Hitler's Heroine: Hanna Reitsch (20 page)

To test the Reichenberg to its operational limits a water tank was installed to mimic the weight of a fully loaded V1. This was too heavy to land with (the true Reichenberg not being required to land safely), so a plug operated by a lever in the cockpit was installed to drain the water in the air and enable the test pilot to land safely. As with her disastrous flight in the Me 163, Hanna was soon to discover the limitations of release mechanisms. She tested one of these modified V1s at 18,000ft as she had been instructed, hardly thinking that the cold at such heights would freeze the water tank plug into its hole. Coming down to 4,500ft, Hanna went to drain the water and found the lever would not move. She was rapidly losing height and, as this variant had no engine, time was of the essence if she wished to avoid crashing. She clawed at the lever desperately, pulling on it with all her strength, wrenching the skin off her hands and making her fingers bleed, the ground looming closer and closer. Then, just as all seemed lost, the lever released and the water drained away in sufficient time for Hanna to land almost perfectly.

Testing came to an end just as Britain was finalising the plans for the D-Day landings. By the time Hanna and Kensche had handed over to trained instructors the suicide programme was already too late. The Allied invasion had begun and long-distance rockets were not going to help against troops streaming from both east and west into Germany. Many of the volunteers had also developed cold feet; the glory of giving one’s life for the Reich had seemed a powerful motivation before the actual reality of the operation had sunk in. Hanna might have spoken of hundreds of volunteers, but in actuality she had seventy who had signed an oath to fly to their death. Some of these had perished in test flights; others, witnessing the fatal crashes, had become reluctant to risk the same. After all, what was the point? Germany looked pretty doomed with the Allies pushing towards Berlin. Hitler was ranting about the impossible and the other high-ranking members of the Reich were either arguing with each other or casting men into pointless deadly situations. No wonder even Hanna felt disillusioned. She was angry with Himmler for not appreciating the skill required to fly a V1 and hated Goebbels for turning their mission into another propaganda ploy. By the time the suicide unit was ready to fly it was no longer of any use.

Hanna’s vision of a noble suicide in the name of the Reich was never going to happen. Hitler was never really convinced by it. He was later won over on the Storm Fighters and missions of April 1945 because they were high risk, but not deliberately suicidal. For Hanna’s men there would have been no second chance; this was the reason her plan never took off. Hitler refused to see good pilots wasted unnecessarily. Paradoxically, he often ordered the Wehrmacht into suicidal situations and told them to fight to the last bullet and the last man, praising their inevitable self-sacrifice. But cannon-fodder soldiers were far easier to come by than experienced pilots, not to mention planes. In short, Hanna’s experiments with the V1 were never going to bring her the fame and glory she craved. Instead, they brought her a strange memorial. The film
Operation Crossbow
blended truth and fiction to give the impression that Hanna flew V1s to test their suitability as rockets. This confusion of the true nature of her tests has become an oft-repeated ‘fact’. That she was testing them as suicide craft was never suspected – one of those cases of truth being stranger than fiction.

9

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Hanna’s world had crumbled a long time ago, only she had failed to notice – or rather she chose to ignore the signs. Her association with Himmler, going to the extent of defending him as being misunderstood, had earned her the anger of some of her colleagues, who could not believe that she was so blind. But Hanna was desperate: desperate to believe there was some good left in Germany and its leaders, desperate to know that she had not devoted her career to aiding madmen and murderers. Such desperation is a powerful motivator when it is mixed with pride and patriotism. ‘She was too good for what they made of her,’ her friend Otto Fuchs recalled.

Hanna did not see the subtle shifts and ulterior motives around her. She was honest to the point of stupidity; she was rarely devious, she could not lie (except to herself) and she bounced around the Nazi world taking at face value everything that was said to her. If Himmler said there were no gas chambers, well, that must be the case. Hanna could not conceive that her leaders and superiors would lie to her face. Such subtleties were lost on her. Not all her family were so blind. In desperation over Göring’s misunderstanding of the strength of the Luftwaffe, Hanna told her cousin Helmut Heuberger about her meeting with the chief of the air force and his conviction that the Me 163 was already in production. If he believed this then surely he had convinced Hitler of the same? The horror of knowing her superiors were so ill informed was hardly imaginable.

