The Women who Flew for Hitler

‘Time,’ Hanna decided a few days after the Peenemünde bombing, ‘was not on Germany’s side.’¹ With large parts of the Baltic proving ground now under rubble, ash and sand, Hanna returned to Berlin as soon as possible. She might have slept through Operation Hydra, but the implications of the raid weighed heavily on her mind. Domestic papers covering the bombing on ‘the north German coast’ focused on the number of planes shot down, but the foreign press reported that Himmler was investigating the operation personally to discover ‘who had betrayed the position of the Peenemünde plant’.² British papers even claimed that Goebbels was ‘feeding the wildest lies about Allied defeats to German listeners’, while ‘trying to hearten his own folks and scare ours with tales of terrible new Axis weapons now being mass-produced’.³ ‘There is no doubt that Hitler has been vehemently calling upon his scientific research experts to bring forth some salvation miracle,’ they continued, slightly smugly, ‘but the RAF raid on Peenemünde can not have helped that appeal much.’⁴

Unlike Melitta, Hanna had never doubted the aims of the Nazi regime. Even she, however, had now lost faith in the promised certain victory. ‘One after another, towns and cities were crumpling under the Allied air attacks,’ she wrote. ‘The transport system and the production centres were being systematically destroyed … the death toll continually mounted.’⁵ In late August, over lunch at the Berlin Aero Club, Hanna quietly discussed the adverse turn of events with two trusted friends, Captain Heinrich Lange of the special operations Luftwaffe squadron KG200, and the head of Rechlin’s institute of aeronautical medicine, Dr Theo Benzinger. Some radical new action was needed, they agreed, and Hanna believed that she might be the person to lead it.

Hanna reasoned that her Fatherland could only be ‘saved from disaster’ if the conflict could be brought to a rapid conclusion through a negotiated peace.6 But Nazi Germany would not be able to secure favourable terms unless the military strength of the Allies could be considerably weakened first. ‘This could only be done from the air,’ Hanna, Lange and Benzinger agreed.⁷ Together they sketched out secret plans for ‘a rapid succession of devastating blows’ at factories, power plants, water facilities and other infrastructure.⁸ Crucially, naval and merchant shipping was also to be targeted should the Allies move to invade the European continent.

Hanna knew that the precision of these air attacks was critical to the success of her plan. Melitta’s work with dive-sights and dive-bombing techniques had greatly improved accuracy, but Hanna had something more radical in mind. She wanted pilots, potentially including herself, to guide their missiles right down to the point of impact – without pulling out. With shipping targets, one paper outlined, ‘the plane was expected to shatter upon impact with the water, killing the pilot instantly and allowing the bomb to tear loose from the plane to continue under the keel of the vessel, where it would explode’.⁹ Although the pilots ‘would be volunteering for certain death’, Hanna added, ‘it would be no task for mere dare-devils … nor for blind fanatics, nor for the disenchanted and the life-weary who might see here a chance to make a theatrical exit …’ What was needed, she felt, were measured and honourable men, ‘ready to sacrifice themselves in the conviction that only by this means could their country be saved’.¹⁰ She named the fledgling plan ‘Operation Suicide’.^* Melitta was also having lunch with friends at the Berlin Aero Club a few days after the Peenemünde raid. She too was ‘very pessimistic’ about the war, she confided rashly to her diary.¹¹ Despite her work with Hajo Herrmann and his Wilde Sau group of interceptor fighters, Allied bombers were increasingly seen in the skies above Berlin. In September Melitta gave Franz Amsinck an excellent reference to start night-fighter training. With so many close friends now deployed, she also began to record the details of those who had been killed in action. In early September she noted that ‘bombs are close’, and then ‘bombs on the runway’ at Gatow.12 The raids deprived her of sleep, but were never enough to prevent her work. As a result she was permanently exhausted. Her allowance of pilot’s chocolate, and the coffee that she found as ‘welcome, as after a flight round the world’, kept her going until she could collapse.¹³ ‘Slept like the dead,’ she scrawled in blunt pencil.¹⁴

Like so many wives in wartime, Melitta was also suffering constant anxiety about the fate of her husband. Alexander was still on his artillery course in northern France, but expecting a new posting to the front at any time. Melitta’s stress was soon manifested in stomach problems, renewed skin rashes and persistent headaches. She was also ‘lonely’, she recorded tersely.¹⁵ The Aero Club was a good place to meet Franz, as well as old friends like Paul, and Alexander’s brothers, Claus and Berthold, when they were in Berlin. ‘I often talked to Litta about the conflict …’ Paul later wrote. ‘Should the individual carry on … to save the country from losing the war,’ he asked her, ‘or by contrast, was the possibility that Hitler could win a victory over Europe not the greatest evil that could happen – and in that case, was the fall of the Reich not a far lesser evil? In other words … shouldn’t one contemplate the removal of the rulers of Germany and feel around for others who might think along similar lines?’¹⁶ Such conversations were treasonous, punishable by death.

