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

by Clare Mulley

  Wine and cigarettes aside, Alexander had always been more concerned with the cerebral than the material. In addition to translating Homer, Aeschylus and Pindar, in 1954 he published a short biography of Claus, praising his brother’s ‘high spirituality’, impressive oratorial skills and exemplary determination to act.67 At the same time, his academic work was becoming increasingly political. Assigned to committees to discuss the prospects for a reunified Germany, and West Germany’s greater potential involvement in Europe, he became instrumental in helping to secure his country’s membership of the European Economic Community in 1958.* Later that year he appealed for the creation of a nuclear-free zone and campaigned against nuclear rearmament.

  Still unable to fly competitively in Germany, Hanna was delighted to receive an invitation to India in 1958. The country had resisted German approaches while under British rule, but an independent India was now accepting West German loans and investment. Several gliding clubs had been established by the 1950s and, when the gliders in New Delhi were accidentally damaged, West Germany saw an opportunity to forge stronger ties. In the spring of 1959, the government in Bonn sent over a state-of-the-art glider accompanied by Hanna to give aerobatic demonstrations. Originally invited for two weeks, she stayed for two months. She loved the warmth of her reception, gave frequent talks on the spiritual experience of silent flight, and developed proposals for glider training with the Indian air force. She was also thrilled with what she called ‘the lively interest in Hitler and his achievements’ that she claimed to receive ‘all over India’.68 The cherry on the cake came when the ‘wise Indian Prime Minister’, Jawaharlal Nehru, requested she take him soaring.69 Hanna and Nehru stayed airborne for over two hours, Nehru at times taking the controls. It was a huge PR coup, widely reported across the Indian press. The next morning Hanna received an invitation to lunch with Nehru and his daughter, Indira Gandhi. Her last few days in the country would be spent as their guest.

  When Hanna left India, the German Embassy triumphantly cabled Bonn that, ‘since the end of the war, no other German public figure has met with a comparable reception’.70 She stayed in touch with Nehru for several years, asking after his family, and expressing her concerns about the spread of communism. When she learned that President Heuss had also visited India, she wrote to him too, requesting a meeting to discuss the country and its problems. A polite but regretful reply came back; Hanna would never meet Heuss.

  In 1961 Hanna returned to the USA at the suggestion of her old friend, the aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun, who was now working at NASA.* She often claimed to have refused post-war work with the American aeronautics programme on the basis that it would have been the ultimate betrayal of her country.* Braun felt differently, and occasionally tried to persuade Hanna to change her mind. ‘We live in times of worldwide problems,’ he had written to her in 1947. ‘If one does not wish to remain on the outside, looking in, one has to take a stand – even if sentimental reasons may stand in the way of coming clean. Do give it some thought!’71 Over a decade later Hanna visited Braun’s rocket test sites in Alabama, witnessing the launch of a Saturn rocket, and giving a talk at the National Space Institute with both an ageing von Braun and a young Neil Armstrong in the audience.

  While in the States, Hanna also took the opportunity to join glider pilots soaring over the Sierra Nevada, and to meet the ‘Whirly Girls’, an international association of female helicopter pilots. As the first woman to fly such a machine, she found she had the honour of being ‘Whirly Girl Number One’. It was with the Whirly Girls that Hanna was invited to the White House, meeting President Kennedy in the Oval Office. A group photo on the lawn shows her in an enveloping cream coat with matching hat and clutch, standing slightly in front of her taller peers. Her smile is once again dazzling; she felt validated. In interviews she revealed that Kennedy had told her she was a ‘paradigm’, and should ‘never give up on bringing flying closer to people’.72

  On her return to Germany, Hanna was presented with a new glider and largely accepted back into the flying community. But she was not on every invitation list. Eric Brown remembered her absence from the unveiling of a refurbished Me 163b Komet at the German Air Museum in Munich because, he later wrote, ‘the notoriety of her Hitler’s Bunker episode was an acute embarrassment to the Germans at a time when they were feeling their way back to political normality’.73

  In 1962 Kwame Nkrumah, president of newly independent Ghana, invited Hanna to promote gliding in his country. Nehru himself had reportedly recommended her.* Despite her oft-repeated fear of the spread of communism, with little to keep her in Germany, Hanna accepted Nkrumah’s invitation to help with the work she chose to see as nation-building. Petite and well dressed in cream twinsets and pearls, the ‘Woman Who Dares the Heavens’ was surprisingly ‘feminine in every way’, the Ghanaian press recorded.74 She quickly formed a close bond with the handsome and dynamic Nkrumah, embassy staff noting that ‘as a woman’ she was above suspicion of harbouring political ambitions.75 When Hanna enthusiastically promoted gliding as an ideal way to train character, Nkrumah commissioned her to establish a national gliding school as part of his programme to modernize the country.

