‘Women have always been among my staunchest supporters,’ Hitler told the New York Times in July 1933. ‘They feel my victory is their victory.’1 While working to return women to their rightful and respected role, as he saw it, of hausfrau, Hitler had been keen to exploit any support for his National Socialist Party. At times this required rising above a tide of female fan mail and enduring more than one public display of adoration. ‘He was often embarrassed’ by such women, his friend and official photographer Heinrich Hoffmann later remembered, but he ‘had no option but to accept their veneration’.2 Hitler, Hoffmann felt, had ‘a lovely appreciation of women as a political influence’, and before the election he ‘was convinced that feminine enthusiasm, tenacity and fanaticism would be the deciding factor’.3 In fact, most women who supported the Nazis did so not for love of the leader or a desire to return to the home, but for the same reasons as men: the prospect of a strong government that could deal with the ‘menace of communism’, wipe out the shame of Versailles, and provide employment and a just redistribution of the nation’s wealth. Nevertheless, appealing to women and harnessing their propaganda value were significant parts of Hitler’s campaign before and after he assumed power. Hanna and Melitta would both soon duly play their part, and come to appreciate the vital importance of public relations under the new regime.
As Hanna spread her wings, the mood of the country seemed to lift with her. She had turned twenty-one in March 1933 and, for her, the last few years had been a wonderful adventure: leaving home, learning to fly, and setting new world records almost effortlessly. In Hirschberg, as across Germany, there were frequent patriotic marches and torch-lit parades with speeches, singing, and copious flags and bunting. Hitler’s speeches tended to deal with grievances that were familiar to many working people, and had a sort of evangelical simplicity that made them easy to follow. He promised a higher standard of living with a car for everyone, beautiful homes, affordable holidays, marriage loans, respect for mothers and a defence against Bolshevism. People seemed electrified, and everywhere there was talk of ‘the unity of the German people’ and the ‘national uprising’.4 With little interest in party politics or current affairs, to Hanna it seemed simply patriotic to support Hitler and his dynamic new regime. At last, the future looked promising, and she was keen to seize every opportunity. When the Führer called on the German people to ‘awake to a realization of your own importance’ in his May Day speech of 1933, Hanna might have been forgiven for imagining that he was talking directly to her.5
Melitta followed the consolidation of Nazi power in Germany from a more sober and critical perspective. She welcomed the prospect of stable government, the pledges for greater safety on the streets, job creation and the proposed investment in technological research, as well as the restoration of German pride and the countering of communism on the international stage. However, her doubts about the legitimacy and principles of the regime were growing. Where Hanna saw parades and bunting, Melitta saw Germany’s constitution under attack. Hate-filled posters were pasted onto walls, newspapers were thick with propaganda, and trucks full of SA and SS troops were roaring through the major cities, recruiting, collecting names, and occasionally breaking into houses and apartments to arrest and remove not only communists, who Melitta saw as a serious threat, but also social democrats, union leaders and liberal intellectuals. The Nazi plan was to preclude any attempt at organized opposition by removing potential leaders and quietly intimidating the mass of the population. Like many others, Melitta hoped such tactics would soon be replaced by more benign policies. Then, in late May, personal tragedy overwhelmed her.
Melitta’s closest female pilot friend, Marga von Etzdorf, had been attempting a record flight to Australia when her Klemm aeroplane was damaged in gales, forcing her to land at an airfield in Aleppo, in what was then the French mandate of Syria. Having asked for a quiet room in which to rest, Marga took out a gun and shot herself. She died instantly. It would later emerge that the French authorities had found leaflets for a German weapons manufacturer along with a model machine gun stowed on her plane. It seemed that Marga had been trying to supplement her sponsorship earnings by ferrying arms, in direct breach of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. On hearing of their friend’s death, the DVL engineer Georg Wollé immediately sought out Melitta. He found her in her office, ‘in floods of tears’.6 Marga’s death ‘hit her very hard’, Melitta’s sister Jutta recalled, adding that ‘later, she had to mourn her colleagues all too often’.7
Hanna had also had to cope with personal tragedy. In the spring of 1933 she was working as an instructor at Wolf Hirth’s gliding school when one of her students was killed in a crash landing. It was Hanna’s first experience of losing a colleague, as it had been for Melitta. Although deeply shocked, she insisted on informing the man’s family herself. His mother met her at the door, anticipating bad news. She told Hanna that the night before her son had dreamt that he would die. Whether it was a premonition, or just that a sleepless night had affected his concentration, Hanna felt a sense of relief; a little helpful distancing from the tragedy. A few days later she was due to compete in the annual Rhön-Rossitten gliding contests, and she wanted to be focused and show the world what she could do.
Organized by the meteorologist Walter Georgii, the first Rhön gliding competitions had been held on the Wasserkuppe mountain in 1920. Every summer since, thousands of sightseers had journeyed by train and foot up to the annual rallies held on the bare summit of the Wasserkuppe, the Rhön valley’s highest point. According to contemporary German flight magazines, by the late 1920s the highest slopes of the mountain hosted a glider camp with its own water and electricity supply, hotels, bars and restaurants, a post office with special-edition stamps, and indeed everything, ‘like in the big cities. Even dancing. Even bobbed hair!’8 Perhaps their reporters had spotted Melitta up there among the crowds. Once a regular spectator, she had applied for a gliding course at Wasserkuppe in 1924 and, although not able to take up her place because of work commitments, she still visited when she could.
By the 1930s, over 20,000 people regularly travelled to the Rhön valley at weekends. On the day of the 1932 Reichstag elections, a temporary voting station had even been set up on the mountain, and Walter Georgii called on the people of Germany to ‘do as the gliders have’. His message was clear – it was time to recognize the forces of nature and embrace a brave new future characterized by technical prowess, a love of freedom and a deep sense of national pride. With the Nazis securing over 50 per cent of the mountaintop vote, the Wasserkuppe fraternity’s support for Hitler was considerably above the national average.* Here, with Wolf Hirth at her side, Hanna enjoyed feeling not only a part of the gliding community, but part of a brave, idealistic, almost moral endeavour, far removed from the partisan politics pursued in the valleys.