Hanna would have seen the forced labour camps at Peenemünde, but if she was concerned, or heard rumours about the appalling conditions at Mittelwerk from Braun, Dornberger or anyone else, she did not record it. For a while she was busy touring airfields to demonstrate the Me 109 to trainee pilots. ‘The impression of this new aircraft was really huge,’ one recalled, but Hanna’s heart was not in the work.¹⁸ The testing of Me 163 Messerschmitt rocket planes had been moved west to Bad Zwischenahn, not far from the North Sea, and Hanna hoped that there she might still fly a prototype under full power. ‘She intimated that the Führer and commander-in-chief of the armed forces had authorized, and if need be, ordered her to fly any plane in Germany that she wanted to,’ Wolfgang Späte was informed on her arrival.¹⁹ Späte did not believe a word of it but Hanna had set to work anyhow. ‘Out on the runway, she’s actually quite friendly and modest,’ one of the ground crew reported, apparently ‘shaking his head, somewhat surprised’.20 Recognizing that his men ‘were proud to be on the same footing as this famous female pilot’, Späte sensed defeat.²¹ Having secured authorization from Berlin, he finally gave her permission to fly whatever she chose, but whether she flew the Me 163 under power is not verifiably recorded. Her energies were increasingly directed towards promoting Operation Suicide.

At first Hanna had kept her discussions completely secret. Despite her talk of honour, the concept of suicide missions went against all European military tradition, and smacked of desperation, even defeatism. In the autumn of 1943, any talk that might be construed as undermining the morale of the people was already a serious crime. It would not be long before defeatist talk became punishable by death. Nevertheless, as word of Hanna’s proposed suicide squadron spread, she began to receive discreet enquiries from other zealous pilots, enthused by the thought of sacrificing their lives for Hitler’s Germany. Encouraged, Hanna sought out more volunteers. ‘We found them everywhere,’ she wrote with satisfaction. Most ‘were married and fathers of families and were robust, uncomplicated individuals. As they saw it, the sacrifice of their lives would be as nothing compared with the millions, both soldiers and civilians, who would die if the war was allowed to continue.’²²

As the number of people initiated into Hanna’s plans grew, however, she also began to face objections. ‘That we were often misunderstood is only to be expected,’ she commented, before adding grandly, ‘here was required nothing less than the complete conquest of the self’.²³ Nevertheless, it seemed wise to gain official sanction for the proposed operation before the criticisms grew more vocal. As Hanna was still persona non grata with Göring, and had in any case lost all respect for the Reichsmarschall, she approached his deputy, Field Marshall Erhard Milch. Milch knew that the Luftwaffe was already facing criticism for ‘too much experimenting’ instead of focusing resources on producing the planes and pilots that were desperately needed.²⁴ No doubt mindful of his personal position, as well as the potential waste of good pilots, he ‘refused point blank’ to consider the idea.²⁵ Bitterly disappointed, Hanna scornfully waved aside his moral objections, suggesting he leave these ‘to the conscience of the individual volunteers, whom, after all, it primarily concerned’.26 Milch was unimpressed, and curtly prohibited the use of any Luftwaffe aircraft or personnel for developing the project.

As Hanna wrestled with official rejection, Melitta was facing her own, more personal, heartache: Alexander had been sent back to Russia in mid-September. ‘Grievous blow,’ she confided to her diary.²⁷ Melitta begged Claus to discover her husband’s route east, so that she might fly out and meet him on the way, but this time her efforts were in vain. ‘Mentally very fragile,’ she scribbled the next day, ‘aching heart … all hope dashed.’²⁸ She knew that a posting to the Eastern Front was tantamount to a death sentence and, as the weeks passed with very few letters, she again became sick with worry. To distract herself, she took up sketching, went swimming, sailed a dinghy on the Wannsee with Claus and Berthold when they were around, drank lots more coffee and went on moonlit walks, picking mushrooms and shooting rabbits to supplement her wartime rations. Mostly, however, she just threw herself into her work. Despite occasionally snatching afternoon naps on a sofa, by mid-October she was ‘very tired, depressed’ and ‘exhausted’.²⁹ By the end of the month she had tonsillitis and a fever, her rash was back and she was taking morphine. Soon her work was suffering, too. She was arguing with colleagues including Milch, and even found Franz irritating. He ‘stretched it a little too far’, she wrote tensely.³⁰ One ‘black day’, when she couldn’t find her sunglasses, she had to brave going out with her eyes still puffy from crying.³¹ Melitta was far from the typical hausfrau of the time but, as for so many women across the world, with her husband at the front and her home city under attack, daily life was becoming almost unbearable.

