by Clare Mulley
Klara’s forbearance was remarkable. She thanked Hanna for explaining her doubts ‘so candidly’, expressed how devastating it was to see her sister ‘presented in such a shadowy way’, and assured her that she would not rest until everything had been cleared up. ‘We will, of course, accept any true version of events, even if it should become apparent there have been actual mistakes. No one is infallible and she, thank God, was very human.’107 But Klara also insisted that Hanna accept Melitta ‘would have been incapable of promoting anything “against her better knowledge”’; Melitta was nothing if not honourable and Klara was determined to discover the facts.108 ‘I am happy about every step with you to discover the truth,’ Hanna responded.109 Eventually Klara put an end to their correspondence. She had found a number of people who supported her own picture of her sister. Sending the details to Hanna, she told her, ‘With this, this unpleasant chapter is finally closed for my family and me. I assume that you too will be happy about this,’ she could not resist adding, ‘for the sake of finding the truth.’110*
The following year the BBC filmed a still effusive and engaging Hanna, dressed in a uniform-like skirt suit decorated with her flight badges, for a television series, Secret War. Before the interview began, the producer had to ask her to remove a decoration containing a swastika and, whenever the cameras weren’t rolling, he was shocked at how pro-Nazi she was. ‘She worshipped Hitler,’ he later recalled. It was clear that ‘she was very much in awe of him’.111 Publicly, however, Hanna still argued that she was not political; that her only concerns were flight, truth and her personal honour.
Melitta’s family were more overtly politically engaged. In 1976 Franz Ludwig, now an attorney, was elected to the Bundestag, the German parliament, representing the democratic centre-right Christian Social Union. He would serve for almost ten years, as well as for six as a member of the European Parliament. Hanna, meanwhile, focused increasingly on gliding again. She set several more women’s records in fibreglass ‘racehorses’, as she called the modern gliders, over the next few years.112 When in 1978, aged sixty-six, she set an Alpine time and distance record: ‘ten hours’ hard fighting, but a most wonderful experience’, the new president of the German Aero Club wrote to congratulate her.113 Their twenty-year feud was over, but Hanna was already courting new controversy.
As well as aligning herself with the establishment whenever she could, Hanna maintained her links with the far right. Her correspondents now included Edda Göring, the only child of the Luftwaffe chief Hanna had so despised, and Fritz Stüber, editor of the anti-Semitic, extreme-right periodical Eckarbote, which aimed, Hanna understood, to preserve ‘the indestructible German soul’.114 She also had a long exchange with Eleanore Baur: the only woman to have participated in the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, and an unrepentant Nazi who had been sentenced to ten years for war crimes. ‘The Führer, our Hitler, would have been delighted to know we two are writing to each other,’ Baur told Hanna. ‘I believe he is watching us from above.’115 Later she sent a photograph of herself with Hitler, revealed her delight at finding they shared ‘all the same friends’, and waxed lyrical about Hanna’s memoirs, which she hoped to help promote ‘as a thank you to you, and for the truth, and for the spirit of Germany’.116
Hanna was also in touch with another, unrelated Baur: Hitler’s former personal pilot, Hans Baur, who at almost eighty was another unapologetic racist and unreconstructed Nazi. ‘Apart from those people who admire us for our successes as pilots, much of the rest of the world is against us,’ he cautioned Hanna. ‘We have to be careful about what we say, and how we say it.’117 In 1978 he and Hanna joined a public event to honour the life of the first pilot to cross the Atlantic from Europe to America, in 1928. A devout Catholic, Hermann Köhl had taken a stand against the Nazis in the 1930s, only to be banned from public speaking, lose his job, and die in Munich four years later. The German press did not respond well to Hanna and Baur’s presence, and the resulting articles rekindled Hanna’s feelings of persecution and victimhood. In an attempt to cheer her, Baur praised her ‘attitude and loyalty towards our Fatherland and Führer’, and spoke warmly of the ‘brave old Germans’, ‘real Germans’, now living in South America, who saw her as ‘a model of perfection’.118 Hanna responded that while she appreciated his support, ‘for the sake of truth and duty’ she needed to set the historical record straight, ‘from a German perspective’.119
Nine years younger than Melitta, Hanna had scarcely known any Germany other than the Third Reich, and having aligned herself with the new regime she had continued to create her own exculpatory narrative regarding her actions as the war progressed. As the extent of the Nazi programme of genocide was exposed after the war, many Germans had distanced themselves from their previous support for the regime. Far from softening over time, however, Hanna was becoming increasingly belligerent. Refusing to concede any error of judgement or show any remorse, instead she grew ever more critical of post-war West Germany. In letters to a British friend, Hanna bemoaned the number of ‘foreigners’ among Frankfurt’s schoolchildren, and hearing more ‘Turkish, Yugoslavian, Italian and Greek’ than German spoken on the streets.120 Her friend sympathized, inspiring Hanna to go further. ‘The Jew is with my country,’ she replied. ‘The most horrible lies the history had ever produced with “Holocaust” is spreading around the world with the purpose to hate Germany. The Jews have the most rare brains to invent hatress, hatress, hatress [sic] instead of peace. A Jewish movie-“industry” in USA . . . invented this to save themselves. They are earning millions and millions of Dollars and the Germans are so characterless and stupid as no nation of the world is – and believe this.’121* Her anti-Semitic rant not yet over, Hanna now clung desperately to the work of Holocaust deniers to validate her decades-long refusal even to consider the truth. ‘Historians from UK, from France, from USA are giving all kinds of proofs, that this all, are the most perfidy of lies the world has ever experienced!!!’ she shouted onto the page, ignoring the fact she had seen photographs of the Majdanek camp during the war, and had heard Eric Brown describe his own experience of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. As Hanna refused to accept the facts, denial became a part of who she was, and her need to shift all blame became visceral. ‘These is cowardness making money in producing hatress! That is their “purpose of life”,’ she continued. ‘Oh I am deeply unhappy and ashamed that my nation and also many of my German pilot-comrades are only “opportunists” joining those “devils”.’122
Later that year the American photojournalist Ron Laytner conducted what became an infamous interview with Hanna. Laytner reported her bitter disappointment in West Germany, ‘a land of bankers and car-makers’. ‘Even our great army has gone soft. Soldiers wear beards and question orders,’ she told him. ‘I am not ashamed to say I believe in National Socialism. I still wear the Iron Cross with diamonds Hitler gave me. But today in all Germany you can’t find a single person who voted Adolf Hitler into power . . .’ Hanna’s most unguarded comment, however, came at the end of the interview. ‘Many Germans feel guilty about the war,’ she concluded. ‘But they don’t explain the real guilt we share – that we lost.’123
Towards the end of 1978, Hanna agreed to give a lecture at an event organized by the Stahlhelm Youth, a fascist movement inspired by the Hitler Youth.* The talk was scheduled for 8 November. Given the furore over the commemorative event for the pilot Hermann Köhl, she cannot have been unaware that this date was the fortieth anniversary of Kristallnacht. More than insensitive, the planning of the Stahlhelm Youth event was deeply provocative. The mayor of Bremen’s condemnation eventually prompted her to pull out. Yet when a Bremen Christian congregation questioned some of her words about the gas chambers, she once again threw herself into a letter campaign, accusing them of slander. Telling Hans Baur about this ‘defamation’ of her character, she wrote, ‘What we think about these horrific exaggerations [about the gas chambers] remains in our hearts. As yet, we cannot determine where the truth begins – and
where the lies end. I am passionately trying to find the truth – and I am fighting wherever I am able.’124 Hanna demanded a public apology, refusing to let the matter drop, on the grounds of honour. Honour was the badge that she had proudly pinned to her chest when no longer allowed to wear her Iron Cross in public. In the decades since the war, she clung to it with increasing desperation.*
The strain of public controversy eventually began to take its toll on Hanna. She was still conducting her letter campaigns and giving talks all over the country into the summer of 1979. That August she told friends that she was having chest pains. When Joachim Küttner telephoned to see if she would like to meet at the airport, their regular rendezvous, she asked him to visit her at home instead, adding, ‘I really have a problem, I need you, I need your help.’ Unable to rearrange his plans, Küttner told her he would come another time. The following morning, 24 August 1979, Hanna died at her home. She was sixty-seven years old.
No post-mortem report is available, but the cause of death was given as a heart attack. In accordance with Hanna’s wishes, her surviving family announced her death only after a private burial. She was interred with her parents, sister, nephew and nieces, in the municipal cemetery in Salzburg. A large boulder engraved with all the family’s names marks the plot. Alongside is a tribute from the Alte Adler association, in the form of an eagle in flight surrounded by a laurel wreath; a design very similar to the Nazi pilot’s badge but without the swastika carried in the eagle’s talons.
In the months that followed, speculation grew as to whether Hanna had finally kept her promise to Greim twenty-four years after his suicide, and stood by her concept of an honourable death by biting on her glass phial of cyanide. The capsule was not listed among her final possessions but neither, despite Hanna’s love of getting the last word, was there any record of a note. Perhaps her contempt for the last letters of Eva Braun, and of Joseph and Magda Goebbels, had saved her from this last temptation. Or Hanna’s brisk dispatch of Braun’s last note might have given licence, to those who found her, to discreetly remove her own. Or perhaps there was neither note, nor suicide.
There was at least one last letter, however: a brief page Hanna sent to Eric Brown a few weeks before she died. In it she mentioned that she had been suffering from ill health, and that she felt angry and depressed because ‘nobody’, Eric included despite their ‘common bond in our love for flying and danger’, seemed to understand her ‘passionate love of the Fatherland’.125 To Eric, the letter implied ‘that she’d come to the end of her tether’.126 Hanna’s intriguing last words before signing off were, ‘It began in the bunker, and there it shall end.’127 After hearing the news of her death, he had no doubt that Hanna had finally taken her life with the cyanide Hitler had given her in the bunker. He sent the letter to Hanna’s brother Kurt, whom he knew through a post-war secondment to the German naval air arm. Kurt, who died not long afterwards, never acknowledged it. ‘To the bitter end Hanna Reitsch managed to surround herself with controversy,’ Eric later wrote.128
There is no evidence that Hanna finally took her own life rather than simply suffering a fatal heart attack. Whatever promise she had once made to Greim, she had decided, decades earlier, not to take her cyanide.* Hanna had never lacked physical courage. She had accepted the likelihood of dying when she volunteered as both a test pilot and a suicide bomber, and had told her brother that ‘one’s own death has little importance’.129 She did not change her mind from fear; she chose to live to defend her ‘honour’, along with that, as she saw it, of the Nazi regime. But Hanna had no moral insight. She never expressed remorse about her association with the Nazi leadership, and refused to accept any alternative world view. It was not that she was incapable of telling the truth; rather, she was a fanatic, and could not see any truth other than her own. Any romantic thoughts she might once have nurtured about eventually taking her own life may ultimately have proved as whimsical as her plans to work for historic truth, honour and reconciliation.
Melitta had died in action, knowing that Hitler’s Reich had been defeated, and that she had done everything possible to defend her colleagues and her family. She had longed for freedom all her life, and was killed in the pursuit of that dream. That her bravery was little known or acknowledged would not have concerned a woman who had always sought to avoid publicity. Hanna had lived on long after the deaths of most of her family and close colleagues. She slowly realized that, however much she hid her political convictions in public, neither her aspirations for a renewal of Nazi government, nor her hopes to have her name entirely cleared, would come about. Her fate was not to be killed in the war, but to live and see her Nazi beliefs utterly refuted. Ironically, for a woman who had spent her life searching for the fabulous, and whose courage in pursuit of her dreams was beyond any doubt, Hanna died in her own bed, in many ways a coward, defeated by the truth.
EPILOGUE: A TIME OF CONTRADICTIONS
A dictatorship is a time of opportunism, of not wanting to know, of looking away. By contrast, it is also a time of resolute action and of making fresh and careful judgements every day about good and evil for those who – in whatever way – find themselves at loggerheads with the government . . .
DOROTHEE VON MEDING, 19921
Hanna Reitsch and Melitta von Stauffenberg were both born before the First World War, in neighbouring regions of Germany. Both became brilliant and courageous pilots, motivated by a love of flight and personal freedom, and a belief in the importance of patriotism, honour and duty. The women’s responses to flight neatly reflected their approaches to life. Learning to glide over the same green slopes, they were intoxicated by their ability to sail through what Melitta called ‘the borderless sea of the air’. Hanna more covetously referred to ‘new and fabulous realms’.2 Later, while Melitta dedicated herself to learning how to direct and control her aircraft, Hanna decided that ‘gliding is the best thing in the world because . . . [one is] carried along by a force of nature’.3
Neither woman was as comfortable on the ground. Melitta was anchored both by her conservative Junker values, and by the unexpected discovery of her Jewish ancestry. Although determined to lead an active and ‘heroic life’, she never questioned the importance of tradition and security.4 Hanna, conversely, nine years younger, was keen to embrace the winds of change and seize the opportunities brought by the Nazi leadership. ‘Just like an alcoholic, everything that justified flying was convenient for her,’ Melitta’s nephew, Berthold von Stauffenberg, has said of Hanna. ‘Flying justified her attitudes and morals.’5
Their gender has meant that Hanna and Melitta were, and are still, seen through a specific lens. If this means that Hanna has perhaps attracted more criticism than that attached to her male colleagues, then she has also, elsewhere, received greater support in deference to her presumed innocence. ‘Aryan’ girls were educated to believe in patriotism, honour and racial discrimination, and to be devoted uncritically to their country and their Führer. Women in Nazi Germany lived in a man’s world. They were encouraged to be domestic rather than political, and assigned duties without rights. It is because Hanna and Melitta were not men, and so neither welcomed into aviation nor later conscripted into national service, that their actions undoubtedly involved a degree of choice. It was their strength of character and determination, as well as their differing values, interests and decisions, that would place them on opposite sides of history.
Melitta’s deep patriotism was shaped by her experience of the Great War and the terrible peace that followed. She believed in dutifully serving her country through courage, determination and hard work. Although addicted to the thrill of flight, she saw herself not as an agent of change but as an exception to the gender rule: an honorary man at work, a pilot in the sky, and a supportive wife at home. ‘The values characteristic of all womankind have not been altered, for us flying has never been a matter of causing a sensation, or even of emancipation,’ she argued. ‘We women pilots are not suffragettes.’6 Like her aristocrat
ic husband, Melitta believed in a certain social order. She might have ‘admittedly unusual’ career ambitions, but she could no more support Hitler’s Nazism than she would have backed anarchy or communism.7
Her pre-war discovery that her family was considered part-Jewish and were thus unwelcome subjects rather than equal citizens of Germany, confirmed Melitta’s early antipathy to the regime. Instead of speaking out against the government’s dismantling of democracy, growing anti-Semitism and persecution of ideological enemies, as the state threat increased she chose to quietly focus on trying to protect her family.
Melitta was deeply conflicted when war came. She was privately opposed to the regime, but a nation is not indistinguishable from its government. For her, patriotism meant loyalty to a Germany that was older and greater than the Third Reich. She felt a duty to serve her country, and saw an opportunity to prove both her loyalty and her value. Later she also hoped to help protect German pilots under attack, and citizens suffering under Allied bombardments. ‘War in our time has long outgrown the historical, initially incomprehensible, seeming futility of its origins, and outgrown the question of guilt or cause . . .’ she argued. ‘Imperceptibly it has received its terrible objective meaning, which we do not give it, but which towers threateningly before us.’8
By the spring of 1944, Melitta found herself heading up technical research for the Nazi Air War Academy, an extraordinary position for a woman in the Third Reich. Her association with Claus von Stauffenberg, however, also gave her an opportunity to support the assassination of Hitler. Many of the leading conspirators played similarly ambiguous roles. Most were not primarily motivated by ending the atrocities perpetrated against Jewish and other minorities, although this was a factor, but by what they considered the betrayal of the German people and their armed forces through the continuation of an unwinnable war. As Claus expressed it, they were planning ‘treason against the government. But what [the government is] doing is treason against the country.’9 When the plot failed, Melitta’s only aim became to protect Alexander and the wider Stauffenberg family in defiance of Hitler’s extermination orders.
