‘Flying ladies …’ Colonel Dr Georg Pasewaldt at the Ministry of Aviation wrote dismissively, ‘generally used the profession more or less to further their own publicity.’1 As a rule, he ‘paid no particular attention’ to them.2 At the end of 1941, however, Pasewaldt was undertaking an inspection at Rechlin when he spotted a Junkers Ju 88 twin-engine bomber streaking down out of the sky, straight towards the earth. The colonel demanded to know the name of the pilot at the controls, and what purpose was served by this high-risk manoeuvre, ‘which appeared to me to far exceed the limits of the permissible, even at a test centre’.3 It was just ‘Melitta, doing her dive trials’, he was told by the ground crew, who were amused by his surprise at what was to them so familiar.4 Pasewaldt stared in disbelief as the bomber straightened out. Then he drove to the hangar to wait for Melitta.
A veteran of the First World War, and squadron commander of two Bomber Wings in the Second, Pasewaldt knew that taking a plane into even a moderate nosedive was ‘something many male pilots already regarded as an act of heroism’. Melitta’s work, repeatedly flying ‘in the most extreme dive configurations’ to develop equipment herself, was absolutely astounding.5 From the moment Pasewaldt watched her ‘climb out of her aircraft, fresh and light-hearted’, he was captivated by Melitta’s ‘almost unique outlook on life … far removed from even the slightest hint of egotism’.6 That day he ‘firmly resolved to make sure that this exceptional woman should receive special distinction’.7 Pasewaldt as yet ‘knew nothing’ about Hanna’s flight trials. Before 1942 was out, however, he would find himself discussing ‘what special, exceptional honour’ could be awarded for her service as well.8
Melitta and Hanna were both transferred away from Rechlin at the beginning of 1942. Hanna left in January, returning to the glider research institute at Darmstadt. There she faced a terrible start to the new year. Within a month of Udet’s death, the husband of her sister, Heidi, was killed in action, leaving his widow with three small children and heavily pregnant with their fourth. Two weeks later Kurt was reported missing for a second time. Heidi’s baby died within a few months of birth, and Hanna’s father, Willy Reitsch, slipped inexorably into depression. Hanna’s work was going badly, too. At Darmstadt she was testing more of Hans Jacobs’ designs, but these gliders no longer inspired her. With Udet gone, she needed a new mentor. An instinctive hero-worshipper, Hanna had adopted Wolf Hirth as her first ‘flying father’ until Walter Georgii and then Udet had taken over the role, easing her career path and generally promoting her to the Nazi leadership. Now she appealed again to Udet’s fighter ace friend from the First World War, Robert Ritter von Greim.
Greim was an enthusiastic Nazi who had joined the Party early. It was he who had taken Hitler on his first flight, in an open biplane, to the Berlin Kapp Putsch of 1920. When the coup failed, Greim had performed aerobatics for a living, before accepting work with Chiang Kai-Shek’s government helping to build a Chinese air force. Bluntly racist, he did not expect much from his Chinese students, and was pleased to return to Germany and lend his support to Hitler’s Munich Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. Ten years later he was a key figure working with Göring to secretly rebuild the Luftwaffe. By 1942 he had supported the invasion of Poland, the Battle for Norway, the Battle of Britain and Operation Barbarossa, the surprise German invasion of the Soviet Union. His only son, Hubert, not far off Hanna’s own age, was a Luftwaffe pilot. To Hanna, Greim embodied all the virtues she most admired: a love of flight, patriotism, honour, authority and absolute loyalty to the Third Reich. Now she began to lobby him for more exciting test work. Greim helped when he could. When he could not, Hanna started to claim that the Führer had given her licence to fly the best and most challenging aircraft the Third Reich had to offer. Not everyone believed her, but few wanted to get on the wrong side of Hanna Reitsch.
In February it was Melitta’s turn to leave Rechlin. Pasewaldt’s endorsement had helped secure her transfer to the Luftwaffe Technical Academy at Gatow, where some of the most advanced research in Germany was being carried out. Gatow was also the site of the Luftwaffe’s most prestigious training school and, being on the outskirts of Berlin, it was the airport most often used by Hitler for his personal journeys. Set in beautiful deciduous woodland that ran down to the Wannsee, it was a surprisingly tranquil environment at the heart of Nazi air war operations. Melitta was allocated a room on the first floor of a guesthouse on the academy campus. From here she had fine views over the lake and the wooded shore beyond. Every morning she woke to birdsong, and she even befriended a squirrel, which allowed her to feed it from her window. In the evenings wild pigs would venture out, leaving tracks in the mud and, when it was cold, sometimes scavenging right up to the airfield hangars.
As time went on, ‘the number of friends in her circle however diminished’, Jutta realized, noticing that ‘an increasing number of pictures of crashed, fallen and missing friends were hung on the wall’.9 Melitta felt no allegiance to the Nazis, but these young pilots had been friends and colleagues, fighting and dying, she believed, for the honour and security of their country. Knowing that her work could reduce some of their risk, Melitta exploited every moment of good weather, walking or cycling over to the airfield early in the mornings and often managing twelve or more test-flight dives with Ju 88s and Ju 87s every day.