Helmut seemed a good person to voice these concerns to. An enthusiastic member of the Hitler Youth, he had joined the army empowered by propaganda and Nazi righteousness. A severe injury had prevented him participating in the disastrous Stalingrad campaign, but had earned him the Iron Cross, Second Class. Now invalided out of the army, he was watching the war from the side lines. Hanna’s news fed into worries that had already been troubling him. Doubts had entered Helmut’s mind and he started to wonder what he had fought and been injured for. He came to the conclusion he could no longer support Hitler. He had to stand for Germany, to save his country from further destruction. Doing that meant opposing the Führer. Helmut went on to become one of the leaders of the Austrian resistance, completely unbeknown to Hanna.

Hanna’s ignorance of the worst excesses of the Nazi creed was far from unusual. Many Germans, especially women who were not involved in the fighting, were ignorant of the crimes of Hitler and his cronies. Even those who hated the Jews found the concept of mass murder impossible to swallow and even harder to imagine on the scale the Allies claimed. Nearly seventy years on, the facts are undeniable, but it should be remembered that in the blinkered, controlled world of Nazi Germany truth was a scarce commodity. Papers reported what they were told to. Those who lived in the areas of concentration camps must have had some idea of the conditions, but mostly they were kept at a distance. Ignorance was widespread. Besides, it is very hard to believe that your leader, the man you have placed your trust and hopes in, could be so evil and bloodthirsty. Unlike some, Hanna could not claim complete ignorance. She had been shown evidence of Nazi crimes; she just refused to believe it. In that she was far from alone in Germany.

In October 1944 Hanna was hurt running to an air-raid shelter during a bombing raid on Berlin. Her injuries were relatively minor: a concussion and damage to her elbow, but she was taken to hospital and there fell in with Colonel Hans-Ulrich Rudel, a veteran of the Eastern Front who had recently had his leg amputated. Hanna put to Rudel a question that had been troubling her – how would the wounded be evacuated from Berlin once the city was in ruins and navigation by air almost impossible? Planes sent to airlift civilians would find it impossible to land now that the city was being blown to smithereens and all landmarks were lying in rubble.

Rudel considered the problem and agreed with Hanna that the situation would call for advanced planning. Hanna thought a helicopter might be the answer: it could land much more easily than an aeroplane. Once sufficiently recovered, Hanna began searching for evacuation routes through Berlin. She used an Ack-Ack tower as her target, the space on the top of the tower being just big enough for a helicopter to land. Then Hanna plotted routes from all sides of Berlin, all angles, all compass points. She memorised each course so that she could find the tower even in a night air raid with smoke obscuring her view. The project certainly kept her busy, but what was the point? Hanna alone in a helicopter could rescue a handful of people only; a mass evacuation of Berlin was simply unfeasible. Still, the experience had kept her distracted from other concerns, such as the fast encroaching advance of the Russians, who even now were making inroads into Silesia. Rumours of Russian atrocities had reached Berlin and frightened everyone. Hanna became afraid for her friends still living there and phoned Otto Fuchs and begged him and his wife to leave the city as soon as they could. Fuchs was touched by the phone call; he had not spoken to Hanna for some time – since they had fallen out over her dogmatic defence of Himmler and Hitler.

Hanna was equally concerned about her own family. She had made a trip to Breslau as pilot to State Secretary Naumann. The city had been under siege for some time and the depression and distress all around filtered even into Hanna’s rose-tinted worldview. Naumann had gone to try and raise hopes and brandish Nazi propaganda, but the dying city was past being saved by words. The inhabitants had already conceded defeat mentally and Hanna left with a deepening impression of the despair Germany was destined to suffer. Her parents were still in Hirschberg, but the pressure of the Russian advance, and the persistent pleading of the Hirschberg mayor, finally persuaded them to leave their home and travel to Salzburg, where they found accommodation in the attic of a once-grand mansion. Herr Reitsch’s depression was worsening. Having been called upon to treat the wounded because of his medical knowledge (even if he was only an eye doctor), he had seen first-hand the brutality of the Russians: women and children raped repeatedly, old men and wounded soldiers tortured and beaten. He had seen cruelty he had never imagined and it haunted him. It seemed the Bolshevik threat Hitler had scared them with over the years and which had gained him power, had proved too much for the Führer to hold back. In contrast to her husband, Emy Reitsch settled well in Salzburg and began to make plans for the future. Heidi’s children were growing up and Emy wrote an Easter play for them in verse and made them all costumes. As usual, she was the glue holding the family together.