  Delighted by Hanna’s reception, in 1963 the West German government provided training support and the gift of a glider. When Hanna delivered the aircraft, she stayed on for four years, throwing herself into the development of the gliding school. Regularly up at four in the morning and ‘bursting with energy in long white trousers’, she oversaw the conversion of a colonial airfield and the erection of some hangars.76 The first students were selected from the ranks of the Ghanaian Young Pioneers, a boys-only political youth movement. She had no interest in training girls who, she felt, had ‘numerous other important tasks in order to prepare themselves for raising children’.77 Her aim, she told a British film crew, banging her fist on the arm of her canvas director’s chair, was ‘to form the character of the youth . . . you see you can’t be a pilot without being disciplined’.78 Despite a tight budget, she won support for the increasingly controversial project by staging aerobatic shows, and was filmed chatting and laughing with Nkrumah as they hand-launched model gliders.

  Hanna had again aligned herself with a leader increasingly seen as a dictator. Some Ghanaians felt she was politically innocent. ‘Hanna lives truly in the heavens,’ one author wrote to Nkrumah. ‘Her total ignorance about her own country was clearly indicated when she was with us. They completely fooled her!’79 For others, especially many American-Ghanaians, her Nazi past made her a controversial figure. Nkrumah was not concerned. That year he told the West German ambassador that he ‘could not understand why the German people focused so strongly on [Hitler’s] negative aspects without acknowledging his historical greatness’.80 By 1965 the gliding school was showing results. Hanna saw her work as a kind of ‘humane charity’, she wrote, helping ‘Africans develop’ and learn to escape from poverty.81 Ghana had become a public stage for her moral self-representation.

  After Christmas in Germany that year, she returned to Ghana in early 1966. A few weeks later there was a military putsch. Nkrumah was stranded overseas. The gliding school was closed and Hanna was quickly deported. ‘The most beautiful task of my life’, she wrote, was suddenly at an end.82 Back in Germany, she was shocked by reports of the putsch. ‘Everything I read in western newspapers and magazines about the personality of Dr Nkrumah, his political philosophy, and his political goals, was so disconcertingly wrong, that for the sake of the truth,’ she wrote, as emphatic as ever, ‘I held it my duty to write down my experiences during those four years I was active for Ghana.’83 Although Hanna stayed in touch with Nkrumah, exchanging roses as well as affectionate letters, they would never meet again.

  In many ways Alexander had thrived during these years. Melitta was rarely mentioned at family events, the Second World War was not taught in schools or much discussed socially, and if asked about the assassination attempt he would say little but emphasize ‘the hum
aneness and the tragedy of the act’.84 Alexander preferred to focus on the present: his family; his poetry, academic work and several published books; and his voice in the shaping of his country. Photos show him looking suave and handsome in the early 1960s, dressed in a well-tailored suit, with a thin, dark tie and crisp pocket handkerchief, his gaze direct but a slight smile playing round the corners of his mouth. They also show that his hair had turned grey, white in parts. A few years later Alexander knew he was seriously ill. Eventually he had to give up lecturing, but he continued to receive students at his home. He died of lung cancer in Munich on 27 January 1964. He was fifty-eight. Reflecting his own path in life, he was not buried at Lautlingen with Melitta and the memorials to his brothers, but in Upper Bavaria where he had lived so happily with Marlene.* She had helped give him twenty more years, and he had used them well.

