Hanna Reitsch

Flugkapitän Hanna Reitsch
Hanna Reitsch in 1941
Born	29 March 1912 (1912-03-29) Hirschberg, Silesia, Kingdom of Prussia, German Empire (Now Jelenia Góra, Poland)
Died	24 August 1979 (1979-08-25) (aged 67) Frankfurt am Main, Hesse, West Germany
Known for	Nazism, Aviator, test pilot First woman to earn the Silver C Badge First woman to fly a helicopter First woman to pilot a rocket plane First woman to fly a jet Iron Cross First Class Luftwaffe (one of only three women) Pilot/Observer Badge in Gold with Diamonds (only woman) Honorary member of the Society of Experimental Test Pilots (one of only three women) Member #1 of the Whirly-Girls female helicopter-pilot association
Partner	Robert Ritter von Greim (1945)

Hanna Reitsch (29 March 1912 – 24 August 1979) was a German aviator and test pilot. Along with Melitta von Stauffenberg, she flight-tested many of Germany's new aircraft during World War II and received many honors. Reitsch was among the very last people to meet Adolf Hitler before his death in the Führerbunker in late April 1945. Following her capture, she provided information about her departure from Berlin and denied that she might have helped Hitler escape.

During the 1930s, Reitsch set more than 40 flight altitude records and women's endurance records in gliding and unpowered flight. In the 1960s, she was sponsored by the West German foreign office as a technical adviser in Ghana and elsewhere. She also founded a gliding school in Ghana, where she worked for Kwame Nkrumah.

Early life and education

Reitsch was born in Hirschberg, Silesia, on 29 March 1912 to an upper-middle-class family. She was daughter of Dr. Wilhelm (Willy) Reitsch, who was an ophthalmology clinic manager, and his wife Emy Helff-Hibler von Alpenheim, who was a member of the Austrian nobility. Despite her mother being a devout Catholic, Hanna was raised a Protestant. She had two siblings, brother Kurt, a naval Fregattenkapitän (frigate captain), and younger sister Heidi. Reitsch began flight training in 1932 at the School of Gliding in Grunau. While a medical student in Berlin, she enrolled in a German Air Mail amateur flying school for powered aircraft at Staaken, training in a Klemm Kl 25.

Career

1933–1937

In 1933, Reitsch left medical school at the University of Kiel to become, at the invitation of Wolf Hirth, a full-time glider pilot/instructor at Hornberg in Baden-Württemberg. Reitsch contracted with the Ufa Film Company as a stunt pilot and set an unofficial endurance record for women of 11 hours and 20 minutes. In January 1934, she joined a South American expedition to study thermal conditions, along with Wolf Hirth, Peter Riedel and Heini Dittmar. While in Argentina, she became the first woman to earn the Silver C Badge, the 25th to do so among world glider pilots.

In June 1934, Reitsch became a member of the Deutsche Forschungsanstalt für Segelflug (DFS) and became a test pilot in 1935. Reitsch enrolled in the Civil Airways Training School in Stettin, where she flew a twin-engine on a cross country flight and aerobatics in a Focke-Wulf Fw 44. In 1937, Ernst Udet gave Reitsch the honorary title of Flugkapitän after she had successfully tested Hans Jacobs's divebrakes for gliders. At the DFS, she test-flew transport and troop-carrying gliders, including the DFS 230 that was used at the Battle of Fort Eben-Emael.

1937–1945

Reitsch in 1936 at Wasserkuppe

Hitler awards Reitsch the Iron Cross 2nd Class in March 1941

In September 1937, Reitsch was posted to the Luftwaffe testing centre at Rechlin-Lärz Airfield by Ernst Udet.

Her flying skill, desire for publicity, and photogenic qualities made her a star of Nazi propaganda. Physically she was petite and very slender, with blonde hair, blue eyes and a "ready smile". She appeared in Nazi propaganda throughout the late 1930s and early 1940s.

Reitsch was the first female helicopter pilot and one of the few pilots to fly the Focke-Achgelis Fa 61, the first fully controllable helicopter, for which she received the Military Flying Medal. In 1938, during the three weeks of the International Automobile Exhibition in Berlin, she made daily flights of the Fa 61 helicopter inside the Deutschlandhalle.

In September 1938, Reitsch flew the DFS Habicht in the Cleveland National Air Races. By the end of the 1930s, Reitsch had set more than 40 flight altitude records and women's endurance records in gliding and unpowered flight.

