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

by Clare Mulley

  Soon Hanna was offering support to defendants at ongoing military tribunals. She felt, as many did, that the trials were driven by revenge. Under the stated motive of working ‘against mutual hatred’, she argued that ‘if military leaders are made accountable . . . for the sake of justice and not out of hatred, revenge and feelings of superiority over the powerless, the military leaders of other nations must be held responsible too.’25 Although she attended several of the trials, she was disappointed not to see her friend Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk. She later learned he had been sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. ‘The suffering! The injustice!’ Hanna wrote to Luise Jodl, whose husband, an injured survivor of Claus’s assassination attempt, would be found guilty of crimes against humanity, and later executed. ‘Your pain and my pain are the most holy thing left to us,’ Hanna continued, adding that most of the defendants, ‘especially the most worthy of them, carried their martyrdom with pride – most heroically’.26

  Among those to whom Hanna lent her support was the commando officer Otto Skorzeny. Calling for him to be helped rather than condemned, Hanna wrote a ‘solemn declaration’ that Skorzeny had suffered when the honest principles of the SS had been turned into dishonest crimes by their leaders.27 Skorzeny was acquitted. Hanna also spoke up for the popular Luftwaffe field marshal ‘Smiling’ Albert Kesselring, whom she praised for ‘his chivalry, humanitarianism and fairness’, despite a war crimes record which included the exploitation of Jewish slave labour and massacres in Italy committed by troops under his command.28 Kesselring was sentenced to death, later commuted to life imprisonment. Hanna sent him a signed photograph of herself with a letter presenting her life as ‘one long struggle for truth and honour, for understanding, reconciliation and peace’, despite all the ‘terrible things [happening in] our homeland’.29

  In May 1948, Hanna was herself arrested while attempting to cross into Austria illegally. Despite her oft-repeated passion for honesty, she lied to the border officials and signed her statement under a false name. When later questioned, she said she had no choice, given the potential damage to her reputation. She was kept in a cell overnight, with a straw sack to sleep on and an open bucket to share with seven ‘vicious’ female prisoners. Three of the women were pregnant, ‘whores all of them’, Hanna decided.30 To win some goodwill, she shared out her cigarettes and sandwiches. When they began to talk, she noted earnestly that ‘each woman recognizes the spark of the Madonna that God laid in each female being’.31

  The next day, Hanna admitted her identity to the local police chief, whose ‘good, clear, earnest eyes’, she wrote, reassured her that he had been sent by God to save her.32 She claimed she had been trying to visit her family’s graves, helped by a ‘heaven-sent’ young glider pilot.33 Later she decided she could also speak honestly with a judge, despite the ‘strong Jewish element’ she noted in his features, ‘because his eyes expressed goodness and purity’.34 She was now not only anti-Semitic, but also delusional. She wept at being told she could not return to her cell to ‘save’ her fellow prisoners. Then, having been allowed to visit the graves, she came back with food, toiletries and fifteen of her mother’s religious poems which she recited through her tears. Eventually she returned home, happy in the belief that she had accomplished much good work planned by God.

  American intelligence suspected Hanna might have been helping former Luftwaffe personnel flee to Austria, and arranged a sting to see whether she would aid their agent, who posed as having escaped from internment. Although she agreed to see the man, questioned him closely, gave him food and ‘began to weep for the hardships which the imaginary escapees had to endure’, the operational report recorded, when pressed for further help, she regretfully replied that she ‘had no means to do so’.35 The Americans could only speculate that despite being ‘very suspicious’, the ‘plainly nationalistic’ Hanna would have given any assistance in her power.36 Nonetheless, her record was technically clear.

