A lone Fieseler Storch reconnaissance aeroplane circled in the sky, high above Buchenwald concentration camp and the surrounding beech woods after which it was named. Its stiff-legged silhouette was distinctive as it turned. Alexander, Mika and the other Sippenhaft prisoners arrested after the Valkyrie plot ‘rushed outside’ from their barrack into an enclosed yard, their fellow prisoner Fey von Hassell recorded, ‘and waved with handkerchiefs and bed sheets’.1 It was mid-March 1945, and Melitta was at the little plane’s controls. Seeing the prisoners signalling to her through the foul-smelling smoke blowing across the camp from the crematory chimneys, she circled round once more, looking for a place to land her ‘wing-weary little bird’.2 The Storch’s long legs splayed a little to absorb the shock of impact as she touched down in a neighbouring field. Her own shock at the sight and smell of this vast camp, with its thousands of starving prisoners, was cushioned only by a sense of relief at having finally found her husband.
Over two months had passed since Melitta had last seen Alexander. He had then been held in Stutthoff concentration camp, in East Prussia, and she had been able to pass on news of the children to him, Mika and their grandmother, as well as food and blankets. Four days later, the Soviets had launched their winter offensive, and Alexander and the other Sippenhaft prisoners were transported away from the approaching front line. None of them knew where they were being taken. Travelling in achingly slow, freezing train carriages, with huge drifts of snow blowing in through the broken windows, the group had to count themselves fortunate. Behind were open cattle cars packed with hundreds of less valued prisoners. At night, the temperature dropped to minus 30°. As people died from exhaustion and exposure, their bodies were pushed from the wagons to join the snow-blown corpses of horses and mules below. Stumbling along beside them were long columns of refugees, many leaving their own dead beside the tracks, the others ‘silent and grim’ as they pushed their way west.3
Melitta had been working at Berlin-Gatow airfield when her husband and his family disappeared. Despite desperately calling everyone she knew, she found that no one was willing to talk. Rumours had begun to circulate about Melitta’s loyalties, always suspect, and even valued friends were now cautious about being seen to help her. ‘When the news came that your sister-in-law had gone over to the enemy, I had to distance myself,’ Paul Opitz, the Gestapo official who had helped Melitta so much in prison, later told Mika.4 For weeks, the most Melitta learned was that the prisoners had likely fallen into Russian hands, and ‘had probably not survived’.5
Officially Melitta’s role was still to instruct pilots in the use of her optical night-landing equipment. She had also been commissioned to develop similar technology for the Messerschmitt Me 262, the world’s first jet-powered fighter, and had been assigned a new young pilot to help with the test flights. Hubertus von Papen-Koeningen was the nephew of the former German Reich chancellor, Franz von Papen. He had lost both of his older brothers in Russia and, like Melitta, he was firmly anti-Nazi. Hubertus warmed to Melitta from the moment he knocked on her door, marked Countess Schenk, and realized she was not allowed to bear the Stauffenberg name ‘because her brother-in-law was the assassin’.6 They quickly came to trust one another, and often talked about the regime and the conflict behind closed doors. Neither of them believed the war could last much longer. While Hubertus carried out all the Me 262 tests, using a closed and concreted stretch of the autobahn as his runway, Melitta’s energies were entirely directed towards finding and helping her family. ‘Flying, as well as her technical development work, was completely in the background,’ Hubertus later recalled. As far as he was concerned, ‘one just had to win time until the end of the war’.7 But Melitta knew that for Alexander and the other Sippenhaft prisoners, now witnesses as well as enemies of a desperate and brutal regime, the last days of the war were likely to be the most dangerous of all.