Reitsch was a test pilot on the Junkers Ju 87 Stuka dive bomber and Dornier Do 17 light/fast bomber projects, for which she received the Iron Cross, Second Class, from Hitler on 28 March 1941. Reitsch was asked to fly many of Germany's latest designs, among them the rocket-propelled Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet in 1942. A crash landing on her fifth Me 163 flight badly injured Reitsch; she spent five months in a hospital recovering. Reitsch received the Iron Cross First Class following the accident, one of only three women to do so.

In February 1943 after news of the defeat in the Battle of Stalingrad, she accepted an invitation from Generaloberst Robert Ritter von Greim to visit the Eastern Front. She spent three weeks visiting Luftwaffe units, flying a Fieseler Fi 156 Storch.

V1 (1944)

On 28 February 1944, she presented the idea of Operation Suicide to Hitler at Berchtesgaden, which "would require men who were ready to sacrifice themselves in the conviction that only by this means could their country be saved." Although Hitler "did not consider the war situation sufficiently serious to warrant them ... and ... this was not the right psychological moment", he gave his approval. The project was assigned to Gen. Günther Korten. About 70 volunteers enrolled in the Suicide Group as pilots for the human glider-bomb. By April 1944, Reitsch and Heinz Kensche finished tests of the Me 328, carried aloft by a Dornier Do 217. By then, she was approached by SS-Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny, a founding member of the SS- Selbstopferkommando Leonidas (Leonidas Squadron). They adapted the V-1 flying bomb into the Fieseler Fi 103R Reichenberg, including a training single-seater with landing flaps, a training two-seater with no power unit, and an operation single-seater without landing flaps. The plan was never implemented operationally due to other war concerns.

In her autobiography, Reitsch recalled that after two initial crashes with the Fi 103R she and Heinz Kensche took over tests of the prototype Fi 103R. She made several successful test flights before training the instructors. "Though an average pilot could fly the V1 without difficulty once it was in the air, to land it called for exceptional skill, in that it had a very high landing speed and, moreover, in training it was the glider model, without engine, that was usually employed."

In October 1944, Reitsch claimed she was shown a booklet by Peter Riedel which he had obtained while in the German Embassy in Stockholm, concerning the gas chambers. She further claimed that while believing it to be enemy propaganda, she agreed to inform Heinrich Himmler about it. When she did, Himmler is said to have asked whether she believed it, and she replied, "No, of course not. But you must do something to counter it. You can't let them shoulder this onto Germany." Himmler replied, "You are right."

Escape from Berlin (1945)

A Fieseler Fi 156 Storch similar to the one Reitsch landed in the Tiergarten during the Battle of Berlin

In late April 1945, during the Battle of Berlin, Hitler dismissed Hermann Göring as head of the Luftwaffe and appointed Robert Ritter von Greim to replace him. Reitsch had been making military and personal flights between Breslau (Poland), Munich (Germany), and Kitzbühel (Austria) when von Greim instructed her to meet him in Munich, thinking he might need her to pilot a helicopter. Reitsch said goodbye to her family late on 25 April at the Schloss Leopoldskron in Salzburg before driving to Munich. That night, she and von Greim were flown in a Ju 188 from Germany's Neubiberg Air Base to the Rechlin airfield, about 100 km (60 mi) northwest of Berlin. They were then flown to Gatow, Berlin, in a Focke-Wulf Fw 190 (Reitsch riding in the tail by way of an emergency opening), protected against the Soviets by perhaps 40 fighters, including 12 other Fw 190s from Jagdgeschwader 26 under Hauptmann Hans Dortenmann's command. The pair took a Fi 156 Storch, first piloted by von Greim until his foot was struck by a bullet, then by Reitsch reaching over him to land on an improvised airstrip in the Tiergarten near the Brandenburg Gate.

The Tiergarten's Straße des 17. Juni served as an improvised airstrip.

The pair arrived in the Führerbunker on the evening of 26 April, when Red Army troops were already in central Berlin. Hitler thanked von Greim for coming in light of Göring's dismissal. Late that night, the Reich Chancellery received the first heavy Soviet barrage. As arranged with Rechlin a day before, on 27 April a Ju 52 landed on the makeshift runway for Reitsch and von Greim, but having learned of Göring's betrayal, they decided to stay in a gesture of loyalty. Later on 27 April, Hitler gave Reitsch two capsules of poison for herself and von Greim, which she accepted. Hitler suggested that General Walther Wenck's 12th Army could still save them and spent the next two days contemplating this. On 29 April, a telegram reported that Himmler had made unauthorised contact with the western Allies regarding surrender terms. Shortly after midnight on 30 April, Hitler ordered Reitsch and von Greim to fly out of Berlin in an Arado Ar 96 that had arrived on 28 April, asserting that they could get Wenck to save Berlin. Von Greim was ordered to command the Luftwaffe to attack the Soviet forces that had just reached Potsdamer Platz and to make sure Himmler was punished for his treachery.

