. She ‘still possessed much of her exotic charm’, a cousin wrote, but not surprisingly after the shocking death of Claus, her long months of imprisonment and lonely childbirth, ‘she looked worn and far older than her years’.93 Karoline was astonished that the Gestapo had not murdered her son’s wife. Nina’s survival was due not only to her potential value as a prisoner, but also to Melitta’s support, her own impressive resilience, and luck.