It was icy-cold when she reached Greim’s headquarters in a forested area near the ancient city of Orsha, now in Belarus.^* Although under Nazi-German occupation since July 1941, resistance in the area was infamous and several concentration camps had been established in response. An estimated 19,000 people would be killed in these camps. Hitler had given his soldiers free rein to act without restraint in the war in the east, and Jews, communists and other civilians were being murdered on a large scale. Greim would have been aware of these criminal developments, but it is unlikely that he discussed them with Hanna. If she saw any evidence of atrocities, or of the enforced movement of thousands of civilians by rail while she was travelling in the region, she chose not to record it. Six months earlier Greim had received the distinction of ‘Oak Leaves’ for his Knight’s Cross, awarded for his service in Russia. Now morale was faltering but Hanna noted only that Greim was still greatly respected by his men, and indeed regarded almost as a father figure with his clipped white hair, furrowed brow and slightly sad, knowing eyes. ‘I cannot convey to you the pleasure of the soldiers when the General appears,’ she wrote enthusiastically to her parents and sister. ‘They love and honour him greatly – and no wonder!’³³ As a mark of her personal respect, she never mentioned Greim without using his title and he, likewise, always referred to her as Flugkapitän.

No sooner had she reached the first German ack-ack position than the Russians started a heavy bombardment. ‘Automatically everyone vanished into the ground, while all around us the air whistled and shuddered and crashed,’ she wrote. After their own guns had pounded out their reply, a formation of enemy planes began to bomb the Wehrmacht position. ‘I felt, in my terror, as though I wanted to creep right in on myself,’ Hanna continued. ‘When finally to this inferno were added the most horrible sounds of all, the yells of the wounded, I felt certain that not one of us would emerge alive. Cowering in a hole in the ground, it was in vain that I tried to stop the persistent knocking of my knees.’³⁶

When the bombardment was over, Hanna emerged from her foxhole to help tend the wounded. Believing that ‘the men’s eyes light up at the sight of me’, she insisted on visiting the forward gun sites.³⁷ ‘Their astonishment and delight …’ she later told her family with typical exuberance, ‘was overwhelming.’³⁸ Over the next three weeks Hanna flew the Storch to most of the isolated Luftwaffe units in the area. From the cover of tanks and trenches, she watched as ‘the earth heaved into the air’ from exploding shells, and learned to distinguish between the sounds of German and Soviet fire. Meeting the men, and sometimes sharing a tin of sardines with them, she answered their questions as best she could. ‘I tried hard not to raise false hopes,’ she made a point of recording.³⁹ But whispering, so that the more senior officers would not hear, she also spoke about the secret ‘wonder weapons’, the V-1,V-2 and Me 163. ‘She actually glowed with optimism and encouragement,’ one young soldier later reported.40

Hanna’s visit to the front was certainly appreciated, but it was no substitute for the supplies or reinforcements that were desperately needed. For Hanna herself, the experience hardened her resolve to serve. ‘I should like to stay out here, and be allowed to fight,’ she wrote to her family.⁴¹ She was being romantic. She knew her greatest contribution would not be made in the east, but the emotion behind her declaration was honestly felt. ‘Flying beneath grey skies over measureless expanses of open country occupied by partisans, talking with weary and anxious men in huts and holes in the ground, the hand-claps of those from my own homeland, the agony, the endurance – and the cold,’ she wrote, ‘all this will not fade from my mind.’⁴² A few weeks later, visiting her Austrian Heuberger cousins, she told Helmut that ‘Stalingrad had been a disaster’, and as the Luftwaffe was no longer in any state to defend Germany, ‘more disasters were on the way’.⁴³ She then insisted on the family singing folk songs down a priority telephone line to Greim, who was still at the front. When the operator interrupted, questioning the importance of the call, the general insisted it was vital for morale.

Although also on the Eastern Front, Alexander was hundreds of miles from Orsha, serving as a front-line artillery observer on, ‘or rather in,’ Melitta wrote wryly, the Dnieper River, near Novo Lipovo, now in Ukraine.⁴⁴ At the end of October, she learned that he had taken part in a series of assaults against the encroaching Soviets. Touchingly, she spent that evening reading his essay on ‘Virgil and the Augustinian state’, as if his words could bring him closer. ‘The losses were generally high,’ she later wrote sparingly to her sister.⁴⁵ Indeed, the Germans were estimated to have lost at least 500,000 men and significant territory over the four-month operation. A week later a telegram arrived from Lublin. Alexander had been seriously wounded, his back ripped open by shrapnel from a grenade.

