Within a fortnight of the Munich Agreement, it became clear that Hitler wished not only to embrace those ethnic Germans living abroad within the expanding borders of the Third Reich, but also to exclude anyone insufficiently ‘Aryan’. Melitta was still waiting for confirmation of her legal status and that of her family, and it was clear that the rules were getting tighter following Germany’s declaration that Jews deemed to be of foreign descent were to have their residency permits revoked. Many countries were already panicking about the mass influx of Jewish refugees, and Poland’s government announced that after the end of the month they would no longer accept German Jews of Polish descent as citizens. As a result, on 26 October 1938, 12,000 such Jews were arrested across Germany, stripped of their property, and herded onto trains for the border. Poland refused to admit them and, although the Polish Red Cross provided some humanitarian aid, conditions in the makeshift camps were soon squalid. Among the deportees were the parents of Herschel Grynszpan, a young German Jew who was living in France without papers. A few days later, distraught at this latest persecution of his family and community, Grynszpan bought a gun. Asking to speak to an official in the German Embassy in Paris, he shot dead the third secretary, Ernst vom Rath.* Grynszpan’s act provided the pretext Hitler had been waiting for to encourage a massive pogrom against Jews across Germany and Austria.
On 9 November, out-of-uniform SA paramilitary thugs started to smash and loot Jewish homes and shops, identifiable by the white-painted names on their windows. The police and fire authorities stood by, making no attempt to intervene unless non-Jewish properties were threatened. More than a thousand synagogues were set on fire and 7,000 businesses attacked. The smashed glass that littered the streets led to the event becoming known as Kristallnacht. By evening Jewish families were being dragged from their homes. Between 90 and 150 people were killed, with many others badly beaten, threatened and spat on.
Hanna was on the annual Darmstadt Institute work outing that day, and she witnessed an elderly couple ‘protesting and struggling’ as they were forced out of their home, still in their nightclothes. She was shocked. ‘People were jeering at them,’ she recalled. A moment later she witnessed shop windows being smashed, and then ‘some children coming noisily down the street, dragging behind them a Jewish hearse’, which they ‘chopped to bits with an axe, and then pushed into the river’.1 Hanna’s immediate thought was that this must be a ‘Bolshevik uprising’ and she shouted for the police. When she realized the truth, she called for restraint, asking the children’s parents to stop the destruction, and loudly declaring that ‘the Führer would weep if he knew such things were being done in his name’.2 One of her more sympathetic colleagues, the glider designer Hans Jacobs, bundled Hanna away through the smell of burning, the ashes and rubble, before the growing crowd could turn against them. Later, she told friends that she had been attacked and ‘could hardly escape’.3 She had been with over a hundred Darmstadt employees that evening, but only half a dozen had shown any distress and some, Jacobs noted with disgust, ‘were even excited and approved of the violence’.4
Hanna was appalled by the events she had witnessed. Soon afterwards she and Jacobs were taken before a committee of local Party officials to explain their apparent sympathy for the Jews. Risking their careers, both refused to retract their condemnation of the violence, but they were released nevertheless. Aircraft designers and test pilots of their skill and status were not easy to replace. It was a relief for Hanna when her ‘adored’ uncle, Friedrich von Cochenhausen, a lieutenant general in the Luftwaffe, assured her that the horror of Kristallnacht had not been planned.5 An order by Goebbels for an isolated and discreet attack on one subversive synagogue had been misunderstood, he told her, and the violence had escalated as the German people spontaneously vented their anger against their Jewish neighbours. As the country’s leader, Hitler was reported to be quietly shouldering the blame.
Hanna’s sympathetic support of her Jewish friend, Joachim Küttner, shows that she was not ignorant of the Nazi state’s growing anti-Semitism, but she was happy to accept her uncle’s defence of the regime despite having witnessed the worst pogrom in Germany’s history. Her refusal to retract her condemnation of the Kristallnacht violence was brave, but it was also a testament to how secure she felt personally in the Third Reich. She simply refused to believe that Hitler or other Party leaders had known about or condoned – let alone incited – such mob violence, and she chose not to question too far. Hanna had aligned her honour with the Führer, and she could not countenance the idea that he was unworthy. Fortunately for her, life offered pleasant distractions such as the Paris Air Show, and a reception held in her honour by the American–German Gliding Association later that month. A visit to Libya, then still under Italian colonial rule, followed. It was easier to study thermal wind currents in North Africa than disquieting political trends at home.* For Hanna, life continued much as it had before but, from this point on, her belief in the moral authority of the Nazi regime was a matter of active choice against a growing body of evidence.
