HITLER’S FLYING FEMMES
One promised him Nazi kamikazes; the other tried to kill him
WHEN German pilot Hanna Reitsch was summoned to meet Adolf Hitler in February 1944, she found a führer who was too tired to lift his arm in salute. Germany’s declining fortunes in World War II were taking their toll on the tyrant who started the fight.
Speaking negatively about the regime was punishable by death, but Reitsch, there to be awarded the prestigious Iron Cross, had few boundaries. She had an idea for a Nazi kamikaze squad that just might salvage the German war effort, and planned to share it with her führer whether he liked it or not.
Hitler rejected her idea of having pilots train for suicide missions in planes designed like missiles, prefer- ring to rely on a jetfighter program that Reitsch knew was a long way from fruition.
The impatient Reitsch, risking all, cut him off in mid-sentence, practically screaming. “Mein führer, you are speaking of the grandchild of an embryo!”
A “painful silence” followed. Not only did Reitsch escape the meeting unscathed, but she received permission from the Nazi leader to develop the program, known as Operation Self-Sacrifice.
‘THE Women Who Flew For Hitler” (inset) tells the story of “the two most highly honored women in Nazi Germany,” pilots Reitsch and Melitta von Stauffenberg, who also received the Iron Cross from Hitler.
The two test pilots (women were barred from combat) were fearless adventurers who sought evergreater challenges, despite the limitations of what women were allowed to do.
But within the nightmare of Nazi Germany, they took very different paths. The secretly part-Jewish von Stauffenberg lent her clandestine support to a Hitler assassination plot, while Reitsch’s admiration for the Nazi cause never wavered.
While von Stauffenberg set records by performing up to 15 dive-bomb tests per day — trials that found her
Save yourself, mein führer — that is the will of every German! — Hanna Reitsch (above greeting Hitler), as she begged him near the end of the war not to kill himself
plummeting from the skies at breakneck speeds in a perilously shaky flying machine — she was also agreeing to fly her brotherin-law, German Army officer Claus von Stauffenberg, into Berlin to assassinate Hitler, then facilitate his escape.
In the end, though, Claus (right) didn’t need the pilot. On July 20, 1944, he set off a bomb just six feet from the German leader. Hitler suffered a concussion and ringing ears but sustained no lasting injuries. Claus was executed the following day. (Tom Cruise played Claus in Bryan Singer’s 2008 film about the plot, “Valkyrie.”)
IN April 1945, von Stauffenberg was shot down by American forces while searching concen- tration camps for her husband.
Reitsch, meanwhile, had Operation Self-Sacrifice all but ready to launch when D-Day scuttled her plans and German fighters were reassigned to defensiveve posts.
In late April 1945, Hitleritler summoned Reitsch to his Berlin bunker.r. With the US and Rus-sian armies just dayss away — and word spreading that Russian soldiers were committing atrocities — the Nazi high command was be-yond panic.
Reitsch saw Hitlerr well up in tears as hee discussed a recent be-etrayal by Luftwaffefe commander Hermann Göring, who had indicated a move toward taking over Nazi leadership. Later, Hitler presented Reitsch with a gift: “two small brass capsules,sules, each containingc a fragile glass phphial filled with half a teteaspoon of amber liqliquid: cyanide. The bobottles were dessigned to be broken bbetween the teeth, aand the poison ququickly swallowed.” HHitler told Reitsch thathat if what remained of tthe German army coucouldn’t stop the Russisians, he and his lover, Eva Braun, would take their own lives. Reitsch was distraught. “With tears in her eyes, she asked Hitler to reconsider depriving Germany of his life. ‘Save yourself, mein führer,’ she pleaded. ‘That is the will of every German.’ ”
Before she left, Braun passed Reitsch a note to deliver to her sister, but Reitsch found Braun to be “a pathetic figure . . . bemoaning Hitler’s lot while fussing over the state of her hair and nails,” and ripped up her letter undelivered.
REITSCH was captured by the Americans, and released in July 1946. She fell in and out of favor with various flying communities over the decades to follow. She ultimately became a hero to many in Ghana and India for helping to promote flying there, and her association with the Whirly Girls, an international organization of female helicopter pilots, earned her a visit to President John F. Kennedy’s Oval Office.
She died on Aug. 24, 1979, at 67. The official cause of death was a heart attack, although one former associate, who had recently received a letter from Reitsch, believed she had used Hitler’s gift to take her life.
In the letter, Reitsch wrote that she was depressed and in poor health, and had “come to the end of her tether.” But it was her signoff that made it seem that she used her final act to cement an eternal bond with Hitler.
“It began in the bunker,” she wrote. “And there it shall end.”