Despite his injuries, Alexander did not want to leave his unit and had to be forcibly moved back from the clearing station for transfer. Eventually he was sent to ‘a very nice military hospital’ in Würzburg, with Melitta calling in favours all the way.46 As soon as she had leave, she cycled over early to the train station to visit him. It was dark by the time she returned, and with blackout in operation there were no lights to guide her way. When her bike hit a rut she was thrown from the saddle, hitting the ground hard and staying there, cursing the world while she caught her breath. ‘All a bit much,’ she later commented.⁴⁷ Alexander’s injury ‘was a grenade splinter which went deep into his back and is still there,’ she wrote in anguish to her sister Lili a few days later.⁴⁸ But Alexander had again been lucky. The shrapnel had missed his ribs and lungs. Doctors agreed it could be safely left inside him, and the wound was healing well. As the hospital was near their apartment, soon he could even go home in the afternoons. Melitta joined him whenever possible; the rooms that she had found ‘bleak’ and ‘depressing’ without him were once again her home.⁴⁹ The only heating came from the stove and they no longer had a maid, but ‘although we have come down a peg’, she wrote, this had ‘the comforting advantage of not always having a stranger in the limited space’.⁵⁰

Occasionally Franz visited Melitta at the apartment for tea or dinner when Alexander was there, and sometimes he stayed until the early hours. She had now given her young admirer the pet name Spätzchen, or ‘little sparrow’, rather as she secretly called Alexander her Schnepfchen, or ‘little snipe’. She clearly loved them both, although they occupied different places in her heart. Franz was certainly Melitta’s friend, rather than Alexander’s, but Alexander was ‘okay with it’, Melitta noted briefly, before grumbling about his occasional ‘wallows’.⁵¹ Whatever arrangement the three of them had come to, Alexander knew that his wife loved him deeply and, so long as her husband was out of danger, Melitta felt that everything else was somehow manageable.

A few days later the RAF made their most effective raid on Berlin, causing huge destruction to the inner city, including several residential areas. Many bombs also fell on the city zoo. One afternoon there were six female elephants and one calf doing tricks with their keeper; a few hours later all seven had been burned alive. Polar bears, camels and ostriches were all killed, while the snakes, whose enclosure was damaged, reportedly ‘froze in the cold November air’.⁵⁵ The only comfort for the zoo’s stricken staff was that at least these bombs had not fallen on housing. Between January 1943 and May 1945 350,000 Germans were killed by Allied bombing, as well as tens of thousands of forced foreign workers and POWs.^* ‘The longer the war lasted and the more fearful the air raids on the Fatherland became,’ Hitler’s photographer Heinrich Hoffmann recorded, ‘the more intolerable grew the atmosphere in Führer headquarters, where the deepest pessimism reigned supreme.’⁵⁶ For Melitta, the scale of the terror and devastation was unbearable, and she was proud of her part in developing the planes, equipment and techniques needed to intercept the bombers. She often showed her new decoration to friends like Claus’s wife, Nina, who would hold it up for her ‘very impressed’ children to admire.57

Melitta spent the next few months commuting between Alexander, slowly recovering in Würzburg, and her work at Gatow. Her new employment contract with the Reich had finally come through, but she was not happy with the terms. Her salary had been pegged to Hanna’s but she felt that any comparison of their duties or performance was misleading. ‘Hanna Reitsch has not studied … [and] could only offer flying knowledge,’ she told the ministry curtly.⁵⁸ She herself, being an aeronautical engineer as well as a test pilot, provided vital technical direction and should therefore be paid the same as ‘officials or male employees of the Reich with equivalent previous knowledge for similar work’.⁵⁹ She was clearly feeling more secure personally, yet she still added the caveat that ‘the work to be done is … so extensive that it will be years before it ends’.⁶⁰ Melitta’s salary was eventually agreed at an initial 1,400 Reichsmarks, almost a third more than Hanna received, even given danger allowance, and three times Alexander’s university salary. She was also promised a swift pay review, along with a research institute of her own the following year with a 100,000 Reichsmark start-up budget, plus the same again for running costs including salary for eight employees.

Claus and Nina’s eldest son, Berthold, remembers overhearing a conversation between Melitta and his great-aunt Alexandrine, at around this time. Although just nine years old, Berthold was already ‘a regular newspaper reader’ and had often seen Hanna celebrated in the press as a heroine of the Reich, so his ears pricked up at the mention of her name.⁶¹ It was with some surprise, then, that he realized ‘it was obvious that [Melitta] did not like her’.⁶² Melitta and his aunt then started caustically referring to Hanna by her nickname, Heilige Johanna – Saint Joan. The implication was not that Hanna was Germany’s self-sacrificing saviour, but rather, Berthold thought, that Hanna ‘thought herself to be so perfect’.⁶³ The conversation also suggests that Melitta had now heard of Hanna’s suicide-bomber plans.