As an engineer–pilot, Melitta already had all the qualifications needed for a technical general staff officer so she now started work on a PhD. Her new work was focused on the development of a special night-landing device for single-engined night fighters. She was ‘testing landings with fighter planes for unlit, improvised emergency airfields’, and ‘blind-flying’ without any electrical landing systems, Jutta explained.10 She also had to respond to various spontaneous demands and requests from the academy. Once, testing a powerful Ju 52 on a cross-country flight, her co-pilots were ‘astonished by how precisely’ she held the ‘powerful central engine’ even in squally weather.11 ‘During the flight, Countess Stauffenberg wore a grey or blue-grey suit and a hat with a broad brim which she did not remove during the whole flight,’ one remembered noticing, before he was distracted when ‘the frequent and full rudder movement due to the bumpy weather meant that she had to continually struggle with the skirt of her suit which tended to ride up’.12 When, arriving back at the airfield, he expressed his amazement at the ability of this most feminine pilot, he discovered that ‘the Countess’s precise flying and holding of an exact course’ were already well known and respected.13
The RAF and the Luftwaffe were now engaged in a sustained air war, with regular bombing raids on both sides. Although Britain was not yet undertaking saturation bombing, which was initially used to support ground operations, many residential areas in Germany were badly damaged and civilian casualties were high. The same was true in Britain. In May the House of Commons and Westminster Abbey received a direct hit during what the Nazi press called retaliatory action. ‘The debating chamber of the House was wrecked …’ The Times reported. ‘Big Ben fell silent, its face blackened and scarred.’14 ‘Our ability to produce more and more [bombers] in spite of the air raids must have been one of the reasons that Hitler did not really take the air battle over Germany seriously,’ Albert Speer later wrote.15 But in 1941 Hitler had overextended his resources by embarking on the Russian offensive. As a result, he rejected Speer and Milch’s proposals ‘that the manufacture of bombers be radically reduced in favour of increased fighter-plane production’, until it was too late.16
As the Allies invaded the airspace above Gatow, Melitta faced jeopardy not only from her own inherently dangerous work, but also from enemy engagement. Despite several attacks by Allied planes, which also strafed the airfield, Melitta’s test rate never slowed. She would complete over 2,000 nosedives and patent many innovative equipment designs during her time at Gatow.* ‘I believe I can say this much with satisfaction,’ she later told an audience when required to speak about her work. ‘My efforts have not been in vain.’17
As Gatow was on the edge of Berlin, Melitta often travelled in to buy black tea and biscuits, or to meet friends for supper at the Aero Club. She also relaxed by sailing on the beautiful Wannsee, or sculpting fine busts of Alexander, his dissident uncle Nikolaus von Üxküll-Gyllenband – now better known to her as Uncle Nüx – and several of her colleagues.† Paul von Handel admired her ability to catch a likeness and thought the portraits ‘very impressive and powerful’, but he wondered how she could find the time for such work.18
Melitta was also trying to see more of her own side of the family. Once she even managed to travel to Danzig for a party. Photographs show her standing on the steps of her parents’ house in a fashionable satin summer dress, surrounded by Lili, Jutta, Otto and various children. Most get-togethers were in Berlin, however. Otto’s wife, Ilse, was now living near Tempelhof airport at Manfred von Richthofen Strasse, named after the Great War fighter ace, and her house became a hub for visiting family. Otto would sometimes arrive in his long leather coat, with presents of clothes and hats from Russia and Romania, or Delftware brought from the Netherlands. No one asked how he had acquired them. Melitta brought gifts too. Arriving for tea in one of her elegant trouser suits, she always carried an incongruously large handbag. Ilse and Otto’s two young daughters, Ingrid and Hannalore, and their cousin, Heidimarie, would pounce on the bag, knowing that their ‘Tante Litta’ brought something more precious than textiles or ceramics. Melitta saved up her rations of pilot’s issue Scho-ka-kola chocolate for the children. The round blue and white tins, featuring a swastika-laden eagle within a starburst, had become iconic when the brand was launched at the 1936 Olympics. Among other active ingredients, the chocolate contained Pervitin, a strong nervous-system stimulant that helped to keep pilots and other servicemen alert. No wonder the children loved it and would afterwards bounce around, particularly Heidimarie who, being the eldest, would always take ‘the lion’s share’ of the chocolate when it was divided up.19
In February, Alexander was drafted into Artillery Regiment 389, known as the Rhine Gold Division, and sent to a former Czechoslovakian training garrison at Milowice.* Melitta missed him and worried about him terribly. Pulling a few strings, she managed to secure a work trip to nearby Prague, and Alexander took leave and travelled over to meet her with a close friend, Max Escher. Melitta was staying at the prestigious Hotel Ambassador and the men revelled in the chance to enjoy a bath and some good food before they all headed out for the evening. This was the first time Escher had met Melitta, and he was surprised to find a ‘fine-limbed, delicate woman’, who ‘did not give the impression of a bold and daring pilot’.20 Furthermore, Escher wrote, ‘this objective woman with her incisive mind provided the greatest contrast to the imaginative, silent poet and academic, but also his best complement.’21 Together, he felt, they were ‘a quite amusing pair’.22
Melitta knew how much Alexander enjoyed a glass of really good wine but, having learnt that his camp was ‘dry’, she had been frustrated to discover that bottles of decent wine in Prague were impossible to buy. Instead, she made it her business to visit ‘a string of wine bars’ before he arrived.23 At each venue, after sipping modestly at her drink, she covertly poured the rest of her glass into bottles hidden in her capacious handbag. When Escher feigned outrage at her duplicity, she laughed, telling him ‘at first I wanted to wean [Alexander] off drinking – and in doing so I learnt to drink myself!’24
For a couple of days the three friends roamed through old Prague, exploring the cathedral, castle and palace like any pre-war tourists. They also visited the city’s synagogue and Jewish cemetery. Melitta might not have considered herself Jewish, but her appreciation of culture was not so narrow that she was uninterested. At the sixteenth-century grave of Rabbi Löw, Escher told the story of the Golem, which, he felt, ‘suited our evening stroll through the crooked, narrow lanes of the former ghetto quarter’. Legend tells that Löw, a sculptor like Melitta, had created the Golem of Prague from clay to defend the ghetto from the anti-Semitic pogroms of the Holy Roman Emperor. When his work was done, the Golem’s body was stored in the attic of the old synagogue, in case he should ever be needed again.
It is not hard to imagine Melitta and Alexander’s thoughts as they listened to this story in the Prague of 1942. The first transports of Jews from the city to Łódź had taken place in November 1939. In 1941 Reinhard Heydrich had been appointed ‘Protector’ of annexed, occupied Czechoslovakia, and that October he attended a meeting in Prague to discuss the deportation of a further 50,000 members of the Jewish community. Heydrich had been one of the minds behind Kristallnacht, and was directly responsible for organizing the Einsatzgruppen, the task forces that travelled behind the advancing Nazi German front line, murdering Jews and others deemed undesirable. His round-up of Czechoslovakian Jews and the appalling reprisals exacted for any domestic resistance had led him to be known as the Butcher of Prague. The following January Heydrich chaired the secret Wannsee Conference, to discuss implementing the Nazi plan for the extermination of the Jews through systematic genocide. Melitta, Alexander and Escher would have known little of these events, but it must have been notable how few Jews they encountered as they wandered through old Prague, while any they had met would have been wearing a yellow star and awaiting deportation to Theresienstadt concentration camp, where 33,000 people would eventually die.* ‘We warmed ourselves in a low dive off a gloomy lane,’ Escher continued. ‘A blind harpist sang Czech folk melodies. It almost confirmed the Yiddish romance of the place.’25 He also commented that Alexander and Melitta ‘sit together and cuddle a lot’, but he did not say whether they clung together for romance, blithely unaware of the attacks on the community around them, or for consolation.26
Alexander came from an aristocratic conservative elite that had a history of anti-Semitism, and his brother Claus had certainly absorbed a good deal of racism – and displayed it. Yet Alexander was vehemently opposed to Nazi discrimination. Melitta had found herself aligned with a people she had never much considered previously, and with whom she now feared sharing an identity. Alexander once told Escher that ‘in flying clothes and crash helmet’, Melitta ‘looked like the Archangel Michael himself’.27 He had chosen an interesting simile. Michael is an archangel not only in Christian theology, but in Islam and Judaism, too, and he is widely considered a protector, a healer, and an advocate of the Jews, as well as the patron saint of the airborne.