Reitsch reputedly stated during her 1945 interrogation that she left Berlin early on 30 April, less than 12 hours before Hitler's suicide. In his 1947 book, Hugh Trevor-Roper cites this as a factual error, while arguing that Reitsch's account is biased in favor of Hitler and especially von Greim. Trevor-Roper dates Reitsch's escape to the very early hours of 29 April, citing other eyewitnesses and noting that she lacked knowledge of Hitler's wedding to Eva Braun (which took place just after). The interrogation report claims that the plane took off from the Tiergarten's makeshift runway under heavy Soviet fire; it was spotted by searchlights and attacked by shells, but only shrapnel hit the plane. In her 1951 book, Reitsch wrote that although it was fairly clear and moonlit, they plane took off on 29 April without detection and she saw only "spasmodic" tracer fire from the Soviets before finding a cloud to hide behind, about a mile away. Although Reitsch claimed to her interrogators that there was no plane in the area that Hitler could have used to escape, in the 1970s she told American journalist James P. O'Donnell that after takeoff, she saw a Ju 52 in the area along with a pilot "obviously waiting for somebody". O'Donnell asked pilot Hans Baur about this, having heard that he saw Reitsch and von Greim to the runway, but Baur said he did not know of such a plane, leading the author to speculate that it landed after air traffic control had ceased due to the Soviet advance.

After leaving Berlin, Reitsch and von Greim landed in Rechlin, then flew in a Bücker 181 to Lübeck, where they heard the German announcement of Hitler's death on the night of 1 May and met with officials of the new government. In an effort to continue engaging the Soviets, Reitsch and von Greim flew to Graz, Austria, on 7 May and to Zell am See two days later, by which time Germany had formally surrendered. Reitsch's family had evacuated from Silesia before the Soviet troops arrived and taken refuge in Salzburg; on the night of 3 May 1945, after hearing a rumour that all refugees were to be taken back to their original homes in the Soviet occupation zone, Reitsch's father shot and killed her mother, her sister, her sister's three children, and himself. Von Greim, after being captured by the Allies, killed himself on 24 May 1945.

Reitsch was apprehended in May 1945 in Austria and interrogated in the United States occupation zone of Germany on 8 October by U.S. military intelligence officers. When asked about being ordered to leave the Führerbunker, Reitsch stated: "It was the blackest day when we could not die at our Führer's side." She asserted that "We should all kneel down in reverence and prayer before the altar of the Fatherland," referring to the bunker. After interrogators suggested that Hitler had been seen alive (in Tyrol, Austria, near where she had flown), Reitsch dismissed assertions of his survival and her possible complicity, stating, "He had no reason to live and the tragedy was that he knew it ... perhaps better than anyone else did."

Reitsch claimed that Hitler's initial motivation was "how to give his people a life free from economic insufficiencies and social maladjustments", but gambled with the lives of people: "the first great wrong, his first great failure". She criticised his incompetence as a leader (e.g. his selection of the wrong persons for office) and stated that Hitler had transformed ideologically, becoming a despot. Reitsch stated repeatedly that never again must an individual have so much control over any country. Reitsch's chief interrogator noted that she seemed to be a reliable witness, having struggled with thoughts of suicide since the war but more recently becoming interested in advocating for democracy. She was held for 18 months.

1947–1979

After her release, Reitsch settled in Frankfurt am Main. After the war, German citizens were barred from flying powered aircraft, but within a few years gliding was allowed, which she took up again. In 1952, Reitsch won a bronze medal in the World Gliding Championships in Spain; she was the first woman to compete and in 1955 she became German champion. She continued to break records, including the women's altitude record (6,848 m or 22,467 ft) in 1957 and her first diamond of the Gold-C badge.

During the mid-1950s, Reitsch was interviewed on film and talked about her wartime flight tests of the Fa 61, Me 262 and Me 163.

In 1959, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru invited Reitsch, who spoke fluent English, to start a gliding centre; she flew with him over New Delhi. In 1961, she accepted U.S. President John F. Kennedy's invitation to the White House.