The Wasserkuppe rises 1,300 feet above the plains, and the air currents hitting it are swept forcefully upwards. Here there was ‘wind in plenty’, Hanna noted, and yet on her first competitive flight she failed to find an updraught strong enough to carry her now comparatively heavy and outclassed glider.9 Forced to flop straight back down to earth, she had to wait, ‘sitting in the ditch’ as she put it, while the other contestants, including Hirth, continued to soar above her. A second attempt brought the same result and, whether it was the design of her glider, grief for her lost student, tiredness or just bad luck, so it continued throughout the day, and every day of the event. At some point Hanna lost heart, although not the resolve to keep plugging away. Before long she was seen as the comedy contestant, a subject for ridicule, and eventually she was unable completely to fight back her tears. It was with some surprise, then, that Hanna found her name on the rostrum for the final prize-giving. A sponsor had donated a meat-mincer and a pair of kitchen scales – what better to use as a booby prize, not only provoking ‘uproarious laughter’, Hanna noted ruefully, but also serving ‘as a warning to any other forward little girls who might set their hearts on flying!’10
Melitta’s former gliding instructor, Peter Riedel, was also at the Rhön contests that year, as every year. Peter, who had now applied for Nazi Party membership, was working with Walter Georgii at his gliding research institute,* experimenting with upcurrents and cloud-hopping to achieve spectacular heights and distances. As Hanna was presented with her kitchen scales, he was collecting the Hindenburg Cup, having established a new distance world record of 142 miles. Peter appreciated that Hanna’s award was ‘a crude sort of message that women should stay in the kitchen’ and he was not impressed.11 Already astonished by Melitta’s skill in the air, he now openly admired Hanna’s determination and refusal, as he saw it, to let ‘this humiliation divert her from her dedication to flying … to her beloved Germany … and to Hitler’.12 Peter was not alone in this assessment. In his final speech, Oskar Ursinus, gliding pioneer and the founder of the Rhön contests, pointedly declared that ‘in soaring, it is not success but the spirit which counts’.
Walter Georgii noticed all the attention that Hanna had attracted. He was planning a research trip to study the powerful thermals in South America, and had already recruited Wolf Hirth, Peter Riedel and another of the Wasserkuppe competitors, a boyishly handsome pilot a year older than Hanna called Heini Dittmar, who was flying a glider he had built himself. Now Georgii invited Hanna to join the team as an extra pilot and, he quietly hoped, as a potential publicity hook for the institute and for Germany’s reputation overseas. Hanna was thrilled – the only catch was that she would have to pay her own, considerable, travel expenses.
As a courageous pilot, with her vivacious personality, fashionable looks and brilliant smile, the truth was that Hanna had been attracting plenty of attention ever since she first stepped into a glider. After her record-setting storm cloud flight, the nationalist film studio, UFA, had invited her to act as a stunt double in a film about gliding. Now Hanna accepted the offer, on the proviso that they paid the 3,000 Reichsmarks required for her South American passage.
Rivals of the Air* was an early Nazi propaganda film designed to inspire young men to become pilots, and was produced by Karl Ritter, a Great War veteran pilot and committed Nazi himself. The plot revolved around a young gliding enthusiast, played by Heini Dittmar, who persuades a female college friend to learn to soar with him. Failing the course, the female student is disqualified from entering the Rhön contests. However, ‘being a small and rather energetic person’, in Hanna’s words, ‘she has some ideas of her own’.13 The young fräulein, clearly modelled on Hanna, borrows a glider and sets off in pursuit of the men, only to be rescued from storm cloud disaster by her older gliding instructor, in the form of Wolf Hirth. After much talk of courage, spirit and virility, the older instructor gets the girl, and the younger man wins national honours in the contest: everyone is happy – particularly Hanna who, apparently unconcerned by the politics behind the film, thoroughly enjoyed the chance to repeatedly ‘crash’ her glider into a lake, while getting paid for the privilege.
Hanna set sail for South America, her first venture out of Germany, in early January 1934. With four leading lights of the gliding scene – Walter Georgii, Wolf Hirth, Peter Riedel and Heini Dittmar – at her side, it was another dream come true. Perhaps encouraged by their on-screen romance, Heini flirted with Hanna, but she was not interested, and only complained to the tall, more brotherly Peter that their colleague was rather a nuisance. Perhaps bitterly, Heini later told a mutual friend that he was ‘quite sure’ that Hanna was a lesbian.14 Peter had found romance elsewhere. He never found Hanna sexually attractive, ‘too small, for one thing’, he joked, but he considered her, like Melitta, ‘a great friend’.15 In any case Hanna had no desire for a passionate romance that would inevitably curtail her freedom. Like her film double, her real admiration would always be reserved for older men, father figures like Wolf Hirth.
Everything else about the voyage, however, charmed her: the lights on the water; the captain’s permission to climb the mast; ‘the driving ice floes which broke up on the bow with a sharp tinkle like a toast from a thousand glasses’; and later dolphins, flying fish, and ‘half-naked black boys, supple as fish’, who dived for the coins they threw from the ship’s rails.16 Hanna, like many of her contemporaries, had absorbed – and helped to perpetuate – the casual racism of her times, often admiring from afar but at closer range finding the black men of the Spanish Canary Islands ‘dark and sinister-looking, sending an involuntary shudder down the spine’.17
As soon as the expedition team arrived at Rio de Janeiro they embarked on a PR campaign, with a series of press conferences, dinners and speeches. Walter Georgii had been astute: pretty and petite, and typically dressed entirely in white from flying cap down to tights and shoes, Hanna made a striking figure and was soon generating considerable publicity. She was not just the only woman, but also the most junior member of the team. ‘The presence of a girl …’ she now realized, with rather mixed feelings, ‘naturally increased … interest and curiosity.’18 Every day ‘hundreds and thousands’ of spectators trekked over to the airfield to watch Hanna perform aerobatics, while the men took the lead in the cross-country flights that were the official raison d’être of their visit.