  While Hanna was being closely monitored by Allied intelligence services, once they had been cleared and released home, very little official interest was shown in the family of Hitler’s most famous would-be assassin. Because their Bamberg home had been badly damaged during the war, Claus’s widow, Nina, lived at the Lautlingen schloss for several years. It was here that she nursed her baby Konstanze, and sat with her mother-in-law and the older children, listening to the Nuremberg trials on the radio. Klara managed to visit her sister’s grave at Lautlingen in the autumn of 1945. Her in-laws embraced her into the family. The children knew Klara as ‘Tante Pims’, remembering her as ‘charming, lovely’ and, as an engineer and nutritionalist, ‘very, very clever’.37 For the next couple of years, Lautlingen ‘became my second home’, Klara later wrote. ‘In this way, Litta continued to give me much inner strength, even after her death.’38*

  At the end of 1945 Nina was granted a small pension by the German administration in the French occupation zone. In this she was luckier than most of the widows of those involved in the assassination attempt. Germany’s post-war bureaucrats had unearthed a law according to which civil servants were only entitled to a pension if they had not been found guilty of ‘a capital offence, such as murder’.39 The enthusiastic application of this law was no mistake. For many years, members of the resistance were widely considered to have betrayed their country, and their children were often labelled ‘a poor traitor’s child’.40 As a result, many of the women whose husbands had bravely opposed the criminal regime were forced to challenge their automatic disqualification from the pension lists.

  Soon after Melitta had been reburied, Alexander joined Rudolf Fahrner at his estate on the northern shore of Lake Constance, where he and Melitta had married. Alexander would often return here over the next three years, walking, talking with friends and writing poetry, invariably with cigarette in hand, until he felt able to face the world again. His poem ‘Litta’, unpublished in his lifetime, opens with the beauty of reflection, but ends on a note of bittersweet grief. Although the war was over, these were possibly the darkest and most difficult years of his life. Devastated by the death of his wife and brothers, he also felt that his personal honour had been tarnished. Although Alexander had been the first to speak against the regime, his family had shielded him while they risked their own lives. ‘Litta’ not only celebrated those Alexander loved; it was also, he wrote, ‘my ripe song of anguish’. The poem closed:

  ‘On the Field of Honour’, the message was announced,

  And with the pair of brothers gleams

  Before us your victorious face . . . 41

  Alexander’s thoughts might linger with the dead, but he still had many friends who had also suffered and who now stood by him. As Nina had hoped, he became baby Konstanze’s godfather, but they met only at occasional family reunions. Konstanze would mainly remember how kind, and how tall, her godfather was. For a while he and Klara were close, sharing their grief. When Alexander gave her one of his books, inscribed, From the depths of my heart, Alex, Klara found he had slipped a copy of his poem, ‘Litta’, handwritten in blue-black ink, in between the pages.

  Alexander also wrote long letters to Fey, now reunited with her husband and two young sons in Italy. These were ‘at first rather sad’, Fey felt, reflecting on the ‘terrible personal losses he had suffered’, and expressing nostalgia for the days they had spent together after liberation, before real life had started again.42 Rumours still occasionally surfaced about their relationship, mostly among the surviving former Sippenhaft prisoners, but Alexander never spoke of it. He remained, ‘in spite of what had happened to him, a true romantic’, Fey concluded.43 He was also a true survivor.

  In 1948 Alexander became professor of ancient history at the University of Munich, moving to the city that had once been the Nazi heartland. The following year he married again. Marlene Hoffmann was a widow with two children, who had been among the circle of friends living by Lake Constance since 1938. A talented silversmith, Marlene was also a poet and translator of Europ
ean literature. She was, moreover, brave. When Fahrner was arrested in 1944, she had accepted responsibility for preserving the only known copy of Claus’s so-called ‘oath of conspirators’, the highly incriminating typed statement of their vision for post-Nazi Germany. Safely hidden, the document survived the war. Alexander and Marlene married in July 1949, Alexander adopting her two daughters. Konstanze felt that ‘it was hard for her to be the second wife, especially when Melitta was so loved by the whole family’.44 But Marlene proved to be just what Alexander needed, and the new family flourished.