Hanna made a final trip to Hirschberg in the April of 1945. Only a few years before she had walked through the streets of her hometown a heroine, greeted by flags and smiling faces. Now the roads and houses were empty. Everything was quiet as those few who remained awaited the arrival of the Russians. Hanna walked the old routes, looked upon the tramways she had once used, peeked in at the empty school and stood outside her house. She took it all in one final time. She would never see Hirschberg again. She travelled on to Salzburg and paid an unexpected visit to her family. Emy was ecstatic and hugged her daughter tight. Hanna was able to stay the whole day, a treat she had not experienced since Christmas. She played with her nieces and nephews, enjoyed a family meal and overlooked the quietness and reserve of her father. It was a happy occasion despite the dark clouds looming over Germany.

On 25 April Hanna received a call from Ritter von Greim. He had been summoned by Hitler to the Führerbunker, in the heart of besieged Berlin. The mission was no doubt suicidal, but von Greim’s honour as a soldier would not allow him to ignore the command. Getting to Berlin was tricky enough, so he decided to ask Hanna to fly him in via helicopter, having heard of her experiments in 1944. Later authors have suggested Hanna was an unwanted guest on the mission to Berlin, that she wheedled her way into flying with von Greim to pay a final farewell to the Führer. This makes a better case for a sycophantic Hanna Reitsch, suggesting she was desperate for one last minute in Hitler’s reflected glow, but it is in fact untrue. Von Greim knew Hanna was probably his best chance to get in safely because of her knowledge of all the routes through Berlin. The fact he sought permission from her parents to allow her to accompany him also shows he wanted her and not that she was an unwelcome tag-along. The knowledge that Hanna was requested by a superior to fly him to Berlin and did
not
insist on going for the sake of some egotistical hero-worshipping foible, casts a whole new light on Hanna’s time in the bunker.

Hanna said a final farewell to her family in Salzburg. Despite her eternal optimism, Hanna had to admit that there was little hope of her returning and her parents knew this as they kissed and hugged her goodbye. There was still no news of Kurt, who had vanished after his ship had sunk and now Emy’s eldest daughter was flying into a war-ravaged city and probably to her own death. Hanna flew with von Greim to Rechlin. There the news was bad: for two days no plane had been able to get past the Russian defences. There was no knowing the condition of runways nearer Berlin; a pilot would probably have to improvise. The airport at Gatow was still in German hands, but it was completely encircled and under almost constant enemy artillery fire. Just to finish off the catalogue of disasters, the helicopter Hanna had intended to fly had been destroyed in a recent air raid on Rechlin.

Von Greim was still determined to reach Hitler. A Focke-Wulf 190 was put at his disposal, along with a pilot who had made several successful trips into Berlin and back, and knew the safest routes. He would land the colonel general at Gatow then take off immediately, since the Russians were expected to take the airport at any time. Hanna queried how von Greim expected to get from Gatow to the Führerbunker, a considerable distance through a ruined and bombarded city. Von Greim would have to pilot himself, but naturally it would be difficult for him to navigate, especially as he had spent many of the last months on the Eastern Front and Berlin was a very changed city. Hanna decided that she still could be of some use, showing von Greim the route through the city she had memorised during her flights in 1944. Von Greim agreed. Hanna was one of the few people who knew how to navigate through the wreckage of Berlin.

Hanna made her way to the pilot who would fly von Greim into Berlin and asked if it would cause him a great deal of difficulty to include her on the flight. The pilot laughed: ‘Frau Hanna, your weight will not matter, but where should I put you?’ The Focke-Wulf was a single-seater, though the 190 von Greim would travel in had been equipped with a second seat for a passenger. Aside from that there was no room for anyone else. Hanna took a look at the 190 and decided she would have to squeeze into the rear of the fuselage, crammed between oxygen cylinders and the metal struts of the plane. There was no dignified way of entering and Hanna was literally threaded into the aircraft feet first. Once wedged in, the metal struts digging painfully into her flesh, Hanna was completely immobile. She could not pull herself out of the tight crawl space. Should the worst happen – the plane crash and catch fire – Hanna would be trapped in her own coffin waiting to cook to death. A sudden panic engulfed her at the thought; but she was doing this for von Greim, because he had been a loyal supporter and friend since the loss of Ernst Udet – a loss that still pained her. She was very alone in the world of the Luftwaffe and von Greim had made the constant obstacles and criticisms bearable. For this reason she wanted to see him safely into Berlin, but the confinement of the 190 almost proved too much. She had to bite down firmly on her fears and ignore the vivid nightmares her imagination drew just to remain calm.