After a few weeks they moved on to São Paulo where Hanna had more opportunity to take part in the long-distance flights, guided by the cumulus clouds formed by warm rising air, or following the black vultures that soared the thermal upwinds.* One Sunday morning she mistook a single ‘thermal bubble’, a small pocket of warm air, for a stronger rising column capable of taking a glider up and, with her usual mix of confidence and impatience, she cast off prematurely from her motorized tow-plane. To her dismay, she quickly found herself circling back downwards, forced to search for an emergency landing site. As she approached the only obvious field in the densely populated city below, she was horrified to see it was a football pitch with a match in progress, surrounded by crowds of spectators. In Hanna’s account, it was only as she ‘swooped clean through a goalmouth’, screaming warnings in Spanish, that the players realized she was not able to pull up and ran or flung themselves to the ground. Fortunately no one was hit. Once down, her glider was mobbed by the crowd and she was only saved, she reported, by ‘a German’ who called the mounted police. Several people were injured, ‘trampled beneath the horses’ hooves’, but instead of Hanna being reprimanded, the event turned out to be the most successful PR coup of the expedition, with many local newspapers covering the ‘Strange and Marvellous Case of the Girl who Fell from the Sky!’19
Hanna spent several weeks in Brazil, and then soaring over the grassy plains of Argentina, where she landed twenty metres from the war minister after her opening display. ‘Of course’ the locals asked about Hitler, Peter wrote, as their planes ‘bore the swastika above Argentina’.20 By the time the team set off for home, in mid-April 1934, Hanna had been guest of honour at numerous events, and landed in several remote villages. She had stoically rebuffed not only Heini’s advances but also the less unwelcome ones of a handsome young Spanish pilot, and she had collected the Silver Soaring Medal, the first woman ever to do so. Peter had set a new record for long-distance soaring, Wolf had achieved an unprecedented sixty-seven loops in succession, and Heini had broken the world altitude record. But ‘more importantly’, Hanna noted, ‘we had built a bridge of friendship’.21
During their absence Germany had become increasingly unpopular overseas and, although their trip had not been an official goodwill mission, Hanna was delighted to have served as a voluntary ambassador for her country. At home, meanwhile, ‘Hitler seemed to be carrying everyone along with him,’ Peter wrote on his return. ‘The economy was booming, the unemployment problem had almost disappeared, the country was becoming strong again after all those years of hopelessness.’ Any earlier doubts he had harboured about the regime began to ebb away. ‘I thought Hitler must be the right man for Germany,’ he said.22 Hanna emphatically agreed.
While Hanna had been away, courting publicity both for herself and for the Nazi regime, Melitta had been deliberately keeping a low profile at DVL, the German Research Institute for Aeronautics. A few years earlier, as a ‘new woman’ studying engineering, sitting astride a motorbike, or even just smoking a cigarette, she had been very visible in the Weimar Republic. But despite her unusual choice of career for a woman in 1930s Germany, as the Nazis gained support Melitta seemed discreetly to fade from view.
Melitta had always been a traditionalist at heart. Admittedly she still needed to fly as others need to breathe, but at thirty-one she was essentially socially conservative, keen on heritage, duty, and reward through hard work. She might have friends among working pilots and engineers, but now she also mixed with the aristocratic Stauffenberg brothers, rising figures in academia, law and the military, and her own siblings were flourishing in the very respectable fields of the civil service, medicine and business journalism. Melitta’s statement bob was long gone, and if she still wore trousers to work they were now part of a well-cut suit and the look was carefully softened by a silk blouse and string of pearls. She was dressing to be practical, not provocative, and this seemed to reflect her whole approach to life. Jutta saw that her sister ‘firmly declined to be dragged into the public eye’, and Melitta herself declared that she would not be ‘drawn into the shrill world of advertising in the press or radio’.23 She may have been naturally reserved, but now she had another reason not to make unnecessary waves. While doors everywhere were opening for Hanna, Melitta had learned some family history that threatened not just her opportunity to fly, but also her professional life, economic well-being and even her personal relationships.
As a young man about to set out for university, Melitta’s father, Michael, had been baptized as a Protestant. It was in this faith that he had been raised, and would later bring up his own children. Melitta’s grandfather, however, Moses, had been a non-practising Jew. In the nineteenth century, when Posen had come under Prussian rule, a new synagogue had been built and the Jewish community developed close links with the German, mainly Protestant, population. Moses admired German culture, and when Michael was baptized, both father and son considered their Jewish roots to be behind them. They were German patriots, and either from a sense of shame, a wish to avoid discrimination or a belief in its irrelevance, the Schillers’ Jewish ancestry was never discussed. None of Michael’s friends knew that this young man was anything other than the model German Protestant that he both appeared, and considered himself, to be.
It is not known when Melitta first learned of her paternal Jewish ancestry: perhaps when she was confirmed, aged fourteen, or when Hitler came to power in 1933 and the fact became politically significant. That year the first wave of legislation came into force limiting Jewish participation in German public life, whether as students, civil servants, lawyers or doctors. She certainly knew by September 1935 when the Nuremberg Laws further codified the regime’s anti-Semitism, stripping German Jews of their citizenship, depriving them of basic political rights and prohibiting them from marrying or having sexual relations with ‘Aryans’. The Nuremberg Laws effectively ended any realistic hope the community might still have harboured for a tolerable existence within their country.
Close friends and colleagues knew that Melitta was already critical of Nazi policies. Perhaps while studying in Munich she had heard some of the early speeches in which Hitler referred to Jews as ‘vermin’, and insisted that ‘the Jew can never become German however often he may affirm that he can’.24 This ‘Volkish’ ideology, the belief that blood rather than faith or legal status determined the race to which any individual belonged, had been reiterated in the two volumes of Mein Kampf, published in 1925 and 1926.* Along with many others, at that point Melitta probably still doubted that Hitler would gain power. By 1933 ‘the Nazis were in the saddle, but no one dreamed that it would be for long’, a Stauffenberg family friend wrote, before adding that ‘it was amazing to watch the speed with which the paralysing power of dictatorship and tyranny grew’.25 Two years later Melitta must have paid close attention to Hitler’s introduction to the Nuremberg Laws, but here the Führer was uncharacteristically vague. In interviews afterwards he claimed that ‘the legislation is not anti-Jewish, but pro-German. The rights of Germans are hereby protected against destructive Jewish influence.’26
Michael Schiller, now seventy-four, responded with a mixture of courage and caution. At the end of 1935 he submitted a three-page article to Germany’s Nature and Spirit magazine, making the case for raising children to be ‘fully human’ by the cultivation of logical thinking and the exclusion of any belief in supernatural powers.27 He was not making a stand for Jews, or for human rights in general, but simply for his own family. He could not understand how they could be defined by their ‘blood’ rather than by their obvious brains and abilities. On publication, he sent the article to his children; it would not be his last attempt to defend them.