The friends then found a bar and settled down to discuss their own likely futures. Escher wondered whether he and Alexander might volunteer for the Norwegian coastal artillery, but Alexander believed they would be sent to the Eastern Front. Although aware of the hardships there, he tried to keep their spirits up, laughing that ‘we will have to see where the ancient Goths wandered about!’28 Melitta said nothing to dissuade her husband from ‘the Russian adventure’, as Escher put it, but he noted that ‘her anxiety showed itself as we parted: “Please keep an eye on Alexander”,’ she exhorted him; ‘“he is totally unmilitary!”‘29
In early March, shortly before the men’s transport left, Melitta managed to meet them again, this time at their camp in Milowice. Alexander had arranged for her to stay at a local guesthouse; he was so unworldly he did not realize that it also served as the troops’ brothel. Word quickly spread about his faux pas, and new rooms were found at a farmhouse. It was clean but cold, so Escher arranged for two sacks of coal to be brought over from their own stocks. He and Alexander also liberated a heavy case of French sparkling wine, which they dragged across the snow to the farmhouse.
The moon was already up when Alexander, Escher and Melitta met for a last night together before the men left for the front. In honour of the occasion, Melitta wore an evening dress with some old family jewellery. The farmhouse stove was glowing, and the painted furniture, woven chair covers and red-checked bedding made the room feel warm, safe and snug, but thoughts of death could not completely be chased away. Alexander read out some of his most recent poems, which were personal but also full of portent: ‘Whoever thinks about the worst, about death, attracts it,’ he had written.30 Eventually, though, warmed and wearied by wine, they found themselves gripped by a ‘lasting peasant-type jollity’.31 Admiring Melitta’s ‘remarkable inner reserve’, Escher decided that ‘true serenity is the best protection for the soul, and the nerves’.32 For all her ‘robust attitude’, however, it was clear to Escher that Melitta was struggling to ‘overcome and forget the conflict between her gruelling service under a tyrant … and her growing insight into the criminality of his regime’.33 Despite her ‘shy smile’, he wrote, ‘she could not hide a slight, latent melancholy’.34
That spring was hard for Melitta. Alexander and the 389th Infantry Division saw action almost immediately after her return to Berlin. Casualty figures were high. Yet Melitta’s work and day-to-day life had to continue much as before. Sometimes Claus’s beautiful wife, Nina, would visit Melitta with her children in tow, and the two women would talk about their husbands away on active duty, the letters they sent back, and the direction of the war. As a distraction, Melitta also took Nina out sailing on the Wannsee, as was her habit with close friends. Once, a lady beside them on the same jetty dropped her handbag, which fell into the lake. Without a second thought, Melitta pulled off her jacket and dived in after it. Moments later she returned the bag to its owner, deeply impressing Nina’s six-year-old son, Heimeran von Stauffenberg. It was typical of the spontaneous and slightly daring nature that made Melitta so popular with the children.
With Alexander now deployed, Melitta also started spending more of her free time at Lautlingen, the Stauffenberg country home where Nina also liked to escape the air raids of Berlin. Melitta loved the grand old house and the surrounding hills, thick with forest, where she would go shooting with Alexander’s uncle Nüx. She arrived not just with Scho-ka-kola for Nina’s children but also model Junkers aircraft made from cast metal, precious gifts during wartime when chocolate and new toys were rare. Her nephews and nieces adored her and sat entranced by her flying stories, just as she had with her uncle Ernst during the previous conflict. They all found her much warmer than their academic uncle Alexander. When they were with Alexander, ‘he was always writing poems which we children didn’t read,’ Claus’s eldest son, Berthold, remembered. ‘We liked him very much, but he was a bit unworldly.’35 Not quite eight, but clever and mature for his years, Berthold had always enjoyed watching the adults and felt that, although they clearly loved one another, Melitta had tended to ‘mother’ Alexander.36 His admiration for his aunt, however, was boundless.
On the rare occasions when Claus was home on leave, he and Melitta would also have long conversations at Lautlingen. Claus was serving in Vinnytsia, in Ukraine, where the mass graves of 10,000 men murdered by the Soviets just before the war had been uncovered in 1941. Later Nazi atrocities committed in the area included the murder of around 28,000 people, almost the entire Jewish population of the town. ‘These crimes must not be allowed to continue,’ Claus had reportedly sworn to officers at the General Staff headquarters.37 Such words were worthless. Although seven-year-old Berthold did not know what his father and Melitta were discussing, he saw that ‘they were close friends’, and he understood that all was not right.38
While Melitta was developing aircraft technology at Gatow, and Alexander and Claus were on active service, Hanna was seconded from her glider research institute to work with the pioneering rocket-powered fighter plane, the Messerschmitt Me 163. Hanna had already tested several of Willy Messerschmitt’s prototype gliders, including the Me 321 Gigant. Now Messerschmitt and his design team were focused almost exclusively on developing engineless jet-powered aircraft. Their designs were revolutionary. The Me 262 Schwalbe, or Swallow, would become the world’s first operational jet fighter.* The stubby Me 163b Komet, a small egg-shaped machine with wings designed by Alexander Lippisch, would be the only operational rocket-powered aircraft.† Lippisch was also a veteran of the glider research institute, and had joined Messerschmitt at his base in Augsburg in 1939. His designs naturally reflected his experience. The Me 163 was made of fabric-covered wood, and while it flew at near sonic speeds under rocket propulsion, once its fuel was burned it coasted back down to earth as a glider.