In October, all Nazi-held land within a 130-mile range of London was photographed and studied. The next month Constance Babington Smith spotted a tiny cruciform blur on a photograph. At less than one millimetre across, the image was hardly visible to the naked eye but Babington Smith had her pre-war German jeweller’s magnifying glass. The V-1 was ‘an absurd little object’, she wrote, ‘sitting in a corner of a small enclosure’, but nevertheless ‘a whisper went round the whole station. We were all very well aware that this was something fantastically important.’⁶⁶ British researchers now knew what they were looking for, and ninety-six V-1 launch sites were eventually identified in France, many with ramps pointing towards London. Estimates were that Germany would soon have the capacity to launch around 2,000 flying bombs every day. ‘It seemed that the V-1 attacks, when they came, would be of appalling magnitude’, Babington Smith continued. The sites ‘had obviously got to be bombed’.⁶⁷

While the Allies were photographing occupied northern France, Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry sent Melitta on a public relations mission to neutral Sweden. Apart from a few radio interviews, Melitta had largely avoided being used for Nazi PR. She had already won reprieves from visiting Stockholm on the pretexts that her husband needed her, and that she did not wish to look as though she were leaving Berlin from cowardice during the air raids. Now, however, Swedish students were demonstrating in support of their conscripted Norwegian counterparts. Needing someone to rally the Swedish establishment, the Reich pressed Melitta, who reluctantly accepted that some public relations work had ‘become unavoidable’.68

Her journey to Stockholm was an adventure in itself. Engine troubles prevented her flying from Würzburg, and the train to Berlin was delayed by three hours of air-raid warnings. In the capital, the Foreign Office had been bomb-damaged and the Swedish Embassy completely destroyed, making visas unobtainable. In any case, as a woman, she was told, she was ineligible for the reserved government seats on the only flight out. The official responsible for this decision ‘gave way of course, within a minute, when he got a reprimand from on high’, Melitta later reported with some satisfaction, but another air raid made her miss the flight anyhow.⁶⁹ Her phone calls to the Foreign Office went unanswered. ‘The operators simply let me hang on,’ she wrote, ‘and, if I complained, snapped my head off because they took me for a secretary.’⁷⁰ Eventually she caught a flight to Copenhagen, in occupied Denmark, where she alighted without money or onward papers. ‘Just as I was thinking that at last I had a night before me which would be undisturbed by air-raid warnings,’ she wrote drily, ‘there was a shooting a few steps away from me.’⁷¹ A German sergeant had been killed by the Danish resistance: ‘shot by an assassin’, as Melitta reported it.⁷² A moment later, she heard ‘two big explosions’ caused by sabotage inside nearby factories. Although well used to feeling under siege herself, she was shocked to witness such resistance to Nazi occupation.

Melitta eventually arrived in Stockholm by train the next day. She was received ‘with an audible sigh of relief’ by a representative from her embassy, along with a crowd of reporters, whom she tried to avoid.⁷³ Her phone did not stop ringing, however, until she walked out that evening in an elegant gown, quickly mended and ironed, to address an audience of almost 700 diplomats, Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht generals, scientists, academics and other dignitaries. Among them was her and Hanna’s pilot friend Peter Riedel, who had managed to stay in diplomacy and been appointed air attaché to the German Embassy in Sweden a month earlier, as well as the two sisters of Carin Göring, the first wife of the Reichsmarschall.

Entitled ‘A Woman in Test-Flying’, Melitta’s lecture provided a fascinating picture of her life and career, without going into the details of her current war work which was, she said, ‘naturally of a secret nature’.74 Although she was expected to champion the regime, at a time of great rhetorical flourish her carefully chosen words were telling in their modesty. ‘I have tried to serve my country in both war and peace,’ she began, framing herself as a patriot rather than a Nazi. Throughout the lecture, she avoided mentioning Hitler and the National Socialist Party, and when she talked of her work as being ‘a commitment to the Reich’ she added the corollary that this commitment was one shared by all fighters and workers, men and women, ‘and, therefore, I am not speaking to you in my own name …’⁷⁵ Rather, she said, she felt herself ‘to be a representative of the thousands and thousands of German women who, today, are involved in fighting and danger, and … an ambassador of my “people in arms”.’ While Melitta did not overtly criticize the Nazi leadership or its policies, this was not the usual language of a proud spokesperson for the regime.

Perhaps the strongest rhetoric in Melitta’s speech, however, was reserved for her thoughts on gender. Female pilots had long been a topic of press and public interest. Naturally conservative, Melitta knew she could speak from the heart on this subject without causing controversy at home. ‘I believe I am able to say this in the name of all German female pilots,’ she announced rather sweepingly. ‘The values characteristic of all womankind have not been altered; for us flying has never been a matter of causing a sensation, or even of emancipation. We women pilots are not suffragettes.’⁷⁶ Although she had had to fight for her own opportunities and equal pay, and never hid her irritation when she encountered sexism personally, Melitta saw herself not as an agent of change, but rather as the exception to the gender rule. Her argument that ‘woman is no stranger at all to the most masculine activity and harshest self-denial in the service of higher values, while still safeguarding womanly worth and charm’, was quite sincere, and borne out by her own experience.77 She had volunteered for a more feminine ‘helpful and healing’ role with the German Red Cross, she said, and been rejected. Now she spoke of her ‘soldierly effort’ in aircraft development, and test flights undertaken even if they involved ‘sacrificing my life’.⁷⁸