Melitta’s one comfort was that she could still support Claus’s widow, Nina. Until early January, the heavily pregnant Nina had been kept in isolation at Ravensbrück concentration camp. As her due date approached she was moved, under armed guard, over a hundred miles south to a Nazi maternity home in Frankfurt an der Oder. A few days later the home was evacuated, but a bed was found for Nina in a private Berlin clinic. Here, under the pseudonym of Frau Schank, Nina gave birth to her and Claus’s last child, a daughter called Konstanze, on 27 January 1945.* As soon as she could get away, Melitta cycled over from Gatow with some roasted joints of rabbit and other smoked meat, a pair of men’s trousers and some shoes. As she did not have the required Gestapo visitor’s permit, she pinned the ribbon of her Iron Cross firmly to her jacket. Luckily the ‘astonished’ senior doctor had once served with the Luftwaffe and, recognizing Melitta as an aviation heroine, he let her in.8 A power cut meant that the two women sat talking in the dark, but Melitta was delighted to meet her new niece and Nina gratefully stowed her gifts in the dilapidated hatbox that was now her only baggage. Eight days later both Nina and her baby had caught a raging infection and were moved again, still under guard. Unable to stand, Nina was ‘bundled out like a crate of goods’, and sent to a hospital in Potsdam.9
Unknown to Melitta or Nina, as the war ground interminably on, Himmler had come to regard Alexander and the other Sippenhaft prisoners as possible bargaining chips and ordered that, for now, they be kept alive. Their journey from Stutthof was soon broken at Danzig-Matzkau penal camp, built for Waffen SS officers charged with misconduct. Too weak to walk, they were dragged through the snow and into the yard by existing inmates, and fed on SS officers’ rations. A few days later, they were told they were to have hot showers. Ushered into an enormous room in a barracks at the far end of the camp, they were ordered to strip naked. Again they were spared. The doors were left open and searingly hot water poured from the taps; there was no gas chamber at Matzkau. Even so, it was here that the first of the group died.
Nina’s mother, the courageous Anni von Lerchenfeld, had survived Ravensbrück, where she had briefly witnessed her pregnant daughter’s solitary confinement. Nina had written to her mother, but had not known where to send the letter. Anni had then survived Stutthof, even though, as Fey von Hassell noted, being from the Baltics ‘she was especially hated by the Nazis’.10 Now the once noted society beauty walked around with her hair unbrushed, wearing shabby clothes and with huge slippers on her feet. ‘People tended to avoid her,’ Fey wrote, ‘because she was so talkative.’11 She finally died at Matzkau from a combination of pneumonia, typhus and dysentery.*
In February the prisoners were moved again. Carefully clutching their collection of blankets, nails, one pot, and a rusty stove that the men had dug from the floor at Matzkau, they travelled in turn by truck and cattle wagon, winding through a frozen Prussian countryside disfigured by burned-out vehicles, derailed trains and piles of rubble. Sometimes they heard the noise of gun battles nearby. As rumours came that the invading Soviets were killing SS officials, the dynamic between the prisoners and their captors began to change. Sensing ‘the end coming’, Alexander’s cousin Otto wrote, ‘they were often drunk, especially the women’.12 One female guard ‘took on the brittle expression of someone in a controlled but ever-growing panic’, Fey added. ‘Her sharp voice no longer resonated along the corridors. On the contrary, she became quite obsequious. Her fate was our fate, no better and probably worse.’13
Even at this point in the war, with Germany seemingly in chaos, refugees streaming between towns, and constant air raids, soldiers were still being disciplined, trained and sent to the front, and the Sippenhaft prisoners were being transported hundreds of miles around the country. When they passed close to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, near Berlin, it became clear that Alexander’s uncle, the increasingly weak Clemens, could no longer continue. He and his wife Elisabeth were forcibly taken from their three adult children, and left behind in the Sachsenhausen medical barrack. They knew they were unlikely to see each other again. As the size of the Sippenhaft group got smaller, so their individual hopes for survival also diminished.