For many others, Kristallnacht would prove a turning point, opening their eyes to the true nature of National Socialism. In early 1938 many German Jews had chosen to hope that the worst persecution was over. Jewish contributions to popular culture, the press, the law and much business had been eliminated. Jews knew they were no longer equal citizens, but beyond that, one Berliner later recorded: ‘Hitler’s threats were so utterly implausible that we regarded them as unreliable guides to future conduct. They were literally incredible.’6 After 9 November, however, the situation for Jews inside Germany became much worse. An estimated 30,000 Jewish citizens were arrested and sent to the concentration camps of Sachsenhausen, Dachau and Buchenwald where, one survivor later testified, they were ‘frozen, starved, humiliated’.7 Release was conditional on emigration. Over 2,000 would die while still interned. The Jewish community as a whole, meanwhile, was required to pay a collective fine of one billion Reichsmarks to cover the costs of the Kristallnacht damage: damage which had been inflicted upon them. Not long after, Jews were forbidden access to the theatre, cinema and cultural events, and were segregated on trains; they were being isolated and dehumanized. Some later asserted that ‘the violence of [Kristallnacht] conditioned the German people to condone brutality’, leading directly to the Holocaust.8
Melitta had never considered herself to be Jewish but she knew that the state might, and Kristallnacht had shown that it was not only her career or even her citizenship that was at stake; she and her family faced the risk of being deported and possibly murdered. Melitta never considered leaving her country; that would have gone against her deep patriotic belief in a Germany greater than the Third Reich, a Germany to which she felt she owed allegiance. Unlike Hanna, however, she knew she was in no position to publicly express her horror about the pogrom.
Alexander and his younger brother, Claus, did not feel so constrained. Alexander felt that the patriotism and sense of personal honour he held dear were being misused to create a climate that encouraged division, hatred and violence, while any dissent was interpreted as potentially treasonous criticism of the regime. Above all, he was disgusted at being surrounded by people who perpetuated Nazi lies, either through their own warped convictions or from fear of speaking out and the very real risk of indefinite detention. Determined to resist such intimidation and coercion, he again began to voice his opposition, particularly in regard to the Nazis’ view of history and their racial doctrine. ‘He was not careless,’ his daughter later stated, but rather deliberately committed to affirming his resistance wherever possible.9
Claus took a different approach. He had never approved of the democratic Weimar Republic and, not in principle opposed to dictatorship, he had welcomed Hitler’s strong leadership. He also supported many early Nazi policies, such as the reintroduction of conscription and the fight against communism. Casually anti-Semitic, he had not objected to limiting Jewish control of the arts and publishing, or the expulsion of non-German Jews. Yet he had doubts about the regime, too. Claus did not believe in what he considered to be ‘the lie that all men are equal’, and felt that natural hierarchies should be respected. In his opinion, the jumped-up ‘petty bourgeois’ Hitler had ‘exceeded all bounds of hubris’.10 Knowing that the sort of ‘so-called society people’ typified by Claus presented a potential conservative resistance, at the 1938 Nuremberg Rally Hitler had described them as having ‘old and decadent blood’. ‘These people are sometimes called, by those who don’t understand, “the upper classes”,’ he continued. ‘In fact, they are simply the result of a sort of miscarriage, of bad breeding. They are infected by cosmopolitan thoughts and have no backbone.’11 Now Claus defied Hitler, condemning the Kristallnacht violations of law and decency that had ‘shocked and disgusted him’.12 He felt his doubts about the regime and its leader had been confirmed.
The responses of the wider world to Kristallnacht were mixed. Having witnessed ‘frenzied Nazis’ destroying much of Jewish Berlin, the American journalist Louis P. Lochner attended a Propaganda Ministry press conference the next morning. There he was incensed to hear Goebbels announce that ‘all the accounts that have come to your ears about alleged looting and destruction of Jewish property are a stinking lie. Not a hair of a Jew was disturbed.’13 Few people believed such statements. Britain’s ambassador, Nevile Henderson, felt that the ‘disgusting exhibition’ had ‘shocked all decent Germans as much as it did the outside world’.14 In the USA, a horrified Peter Riedel wrote that ‘the reaction of Heinrich Himmler and Joseph Goebbels made me ashamed for the first time of being German … I hated them and their brutal, organized bullies.’15 Ulrich von Hassell, the German ambassador in Italy, also recorded his disgust at the ‘vile persecution’, noting in his diary that ‘there is no doubt that we are dealing with an officially organized anti-Jewish riot … truly a disgrace!’16 His daughter, Fey, called the attacks ‘true barbarism!’17 Hassell would spend the next six months scurrying between Henderson, who was pro-appeasement, and various Nazi chiefs, trying to prevent war. The brutality of Kristallnacht had changed the political climate but few could predict the horrors that lay ahead. It is ‘unimaginable’ that Jews in Germany ‘will all be lined up against the wall one day … or that they will be locked up in giant concentration camps’, the Italian Embassy in Berlin reported, tacitly recognizing the violence of Nazi German anti-Semitism.18 Yet not one country broke off diplomatic relations with Germany, opened its borders to refugees, or imposed sanctions. While peace was still a possibility, no country wanted to provoke a political crisis.
That autumn Winston Churchill famously argued that ‘the prime factor of uncertainty in the world today is the menace from the air’.19 Germany was now so confident in its renewed air power that a 1938 Berlin music-hall joke claimed, ‘the English may have so many planes that the sky is black with them, and the French ones are so numerous that you can’t see the sun for them; but when Hermann Göring presses the button, the birds themselves have got to walk.’20 But the skies were also a source of vital intelligence. It was a German, General Werner von Fritsch, then commander-in-chief of the Wehrmacht, who predicted that ‘the military organization with the best aerial reconnaissance will win the next war’ – which was ironic, given that it was the British who would lead the field.
The British chief of air intelligence at MI6, responsible for gathering information from overseas, was the charmingly named yet ‘superbly anonymous’ Frederick Winterbotham, better known to his colleagues as ‘Cloak and Dagger Fred’.21 A regular visitor to Germany throughout the 1930s, where he posed as a Nazi sympathizer, Winterbotham had been secretly monitoring the country’s rearmament programme. In November 1938, a week after Kristallnacht, he appointed a tall, ‘wolfish’, middle-aged Australian pilot called Sidney Cotton to his team. After the First World War, Cotton had answered an advertisement in the Aeroplane magazine for pilots to fly over Newfoundland, spotting seals for culling.* Later he took aerial photographs for a map-making firm, using his legs to hold the stick steady while pointing a large plate camera over the side of his open cockpit. Over the next few years he and his photographer girlfriend, Patricia Martin, improved the technique until they were expert.
Winterbotham and MI6 now set Cotton up as an entrepreneur, providing him with a beautiful, state-of-the-art Lockheed aircraft in ‘exquisite duck-egg green’. The colour was unusual in an era when most private aircraft were silver, but it ensured that the plane was practically invisible against the sky from below.22 After some practice flights over France and North Africa, it was in this plane that Cotton started regular visits to Berlin, ostensibly on behalf of his aeronautical and colour film businesses. Having caused quite a stir with his elegant plane, he was introduced to some senior Nazis, leading to an invitation to photograph Göring at his country house. Cotton wrote that Göring was dressed like Robin Hood with his ‘velvet knickerbockers, shoes with gold buckles and a sleeveless leather hunting jacket’.23 He bit his tongue, however, as Göring showed him round his house and art treasures, even demonstrating his enormous model railway, which, Cotton noticed, had small Stuka aeroplanes on a track overhead, able to release wooden bombs at the flick of a switch.* Disappointingly, however, they did not dive.
In January 1939, a Party memorandum was issued, stating that Nazi policy towards the Jews was one of emigration. Less than a week later Hitler’s so-called ‘prophecy speech’ to the Reichstag directly proposed the ‘annihilation’ of European Jewry. Still without news about her ‘Aryan’ status application for herself and her siblings, Melitta was keeping her head down at work while throwing herself into the enjoyment of every spare moment with Alexander. ‘Due to the bleak backdrop,’ her sister Jutta later wrote, these months were ‘lived more intensely and as a result were happy.’24
Melitta usually made her weekly commute from her work in Berlin to see Alexander in Würzburg by plane, but now she also bought a car: a beautiful two-seater, four-cylinder-engine Fiat 500 Topolino, or Little Mouse. It was not exactly a convertible but it had a folding canvas top. Sometimes she and Alexander would drive to the Stauffenberg family residence at Lautlingen in the beautiful Swabian Alps for weekends of field sports and country walks in the richly wooded hills. Whenever possible they tried to coincide their visits with Claus and Nina, Berthold and Mika and their growing families. Claus and Nina already had three sons, the eldest of whom, another Berthold named after his uncle, was six years old. Melitta loved giving him exhilarating rides in the back of her Topolino, ‘sitting on nothing’, as he remembered it, while she tore round the country roads at speeds ‘typical for a pilot’.25 The young Berthold dutifully loved his uncle Alexander who was ‘remarkably cordial’ and ‘of a poetic nature’, but he adored his rather wilder aunt. Melitta did not just have a car, unusual though this was for a woman: she was also a pilot and an artist, she went hunting, sailing and could fire a gun. She was, her nephew felt, ‘a woman who could do just about anything!’ and he ‘admired her completely’.26
All the children loved Melitta, not only because she was exciting to be around, but also because ‘she treated children like people and not like babies’, one of her nieces would later say.27 But when Nina asked Melitta whether she and Alexander were planning a family of their own, Melitta blushed, lowered her face and said softly only that that was the plan. There was already enormous state pressure on ‘Aryan’ women in Nazi Germany to have babies. The first Mutterkreuz (Mother’s Cross of Honour) for a woman who had raised four or more children was awarded that May, and Hitler would later become official godfather to every tenth child in such families. Still in legal limbo, Melitta and Alexander may not have wished to start a family, or they may not have been able to. In any case, Melitta was committed to her flying career and could not countenance giving it up. ‘I just can’t stop flying,’ she told friends. ‘I can’t help it.’28 This was something Hanna understood. ‘Hanna was a fanatical aviatrix,’ a fellow female pilot recorded, ‘and could not bear to spend a day without flying.’29 Melitta and Hanna were both exceptional women, and children were just not on their radar. When male pilots took out their wallets and showed her photographs of their wives and children, Hanna would tell them ‘it was hard, very hard, to deny myself this fortune’, but stoically explained that she ‘had to do it, to completely dedicate myself to flying’.30
Alexander was also absolutely dedicated to his career, and increasingly obsessed by the poems of late antiquity. In March, while the Wehrmacht marched further into Czechoslovakia, in pursuit, it was said, of justice rather than war, Alexander’s Würzburg University exempted him from military service, and sent him to Greece on a study trip. With his crisp white shirts and pale trousers, windswept hair and earnest face, Alexander was the epitome of a classics lecturer removed from the action and set down among ancient ruins. Although anxiously following events with the Luftwaffe, when Melitta could secure some leave she joined her husband on the Greek mainland. Unlike Germany’s desperate Jews, she had no problem securing her travel documents to leave the country. A photograph taken by Alexander shows her smiling brightly in the spring sunshine but well wrapped up in tights and scarf, her short chestnut hair now curled and set – it must have felt strange not to have to force it under a flying cap every day. Perched on top of a stony outcrop in the mountains, she seems to be surveying the landscape below, map in hand, like a true navigator.
Melitta must have spent many hours studying maps that spring. Back at home, the state-controlled news was once again portraying the invasion of a neighbouring country, this time Czechoslovakia rather than Austria, as a welcomed intervention. Soon there was talk of restoring parts of Poland to the Fatherland, including the areas of Silesia where Melitta had grown up and which had been ceded to Poland in 1921. Danzig, where Melitta’s parents, Michael and Margarete Schiller, were now living as part of the German majority in the city, was also being considered.* For once Melitta fully approved of Nazi policy, welcoming what she hoped would be the restoration of her childhood home to German governance. Few outside Germany saw such expansionist ambitions in such a positive light.
At the end of June, Sidney Cotton and his British co-pilot descended into Berlin’s Tempelhof airport to find it bedecked with black and crimson Nazi flags, and the airfield surrounded by anti-aircraft guns. Watching a dozen armed soldiers running across the tarmac towards them, Cotton thought, ‘Christ, we’ve had it,’ but they were merely being greeted by a guard of honour.31 The next month they flew to the international Frankfurt Air Rally, which was packed with Luftwaffe officers in their grey dress uniforms, including Udet, Erhard Milch, the deputy head of the Luftwaffe, and his chief of administration, Albert Kesselring, a friend of Hanna’s popularly known as ‘Smiling Albert’.32 Despite his nickname, Kesselring had a taciturn, almost rude manner, and bluntly asked Cotton for a flight in the magnificent Lockheed with its painted, all-metal fuselage and heated cabin. Cotton, professionally charming, was delighted to oblige, even offering Kesselring the controls. Once up, he reached beneath his seat and activated the hidden German Leica cameras, the best on the market, focused down on the land below. When Kesselring asked about the unfamiliar green light flashing on the control panel, Cotton explained that it showed the petrol flow to the engines. Soon Cotton was taking a series of generals and colonels on joy-flights a couple of thousand feet ‘above airfields and ammunition dumps, factories and fortifications’, while his hidden cameras clicked away, taking some of the first aerial reconnaissance photographs of the coming war.33
By the time that Cotton was flying over Frankfurt, neither he, Melitta nor Hanna were in any doubt as to where their countries were heading. Even while signing the Munich Agreement the year before, Chamberlain had agreed to a huge increase in British armament spending, and production levels in German aircraft manufacturing had soared. Britain and France had guaranteed Poland’s independence in March 1939. In August the Greater German Reich and the Soviet Union agreed a mutual nonaggression pact, Nazi German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop flying to Moscow with Hitler’s personal photographer to record the historic moment. Europe was dividing.
As the prospect of war looked ever more likely, Germany was gripped by a renewed sense of patriotism. By now both Alexander and Claus had taken part in military exercises, in different capacities. Despite his political dissent, Alexander had been brought up to value the honourable fulfilment of his duty to people and state above all else. As a result, although he considered himself ‘unsuited to being a soldier’, he had served voluntarily in a cavalry regiment as early as 1923, becoming a keen horseman.34 Until March 1934 Alexander had even been a member of the SA, the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party, although he was never a Party member. In 1936 he became a corporal in the Reserve, and it was as such that he participated in military exercises over the summer of 1938. Unlike his brother, Claus was a passionate soldier. Having already seen service in Czechoslovakia, he was now awaiting new orders. Nevertheless, ‘the mass of German people …’ Nevile Henderson wrote, ‘were horror-struck at the whole idea of the war which was thus being thrust upon them’.35
Sidney Cotton finally returned to Britain with the dubious honour of being the last civilian to fly out of Berlin in late August 1939. He carefully photographed the German fleet congregating at Wilhelmshaven as he went over, with Hitler’s personal yacht, the Grille – ‘the cricket’ in English – clearly distinct as a white fleck among the grey. Days later, although officially still a civilian, Cotton flew back to film the fleet again for the British Admiralty, showing which vessels had departed. Soon he was busy establishing a special unit to pioneer military aerial reconnaissance during the coming conflict, eventually accepting a commission with the RAF.*
Inside Germany, it seems that only the young and then politically naive British pilot Eric Brown, who had partied with Hanna at Udet’s apartment after the Berlin Motor Show, was not anticipating the coming conflict. On the morning of Sunday 3 September 1939, he was ‘shaken’ to be arrested by the SS at the small Munich inn where he was staying.36 Although he had been studying in Germany for several months, Eric had ‘never once felt any real likelihood of war’, he later claimed.37 After an interrogation that lasted three days, he was pushed into a car and driven away. Thinking he was bound for a Gestapo cell or the firing squad, he was surprised to see his own beautiful MG Magnette sports car being driven behind, with the entire head of the large SS sergeant who was behind the wheel sticking up above the windscreen. To his astonishment, both he and the Magnette were deposited at the Swiss border, where he was told to drive on. His arresting officer ‘was standing with a … hand machine gun pointing at my back, and the Swiss were standing with one pointing at my front,’ Eric later recounted. ‘I wasn’t feeling too confident at this stage.’38 Within a few hours, however, he was racing across Switzerland for France, his immediate fears of a bullet having been replaced by a nagging worry that everything would be over ‘before I could get into uniform’.39 He was lucky not to have been interned. Britain and Germany were officially at war.
_____________________________
* As Ernst vom Rath was well known to be gay, it has been suggested that Grynszpan acted after a lover’s quarrel. Fears of a scandal prevented a Nazi show trial. Grynszpan insisted his motive was to raise awareness of the persecution of German Jews. Although vom Rath had expressed regret for Jewish suffering, he had maintained that anti-Semitic laws were necessary.
* Although delighted by the Libyan children, the hospitality, and the ‘dreamy tenderness’ of the women, Hanna’s racism made her fear the men. Her ‘imagination was busy with blood and the glint of curving steel’, and when she accepted a local invitation, she wrote, she found the ‘animal smell, which the Arab carries with him, particularly disturbing’. See Hanna Reitsch, The Sky My Kingdom (2009), p. 173.
* While in this role, Cotton made friends with an eccentric fur-trapper and his family. Eating in his remote Newfoundland cabin, Cotton asked how his host managed to serve fresh peas. The trapper explained that he filled his baby’s washbasin with salt water and peas, and let the Arctic winds freeze it over. His name was Clarence Birdseye.
* Although Göring’s house was an Allied target, it was Göring himself who eventually blew it up, on 28 April 1945.
* Danzig was claimed as part of Germany on 1 September 1939.
* Cotton’s Lockheed had a long post-war career, and ended up starring in a number of films and television programmes, including Doc Savage and The A-Team.