Nazi Germany’s top female aviators were on opposite sides
Two female aviators achieved fame in Nazi Germany but they despised each other and had opposing views about Hitler, says Clare Mulley
In September 1938, Melitta von Stauffenberg touched down on British soil. The German pilot was a special guest at Chigwell airfield, in Essex, which had been put at the disposal of the British Women’s Air Reserve. Keen to show off Germany’s female aviators, Hermann Göring, the Nazi minister for aviation, selected Melitta to take part in the displays at the grand opening. Her official mission was to extend the hand of friendship. Unofficially, she was there to show the British pilots how it was done.
Melitta, 35, hated publicity and was loathe to take part. Nevertheless, she wowed the crowds by performing perilous loops. Yet even as she did, Neville Chamberlain, the prime minister, was, at that very moment, in talks with Hitler in Cologne. Less than a week later, Britain agreed to the German annexation of the Czech Sudetenland. Within a year, the two countries would be at war.
Melitta was one of only two female pilots in Nazi Germany to be awarded the title of Honorary Flight Captain. The other was Hanna Reitsch. While Melitta was in England, 24-year-old Hanna was in America representing her country at the Cleveland Air Races.
They were Germany’s two premier aviatrixes – yet the two women could hardly have been more different. Whereas dark and shy Melitta shied away from grand displays, Hanna was a show-woman. “Tiny, blonde, blue-eyed and addicted to tea at breakfast,” The New York Times wrote in 1938. Later that year, Hanna became a household name as the first person to fly a helicopter inside a building – the vast Deutschlandhalle, built for the 1936 Olympics. After circling the audience close enough to blow off the gentlemen’s hats, she stepped from the machine, performing the Nazi salute.
But where the two were alike, was in their sense of duty. During the war, they were the only women to actively serve the Nazi regime as test pilots.
As a historical biographer, I know there is a rich seam of untold women’s stories, but it is rare to find them working at such a high level for the Nazis, let alone two women who knew – and despised – one another, not to mention one who tried to save Hitler and another who was prepared to risk her life to help kill him. The Führer had made his first flight in 1920, having recognised the potential of aircraft for political and military manoeuvres. That same year, Melitta also took to the air.
After the First World War, motorpowered flight had been temporarily banned in Germany, and gliding became an aspirational sport. Women were expected to admire the young men risking their necks to restore national honour, but Melitta refused to stay grounded. Her first flight in a flimsy wooden and canvas glider astonished onlookers.
It took 11 years for Hanna to follow. Just a year after getting her licence, in 1932, she set a world record for gliding endurance. Hitler was also back in the cockpit that year, becoming the first political leader to travel round his country by plane. As he rose to power, Melitta and Hanna became part of a close-knit group of female aviators. Both performed at the Olympics – Hanna in gliding; Melitta undertaking daring aerobatics.
Yet their politics could hardly have been more distinct. Hanna was an enthusiastic supporter of what, to her, felt like a dynamic new regime. Melitta was less sure. Although she had been raised as a Protestant, her father had been born Jewish. She was now officially a Mischling – of “mixedblood” – and had even more reason to avoid the limelight, while she quietly applied for “Honorary Aryan” status. Hanna tried to discredit her rival. She hated that Melitta was better-qualified and belittled her achievements to mutual friends. She also disliked that Melitta saw herself as an honorary man – dressing in trouser suits, rather than carving out a space as a new type of professional woman.
Although they flew from the same airfields, the two largely ignored one another. But while relations between the aviatrixes were rocky, with the press they were even worse. Female pilots in Britain and Germany faced prejudice. “The menace is the woman who thinks she ought to be flying a high-speed bomber when she really has not the intelligence to scrub the floor of a hospital properly”, CG Grey, editor of Aeroplane magazine wrote in 1941.
The Luftwaffe refused to admit women, but Melitta and Hanna were so skilled that both were soon serving as civilian test pilots – flying aircraft still under development. Hanna operated a glider, named Gigant, which could carry 200 armed troops, or a tank. The wheels of this monster were as tall as she was, and she had to use a cushion and wooden blocks tied to her feet to reach the controls.
She also tested the notorious Messerschmitt Me 163, which was powered by the combustion of unstable fuels. Prototypes had already claimed the lives of several pilots when Hanna, now 30, started trials.
Inevitably, the undercarriage jammed and she crashed. It was only when she noticed blood running down her face that she discovered “at the place where my nose had been, was now nothing but an open cleft”. Her skull was fractured in four places. Fearing that his celebrity female pilot might die, Hitler awarded Hanna the Iron Cross as she lay in a hospital bed.
Meanwhile, Melitta was an engineer, specialising in nosedives. This was work with clear military significance, and she helped develop the Stuka dive-bombers that proved so devastating in the Blitzkrieg campaigns. But Melitta was not safely entrenched behind a desk. Unlike most engineers, she insisted on carrying out her own test flights. To conduct one dive was considered daring. Pilots would often blackout under the pressure and there were many fatalities.
Melitta undertook up to 15 dives in a single day. She then returned to the drawing table to rework her designs. It was by becoming uniquely valuable to the Nazi regime that she hoped to protect herself and her family. In 1943 she was also awarded the Iron Cross, but – more importantly – her Honorary Aryan reclassification, too.
Nevertheless, when opportunity came, Melitta did not hesitate to support the most famous attempt on Hitler’s life. Her brother-in-law was German officer Claus von Stauffenberg, whose July 1944 plot to detonate a bomb at Hitler’s Eastern Front HQ has become the stuff of legend. Melitta provided a safe space for the conspirators to plot, and was willing to fly Claus to and from the scene. In the end, only one of two devices went off, Hitler survived and von Stauffenberg was shot. Melitta’s involvement went unnoticed.
Hanna, conversely, remained committed to the regime. In April 1945 she flew into Berlin, becoming one of the last people to visit Hitler’s bunker – offering to fly him out of the German capital.
Hitler refused, but sent her away with the final letters of Joseph Goebbels, and his lover Eva Braun – something Hanna thought embarrassingly sentimental and dropped from her plane so it would not make historical record. In the words of British pilot Eric “Winkle” Brown, who knew her, she was “a fanatical Nazi” to the end.
There can be little doubt, however, that she and Melitta were courageous. Their skills placed them at the heart of the Third Reich – but once there they made very different choices.
That they ended their lives on opposite sides of history is unsurprising, but that we are only now discovering their stories is nothing short of incredible.
The Women Who Flew for Hitler by Clare Mulley is published by Macmillan (£20). To order your copy for £16.99 plus p&p call 0844 871 1514 or visit books. telegraph.co.uk