Melitta’s most poignant words, about the ‘whirlwind’ of war, came as she wound up her talk.⁷⁹ ‘War in our time has long outgrown the historical, initially incomprehensible, seeming futility of its origins, and outgrown the question of guilt or cause – so that it develops as if independent of every influence of the individual …’ she argued. ‘Imperceptibly it has received its terrible objective meaning, which we do not give it, but which towers threateningly before us.’ For Melitta, the horrors of the war, the injuries and deaths of those fighting at the front or in the skies, and the bombing of civilians in their homes, had given the conflict an awful meaning and momentum of its own. Whatever the causes, she was not unaffected and could not stand passively by. ‘Let me end,’ she said after a breath, ‘not with such a pathetic picture, but with the conviction that … we shall survive.’⁸⁰ Whether it was the Third Reich in which she placed her faith, or simply ‘the innermost substance of the people’, as she put it, she did not clarify.⁸¹

‘My lecture was exceptionally well received,’ Melitta reported boldly a few days later.⁸² But despite the warm applause in the room, there was little coverage in the Swedish press. A few days of formal lunches, dinners and entertainment followed, hosted by groups such as the Swedish Aero Club and the Women’s Association. ‘The Swedes were all extremely kind,’ Melitta added, although ‘those who are friendly towards Germany lay themselves open to attack’.⁸³ Before she left, one of Göring’s sisters-in-law sent Melitta ‘a very touching letter’ along with a woollen shawl and two blocks of chocolate for her return journey.⁸⁴ A few days later she arrived home exhausted, and headed straight back to work.

Despite Alexander’s temporary reprieve, he and Melitta do not seem to have spent New Year’s Eve together. Melitta drank sweet sparkling wine alone beside her Christmas tree that evening, and spent much of the next day in bed with a cold. She then headed back to work at various airfields. ‘She was always very busy,’ her sister Klara remembered.⁸⁹ Klara sometimes visited at weekends for a brief walk or sail on the lake, adding that ‘as soon as we got back to her place she had to get back into urgent work’.90 She would then help with the domestic chores that Melitta ‘hated spending precious time on’.⁹¹ This included preparing the rabbits that Melitta shot near the airfield. Klara found her sister’s passion for hunting strange. ‘She would not harm a fly – yet in Gatow she went rabbit shooting,’ she remarked, adding that ‘of course she always felt sorry for the rabbits, but her sporting ambition to hit a moving object would take precedence over sensitivity.’⁹² Perhaps, Klara thought, this detachment was how Melitta managed to continue her work developing bombsights, while ‘any thoughts about the target and the consequences of dropping a bomb’ were ‘pushed away’.⁹³

Melitta was in fact now working more on the development of night interception technology and techniques – priority work, given the Allied bombing campaigns. ‘One pitch-black night the Countess Stauffenberg … landed in a Ju 88 on the small airfield at Döberitz to explain her new night-landing technique to me,’ Hajo Herrmann later recalled.⁹⁴ Night landing without ground guidance was still hazardous. Hajo’s Wilde Sau group of interceptors were proving increasingly effective, but Hitler, he noted ruefully, did not like the name, ‘preferring the beautiful word chosen by the Japanese for their fighter pilots: “Kamikaze” – the Divine Wind’.⁹⁵ Nevertheless, Göring rapidly promoted Hajo. At the start of 1944 he was a captain; he would end the year a colonel. Göring also ‘put me up for a higher decoration, which I was then awarded by Hitler’, Hajo later recounted proudly.⁹⁶ Much of his success and promotion was down to Melitta, and he knew it.

Less than two weeks into the new year, the commanding officer of the Gatow academies, Dr Robert Knauss, officially proposed Melitta for the Iron Cross, First Class. His paper cited her ‘sublime achievements’ and devotion to duty, specifying her 2,200 nosedives and other test flights to evaluate of the impact of wind, speed, height, angle and distance in the development of dive-sights and other innovations.⁹⁷ The proposal had already been discussed with Milch, who lent his full support.

On the day of her nomination, Melitta was testing a Ju 87 at Schleissheim airfield near Munich, the home of a night interceptor squadron. Unable to cope with the stresses she put it through, the armoured glass cockpit shuddered and cracked during her flight. ‘Ju 87 window broken,’ she noted prosaically. ‘Organized repair, tea, toast, migraine.’⁹⁸ Melitta spent the next six days at Schleissheim, mainly working with Junkers. In the evenings she ate at the smartest local hotel. She was almost certainly with Franz, whose squadron was based at the airfield. She then flew to Lautlingen, where she met Alexander at the family schloss. Here there were still

On arriving back at Würzburg with Alexander, Melitta telephoned the Schleissheim airfield to speak with Franz. His plane had crashed a few nights earlier, she was told. He had been killed immediately. ‘Sp. dead, numb and no tears,’ was all she wrote before taking the next train to Munich to learn more from the squadron commander.¹⁰⁰ ‘Sp.’ was short for Spätzchen; her ‘little sparrow’. Melitta was devastated. Two days later she started taking prescription sleeping pills. Then her sisters Klara and Lili came to stay with her, taking care of the housework while Melitta worked, mourned, sheltered from air raids, swept up broken glass from her windows, watched a burning bomber crash, and still failed to sleep.