  Hanna did not find such contentment. Since her release from detention, she had been fighting press stories about the closeness, even intimacy, of her relationship with Hitler, and the rumour that she had flown him to Argentina. All ‘fairy tales’, she insisted, arguing that such lazy journalism would not only destroy her own reputation, but ‘drag the truth and honour of all of us through the dirt by labelling real, loyal and true Germans as individuals without character’.45 Soon she was also contesting revelations made by British intelligence-officer-turned-historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, in his famous book The Last Days of Hitler. Although he had not interviewed Hanna, Trevor-Roper had read her interrogation reports, among other documents. Incensed that these papers had been made public, Hanna vociferously condemned the publication.* ‘Throughout the book, like a red line, runs an eyewitness report by Hanna Reitsch,’ she argued. ‘I never said it. I never wrote it. I never signed it. It was something they invented. Hitler died with total dignity.’46 A painful correspondence with Trevor-Roper led him to condemn her ‘incorrigible love of rhetoric’, and her to claim she felt persecuted.47 Various people weighed in on both sides. Some pointed out that, unlike witness statements, interrogation reports are not usually signed. Others came to her defence. The well-known journalist Thilo Bode wrote a fifteen-page document entitled ‘How History Can Become Falsified’, describing Hanna as ‘nearly fanatically truthful’ and ‘a great idealist’.48

  Often Hanna was her own worst enemy. ‘You ought to thank the Lord every day on your knees that the Germans did not shoot you,’ she recorded telling the French resistance fighter Yvonne Pagniez, who had escaped from a concentration camp during the war.49 Pagniez recorded the encounter very differently, surprised to find Hanna ‘not the Walkyrie I had imagined, but a modest-looking, physically fragile woman, wiping away tears of confusion’.50 She would later translate Hanna’s memoirs into French. In 1955 Hanna published another version in English, without reference to Pagniez, and carefully avoiding any overt political commentary. Not only did she apparently see no reason to critically examine her role in the Third Reich, she avoided even considering that working under such a regime might entail moral dilemmas. ‘I am longing to fly again . . .’ she closed her book firmly. ‘There can be no better instrument for peace and reconciliation than our beloved gliding. Flying – that is my life.’51

  For most Germans, the late 1940s had been dominated by the Soviet Berlin blockade, American and British airlifts of supplies, and the future governance of their country. With the end of the blockade in 1949, two independent German states emerged: the democratic Federal Republic of Germany in the west, and the smaller Soviet-aligned German Democratic Republic in the east. Among the national surveys that followed in West Germany, one from 1951 found that only 5 per cent of respondents admitted any feeling of guilt concerning the Jews, and only one in three was positive about the assassination plot. Rather than further soul-searching, the public mood was for peace, rehabilitation and the advancement of West German national interests. This served Hanna well. 1951 was the year that she first flew in public again, competing in the relaunched gliding competitions at Wasserkuppe. Her hand was back on the control column and she sailed through the skies on shimmering wings. The following year the German Aero Club was reinstated with Wolf Hirth as its president. Hundreds of clubs sprang up across West Germany over the next few months and Hanna felt the future brighten.

  The Gliding World Championships were held in Madrid in 1952. Hanna was the only woman to compete. She won a bronze for her country and, in a postscript to her memoirs, wrote how moved she was when a French Jew who had lost a leg and an arm during the war took her hand in Madrid, telling her she had won everyone’s heart. But when the German press covered her victory, they had a different human-interest story: speculating whether Hanna had visited Otto Skorzeny, now living as an exile in Franco’s Spanish capital. Although acquitted in 1947, Skorzeny had been kept at Darmstadt internment camp to go through what he called ‘the denazification mill’.52 Hanna had been the first person he visited while on parole. Skorzeny escaped the following summer, eventually arriving in Madrid where he founded a Spanish neo-Nazi group. He and Hanna were in touch, his letters sometimes delivered through sympathetic intermediaries.*

  While Hanna was in Spain, the trial of the officers who had crushed the attempted Valkyrie coup found that the conspirators had acted ‘for the greater good of Germany’.53 Claus’s formal death certificate was issued later that year. Nina and the children returned to their Bamberg home in 1953. Nina worked hard to rebuild the house, petition for the family’s stolen valuables to be restored, and raise her children, sometimes still in the face of considerable hostility. At least in isolated Lautlingen, her eldest son Berthold realized, ‘we were not constantly confronted with our status as outcasts’.54 In Bamberg there were sideways looks and unsigned letters, ‘quite a number of them, quite nasty in tone’.55 Then, in 1954, Theodor Heuss, the first president of the Federal Republic of Germany, gave an address at the first official memorial service for Claus, Berthold and their fellow conspirators, ten years after the attempted coup. Attitudes were slowly starting to shift.

  The Gliding World Championships of 1954 were hosted by England. ‘Adolf’s Flying Femme Back’, the British Overseas Weekly reported when Hanna’s name was listed among the German team.56 After some controversy, Heuss’s government instructed Hanna be dropped. Outraged, she argued that she had only ever done her ‘obvious duty for her country, like every Briton and every British woman also’.57 Hanna’s fury subsided when, aged forty-three, she became the German gliding champion. Over the next few years she set records at home and abroad. In 1958, however, the World Championships were hosted by Poland. Unhappy at the ceding of her Silesian homeland to Poland after the war, Hanna at first withdrew her name. When she changed her mind, to her astonishment the Poles refused her a visa. Poland had lost more than six million citizens during the war, the vast majority during the Nazi occupation. As an apparently unrepentant apologist for the Nazi regime, Hanna was not welcome. Incensed, she petitioned the new head of the Aero Club, Harald Quandt, to withdraw the whole German team. Quandt was the oldest child of Magda Goebbels, the son to whom her last letter had been addressed. But although he submitted a complaint, Quandt still fielded the rest of the team. Hanna severed all connections, effectively ending her gliding career in Germany.

  Her friends quickly rallied round. Elly Beinhorn, who had also returned to competitive flying, often invited her over.* Even the famous Australian pilot, Nancy Bird, sympathized with what she saw as Hanna’s ‘victimisation and suffering’.58 The Alte Adler, the German veteran pilots’ association, publicly supported her, and the far-right Brazil Sudeten Club made her an honorary life member, sending her ‘patriotic greetings’ from their ‘group bound by their fate’.59* She was still receiving mountains of fan mail, and would be signing collectable postcards in a fading felt-tip for the rest of her life. ‘You must not overrate me,’ she replied to one admirer. ‘My love for the Fatherland is something absolutely natural, and it is likewise natural to campaign for something you fervently love.’60 To another she railed about ‘the wall of lies and tales that have been created and that are weighing down the German people vis-à-vis the rest of the world’.61 She was still berating the fact that ‘the Heimat [homeland] is in a bad way, devoid of all honour’, two years later. Those of us ‘with the same convictions’, she argued, must tell y
oung people ‘the truth and implant it in their hearts’.62

  Many of the younger generation were already drawing their own conclusions about their nation’s history and planning their contributions to a new future. Nina’s eldest son, Berthold, elected to become a soldier in the West German Bundeswehr, joining up in 1955.* He knew he would spend his career in his father’s shadow but believed ‘that the burden would be worth it’.63 Years of awkward questions followed, but Berthold learned to live with ‘plenty of outspoken mess-room discussions’ about his family name.64* He was deeply proud of his father, and never forgot his courageous aunt. ‘Litta was everything,’ he told Der Spiegel.65 His younger brother, Franz Ludwig, who had once refused to answer to the wrong surname while detained at Bad Sachsa, developed an interest in the law. All the children, now young adults, would visit their Uncle Alexander at his Munich flat in the afternoons. ‘In my eyes,’ Konstanze felt, often noticing that her godfather’s buttons were misaligned or his socks mismatched, ‘he was a real professor, very intelligent but sometimes not from this world.’66