From 1962 to 1966, she lived in Ghana. The then Ghanaian President, Kwame Nkrumah invited Reitsch to Ghana after reading of her work in India. At Afienya she founded the first indigenous African national gliding school, working closely with the government and the armed forces. The West German government supported her as technical adviser. The school was commanded by J. E. S. de Graft-Hayford, with gliders such as the double-seated Schleicher K7, Slingsby T.21 and a Bergfalke, along with a single-seated Schleicher K 8. She gained the FAI Diamond Badge in 1970. The project was evidently of great importance to Nkrumah and has been interpreted as part of a "modernist" development ideology.

Reitsch's attitudes to race underwent a change. She stated that "Earlier in my life, it would never have occurred to me to treat a black person as a friend or partner". She now experienced guilt at her earlier "presumptuousness and arrogance". She became close to Nkrumah. The details of their relationship are now unclear due to the destruction of documents, but some surviving letters are intimate in tone.

In Ghana, some Africans were disturbed by the prominence of a person with Reitsch's past, but Shirley Graham Du Bois, a noted African-American writer who had emigrated to Ghana and was friendly towards Reitsch, agreed with Nkrumah that Reitsch was extremely naive politically. Contemporary Ghanaian press reports seem to show a lack of interest in her past.

Throughout the 1970s, Reitsch broke gliding records in many categories, including the "Women's Out and Return World Record" twice, once in 1976 (715 km or 444 mi) and again, in 1979 (802 km or 498 mi), flying along the Appalachian Ridges in the U.S. During this time, she also finished first in the women's section of the first world helicopter championships.

Last interview (1970s)

Reitsch was interviewed and photographed several times in the 1970s, towards the end of her life, by Jewish-American photojournalist Ron Laytner. In her closing remarks she is quoted as saying:

And what have we now in Germany? A country of bankers and car-makers. Even our great army has gone soft. Soldiers wear beards and question orders. I am not ashamed to say I believed in National Socialism. I still wear the Iron Cross with diamonds Hitler gave me. But today in all of Germany you can't find a single person who voted Adolf Hitler into power ... Many Germans feel guilty about the war. But they don't explain the real guilt we share – that we lost.

In the same interview, she is quoted as saying,

I asked Hermann Göring one day, "What is this I am hearing that Germany is killing Jews?" Göring responded angrily, "A totally outrageous lie made up by the British and American press. It will be used as a rope to hang us someday if we lose the war."

Death

Grave of Hanna Reitsch in Salzburg

Reitsch died of a heart attack in Frankfurt at the age of 67, on 24 August 1979. She had never married. She is buried in the Reitsch family grave in the Salzburger Kommunalfriedhof.

Former British test pilot and Royal Navy officer Eric Brown said he received a letter from Reitsch in early August 1979 in which she said, "It began in the bunker, there it shall end." Within weeks she was dead. Brown speculated that Reitsch had taken the cyanide capsule Hitler had given her in the bunker and that she had taken it as part of a suicide pact with Greim. There is no record of an autopsy.

List of awards and world records

• 1932: women's gliding endurance record (5.5 hours)
• 1936: women's gliding distance record (305 km (190 mi))
• 1937: first woman to cross the Alps in a glider
• 1937: the first woman in the world to be promoted to flight captain by Colonel Ernst Udet
• 1937: the first woman to fly a helicopter (Fa 61)
• 1937: world distance record in a helicopter (109 km (68 mi))
• 1938: the first person to fly a helicopter (Fa 61) inside an enclosed space (Deutschlandhalle)
• 1938: winner of German national gliding competition Sylt-Breslau Silesia
• 1939: women's world record in gliding for point-to-point flight.
• 1943: While in the Luftwaffe, the first woman to pilot a rocket plane (Messerschmitt Me 163). She survived a disastrous crash though with severe injuries and because of this she became the first of three German women to receive the Iron Cross First Class.
• 1944: the first woman in the world to pilot a jet aircraft at the Luftwaffe research centre at Rechlin during the trials of the Messerschmitt Me 262 and Heinkel He 162
• 1952: third place in the World Gliding Championships in Spain together with her team-mate Lisbeth Häfner
• 1955: German gliding champion
• 1956: German gliding distance record (370 km (230 mi))
• 1957: German gliding altitude record (6,848 m (22,467 ft))