In fact, at first, none of the Schiller family were directly affected by the Nuremberg Laws. In a painful attempt to discriminate systematically, the regime identified Jews as those who had three or four ‘racially’ Jewish grandparents, or two if they were practising Jews. Melitta and her siblings therefore fell outside the scope of the laws. Furthermore, initial exceptions were made for highly decorated veterans, people over sixty-five or those married to Aryans, meaning Michael was also exempt. There was no need for an anxious conversation about whether to register or try to disappear. Nevertheless, it was clear that the Schiller family were no longer quite the equal German citizens that they had once been, and now that the principles of racial segregation and discrimination were enshrined in German law, there could be no guarantee that they would not yet find themselves subject to persecution.
Before the end of 1935 new legislation further marginalized German Jews: Jewish officers were expelled from the German army; Jewish students could no longer take doctorates; German courts could not cite Jewish testimony; and some cities started prohibiting Jews from municipal hospitals. Soon ‘Aryan certificates’ were required for college, work and marriage. ‘Luckily, we had all finished our studies,’ Klara later remembered, but ‘from that time on there was danger hanging over all of us like the Sword of Damocles.’28 Lili, the eldest sister, had trained as an X-ray assistant in Berlin but, already married and quietly raising a family, she was unlikely to attract attention. Jutta was also married, to a senior Nazi official. For her these were peaceful years. However, Otto, Melitta and Klara all needed certificates for their workplaces. They decided to try to hide their ancestry. The fact that their father, Michael, was officially a Polish citizen following the border change helped to delay things. In an attempt to buy some time, ‘we pretended to get our papers from Odessa,’ Klara continued.29 Later, they claimed nothing could be found. Otto was now an agricultural attaché at the German Embassy in Moscow. In 1932 he had visited Ukraine to gain an insight into the famine caused by Stalin’s programme of farm collectivization, giving him unique value for the new regime. For now his position was secure. Klara had applied for and received German citizenship in 1932. That year she visited Otto in Russia, and stayed to study nutrition and then work in the north Caucasus. In 1935, probably in a deliberate strategy to keep her out of Germany, Otto helped find her work cultivating soya in Spain.
As a patriot Melitta continued to affirm her loyalty to Germany, but unlike Hanna she now saw a clear distinction between her adored country with its rich cultural heritage and the so-called Third Reich, from whom she suddenly had to hide her family history. Knowing that her aviation development work at DVL was of national importance, she focused on making sure she was regarded as an invaluable member of the team before her Jewish heritage could be revealed and her job called into question. She now spent long days on the airfield and in her office, talked a little less about politics, and very rarely mentioned her family.
Nazi interest in science and aviation had given Melitta’s institute a much-needed boost. ‘Suddenly there seemed to be an abundance of equipment, and plenty of funds for building up a new army and to carry out new scientific research projects, as well as for flying,’ her friend and colleague Paul von Handel wrote.30 Between 1934 and 1936, Melitta embarked on the first of a series of test flights with clear military significance. Previously, she had been experimenting with state-of-the-art wind tunnels to assess the impact of wing flaps, slats and adjustable propellers on aerodynamics, speed and efficiency. Her pioneering design solutions became standard for commercial airlines. In 1934, however, she focused on the performance of ‘propellers in a nosedive’; test-flying, analysing and modifying designs that would later become essential for the Luftwaffe – and she was well aware of the implications of this work. Later that year when, as a woman, she was barred from participating in the German touring competition, Melitta flew the event route in an air ambulance, outside the official contest. She was the only pilot to incur no penalties. Melitta was not just making a point about her own ability, ‘she simply didn’t take seriously anything she disagreed with’, one of her sisters commented.31 She was also using the opportunity to gain some practice in case air ambulances should soon be in greater demand.
That autumn Hans Baur, Hitler’s personal pilot, flew the Führer to the annual Nuremberg Rally. As his silver plane circled over the ancient city, thousands strained their eyes to watch him descend ‘from the sky like a Teutonic god’.32 In March he had announced the expansion of the Wehrmacht, the return of universal conscription and the official creation of the Luftwaffe. Public ceremonies were organized, with impressive aerial displays above and military parades below. According to Hanna, this was ‘general peacetime conscription’, but she admitted that the international atmosphere was ‘extremely tense’.33 Until this point, Winston Churchill later wrote, air sport and commercial aviation in Germany had hidden ‘a tremendous organization for the purposes of air war’. Now, ‘the full terror of this revelation broke … and Hitler, casting aside concealment, sprang forward, armed to the teeth, with his munitions factories roaring night and day, his aeroplane squadrons forming in ceaseless succession.’34 Later that year, the flying ace Ernst Udet, who had served alongside Melitta’s uncle in the Great War, demonstrated his chubby grey Curtiss Hawk and a Focke-Wulf dive-bomber at the Reich’s party conference, paving the way for a full aircraft development programme. Melitta was soon busy not only undertaking blind-flying and radio courses, but also working on the development and testing of dive-brakes for bombers. With little safety equipment it was high-risk work; between 1934 and 1937, thirteen of her colleagues were killed in accidents at DVL.
Despite the growing investment in research for military applications, which Melitta welcomed, Paul felt that at DVL ‘the influence of Nazi policies was, at first, barely perceptible’. Even in the army, he believed, ‘there was little political interest’.35 His – and Melitta’s – friend, Claus von Stauffenberg, certainly considered himself an apolitical army officer in the best tradition of the military, although his family later said he would leave the room promptly should he hear Jews being insulted.36
Inside German universities the situation was quite different. Since the Nazis had assumed power, education at all levels had become strictly controlled and directed. For Melitta’s flame, Alexander von Stauffenberg, a professor of ancient history at the University of Berlin and soon to be appointed both to the University of Giessen and as extraordinary professor at Würzburg, the imposition of a political agenda over academic history boded very ill. It was this, Paul believed, that made Alexander so ‘much more critical of the political development of Hitler’s Germany than Litta, Claus and I’.37 Whether from a dreamy lack of social shrewdness or in deliberate angry defiance, Alexander repeatedly and publicly criticized the regime and its policies in a way that already few others would dare. His twin brother, Berthold, now a lawyer in The Hague, was also disturbed by the changing political climate. As early as July 1933, the Nazis had been declared the only legal political party in the country, and that October Germany left the League of Nations, prompting Berthold’s return to Berlin to work at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. The regime’s lack of legal principles and disregard for international law deeply disturbed him. Nationalist patriotism and even some level of racial distinctions he could accept, but not political tyranny or institutionalized racial persecution. Unlike many of their friends and relatives, none of the Stauffenberg brothers joined the NSDAP.
Alexander quietly moved in with Melitta in 1934. Although she did not introduce him to her family, both of them clearly considered their relationship permanent. The previous September, Claus had dutifully married Baroness Nina von Lerchenfeld, an ‘extremely good-looking’ member of the Bavarian aristocracy, ‘with dark slanting eyes and glossy hair’.38* Berthold was engaged to the Russian-born Mika Classen, whom he would marry not long after the death of his father in June 1936. Mika’s family had fled Russia during the revolution, but the old Count had been ‘very much opposed’ to the match because she did not come from an aristocratic German family.39 Only Alexander was still officially single. It is unlikely that his father knew Melitta had Jewish ancestry, but he still had reservations about her social status.
Melitta’s family was not immune from prejudice either, considering privilege not earned by personal merit to be vaguely ridiculous. ‘How often she was teased, with a wink, by her brother and sisters when her mother joked, every now andher mother joked, every now andher mother joked, every now and then, about the deeds of her own noble ancestors,’ Jutta later recalled. Noticing Melitta’s discomfort, her father maintained that coming from the once privileged classes ‘contributed to the establishment of character based in reason and responsibility’.40 Melitta’s response is sadly not recorded but she had sufficient self-respect to see her prestige as a pilot as equal to that of the aristocracy. In any case, Alexander’s classical understanding of what it meant to be noble meant he could never sit idle, resting on the family laurels. In fact he was as enthralled by his vocation as Melitta was by hers. However, there was another reason for Melitta and Alexander not to apply to get married – Melitta would have to provide an ‘Aryan certificate’. Eventually she succumbed and formally applied for Aryan status for herself and her siblings, on the basis of her parents’ wedding certificate listing both parties as Protestant. Then she waited.
Hanna had returned from South America in the late spring of 1934. ‘We can’t let you leave us now …’ Walter Georgii had told her during the return journey, ‘you belong to us.’41 That June she joined Peter Riedel and Heini Dittmar at Georgii’s internationally acclaimed gliding research institute based at Darmstadt, just south of Frankfurt. ‘I could hardly imagine any greater happiness,’ she wrote.42 The timing was good. The Nazis were investing as much in gliding as in Melitta’s aeronautical research institute, DVL, but Hanna needed training before she could become an official glider test pilot. Within a few weeks she established a new women’s world record for long-distance soaring, covering a distance of over a hundred miles. On the back of this she secured a place at the Civil Airways Training School at Stettin, which usually took only male trainees.
Stettin was one of a number of thinly disguised military bases where the students’ blue uniforms would turn out to be remarkably similar to those of the Luftwaffe, revealed the following year. ‘The school was staffed,’ Hanna said, ‘by officers to whom a woman on an airfield was like a red rag to a bull.’43 Despite causing much hilarity as she joined the morning drill line-up, her slight, feminine frame inevitably ‘disturbing the splendours of the masculine silhouette’, as she put it, Hanna quickly proved her capabilities and was accepted by her peers. Most of the flying suits were too large, and she needed cushions to boost her height in the cockpit, but she learned to fly loops, turns and rolls in a Focke-Wulf Fw 44, a two-seat open biplane known as the Stieglitz, or Goldfinch, and carefully concealed her initial sickness by throwing up neatly into one of her gloves. Back at Darmstadt, Hanna could now fly one of the six heavier Heinkels. These were military reconnaissance aircraft that had been stripped of their armaments and issued with civil registrations for use at flying displays, and for meteorological night flights at the institute. Since these machines had been issued first to DVL, it is likely that Hanna was now literally sitting in Melitta’s old seat.
In 1935 Hanna officially became an experimental glider test pilot. The first aircraft she was required to test was a new glider being built at the institute known as the DFS Kranich, or Crane. All went well, and next followed the See Adler, or Sea Eagle, the world’s first waterborne glider, whose gull wings were designed to stay high above the spray and waves. This didn’t always work. After being dragged right under the surface of a lake by the weight of her tow rope during an early test, Hanna and the See Adler eventually lifted off only when pulled into the air by a Dornier flying boat.
Daily letters from her mother brought Hanna considerable comfort during these dangerous trials, reassuring her that she was in God’s hands, if also slightly irritating her with constant warnings about ‘the blindness of vanity and overweening pride’. Where they did see eye to eye was in their shared belief that Hanna’s work was all ‘in the cause of Germany and the saving of human lives’.44
According to Peter Riedel, Hanna quickly became ‘a quite outstanding pilot’ who, he could not resist adding, was ‘capable of equalling or surpassing the best men’.45 Apart from Melitta, who was keeping her head down at DVL, Hanna was the only other woman testing such exciting prototype aircraft. As a result, she started receiving invitations to represent Germany at flight events overseas. In Finland she performed gliding demonstrations to engage the country’s young people in the sport. But en route to Portugal she caused controversy when bad weather forced her to land at a French military airfield without permission. The discovery of a camera on board led to accusations that Hanna was a spy. ‘White with rage’, she vociferously denied the claims, believing that not only she, but also her country, were being maligned.46 Eventually the French Ministry of Aviation ordered her release. Delighted to leave ‘the tensions of the outside world’ behind her once again, she flew on to Lisbon, and happily abandoned herself to her ‘one overmastering desire – to soar in the beauty of flight’.47
‘Hitler wanted the Germans to become a nation of aviators,’ the wife of Hanna’s friend Karl Baur, a Messerschmitt test pilot, later wrote. ‘If there was some kind of celebration in a city, an air show was a must.’48 Karl worked with Hanna to develop an aerobatic programme, and she was soon busy on the demonstration circuit at regional flight days around Germany, performing aerobatics to entertain the crowds. Although his wife thought Hanna was ‘a young fragile-looking girl’, Karl was impressed by the energy she put into her performances, and recognized her as ‘a very talented, enthusiastic pilot’.49
Hanna was now typically flying alongside other stars of the German aviation scene like Elly Beinhorn with her incredibly fast Me 108 Taifun (Typhoon), and Ernst Udet, who stunned the crowds with his sensational open biplane act of swooping down low enough to pick up a handkerchief from the ground with the tip of its wing. Since the Great War, Udet had made a career out of performing aerobatics and mock air battles with his friend and fellow veteran Robert Ritter von Greim, who he considered ‘a splendid pilot’.50 Having starred in several films, Udet was now a huge celebrity, ‘but in all of this there was a secret longing to see the spirit which inspired us become a real power in the nation’, he wrote in his 1935 memoir. ‘We were soldiers without a flag’ until 1933, when, he added, ‘for old soldiers, life is again worth living’.51
Increasingly in the public eye, Hanna was herself becoming a minor celebrity. In 1934 she went from a few mentions in the gliding news to being the title story, and even the cover girl of magazines that featured her sitting in her open cockpit, grinning for the camera, her blonde curls tucked into her close-fitting flying cap, her goggles resting above. She even appeared, wearing a glamorous fur-collared flying jacket, on a gold-embossed Gabarty cigarette card for their collectable ‘Modern Beauties’ series, and no doubt in Germany she and Elly Beinhorn were the women most closely associated with Caron’s ‘En Avion’ perfume, launched in 1932.* Hanna was a natural performer, and silent film footage from this time shows her looking relaxed and fabulous in her flying kit, shading her eyes from the sun and laughing as she gamely bats aside the feather duster being brandished by a handsome young man. With the duster propped in the nose of her glider, more men arrive to joke around with her. It all looks very jolly. In another scene, Hanna, now in a pretty white blouse and neck scarf, goofs about for the camera with a giant cuddly-toy dog dressed in jacket and trousers. Despite the constant sexism, Hanna can afford to laugh generously because she knows that she can fly all these men out of the sky. By the time she pulls her goggles down over her eyes and is strapped into her cockpit, around fifteen men – some in uniform – are gathered to watch her take off. Her elegant white glider dips out of sight and then rises, magnificently, above them all.
Hanna was publicly associating with the dynamic new regime, and beginning to rise with them, but she did not completely support all their policies. One of her flying friends, Dr Joachim Küttner, had been classified as ‘half Jewish’. Küttner had joined Hanna on her official visit to Finland, and now they were both sent to Sweden with Peter Riedel to perform aerobatic displays. While there, Hanna asked Walter Stender, an aviation engineering friend, whether he could help Küttner find work overseas. Stender declined, commenting only that her desire to help a Jew was a ‘noble and dangerous idea’.52 In fact it is unlikely that Hanna was putting herself in great danger by canvassing for Küttner at this time, but her concern does show both that she was aware of growing, state-sanctioned anti-Semitism, and that it did not sit entirely comfortably with her. Nevertheless, she chose to make an exception to help a colleague rather than challenge the general rule. ‘She didn’t see these cases as symptomatic of anything,’ a friend later argued. ‘She saw them as isolated incidents that could be cleared up by a personal intervention … she wasn’t able to see an evil principle in all of this.’53
In February 1936, Hanna was delighted to join Peter again, performing gliding aerobatics at the opening of the Winter Olympics held at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, a couple of small villages in the Bavarian mountains. It was a fun event, taking off and landing on the frozen lake where the figure skating would soon take place. Udet was also there, flying alongside Hitler’s personal pilot, Hans Baur, and others, in a rally for engine-powered planes. Unfortunately for the Olympic competitors, Ga-Pa, as the site was soon known, had suffered from unseasonably light snowfall, but the towns were almost buried beneath an avalanche of swastikas on posters, flags and bunting. This new signage replaced the anti-Jewish notices that had been temporarily removed before the arrival of the international teams, press and spectators in tacit admission that other nations might not understand Nazi race policy. The Winter Olympics were being used to give the regime legitimacy. Despite attracting fewer foreign visitors than expected and some critical press reports from the likes of William Shirer, the bureau chief of the American Universal News Service, they would prove extremely effective. Had the games been officially boycotted internationally, or even had visitors left with a dim impression of the new regime, it is possible that Hitler might not have risked launching his expansionist foreign policy quite so soon. As it was, a month after the games opened, German troops marched into the demilitarized zone of the Rhineland in violation of the Treaty of Versailles.
That spring, back at the Darmstadt Research Centre for Gliding, Hanna started to test glider air brakes. These could be fitted to prevent a speeding glider from exceeding the structural limit of its frame, even when diving vertically, before the pilot could regain control. It was terrifying work as the whole glider would shudder when the prototype air brakes were used, and Hanna reported wedging herself against the sides of the cockpit in order to keep control. Modification and eventual success were an important aeronautical milestone. Perhaps not coincidentally, these air brakes were being developed at the same time as the Luftwaffe’s research into the possibility of dive-bombing with Stukas was stepped up.
Here, for the first time, Hanna’s and Melitta’s work began to overlap. Melitta had already carried out experiments on adjustable propellers and their behaviour in ‘headlong descent’ – in other words, during dives – and Hanna was now testing dive-brakes. There is no question that by now these two exceptional women would have known of each other. Test pilots formed a close and supportive community and Hanna and Melitta were the only women at their respective institutes: a source of curiosity and gossip for the men, and of potential support for each other. Furthermore, they had several close friends in common, from Peter Riedel and Elly Beinhorn to the famous veteran Ernst Udet. However, neither Hanna nor Melitta made any public reference to the other, as if refusing to recognize another woman working in the same field.
In March, Hanna successfully demonstrated glider brakes to a number of Luftwaffe generals including Udet, who would soon be appointed chief of the Luftwaffe’s technical office. Udet’s friend, Robert Ritter von Greim, was also present. Greim was one of the very few people to have piloted a plane carrying Hitler. In 1920, he had flown Hitler through rough weather to Berlin for the Kapp Putsch. When the Luftwaffe was publicly launched in 1935, Göring named Greim as the first squadron leader and now, at forty-four, he was rapidly rising through the ranks. Both the new technology and the female test pilot made a deep impression on Greim and the other men.
Not long after, Hanna was notified that she was to be awarded the honorary title of Flugkapitän, or flight captain, the first German woman ever to be accorded such a distinction. Despite claiming to place ‘no value on decorations’, Hanna was thrilled.54 Before the month was over, Göring had also presented her with a special women’s version of the Combined Pilot’s and Observer’s Badge in gold with diamonds, along with a signed photograph of himself dedicated to ‘The Captain of the Air, Hanna Reitsch’. As if not to be outdone, two days later, on Hanna’s twenty-fourth birthday, Udet gave her a brooch in the form of a golden propeller overlaid with a swastika of blue sapphires, with his own dedication engraved on the reverse. Hanna was clearly the female pilot to know in the Third Reich, and both she and Melitta were fully aware of it.
The Winter Olympics had been a major date on the 1936 calendar, but the main event of the year would be the Berlin Olympics that August. The games had been awarded to Germany in 1931, but because of the severe economic depression nothing had been done at the Olympic site. Within three years of taking power the Nazis had built a monumental stadium to showcase their revitalized nation to the world. Sport in Nazi Germany, with its focus on physically ‘perfect’ young people, was inseparable from nationalism and the idea of racial superiority. Despite some international protest against Berlin as host city – the first time in history that an Olympic boycott was discussed – by July 1936 the German capital was draped not only in scarlet, white and black, but also with Olympic flags. Above the stadium the Hindenburg airship, its tail fins painted with swastikas, proudly trailed an Olympic banner from its gondola. New trees were planted along Unter den Linden, new rail links stretched beneath the city, and the National Socialist architectural style, designed to impress and inspire, was showcased in the massive new stadium as the capital geared up for the arrival of nearly 4,500 participants and 150,000 foreign spectators.* An estimated one million Berliners came out simply to watch Hitler’s journey to the games. ‘Berlin was ready for the festivities,’ the filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl noted in her diary, ‘and the town burned with Olympic fever.’55 Although Udet was banned from flying above the races to take film footage, Riefenstahl planned to get good aerial shots from cameras attached to hydrogen-filled balloons. Ironically, though, none of her footage captured the aerial elements of the games.
Germany had petitioned for gliding to be accepted as an Olympic sport but, after months of deliberation, the International Olympic Committee had rejected the proposal.* In order still to showcase German capabilities in the sky, an Olympiade Grossflugtag or ‘Olympic Great Flight Day’ was organized at Tempelhof airfield for 31 July, the day before the official opening of the games. There were to be tethered hot-air balloons; formation flying by glider pilots; the men’s aerobatics championship finals; and aerial displays by different models of pre-war planes, light aircraft and other engine-powered planes; and it was Melitta – not Hanna – who was booked for the programme. Melitta was to perform a daring stunt flying in a Heinkel He 70 Blitz (Lightning), a plane once used as a light bomber and for aerial reconnaissance. Her display would follow a group of parachutists and some daylight fireworks, and come just before Elly Beinhorn was to wow the crowds in her Messerschmitt Me 108: a plane she had named the Taifun because it ‘sounded international, powerful’.56 All the aircraft were emblazoned with swastikas; this was political theatre at its most spectacular.
Melitta’s thoughts on being involved in this huge public relations exercise are not recorded. However, hosting the games was a long-awaited honour for Germany and few people saw their country’s impressive preparations in anything other than a positive light. Since Melitta regarded Germany as far greater than the current regime, she may have felt proud to have been selected, justifying her participation to herself in these terms rather than seeing the games for what they had become: a homage to Nazi Germany and the Führer, deliberately staged with an eye to world opinion. She must also have known that to refuse any such invitation could be seen as anti-German, and would have been extremely risky at a time when she was still waiting to hear about her personal legal status.
In the event, the weather was terrible. Heavy clouds hung overhead. It was wet, and an unseasonably fierce wind whipped summer hats off heads, set banners flapping and sent clouds of dust into watering eyes. Nevertheless, Hitler, square and stocky in his brown uniform, accompanied by Umberto II, the last king of Italy, attended the Grossflugtag, along with crowds in the tens of thousands. Events started badly. Forty of the 150 participating aircraft had to withdraw because of the weather or engine trouble. ‘It was hell,’ one of the pilots commented in an interview.57 Yet Melitta’s performance was spectacular. Her outstanding aerial acrobatics, control and accuracy generated huge applause and lasting admiration, as well as drawing considerable new attention to her.
Hanna was also expected to play her part during the Summer Olympics. Gliding had been accepted as a ‘demonstration sport’, and a display was scheduled for 4 August at Berlin-Staaken airfield. Although no official contest took place and no prizes were presented, the weather was better and pilots from seven countries took part, with Hanna a member of the strong German team. Unfortunately gliding proved to be the only sport that brought the games a fatality, when an Austrian sailplane crashed after damaging its wing.
Among those watching the displays was a seventeen-year-old Scot. Eric Brown was the son of one of the British air force veterans invited to the games by Udet and the German Fighter Pilots’ Association for a ‘shindig’, as Eric put it, with their former enemies.58 Udet would instil in Eric a lifelong love of flying. Taking him up for a spin, he only nonchalantly checked that Eric was well strapped in before rolling the plane onto its back as they started their approach to land. Eric, who momentarily thought ‘the silly old fool’s had a heart attack’, was speechless, but Udet ‘roared with laughter’.59 Once back on the ground, Udet gave the teenager a slap on the back with the old pilots’ greeting, ‘Hals- und Beinbruch!’ – ‘Break a neck and a leg!’ He then told him to learn to fly, and to learn German. He was ‘a good mentor for someone who wanted an adventurous life’, Eric said, and Hanna no doubt agreed.60 Udet introduced them on the airfield. Hanna was a ‘remarkable lady, tiny sort’, Eric commented, adding that she ‘flew a glider like an angel’.61 Twenty minutes later he had her down as ‘an intense, strong-minded woman, filled with ambition and determination’.62 Like many others, however, Eric underestimated Hanna’s ability. When he learned that she wanted to test-fly engine-powered planes he felt she had ‘no hope’, as she would never have ‘the physical strength to take on a large aircraft’.63 Hanna would soon prove him wrong.
It is hard to know which of these Olympic aerial events, the Grossflugtag or the gliding demonstration, was the more prestigious. Either way, there must have been some awkward moments at the parties and official receptions during the games, and later at Berlin’s Haus der Flieger, or House of Aviators, established by Göring as a meeting place for flight officials and pilots. Hanna was soon talking derisively about Melitta’s skills as a pilot, while Melitta, it was said, chose never to speak of Hanna, even refusing to have a cup of tea with her. It was perhaps inevitable that some gossips would define the relationship between two such brilliant female pilots as rivalry. But although there is no reason to think that Hanna knew of Melitta’s Jewish ancestry at this point, there were many other reasons why the two might not have struck up a friendship. Hanna was vivacious, quick to laugh, and seemingly refused to take life seriously, and yet she had an eye for opportunity and a steely determination to succeed in her chosen career, whatever the obstacles. She could not bear Melitta’s apparent sense of superiority and entitlement. The more considered Melitta was just as dedicated to her vocation, but believed in the old conservative virtues of modesty, study and hard work. For her, respect had to be earned, and she could not consider Hanna, who had no grasp of aeronautical engineering, as her peer. To see such rapid success go to anyone who had less knowledge and experience must have been trying, but to see it happen to someone who appeared so closely to represent and reflect the rise of the new regime must have been a particular challenge.
‘This masculine Third Reich owes much of its success to its women athletes,’ the New York Times reported from the Berlin Olympics.64 Although the Nazis had initially opposed women’s participation in competitive sport on the grounds that it was unfeminine and might damage their reproductive organs, the regime came to appreciate the propaganda value of female Olympians. Nevertheless, there was far less coverage of the women’s events than the men’s. As always, race was a very different issue. The selection of one part-Jewish German woman to compete in fencing, the ‘honorary Aryan’ Helene Mayer, who had previously fled to America to avoid persecution, was offered as evidence to the IOC that the regime selected athletes purely on merit. In fact, the only other German Jewish athlete they acknowledged, the track and field star Gretel Bergmann, was discreetly removed from the team at the last minute. Many people around the world cheered Jesse Owens’ historic win as a victory over Nazi ideology, but few, even within Germany, realized that a woman of partly Jewish heritage had quietly starred in the opening Flight Day.
The 1936 Olympics proved an enormous success for Germany, both in terms of medal tally and for international relations. We are ‘the premier nation in the world’, Goebbels recorded with delight in his diary, while the Olympia-Zeitung asked more presciently, ‘Must we not conclude that the biggest victor of the Olympic Games was Adolf Hitler?’65 Most overseas commentators were positive. ‘Only a determined deaf-and-blind visitor to any corner of this land could fail to see and hear the sight, the sound, of Germany’s forward march,’ the New Yorker reported.66 Meanwhile the famous American pilot Charles Lindbergh, who had been Göring’s guest at the games, noted that he had ‘come away with a feeling of great admiration for the German people’. Although he added that, having been invited to tour the new civil and military air establishments, he still had many reservations about the Nazis, Lindbergh believed that the rumoured treatment of Jews in Germany must be exaggerated, and that German Jews must in any case accept some fault for having sided so much with the communists. ‘With all the things we criticize,’ he continued, Hitler ‘is undoubtedly a great man, and I believe he has done much for the German people.’67 His wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, the first American woman to earn a first-class glider pilot’s licence, was even more enthusiastic, describing Hitler as ‘a visionary, who really wants the best for his country’.68 Despite the Nuremberg Laws, and despite the invasion of the Rhineland, this was a common conclusion.
Carving out careers in the competitive male world of aviation under the Third Reich had not brought Hanna and Melitta together. Despite her mother’s concerns about pride and vanity, Hanna loved to perform and regularly demonstrated that she was more than willing to fly through public relations hoops for the Nazi regime. After one of her overseas visits, the German Aero Club wrote to thank her for having ‘had an admirable political effect’.69 She was becoming a very useful propaganda tool and, while she may not have recognized the full implications, if the payoff was in her favour, Hanna was perfectly happy to be used in this way. The more publicity she received, the more secure she was in her role as a pilot in a country that was rapidly becoming militarized and had less and less need for glamorous female aviators. Melitta was also keen to serve her country but, for her, in 1935, ‘public relations’ under the Nazis had a very different connotation. The thought of having to expose her family to public scrutiny was distasteful at best. That they would eventually be discovered to have ‘Jewish blood’, and that this meant inevitable censure both socially and professionally, was appalling. From now on all Melitta’s decisions and actions would be determined by the knowledge of her, and her family’s, increasing vulnerability.
Hanna and Melitta had both been prepared to play their part in the pageant surrounding the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Their sensational performances would bring them new levels of fame and attention, but would also set them on increasingly divergent paths. Soon both women would again be required to play public roles in support of their country. Like it or not, their reputations as brilliant female pilots were growing, and the way in which they positioned themselves in the new Germany was becoming more important than ever.
_____________________________
* The NSDAP achieved 37 per cent of the vote nationally in 1932.
* Originally the Rhön-Rossitten Society, Professor Walter Georgii’s organization was renamed the German Research Institute for Gliding in 1933, and became the German Research Centre for Gliding (DFS) in 1937. Hanna would start work there in 1934.
* Rivalen der Luft (UFA, 1934).
* So adept were these birds at finding the currents that the team caged some to take back to Germany. Not surprisingly, once they had grown accustomed to being fed in confinement, they later refused to fly. Some were donated to Frankfurt Zoo, and one was reported as walking to Heidelberg.
* In several high-profile cases it was not ‘blood’ but chance that determined race. In 1935 Hermann Göring personally selected the photograph to illustrate a perfect ‘Aryan’ baby for cards and posters that were circulated nationally. The child was Jewish. See the Independent, ‘Hessy Taft: Perfect Aryan Baby’ (02.07.2014).
* Claus and Nina had honeymooned at Borne in Germany, where they enjoyed an exhibition celebrating Mussolini’s first ten years in power. In doing so they missed the German elections of March 1933.
* The perfumier behind Caron’s ‘En Avion’ was Ernest Daltroff, a middle-class Jew whose family came from Russia. In 1941 he escaped Paris for America.
* Among those boycotting events around the games was British scientist A. V. Hill. ‘I have many German friends,’ Hill wrote, ‘but as long as the German government and people maintain their persecution of our Jewish and other colleagues, it will be altogether distasteful for me … to take part in any public scientific function in Germany.’ See David Clay Large, Nazi Games: The Olympics in 1936 (2007).
* Gliding was officially accepted by the IOC in 1938 as part of an optional group of sports to be staged for the first time at the planned 1940 Tokyo Olympics. Hitler expected all subsequent Olympics to take place in Germany. However, the Tokyo Games were cancelled after the outbreak of the Finnish/Soviet ‘Winter War’.