From the summer of 1941 tests on prototypes of these incredible aircraft had been carried out both at Augsburg and at the top-secret proving ground at Peenemünde on the Baltic coast. Messerschmitt’s chief test pilot was Heini Dittmar, the gliding champion who had travelled to South America with Hanna before the war to study thermal winds. Unfortunately he and Hanna had since fallen out. Hanna now had a reputation for demanding access to whichever aircraft she chose, sometimes delaying desperately needed trials. Furthermore, when she undertook test flights her reports were not always conclusive. ‘She flies with her heart and not with her brains,’ one pilot complained, or ‘at least without critical understanding of her work’.39 More than once, deficiencies were found in aircraft that Hanna had signed off. This ‘was a little humiliating for her’, noted Wolfgang Späte, the head of the operational test unit.40 Although ‘not a very talkative person’, Heini happily shared his blunt opinion of Hanna.41 ‘There are women who just can’t stand it when there is a new man in town, and they haven’t got him into bed yet,’ he claimed. ‘With Hanna it’s the same, but about planes. Whenever there is a new prototype she becomes obsessed with it, and is not satisfied until she has flown it.’42 Heini even threatened to leave the team, should Hanna be invited to join them. The other test pilots, including Rudy Opitz, a veteran of the Eben-Emael attack, supported him.
Späte was ‘a dedicated Nazi’, who had a reputation for arrogance.43 He had known Hanna since their glider competition days when she had often outperformed him. Now he agreed that Hanna could be difficult. ‘Her pride would neither tolerate accepting us as equal colleagues, nor even asking for our professional advice,’ he wrote. ‘She was number one, and she knew it!’44 But Späte and Lippisch also recognized that Hanna had the support of Greim and other senior Nazis, and they hoped that her connections might draw extra funding to the project. Since Udet’s death, the Me 163 had had to compete with rival super-weapon projects, such as the V-1 and V-2 rockets. ‘Now and again, human nature and personal feelings tended to play a role,’ Späte argued, ‘and arousing the emotions of people in decision-making positions was one of Hanna’s strong points.’45 Späte negotiated a compromise. Heini and the team would continue their work at Augsburg, developing the aircraft as an interceptor to split up enemy bomber formations before attacking them individually. Hanna was sent to the Messerschmitt aircraft factory at Regensburg. Here she became the first woman to fly the rocket plane, undertaking at least four flights to test alternative landing equipment. To her intense frustration, however, none of her work required the use of rocket power; she was simply towed into the air and released to glide back down.
None of Hanna’s colleagues at Regensburg doubted her courage or skill as a pilot, but a female flier was still a novelty. Although far from being the youngest test pilot at the base, Hanna had to work hard to maintain respect and generally keep the men in line. ‘She was not an unattractive woman,’ the pilot Hein Gering decided, but he understood that she was ‘the girlfriend’ of the Waffen SS’s Otto Skorzeny.46 Hanna did not yet know Skorzeny, although she would later work with him, and this may have been one ruse of several she adopted to keep men at bay.* Another was her habit of wearing a white angora sweater, ‘so you could never put your arm around her because your uniform would be covered in white goat hair, and then everyone would know’, Gering admitted.47 But Hanna was not above appealing to the men for help when occasion demanded. ‘There was one thing she was scared of,’ Gering discovered, and it was not the Komet plane, the SS, or even the enemy.48
One evening a few of the pilots were sitting around in the officers’ mess, chatting, when Hanna said she was hungry and headed to the kitchen to ‘scrounge some food’.49 ‘All of a sudden we heard the most ear-splitting scream,’ Gering remembered. The men immediately rushed into action, expecting to find someone trying to murder Hanna. ‘Instead we saw her standing on the table in a state of great agitation, screeching at us to do something. Each of us looked at the other, not quite sure what to do …’ Eventually they found the source of the commotion: ‘a little mouse quivering in fear under the table’. Although it was quickly removed, ‘no amount of reassurance would settle Hanna, and we had to make a bridge of chairs so poor Hanna could step from one to another before bolting through the door and into the darkness.’50
When the USA had entered the war in December 1941, Melitta and Hanna’s gliding-champion-turned-air-attaché friend, Peter Riedel, was first interned, and then sent back to Germany via Lisbon. Arriving in Berlin with his American wife in May 1942, Peter feared he might be transferred to active service with the Luftwaffe.† In the hope that Melitta might be able to help him secure alternative work as an aeronautical engineer, he sought out ‘the young Countess Stauffenberg’, as he respectfully referred to her, and they arranged to meet at Gatow.51
To Peter, Melitta seemed unchanged from 1932, when he had first taught her to fly gliders. ‘The title of Flugkapitän, or similar honour, didn’t seem to have gone to her head at all,’ he noted with admiration.52 Melitta had changed, however. She had learned to be suspicious of her colleagues, and to completely distrust the state she had been raised to feel so dutiful towards. Peter was bursting to talk. Having been based in Washington for some years, he felt he appreciated the extent of American air armament ‘basically better than anyone else in Germany’, and he had no doubt about the impending ‘disastrous outcome of the war’.53 Before he could say much more, however, Melitta suggested they take a boat out on the lake; it was only a short walk through the woods at the edge of the airfields, and the weather was too good to miss. Only when they were on the water and ‘away from unwelcome witnesses’ did Melitta start to ask questions.54 This ‘seemed to be the habit’, Peter quickly realized, ‘so that we could talk without fear of microphones’.55
Melitta and Peter talked for some hours. ‘As I knew her and trusted her, I told her freely that I was very pessimistic about the outcome of the war,’ he later recalled.56 Melitta gave Peter a few work contacts but there was no obvious job for him at Gatow, so that very afternoon he and his wife visited another old friend doing well in the sector. Hanna ‘had been like a sister to me in the past’, Peter felt, not just on their ‘wonderful soaring expedition to South America’ in 1934, but also on her pre-war visit to the USA.57 She had even helped to clear the way for Peter’s marriage to Helen the year before, pulling a few strings with Udet and others.58 Hanna now had a modest apartment in the Aero Club building, next to the impressive Ministry of Aviation in Berlin’s Prinz Albrecht Strasse, which had once been home to Germany’s upper house of parliament. Rather than meeting in one of the two beautifully furnished lounges at the Aero Club, under lifesize oil paintings of Hitler and Göring, however, Hanna kept their meeting to the privacy of her own small flat. Like Melitta, ‘she was much more conscious of security than others I had met’, Peter noted.59
‘As usual, Hanna was full of energy,’ he later wrote, and she was delighted to meet Helen. After the initial warm greetings, Peter mentioned that he had just come from seeing Melitta. To his shock, Hanna ‘made an extremely rude remark’.60 When he tried to interject, she carried on, using ‘a very crude term’, and even ‘alleged that the Countess had made some sort of pass at her’.61 Stepping back, Peter could hardly believe what he was hearing. Homosexuality was classed as a ‘degenerate form of behaviour’ in Nazi Germany, and lesbians were seen as ‘antisocial’ as well as being deemed ‘non-Aryan’. Anyone found guilty of an ‘unnatural sex act’ was likely to be sent to a concentration camp, and trumped-up charges had been used to remove many people who had upset the Party hierarchy. But Hanna continued furiously, telling Peter that she had ‘already rejected’ Melitta twice and ‘wanted nothing more to do with her’.62
It is unlikely that Melitta was attracted to Hanna. If she considered her at all, it would have been rather condescendingly as ill-educated, uncultured and politically naive – not the sort of person she would have invited sailing on the Wannsee, nor risked any close association with. Hanna may have felt patronized by Melitta, disdainful of her old-school conservatism and irritated by her cool lack of regard. She was certainly jealous of the respect generated by her work, and ‘obviously furious’, Peter realized, at her invasion of Hanna’s space as the female pilot of note in the Third Reich.63 Perhaps she did even feel rejected personally. Whatever the reasons, Hanna had taken offence, and the anger that stemmed from her keen sense of injustice and moral outrage at any perceived slight – a trait that had coloured her character from childhood – was now directed at Melitta.
Hanna did not stop there, however. According to Peter, she now used Melitta’s Jewish ancestry ‘as an opportunity to insult her in the nastiest way’.64 ‘This was the first time that Hanna Reitsch disappointed me as a person,’ he later recalled. ‘She spoke of Melitta in such a sharp and ugly way.’65 Although Hanna’s family had accepted and adopted the casual anti-Semitism prevalent in pre-war Germany, she herself had been horrified by the violence of Kristallnacht. But Hanna had not let this experience effectively challenge the fundamental racism with which she had grown up. Thoroughly attached to the Nazi regime that was providing her with both opportunities and honours, Hanna had willingly accepted both its propaganda and its policies, and allowed these to colour both her judgements and her friendships.
Neither Hanna nor Melitta knew about Nazi extermination camps, nor that the gas chambers quietly built and tested at Auschwitz, in annexed Polish territory, became fully operational that same month. The Third Reich now started to murder Jews, communists, Roma, homosexuals and other ‘enemies of the state’ on an industrial scale. While Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS, spent part of his summer visiting Auschwitz to ensure that the system was running efficiently, Hanna and Melitta, like most German civilians, still felt that theirs was essentially a just war. The increasingly heavy bombardments of cities such as Berlin and Cologne reinforced the public mood of resistance and resolve.
That summer, Alexander’s 389th Division joined the German offensive on the Eastern Front. Operation Blau (blue) aimed to capture Stalingrad on the Volga River supply route, and press on towards the Caucasus oilfields. The battle for Stalingrad was launched in late August, but the Soviet counteroffensive prevented the clean sweep round to encircle enemy troops that the commander of the 6th Army, Lieutenant-General Paulus, had planned. Alexander was serving in the middle of one of the bloodiest and strategically most decisive battles of the war. Within months he was seriously wounded and sent back to Berlin. He had been fortunate. His injuries were not life-threatening, but required some time to heal. Melitta joined him in Würzburg whenever she could, cooking him the best meals she could muster on their ration cards. Knowing these weeks were just a reprieve, they savoured every moment together. As he recovered, Alexander was even permitted to return to his academic work, and was appointed Chair of Ancient History at the University of Strasbourg, although he was not strong enough to take up the post.*
The incompetence of the military leadership, and the evident hopelessness of the situation that autumn, finally convinced Claus that Hitler had to be removed. From this point on, he worked actively towards the overthrow of what he now considered a criminal regime. At great personal risk, while he was stationed at Military High Command in Ukraine Claus contacted his brother Berthold, then advising Naval Command on the conventions of war and international law, as well as other trusted friends such as Helmut James von Moltke, Peter Yorck von Wartenburg, and even Paulus on the Eastern Front. ‘[Claus] was always keenly opposed to the [Nazi Party] business,’ General Ritter von Thoma later remarked.66 Now Claus drove around, urging officers to consider alternative ways forward. ‘He opened his heart to us straight away,’ one later admitted, at once impressed and shocked by Claus’s courage, while another agreed, ‘he was incredibly indiscreet’.67
In late October Melitta’s father, Michael Schiller, now eighty-one, also rebelled, if on a more modest scale. Without consulting his daughter, he sent a handwritten plea to Göring, arguing that while Melitta’s mathematical modelling and engineering work ‘must definitely continue to be used in the interests of the Fatherland’, she should be relieved of the nosedive test flights. ‘According to medical opinion’, he contended, these could ‘prevent the possibility of issue’.68* With astounding audacity, he then suggested that a ‘well-earned further honour for her services’ might overcome any resistance from Melitta to the plan.69
If Michael had any concept of how Melitta was using the value of her work to protect herself and her family, he clearly felt it was not worth the daily risk to her life that came with the test flights. Melitta’s mother, Margarete, however, was horrified when she discovered her husband was not only interfering in Melitta’s affairs, but writing to the commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe about their daughter’s fertility. ‘Reichsmarschall,’ Margarete opened her own letter to Göring, ‘As a result of his advanced age [my husband] overlooks the fact that parents should not involve themselves in the personal matters of their adult children …’ Furthermore, she added, his belief that Melitta’s work could have ‘adverse effects, or even problems, in respect to children, I cannot understand at all’.70 Having requested ‘with the agreement of my husband’ that Göring destroy and ignore the previous letter, she quickly signed off, ‘Heil Hitler!’71
But the following year, Michael again petitioned Göring against Melitta’s continued test flights. ‘I submit … the most humble plea,’ he wrote, prompted by his ‘concern for her life’.72 A pathetic last line begs Göring not to inform Melitta about this second letter. Presumably she had not been pleased to learn of his first. No doubt Michael hoped that Margarete might remain oblivious too. There is no record of any reply from Göring, but if neither Melitta’s gender nor her ‘Jewish blood’ was enough to prevent her work for the Luftwaffe, then her father’s letters stood no chance. Michael was only lucky that there were not greater repercussions.
While Michael was attempting to stop Melitta’s test flights, Hanna continued her work without interference. Over the summer a military version of the Me 163 had been built. It was larger than its predecessor, and one test pilot felt it had ‘the beauty of a muscular wrestler’.73 This aircraft, the famous Me 163b Komet, was powered by extremely combustible twin fuels kept in tanks behind, and on either side of, the pilot’s seat. The fuels were a mixture of methanol alcohol, known as C-Stoff, and a hydrogen peroxide mixture, or T-Stoff. Just a few drops together could cause a violent reaction, so they were automatically injected into the plane’s combustion chamber through nozzles, where they ignited spontaneously producing a temperature of 1,800°C. Several test planes with unspent fuel blew up on touchdown. ‘If it had as much as half a cup of fuel left in its tank,’ one pilot reported, ‘it would blow itself into confetti, and the pilot with it.’74 Several simply exploded in the air. Hydrogen peroxide alone was capable of spontaneous combustion when it came into contact with any organic material such as clothing, or a pilot. To protect themselves, test pilots wore specially developed white suits made from acid-resistant material, along with fur-lined boots, gauntlets and a helmet. Nevertheless, at least one pilot would be dissolved alive, after the T-Stoff feed-line became dislodged and the murderous fuels leaked into the cockpit where they seeped through the seams of his protective overalls. ‘His entire right arm had been dissolved by T-Agent. It just simply wasn’t there. There was nothing more left in the sleeve,’ the chief flight engineer reported. ‘The other arm, as well as the head, was nothing more than a mass of soft jelly.’75*
On 2 October 1942, Heini Dittmar became the first person to fly faster than 625 mph in the Komet, reaching the edge of what was later called ‘the sound barrier’. Although he was privately honoured for his achievement, because of its military significance the record was not made public. Hanna was impressed. She knew the Komet was a prestige project and, despite witnessing what she described as two pilots being ‘blown to pieces when their plane exploded’, she was itching to take her turn.76 In fact, ‘at least half of the test command is pushing to fly it’, Heini laughed drily to Wolfgang Späte. ‘And perhaps end up disintegrating in an explosion of T-agent!’77 Later that month, after another Komet test, ground crew found Heini sitting in his cockpit paralysed with pain. His landing skid had not extended and the shock of impact had been transmitted through his seat. With a badly injured spine, Heini would be out of action for eighteen months. Hanna’s opportunity had arrived.
‘To fly the rocket plane, Me 163, was to live through a fantasy,’ Hanna later wrote. ‘One took off with a roar and a sheet of flame, then shot steeply upwards …’78 Shortly after leaving the ground, the Komet reached a speed of 220–250 mph, blasting out what another pilot described as ‘a violet-black cloud’ behind it.79 The undercarriage, a wheeled dolly, then had to be jettisoned, as it could not be retracted and would otherwise create drag. The plane could then accelerate to 500 mph in the space of a few seconds, disappearing from sight as it reached an altitude of 30,000 feet in less than two minutes. ‘It was like thundering through the skies, sitting on a cannonball,’ Hanna raved, thinking of the cartoon of Baron Münchhausen riding on a cannonball that was the emblem of the test team. ‘Like being intoxicated by speed … an overwhelming impression.’80 After five or six minutes the fuel was spent, silence descended and the pilot had the momentary sensation of swinging, suspended in mid-air, before sinking forward into their harness. The momentum of the aircraft carried it forward for a few more hundred metres, and then the speed started to fall away. The Komet glided back down to earth, landing on its retractable skid at a terrifying speed of between 100 and 150 mph.
‘Bubbling with enthusiasm’ even years later, Hanna would throw her head back and gesticulate expressively with her arms when describing the almost vertical ascent of the Komet, and once, in her eagerness, ‘she slipped off the sofa and onto the floor’.*81
Späte still felt that Hanna was a liability. ‘In my nightly prayers,’ he confessed, ‘I always include a little request that she doesn’t show up again soon.’82 Hanna, however, was nothing if not committed. Her fifth flight, on 30 October 1942, was again unpowered. Her Me 163b V5, carrying water ballast in place of fuel, was towed into the air behind a heavy twin-engined Me 110 fighter. But when Hanna came to release the undercarriage, the whole plane started to shudder violently. To make matters worse, her radio connection was also ‘kaput’.83 Red Very lights curving up towards her from below warned her something was seriously wrong. Unable to contact her tow-plane, she saw the observer signalling urgently with a white cloth, and noticed the pilot repeatedly dropping and raising his machine’s undercarriage. Clearly her own undercarriage had failed to jettison.
Down below, Hanna could see ambulances and fire engines rushing across the airfield. In such circumstances pilots were expected to bail out, but she was not prepared to abandon such a valuable machine should there remain any chance of bringing it safely back to earth. In any case, the stubby fuselage of the Komet meant that the fin was very close to the cockpit, so there was a high chance of her hitting it should she jump. Instead, her tow-plane circled her up to 10,500 feet. Then she cast off. Pulling out sharply, Hanna first attempted to shake the undercarriage free, but it would not move. Instead, with the plane still shuddering violently and time running out, she curved round and down to the airfield from a greater altitude than normal, aiming to side-slip the last few hundred yards to the edge of the field. As she did so, the plane dropped. ‘I was struggling to bring the machine under control when the earth reared up before my eyes,’ she later reported. As she hunched herself tightly together, ‘we plunged, striking the earth, then, rending and cracking, the machine somersaulted over.’84 The Komet had hit a ploughed field just short of the runway. It bounced violently, lost a wheel and slid to a halt after a 180-degree turn. Had she been carrying rocket fuel, Hanna would have been killed instantly.
To her surprise, the first thing she noticed when the Komet came to a stop was that she was not hanging in her harness, so she was probably right side up. She opened the rounded Plexiglas canopy. Feeling no pain, she cautiously ran her hand over her arms, chest and legs but found no injuries; it seemed miraculous. Then she noticed a stream of blood coursing down from her head, and moved her hand up to her face. ‘At the place where my nose had been was now nothing but an open cleft,’ she later recalled. ‘Each time I breathed, bubbles of air and blood formed along its edge.’85 Reaching for pencil and paper, Hanna managed to sketch the course of events leading to the crash before tying a handkerchief around her broken face to save the rescue party the sight of her shocking injury. Only then did she lose consciousness. Seeing her notes, even Späte was impressed. ‘What a woman!’ he commented.86
Hanna had fractured her skull in four places, broken both cheekbones, split her upper jaw, severely bruised her brain and, as one pilot put it, ‘completely wiped her nose off her face’.87 She had also broken several vertebrae. She was rushed to surgery but, knowing her arrival would cause a sensation, she insisted on travelling by car rather than ambulance, and on walking into the hospital through the quieter back entrance and up a flight of stairs before any members of staff were alerted.
After the operation, Hanna woke to find her head thickly bandaged, with just her swollen lips and ‘the blue, bruised rims’ of her eyes visible.88 It still seemed unlikely that she would survive. Her mother joined her the following day, but her close friend Edelgard von Berg, who rushed to visit her, was killed in a car crash en route. It was another devastating blow, but as Hanna’s condition remained serious there was nothing she could do but try to blank out her thoughts, for fear she would despair. ‘I lay in pillowed stillness’, she recorded, trying to cope with a ‘new and passionless world’.89
‘Our Me 163 had again attacked, like a stalking animal,’ Späte wrote.90 He conducted a thorough investigation, but was unwilling to take personal responsibility. His report emphasized that he had been 800 kilometres away at Peenemünde at the time of the accident and stressed that, despite the jamming of the landing mechanism, Hanna should have been able to manage a safe landing. Her injuries were largely her own fault, he implied, because she had not removed the gunsight that had smashed into her nose, while ‘because of her short stature she had used a thick cushion behind her’ and ‘did not have her shoulder harness tight enough’.91
Hanna had needed the cushion and the loose straps to enable her to reach the controls in a cockpit designed for larger men. Späte had thought that wooden blocks to help her feet reach the rudder pedals would be ample modification. ‘She must be able to do it in her sleep!’ he had told himself. ‘It would almost be an insult to give her advice.’92 But the blocks had not been ready, and Hanna would brook no delay. ‘You can’t accomplish much against her will,’ one of the ground staff reported. ‘She decided she would fly without the blocks. That was it. No discussion.’93
Letters, cards and gifts now poured in from around the Reich for the popular heroine. Späte was among many who arrived with flowers, but Emy Reitsch would not let him see her daughter. Even Himmler sent a bar of chocolate and some fruit juice, precious items in war-torn Germany, with his best wishes for Hanna’s recovery. When Göring heard that Hanna had been critically injured during the course of her duty he felt that a public gesture should be made.
Georg Pasewaldt, from the Aviation Ministry, was with Erhard Milch when Milch decided to award Hanna the Iron Cross, First Class. Pasewaldt ‘immediately expressed [his] strongest reservations’, arguing that this was a military honour, to be earned in combat rather than through reckless misadventure.94 He thought the War Service Cross, a decoration he already had in mind for Melitta, was more appropriate. His suggestion was quickly overruled. Milch wanted a ‘special, exceptional honour’ for Hanna Reitsch. Milch then placed a direct call to Hitler, described Hanna’s accident and submitted his suggestion, pressing for an early announcement ‘because of her imminent death’.95 Reportedly ‘deeply stricken and shocked’, Hitler agreed at once.96
A few days later, in early November 1942, Hanna was officially awarded her second Iron Cross. She was the first woman to receive the First Class honour. It remained to be seen whether she would collect the medal in person or whether it would be presented posthumously, but her position as the great flying heroine of Nazi Germany was now unassailable.
While still in his meeting with Milch, however, Pasewaldt had taken the opportunity to request an honour for Melitta; something he had been wondering how to take forward for the best part of a year. Hanna’s unexpected award had provided the perfect precedent. ‘Countess Stauffenberg, with hundreds, more than a thousand experimental flights, beyond anything so far achieved in our special field, is most deserving,’ he told Milch. She should, he said, ‘be decorated with the Iron Cross, Second Class, at the same time’.97 Milch had never heard of Melitta von Stauffenberg, but he knew of a modest aeronautical engineer called Melitta Schiller. His curiosity was piqued and he asked Pasewaldt for more details. ‘This woman has sacrificed herself beyond description with her tireless practical trials for research in the service of the Luftwaffe,’ Pasewaldt obliged. ‘She has made technical and scientific evaluations and produced a complete report on each of her flights which include innumerable dives and night flights. This data is unobtainable by other means, and of unique value.’98 Milch was suitably impressed.
On the morning of 22 January 1943 Melitta received a telegram from Göring. ‘The Führer awarded you today with the Iron Cross 2,’ it read.99 Six days later she received another, which had been delayed. ‘I will present you with the Iron Cross, awarded by the Führer to you, personally, on January 29.’100
Göring presented Melitta with her Iron Cross, Second Class, at his villa in Berlin’s Leipziger Strasse, just along from the Ministry of Aviation. On arrival she was shown into a huge parlour, hung with tapestries and old-master paintings that the Reichsmarschall had collected. Presumably in deference to her gender, Göring’s beautiful second wife, Emmy, her sister, niece and the female head of a theatre school joined Melitta first. Hitler was notably absent. Finally Göring arrived. Melitta was shown into his private office, where they talked for a while about her work. He ‘absolutely can’t believe that I fly heavy bombers, like the Ju 88, and even do nosedives with them’, Melitta later reported to her family. ‘He is also surprised by the number of my dives,’ but he confirmed it all with his files.101 Once satisfied, Göring led Melitta to his desk and pinned her medal on her. It had been intended that she should receive the Military Flight Badge in gold with diamonds and rubies as well, but the jeweller needed another eight weeks to complete it. Göring then expressed his ‘deep, sincere admiration’ for Melitta and her work, and joked with her that it would be easier to list the planes she could not fly, than the ones she could.102 ‘The thing was clearly fun for him,’ Melitta wrote.103
At one point, Göring asked Melitta why she did not work directly for the Reich, rather than through a company secondment. ‘After some thought, I answered that would be convenient in a way, because the other companies wouldn’t see me as competition any more, as they sometimes do, even though I’ve been seconded from Askania since the beginning of the war.’104 Scandalized that commercial interests were apparently still considered during wartime, Göring told her he would personally make arrangements for her release and transfer.