Books by Hanna Reitsch

• Fliegen, mein Leben. 4th ed. Munich: Herbig, 2001 [1951]. ISBN 3-7766-2197-4 (Autobiography)
• Ich flog in Afrika für Nkrumahs Ghana. 2nd ed. Munich: Herbig, 1979. ISBN 3-7766-0929-X (original title: Ich flog für Kwame Nkrumah).
• Das Unzerstörbare in meinem Leben. 7th ed. Munich: Herbig, 1992. ISBN 3-7766-0975-3.
• Höhen und Tiefen. 1945 bis zur Gegenwart. Munich: Heyne, 1984. ISBN 3-453-01963-6.
• Höhen und Tiefen. 1945 bis zur Gegenwart. 2nd expanded ed. Munich/Berlin: Herbig, 1978. ISBN 3-7766-0890-0.

In popular culture

• Reitsch is one of the two female test pilots (alongside Melitta von Stauffenberg) featured in The Woman Who Flew for Hitler (Pan Macmillan, 2017) by Clare Mulley

Reitsch has been portrayed by the following actresses in film and television productions:

• Barbara Rütting in the 1965 film Operation Crossbow
• Diane Cilento in the 1973 British film Hitler: The Last Ten Days.
• Myvanwy Jenn in the 1973 British television production The Death of Adolf Hitler.
• Anna Thalbach in the 2004 German film Downfall (German: Der Untergang).

See also

• Rhön-Rossitten Gesellschaft

References

Footnotes

Citations

Bibliography

• Allman, Jean (February 2013). "Phantoms of the Archive: Kwame Nkrumah, a Nazi Pilot named Hanna, and the Contingencies of Postcolonial History-Writing". American Historical Review. 118 (1): 104–129. doi:10.1093/ahr/118.1.104.
• Beevor, Antony (2002). Berlin: The Downfall 1945. Viking-Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-670-03041-5.
• Brown, Eric (2006). Wings on my Sleeve. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 978-0-297-84565-2.
• Caldwell, Donald L. (1991). JG 26: Top Guns of the Luftwaffe. New York: Ivy Books. ISBN 978-0-8041-1050-1.
• Cook, Joan (31 August 1979). "Hanna Reitsch, 67. A Top German Pilot". The New York Times. Retrieved 7 July 2008.
• Dollinger, Hans; Jacobsen, Hans Adolf (1968). The Decline and Fall of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan: A Pictorial History of the Final Days of World War II. Translated by Pomerans, Arnold. New York: Crown. OCLC 712594.
• Hirsch, Afua (16 April 2012). "Hitler's pilot helped Ghana's women to fly". The Guardian. Retrieved 16 April 2012.
• Mulley, Clare (18 July 2017). The Women Who Flew for Hitler: A True Story of Soaring Ambition and Searing Rivalry. St. Martin's Press. ISBN 978-1-250-13316-8.
• O'Donnell, James P. (1978). The Bunker. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 978-0-395-25719-7.
• Piszkiewicz, Dennis (1997). From Nazi Test Pilot to Hitler's Bunker: The Fantastic Flights of Hanna Reitsch. Praeger Publishers. ISBN 978-0-275-95456-7. Archived from the original on 2 March 2012. Retrieved 8 January 2010.
• Reitsch, Hanna (1955). The Sky My Kingdom. London: The Bodley Head.
  • —— (2009) [1955]. The Sky My Kingdom. London: Biddles Limited, Guildford and King's Lynn. ISBN 978-1-85367-262-0.
• Shirer, William L. (1960). The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany. New York: Simon and Schuster. LCCN 60-6729.
• Slater, AE (December 1979 – January 1980). "Obituary". Sailplane & Gliding. 30 (6). British Gliding Association: 302.
• Trevor-Roper, Hugh R. (1947). The Last Days of Hitler. New York.
• Ziemke, Earl F. (1969). Battle for Berlin End of the Third Reich Ballantine's Illustrated History of World War II (Battle Book #6). Ballantine Books.

Further reading

• Lomax, J. (1990). Hanna Reitsch: Flying for the Fatherland. John Murray Publishers. ISBN 978-0-7195-4571-9.

External links

• Hitler's Heroes: Hanna Reitsch (video) on YouTube
• The last interview on YouTube where she exclaims about Hitler's understanding in avionics: "I was deeply astonished about his interests"
• Hanna Reitch 1941 on YouTube testing the Me 163 jet plane
• Hanna Reitch on YouTube as depicted in Downfall
• Newspaper clippings about Hanna Reitsch in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW