Hitler's Heroine: Hanna Reitsch (30 page)

His answer came all too soon. The following morning Hanna was found dead in her bed. A doctor declared that she had had a massive heart attack, but rumours began almost at once that Hanna had taken her own life. Where was the suicide pill? It was never found, but it is highly unlikely that it would have killed Hanna if she had used it. After more than thirty years the cyanide would have degraded. Some Nazis who had used capsules in 1945, which had been issued five or six years earlier, discovered to their horror that the poison was no longer lethal. Instead, they suffered a torturous few hours, emerging from the experience very much alive. There is little reason to suppose Hanna killed herself. She had been depressed and felt tired, but she also had plans and was still determined to do something for Germany. That her heart ultimately gave out is hardly surprising: after her close encounter with scarlet fever it had always been weak and the strain of travel, flying and very public arguments would not have helped. That she told a friend a day before her death that she was suffering chest pains is the most convincing evidence that it was a heart attack that killed her. Hanna was neither a liar nor cunning enough to attempt misdirection.

In any case, Hanna did not perceive suicide as something to hide. It could be a last gesture of honour. Had she indeed contemplated it, Hanna would surely have left a note and ensured all knew what she was about. It is hardly conceivable that such a talkative person would miss one final opportunity to speak to the world. Hanna died a natural death. That this has spawned one more myth concerning her should hardly be surprising.

‘If flying, like a glass-bottomed bucket, can give you that vision, that seeing eye, which peers down to the still world below the choppy waves – it will always remain magic,’ wrote Anne Morrow Lindbergh of the mystical aspect of her experience of flight. Her words could echo the way Hanna Reitsch felt about flying. It was that pull, that mystical experience that had locked her to a dangerous regime. Hanna has to be viewed through her flying to understand her, but one cannot ignore the poor decisions she made in life, her support for Nazism and her association with some of the worst examples of the regime.

How could Hanna be blind to all that was around her? Historians continue to argue about the level of knowledge ordinary Germans had of the criminal activities of their superiors. Many have argued that ignorance was rife, but in
Soldaten
, an historical and psychological analysis of German soldiers through their interrogation records, Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer argue that knowledge of the atrocities was wider than first thought. Nearly all the soldiers had heard stories; some believed them, some did not. Many were worried that Germany’s reputation after the war would be tarnished by the actions of the few. Many denied having anything to do with the execution of ‘undesirables’, though the evidence indicates the Wehrmacht was heavily involved with transport and executions. Even more surprising was the number of soldiers who had witnessed something personally that either later troubled them or made them think the rumours they had heard about mass murder were true.

These were soldiers, directly involved in fighting and naturally caught up in the execution of grisly tasks, but Neitzel and Welzer have also shown that at the civilian level many people knew that things were wrong in the Reich and simply chose to ignore them. A classic example is given by Mary Fulbrook in her book
A Small Town near Auschwitz
. She learned that a friend of her family (Fulbrook’s mother was originally from Germany) was once the principal civilian administrator of the town of Bedzin, Poland – part of Polish Silesia and just over three hours away from Hanna’s hometown. Udo Klausa had claimed he was a decent man, had not participated in any crimes during the war and had had no knowledge of the gradual eradication of Jews from his town. In fact, he had happily massaged dates to prove that he was never around when the worst atrocities occurred. Fulbrook proved that Klausa had been an integral part of the governing system of Bedzin and
had
to have known what was happening to the Jews under his jurisdiction. He was helping the Nazis in a very mundane way by signing forms and ignoring the consequences. Neitzel and Welzer argue that this holds true for every civil servant who worked under the Nazi regime, continuing with their duties without questioning them. A concentration camp does not function without an administrative system; atrocities cannot be limited to the person who fired the bullet. The blame resonates out further and further, down through the system to the man who signed the form for the camp to be built, to the clerk who typed it up and filed it. Even to the civilians who looked on and did nothing.

Hanna may not have been an anti-Semite, but she was aware of anti-Semitism around her and continued to work for a regime that endorsed heinous crimes. Worse, she defended the leader of that regime, the man who demanded Jewish blood. What we must do is observe Hanna’s blind devotion to Hitler within context; first she had been raised in a cultural environment where ‘true’ Germans were constantly distinguished as superior to other races, including the Jews. Her mother often ranted about how foreign influence had wrecked Germany and her accusations fell on Jews as much as anyone else. Such laying of blame is not uncommon, even today, and probably Frau Reitsch meant very little by it, certainly not condoning mass slaughter. But the effect on a young mind of a combination of denigration of other races and the constant uplifting of German blood (and Hanna in particular) cannot be ignored. Hanna was always easily led; she rarely held opinions that were solely her own and she was superficial in her judgement of others. It was easy enough for such a person to become accustomed to accepting her superiors’ lies over the unpleasant truths others presented to her. Part is due to idolisation, part is due to the horror and fear of what might lie beyond acknowledging the truth. It does not make a person less culpable, but it does make them very human. We all cherry-pick the truth as we see fit, so we can continue to exist in our own world as contentedly as possible. We support a political party and ignore its failings, or at least brush over them. Some take this to extremes and will not admit that the party they support can do anything wrong. Today these wrongs are poor economic decisions, sex scandals and dubious monetary dealings, but the principle is the same. Ordinary, good people prefer loyalty to a party over deeply questioning their political choices. For many it is very simply the easiest option. And we mustn’t forget that for many it is too embarrassing, too shameful, to ever admit publically that they were wrong, even if they accept it privately.

So what makes a Nazi? British pilot Eric Brown, who met (and once idolised) Hanna, stated she had to be a Nazi because she defended Hitler. That is a very simplistic, black-and-white statement. Nazism had far more shades of grey. Even the British POW system recognised that there were ardent Nazis (coded black), non-Nazis (white) and those who were somewhere in the middle (grey). The ‘greys’ made up the vast majority of POWs. Nazism meant different things to different people. For Udo Klausa it was a means to an end. He was an early Nazi, signing up with the party when he realised the power of the movement. He believed, quite rightly, that if he did not join it would hamper his chances of a career in civil administration. Other people joined out of ignorance, or because they liked one policy the NSDAP was promoting. Few joined because they wanted the annihilation of the Jews, and even those who did would not necessarily have agreed with the mass execution the Nazis employed.

Hanna was never a member of the Nazi Party, but she did believe in Hitler in her naïve, lost way. She was deceived by his charisma and led by the fact that he had helped her achieve her dream of flying. She was not a sycophant as some films have portrayed her; she would stand up to Hitler and tell him he was wrong if she saw fit, but she did hero-worship him. Like many Germans, she maintained the belief that Hitler knew nothing about the destruction of the Jews – it was all the fault of his treacherous subordinates, Himmler and Göring, who had betrayed him. Hanna thought of Hitler as she did herself; a naïve visionary who had been betrayed by his own government. She had never liked Himmler and it was easy to blame him for Hitler’s, and Germany’s, fall, much as her mother had found it easy to blame the Jews and foreign influence for the problems Germany faced between the wars.

Does that make Hanna a Nazi? It depends greatly on one’s definition of Nazism. She never killed anyone, nor supported the eradication policies, but she did turn a blind eye to the worst excesses of her government. She did train people to fly – ultimately many of her students entered the Luftwaffe – and she considered the options of suicide missions to cripple Britain. But equally there were many who did similar things during the Second World War who slipped back into normal life afterwards without a hint of Nazism clinging to them. Hanna did not really believe in the National Socialist Party and its ideology – that is plain – but she did believe in Hitler. Ultimately, what she really wanted was a chance to fly, and the war provided that. In a sense she was no different to some of the women who flew planes for the British ATA (Air Transport Auxiliary) during the war and later said they were disappointed when the war ended as it meant the end of their flying careers. Hanna was wrong in her choices, she was wrong in her belief in Hitler, but that does not make her a Nazi or worthy of the extreme demonisation she has suffered, especially in comparison with some of her fellow Second World War survivors.

Mary Fulbrook remarks on the difficulty of assessing a person’s beliefs or criminal culpability at such a distance of time:

Any attempt now to evaluate the acts of a former Nazi – in whatever sense – is complicated by the need to draw lines with respect to degrees of both reprehensibility and responsibility. To err in one direction may mean to concede legitimacy to essentially Nazi arguments, while to lean unduly to the other, expressing moral outrage about any kind of complicity … may be to gloss over real distinctions in degrees of relative responsibility and the historically uneven distribution of the undoubted overall burden of guilt.

Reading the US interrogation reports on Hanna, it seems that there was a feeling among her interviewers that she was generally appalled at the outcome of National Socialism. Again this has to be accepted warily as many former Nazis made emotive and convincing statements of their horror of the system after the war. There were plenty who claimed they had not really known what was happening. Hanna, however, seems to have genuinely felt betrayed by her leaders and shocked at the cruelty of the crimes they had committed.

In comparison with many contemporaries, Hanna has been treated unfairly. In some regards she had an integrity and sense of honour that betrayed her time and again. She would not deny what she had done, nor what she had thought or felt during the war simply to appease post-war audiences. Others reshaped themselves to fit into a new world; Wernher von Braun, for example, the blue-eyed boy of the Nazi rocket industry, had made himself useful to the Americans and so had avoided being tarred with the brush of war crimes. Yet he
had
worked on the V2 and other rocket-propelled weapons and, certainly in the early days of the war, was willing enough to do so. An enthusiast for rockets, the Nazi regime allowed him the freedom to tinker with designs and test engine after engine. A clever man such as von Braun could hardly have been unaware that this was a military operation, and that eventually the rocket would be viewed in the light of how it could win a war. As the years passed this only became more obvious – not to mention the slave labour used to build the rockets. Von Braun carefully avoided all mention of this. Then there are his actions with test pilot Erich Warsitz: despite having no reliable prototype rocket, he was prepared to send up a man, to his very likely death, to test a rocket engine in flight. Pressure from above is one thing, ethics is clearly another. Post-war, Wernher von Braun worked for NASA and was eventually integral to the historic moon landing. He quickly put any associations of complicity with the Nazis behind him. In 1964 he remarked that ‘Having experienced the tragic misuse of power and the gradual destruction of personal freedom in a totalitarian regime, I consider it a blessing and privilege to pursue the peaceful exploration of space in the service of a truly free country and in the interest of all mankind.’

Von Braun became an American hero, not least by suggesting his actions during the war had all been due to Nazi dominance – in his words, he had not been free to do anything else. His hands were tied – he
had
to build rockets of death. We can judge this denial and justification as we wish; would it have gone down so well had von Braun not been so useful to the Americans? Hanna was of no real use to anyone, so she was not worth protecting from the post-war slings and arrows flying at all involved in Hitler’s regime. Her life had intertwined repeatedly with von Braun’s, but she was the one, not the man who created the V2 bomb, who became a villain.

At the end of the day, Hanna was a complex human being who made mistakes and paid for them heavily. Her story is one of triumph through adversity, of bravery and determination, as well as defeat and despondency. Hanna may have failed herself, but her legacy in the world of women’s aviation cannot be denied. She was a pioneer and a dreamer. She wanted the world to fly and to enjoy the spiritual experience of being airborne that she so enjoyed. Unfortunately, she did not understand that not everyone was attracted to flying for peaceful reasons. Hanna Reitsch will always be a name that sparks controversy as well as adulation. To some extent this is the price of fame – after all, if not for Hitler’s influence would we still be talking so much about a German test pilot whose halcyon days were seventy years ago, even a female one?

A
PPENDIX
1

L
ETTER
FROM
D
R
J
OSEPH
G
OEBBELS