They then rejoined the other guests for a lunch of fish pancakes and wine. The talk was light-hearted, despite covering anticipated British air raids, and finally Göring asked about Melitta’s ‘strange husband, who let me fly like this’, practically offering to promote Alexander to professor had he not already held the position.105 It was only after ‘coffee with cream and liqueur or brandy’, that Melitta was finally offered a lift home. Even then, Emmy Göring held her back for a moment, forcing a package of coffee and tea on her, and inviting her and Alexander to use their box at the theatre, and to stay at their guesthouse whenever they wished. All in all, ‘it was really cosy’, Melitta told her family with some astonishment. ‘The tone was pleasant and good-humoured, and you got the impression of an honest and touching heartiness.’106 Göring even noted the event in his diary that evening: ‘Gräfin Schenk (von Stauffenberg) awarded Iron Cross II’.107 It was an extraordinary moment for a woman who the previous year had been under investigation as a ‘Jewish Mischling’ (half-blood).
The press covered the story over the next couple of days. ‘Brave Woman Receives the Iron Cross’ ran the typical headline, before summaries of Melitta’s service for the Luftwaffe, the fact that the award was ‘rare for a woman’ and, sometimes, mention of her ‘feminine grace’.108 One piece even reported how her ‘artistic sensibility’ as an amateur sculptor served her well as a pilot, by providing an ‘unerring sensitivity to the aircraft’.109 ‘Her name was on everyone’s lips,’ Jutta would later recall proudly.110 Melitta’s commemorative radio interview ‘was a disappointment’ to her superiors, however, ‘as she was far too modest and spoke of simply carrying out her duty’.111 As the news from Stalingrad continued to worry the population, her story was meant to be inspiring, but Melitta ‘didn’t want to be involved in propaganda such as this’, Jutta wrote.112
Hanna Reitsch and Melitta von Stauffenberg were now the two most highly honoured women in Nazi Germany. But although officially both heroines of the Third Reich, and with their names prominently linked in the press, according to Peter Riedel, Melitta’s award came ‘much to the disappointment of Hanna’.113*
Hanna was still in hospital facing a series of operations, but off the critical list by the time Melitta received her award. Already livid at this further challenge to her status, Hanna believed that Melitta’s part-Jewish heritage made the situation even more insulting. Even years later she would argue that Melitta’s Iron Cross ‘was not valid’, but only something Melitta had bullied her superiors into agreeing to, and which was never correctly awarded.114 It was probably a fear that her ‘racial burden’ might limit her career, Hanna claimed, that had led Melitta to call Professor Georgii in Darmstadt after Hanna had been promoted to Flugkapitän, ‘not to congratulate me, there was not a word about that, but in order to ask Georgii, who was embarrassed by this, how to obtain such a rank’.115 ‘Even more embarrassingly’, Hanna continued, after the award of her, Hanna’s, Iron Cross, First Class, Melitta had visited Darmstadt to again lobby for her own honour. Udet had reported it to Georgii and herself, ‘very excitedly’, Hanna wrote, saying ‘he had done something stupid. He had let himself be persuaded by Melitta’s constant nagging to award her the Iron Cross, Second Class … to get rid of her.’116 The head of Women’s Affairs in the Reich, Frau Scholtz-Klink, had telephoned Udet ‘scandalized’, Hanna continued. ‘She had been informed at Hitler’s headquarters that the award had never been authorized. From then on everyone stayed silent, in embarrassment.’117
These were embarrassing claims indeed. Udet had been dead for over a year before Melitta’s award was even considered. Even had Hanna accidentally named Udet when she meant to refer to Milch or another general, there were other witnesses to Melitta’s award proving its validity, as well as the reference made by Göring in his diary that confirmed the honour in writing. Furthermore, contemporary newspapers could not have published their reports, nor could Melitta have publicly worn her Iron Cross ribbon as she did, had the award not been legitimate. Ironically, while Hanna was intensely jealous of Melitta’s honour, Melitta herself was ambivalent. ‘She liked to wear the decoration,’ Professor Herrmann, head of the Technical Academy at Gatow, wrote. It was reassuring for her to know she was valued, and she was proud of her work and that it should be recognized. But she wore it, Herrmann stipulated, ‘in spite of her reservations which were becoming increasingly clear to those who were initiated into her personal thoughts’.118
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* According to Jutta, Melitta had patented seventy-five of her inventions by 1943, but no records have been found.
† Melitta sculpted Alexander on several occasions, looking increasingly imperious over time. One version is kept with her bust of Nikolaus, and Frank Mehnert’s busts of Claus and Berthold, at the Stauffenberg schloss in Lautlingen, now a museum.
* Then occupied territory, Milowice is now in Poland.
* Two months later Reinhard Heydrich would die following an ambush by members of the Czechoslovak resistance, supported by the British SOE, in Prague.
* The idea of jet-propelled aircraft was conceived by the RAF’s Frank Whittle in 1929. Although he patented the idea in 1930 and built a prototype in 1937, he failed to gain financial backing. Germany’s Hans Pabst von Ohain had a similar idea in 1936, and within weeks a vast development programme had been launched. Whittle went on to develop the British jet engine during the Second World War.
† The Me 163 was elegant in its own way. Test pilot Mano Ziegler described seeing it ‘squatting in the twilight of the hangar, as graceful as a young bat’. See his Rocket Fighter (1976), p. 2.
* Gering may have had his dates confused, as Hanna and Skorzeny became closely associated in 1944.
† Helen Riedel arrived in Berlin within a month of the declaration of war between Germany and her native USA. She did not speak any German.
* Alexander would be sent back to the front before he could start at Strasbourg.
* Michael Schiller did not know that the enforced sterilization of ‘half-Jews’ had been discussed in Berlin earlier that year, so his chosen line of argument was unlikely to carry much weight.
* Further dangers later faced Komet combat pilots. As forced labour was used in the planes’ production, several examples of sabotage were discovered, including the use of contaminated glue, and stones wedged as an irritant between the fuel tank and its support. Inside the skin of one machine a brave French saboteur had written Manufacture Fermée (‘Factory closed’).
* Although Hanna described flying the Me 163 under power, it has never been conclusively verified that she did so. When Eric Brown later interrogated her about starting the rocket engine, she ‘stammered and stuttered’ and Eric became convinced that she had only ever flown the Me 163 while towed or as a glider. (Eric Brown, Mulley interview 18.03.2013.)
* Deutsche Luftwacht (German Sky Guard) was among the publications to run an article featuring both Hanna and Melitta in early 1943.