  After his death, a collection of Alexander’s prose and poetry about Melitta, Claus and Berthold was published under the title Denkmal (Monument). As well as the poem ‘Litta’, the volume included a poignant re-imagining of Claus and Berthold’s last conversation on the night before the assassination attempt, and an epic poem, ‘On the Eve’, inspired by the conspirators’ oath. Much of the epilogue was devoted to Melitta’s fine mind, attitudes and power, as well as her ‘courageous acts of loving support’ when she repeatedly risked her life for her husband and his family. ‘Heroes wasted, man’s virtues and people’s happiness diminished by too much talk,’ Alexander had written in the foreword. ‘And we stood there, powerless . . . in front of the graves of our proud youth.’85 Later that year Germany honoured Claus, among other heroes of domestic resistance, on a set of postage stamps to mark the twentieth anniversary of the plot. Their faces and names would, for a while, be the currency by which all communications in Germany were sent, infiltrating silently into homes and offices. Whether Hanna ever received one on her considerable correspondence is not recorded.

  Now in her fifties, Hanna found herself living alone in a small flat in Frankfurt decorated with photographs of the Alps, gliders, her family and Greim. Her association with another dictator had tarnished her reputation and, with the Social Democrats in power, there was little likelihood of further diplomatic missions. ‘My life is very turbulent,’ she wrote plaintively to a friend.86 She channelled her energy into gliding regionally. Soaring over to Austria in 1970, she set a new women’s Alpine record. Later that year she was presented with the International Gliding Commission’s Diamond Badge, and attended the Wasserkuppe’s Golden Jubilee celebrations, afterwards dining with the now famous Neil Armstrong, among other guests of honour.

  Although still banned from flying motorized planes, the following year Hanna took part in the first world helicopter championships. She won the women’s class, and came sixth overall. Eric Brown, now heading the British Helicopter Advisory Board, met her at the event. Believing that she was not mixing well ‘because of her notoriety’, he joined her for coffee and they talked about Udet and life before the war.87 ‘I was not sorry for her,’ he said. ‘I had a love/hate relationship with Hanna. I loved her courage, and hated her politics.’88 They kept in touch over the next few years, at events and through the post. Hanna’s typed letters were never ‘chummy’, and Eric’s replies mostly dutiful. ‘Hanna was always absolutely sure that she had done nothing wrong. She felt that any patriot would have done the same,’ he explained. ‘She saw herself as a female knight in shining armour, not a wicked witch.’89 Later, seeing her wearing her Iron Cross with its central swastika symbol in public, Eric went further. Hanna had always argued ‘that the real reason she was distrusted after the war was her deep, deep love of the Fatherland’, he commented. ‘It is arguable whether this was different to love for the Nazi vision.’90

  In the 1970s, Hanna’s aviation achievements were once again celebrated in the international press. At domestic events, one journalist recorded that ‘dozens of surviving German air force pilots and present day German NATO pilots literally shook with excitement to see her’.91 She tactfully did not attend the 1972 Munich Olympic Games, and does not seem to have commented on the murder of the eleven Israeli athletes. The highlight of that year for her was a return to America, where she was honoured in Arizona, and installed as the first female member of the prestigious international Society of Experimental Test Pilots. She could hardly have been happier, sitting in a hall of 2,000 people, discussing a possible new ‘Hanna Reitsch Cup’ with Baron Hilton. Back in Germany, she was now receiving hundreds of letters and parcels from schoolchildren as well as veterans, and even became an ambassador for the German section of Amnesty International. ‘There are millions in Germany who love me,’ she claimed, before adding, ‘it is only the German press which has been told to hate me. It is propaganda helped by the government . . . They are afraid I might say something good about Adolf Hitler. But why not?’92

  For her sixtieth birthday, the Alte Adler association threw her a dinner. Guests came from all over Germany, Europe and even the USA and Brazil. The ‘sensation of the evening’ was Hanna’s spirited yodelling, the association’s president later wrote.93 ‘It isn’t easy to talk about our Hanna,’ he had eulogized on the night. ‘She embodies a woman who we, as humans, have to pay deference to, who always enchants with her charm and who earned the highest recognition and admiration for her achievements . . . especially attracting attention again and again with her constant helpfulness, loyal attitude and her love for the Fatherland.’94 Yet his speech was tempered with regrets that while Germany’s former enemies now celebrated Hanna, she was yet to be honoured by the current German government. ‘She is a model of German honour, to our country, and to our people . . .’ he finished, ‘out of her deep love for her Fatherland.’95