Franz’s funeral was arranged for 3 February 1944. His family invited Melitta to visit a few days before and Anny, his sister, collected her from the station. They stayed up late that night, talking about Franz. His mother was calm, but his stepfather could not speak without choking up. He had started collecting letters and papers relating to his son, and Melitta transcribed some to keep for herself. As well as bringing a wreath with a stencilled ribbon, she had written a poem for the funeral. The second verse ran:

Melitta did not attend Franz’s funeral, however. Perhaps it was not deemed appropriate that such a well-known woman, whose own husband was still on convalescent leave, should be seen there. Early the day before, she ate breakfast with the family and then quietly took the train back to Würzburg. The following morning she put on a black suit, noted the funeral in her diary, and tried to apply herself to finishing a flight logbook. But her work, and later a film at the cinema, failed to distract her. ‘Useless,’ she commented bluntly.102 Alexander read out Franz’s obituary to her two days later. That afternoon she started a new sculpture, a bust of Franz. She now rarely commented on her test flights in her diary, giving space instead to more personal details. She noted that a friend’s son was missing in action, that an evening gown had arrived by post, and that she would wake up on a wet pillow to find she had been weeping in her sleep. One week later Alexander was posted back to the front. Melitta’s world had fallen apart.

On 28 February 1944, Hanna was summoned to the Berghof, Hitler’s chalet in the Bavarian Alps. She was due to be presented with a certificate by the Führer, to mark the award, over a year earlier, of her Iron Cross, First Class. Hitler was tired. There were already reports that he could no longer raise his arm to salute the people as he had always done.^* His temper was short and his charisma waning. After the formalities were over, he invited Hanna to take tea in the large lounge that offered magnificent views over the Austrian scenery down towards Salzburg. The only other person present was his Luftwaffe adjutant, Colonel Nicolaus von Below.^† Ignoring friends’ warnings that any outspokenness could risk her life, ‘I did not hesitate to take this opportunity of putting forward our plan,’ Hanna later recounted. The conversation, however, ‘took a somewhat unexpected course’.¹⁰³

Recent developments with the war were not so serious as to justify such drastic measures as suicide missions, Hitler told Hanna. There was no precedent in German history and the German public would not stand for it. To her rising impatience, he then ‘expounded his views on the subject in a series of lengthy monologues, supporting his arguments with numerous illustrations from the pages of history’.104 This was one of Hitler’s standard tactics. ‘The victim found himself muzzled,’ one of his adjutants recalled. ‘Hitler saw to it that he could not open his mouth, launching into long monologues which gave full rein to his own opinions.’¹⁰⁵ His stories ‘were certainly recounted in compelling and memorable phraseology’, Hanna noted politely, ‘but on reflection I could see that, while superficially appropriate, they were, in reality, irrelevant’.¹⁰⁶

Hanna had never been fond of lectures. Nor was she particularly good at controlling her temper. She knew there was no higher authority to which she could appeal, however, and that she had just this one chance to make her case. Intervening as politely as she could, she argued that Germany faced a situation ‘without historical precedent’, which ‘could only be remedied by new and extraordinary methods’.¹⁰⁷ Sensing resistance from this brave woman, whose broken face now looked up at him, Hitler diverted onto the subject of jet aircraft, one of ‘his favourite digressions’.¹⁰⁸ Hanna had been here before, with Göring, and the conversation had not gone well then. She knew better than anyone how premature Hitler was to pin his hopes on jets, which still needed many months of development, at the least. She had reached the end of her tether.^* ‘Hitler’, she could see, ‘was living in some remote and nebulous world of his own.’ Momentarily forgetting to whom she was talking or the respect due to his position, Hanna cut him off in mid-sentence, loudly exclaiming: ‘Mein Führer, you are speaking of the grandchild of an embryo!’¹⁰⁹

In the ‘painful silence’ that followed, Hanna caught sight of Below’s face, ‘glazed with horror’ at this unexpected exchange.¹¹⁰ While secretly pleased that the Führer had heard of production delays from another source, his adjutant knew Hitler was ‘convinced he was infallible’ in military matters.¹¹¹ Moreover not even his most senior advisers spoke to him as Hanna had just done, and women were never ‘allowed to hold forth or to contradict Hitler’.¹¹²

Almost in panic, a moment later Hanna launched in again. It took a while before she realized that although he retained a conventional politeness, she had ‘quite destroyed Hitler’s good humour’.113 The Führer had no more appetite for the facts than Göring had before him. ‘His face wore a disgruntled expression’, Hanna now saw, ‘and his voice sounded peevish’ as he told her she was ill-informed.¹¹⁴ ‘Totally distraught’ that her interview was evidently at an end, she chanced one last request for permission to at least start experimental work so that, when Hitler decided the moment was right, suicide attacks could be launched without delay.¹¹⁵ Wearily, Hitler gave what Below described as his ‘grudging consent’.¹¹⁶ His only proviso was that he should not be troubled with any issues that might arise during development.