  Hanna was delighted with her reception, but her reputation never felt secure. The following year, 1973, saw the premiere of a British film, Hitler’s Last Ten Days, based on the memoirs of those stationed in the bunker, and starring Alec Guinness as the Führer. Livid that she had not been consulted during the film’s production, and at the portrayal of her as an infatuated Nazi, Hanna began a campaign of public complaint. When she was not taken seriously, she extended her scope to criticize the ongoing imprisonment of Nazi war criminals, and the collective guilt that she felt the world still expected Germany to shoulder. Even thirty years on, Hanna refused to accept the truth about the Nazi regime. Nor could she understand why the country that she had refused to abandon after the war did not officially regard, or even venerate, her as an honourable patriot.

  It was at this moment that Hanna saw a notice in the papers, asking for reminiscences of Melitta for a planned biography. She was appalled. Melitta was her antithesis: a brilliant, part-Jewish, female test pilot who had, in Hanna’s eyes, betrayed her country, while Hanna had held true. If Melitta was represented as a heroine, Hanna could only wonder what this meant for her own reputation. She immediately got in touch with the prospective biographer, and then with Melitta’s sisters, Jutta and Klara. Their correspondence would last four years and was at times as heated as, and much more direct than, any exchange between Hanna and Melitta in life.

  Hanna first met Klara in 1975, when Klara invited both her and her sister, Jutta, to lunch to discuss the draft manuscript. Ostensibly writing to thank Klara for her hospitality, Hanna focused most of her letter on destroying Jutta’s character – the two of them clearly hadn’t seen eye to eye. Hanna was ‘shocked’ that Jutta had shown no interest in her own memoirs, she wrote, ‘but I also felt pity because I felt that there was something ill and twisted inside her. What could have possibly happened in her life to make her like this?’ With a ‘mindset like this’, Hanna continued, she feared that any biography would ‘do your sister more damage than good. This is exactly what I wanted to prevent, for the sake of authenticity and documentation.’96

  Hanna then repeated the list of ‘errors’ she had found in the manuscript. Melitta ‘had never been a test pilot of dive-bombers or any other kind of aircraft’,
she wrote, adding, ‘there is nothing that highlights Melitta’s achievements as especially remarkable’.97 She also denied the validity of Melitta’s Iron Cross, suggesting that she had manipulated her way into receiving an award she did not merit. ‘I am convinced that Melitta did not resort to such an action just because of pure ambition, but because of despair caused by her racial burden,’ Hanna continued, her insincerity almost audible. ‘For Melitta’s sake, I would not want these details to be made public.’98

  Swinging chaotically between insults and wheedling praise, Hanna claimed she was relieved that no one had witnessed ‘Jutta’s reaction about the disagreements I had, and the explanations I offered’. ‘I know you were just as sad as I was,’ she continued, ‘because in your wisdom, you know what the consequences will be if your sister won’t change these parts’.99 The rest of her long letter reiterated her concern that Jutta’s reaction was ‘alarming’, that ‘falsehood certainly does come to light sooner or later’, and that Klara was risking ‘embarrassing discoveries’ should the book go ahead.100 ‘I am sure that you will understand me correctly. I want to protect you, and Melitta’s memory . . .’ she drew to a close. ‘I can only pray that you will take this letter in the right way and be able to influence your sister successfully.’101

  The biography was put on hold while the correspondence continued. When Klara defended Melitta, Hanna wrote to her, ‘I knew and I suffered from the knowledge of how hard it would be for you to hear all these unpleasant things from me.’102 When Klara stated the facts about Melitta’s work, Hanna retorted, ‘it seems embarrassing and like showing off when you include it in a biography’.103 At different times she wrote that dive tests like those Melitta undertook were not risky, and also that she herself had performed similar tests ‘for several years at the risk of my life’.104 She suggested that Melitta was untrustworthy and might have been at ‘work for the enemy’.105 Above all, she focused on what she called Melitta’s ‘inner despair about her racial burden’.106 Hanna had more, but felt she could not write it down, so she gave Klara her phone number.