Ten minutes later Hanna was on her way back to the aeronautical research institute. ‘She left behind a long shadow,’ Below commented.¹¹⁷ Although Hitler refused to accept her word about Luftwaffe production delays, he ‘set very great store by her personal devotion to duty’.¹¹⁸ This was fortunate for Hanna. Had her ideas been ‘expressed by a civilian on a Berlin tram’, they could easily have led to denouncement, investigation and ‘resettlement’ in the east.¹¹⁹ As it was, she returned to work beaming. Hitler had approved her plan in principle, and development work could start in earnest under the more acceptable code name of Operation Selbstopfer, or Self-Sacrifice.

Hanna was motivated partly by patriotism but, despite her misgivings about certain Nazi leaders, she also had an unshakeable faith in National Socialism. In proposing military strategy and engaging others to sacrifice their lives for the defence of the Third Reich, she became an active accomplice of the regime. Yet Milch, Göring, Goebbels, Himmler – and Hitler himself – had not shared her great passion for Operation Self-Sacrifice. According to Below, despite his apparent acquiescence, privately ‘Hitler was completely opposed to the idea of self-sacrifice’.¹²⁰ On learning of Hanna’s plan, Goebbels felt that she had ‘lost her nerve’.¹²¹ Hanna was ‘a very energetic and feisty lady’, he wrote, but in general, ‘you shouldn’t let women be the lead advocate dealing with such important questions. Even with all their efforts, their sense of intelligence will fail, and men, especially of high calibre, would have difficulties allowing themselves to follow the lead of a woman.’122 For Himmler it was the waste of good pilots that rankled, when the country had so few left. To Hanna’s horror, at one point he suggested recruiting her pilots from ‘among the incurably diseased, the neurotics, the criminals’.¹²³ Göring, conversely, would later try to redeploy the volunteers she had recruited, for Focke-Wulf suicide missions for which they had no training.¹²⁴ For Hanna, without the perfect men, equipment or training, the idea of sacrifice became ‘repugnant’.¹²⁵ If, however, the act was ‘noble’ rather than pragmatic, she was certain it was justified. ‘We’re no lunatics, throwing our lives away for fun,’ she told a friend, in what he called ‘her emotional way’. ‘We’re Germans with a passionate love of our country, and our own safety is nothing to us when its welfare and happiness are at stake.’¹²⁶ Ironically, this last sentiment was one that Melitta might have appreciated.

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* At this point Hanna was probably not aware of Japanese plans for suicide attacks.

* Nicolaus von Below, Hitler’s Luftwaffe adjutant, wrote that ‘the prisoners seemed well-treated and were in good physical condition … but it was nevertheless a depressing sight to watch this forced-labour force, who hoped to purchase their lives by their industry’. He, too, must have known that few would survive. See Nicolaus von Below, At Hitler’s Side (2010), p. 227.

* Orsha was liberated by Soviet troops in June 1944.

* Over 11,000 Germans had already been killed by Allied bombing between 1940 and 1942. British casualties from all forms of German air bombardment never exceeded 61,000 between 1939 and 1945. See Max Hastings, All Hell Let Loose: The World At War 1939–1945 (2011), p. 480.

* Asked to provide damage assessment, the eminent British engineer Sir Malcolm McAlpine commented that for the Germans ‘it would be easier to start over again’ than to salvage. See Constance Babington Smith, Evidence in Camera: The story of photographic intelligence in the Second World War (2004), p. 185.

* Fahrner sent a copy of Alexander’s poems to Claus, who was impressed, staying up

* Stefan George moved to Switzerland shortly after the Nazi seizure of power. His move was prompted more by illness than politics, and he died the following year. The poet had been ambiguous about the Nazi rise to power. He refused to join the Prussian Academy of Arts after it had purged anti-Nazi writers, but also disowned some of his Jewish followers who spoke against the anti-Semitism of the new regime.

* Even in November 1943, Hanna’s friend and former colleague, Karl Baur, had felt that the Führer ‘looked tired and worn out. His hand had no strength and he could not raise his arm to salute.’ See Isolde Baur, A Pilot’s Pilot: Karl Baur, Chief Messerschmitt Pilot (1999), p. 151.

^† Nicolaus von Below had been promoted to this role by Greim and Göring.

* In fact, production of the excellent Me 262 jet fighter had been delayed because of Hitler’s demands that it be converted for use as a bomber.

10 OPERATION SELF-SACRIFICE1943–1944

10
OPERATION SELF-SACRIFICE
1943–1944