Eventually, in early March, the ‘stench from the crematory ovens’, as Fey described it, told the remaining Sippenhaft that they were finally approaching Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, 170 miles south-west of Berlin.14 Buchenwald covered an immense site, but its hundreds of barracks were overflowing with thousands of starving prisoners. The camp was ‘indescribably filthy’, one Stauffenberg cousin noted, and ‘there was always an air of abject misery and cruelty’.15 Female SS guards carried sticks and whips with which they frequently beat prisoners, especially if orders – given solely in German – were not obeyed immediately. Those prisoners who began to lose their sanity were locked into a single small room, the doors of which were opened only to allow in half-rations of food, or to bring out the dead. ‘The whole attitude of the SS General Staff towards the prisoners was purposely inhumane and brutal. Prisoners were not regarded as human beings, but as something lower than cattle,’ another Stauffenberg later testified.16 At one point Fey watched a lorry drive past, ‘filled to the brim with naked corpses’. The worst of it was that ‘nobody seemed to notice’, she saw with horror.17 Rumour had it that between 200 and 300 people were dying at the camp every day. Certainly over 13,000 Buchenwald prisoners were registered as having died in the first three months of 1945, and that number did not include executions, arbitrary murders, or deaths from disease, exposure or starvation during transports.
Fortunately for the Sippenhaft group, they were again given exceptional treatment. On arrival at the camp they were pushed through to join other prominent prisoners being held in the ‘isolation barrack’, separated from the rest of the camp by a high wall covered in barbed wire. Foreign dignitaries being held there included the former French premier, Léon Blum, and his wife, who secretly waved to them as they arrived; Miklós Horthy Jr, the younger son of the regent of Hungary, who had been kidnapped by Otto Skorzeny in October 1944, forcing his father to resign; and the former Austrian chancellor, Kurt Schuschnigg; as well as a number of diplomats, church leaders and British POWs. It was here that Fey finally learned of her father’s execution, as well as of his dignity during his trial, but there was no news of her young children. In these traumatic circumstances, the bond that had developed between her and Alexander grew stronger. His ‘sympathy helped cushion my nerve-wracked mind’, she wrote.18
While the Sippenhaft prisoners were being transported to Buchenwald, Melitta was preparing to leave Berlin. Germany’s capital had endured ‘incessant bombing’ since February, her sister Klara wrote.19 In response, Hitler had ordered the various schools of the Luftwaffe’s Technical Academy to be dispersed to smaller, regional sites. Melitta was glad. For some time she and Hubertus had agreed that ‘we must, on no account, fall into Russian captivity’, and she and Klara had also quietly discussed fleeing westward on foot, if that were the only option.20 Now Melitta arranged for her ‘Experimental Centre for Special Flight Equipment’ – namely herself, her prototype devices, work papers and a few staff – to be relocated to Würzburg. Klara agreed to drive Melitta’s old Ford Alpha, loaded up with the heaviest equipment. She set out one foggy evening in mid-March, accompanied by Melitta’s assistant with her dog. Melitta’s official passes saw them through the many control points on the roads, and they arrived safely the next day. Melitta still had some work to attend to in Berlin-Gatow, and said she would follow by plane, having filed her travel cost claims and arranged transfer of her food coupons. In fact she was sending what coupons she could to Nina in Potsdam.
It was now Melitta finally learned that Alexander and his family had been sent to Buchenwald. Incredibly, she again managed to wring the required visitor permit from Gestapo head office. Then she packed her Storch with rabbit meat, fruit, vegetables and soya-flour biscuits, clothes with little notes hidden inside, even bed linen – anything she could find that might help keep the prisoners’ bodies warm and their spirits strong. Her plane was unarmed, but perfect for the short-distance landing and take-off she might need to make. With a cruising speed of eighty miles an hour at low level, she could hope to arrive in under three hours, even if she took a circuitous route to skirt round the most dangerous areas. Above the clouds hanging over the city, it was a bright day and there was not an enemy plane in sight, but Melitta cautiously kept the Storch low as she headed south-west. Once out, flying over the countryside, the sunshine sparkled in the windows of the houses, and made the rivers and canals shimmer below her. For a couple of fleeting hours, it could almost have been a pre-war morning, and she once again thought of the plane as her ‘little bird’, for which she would have to find a ‘suitable branch’ to perch upon.21
Everything changed as she reached Buchenwald. Circling low above the rows and rows of barracks, straining to see some sign of where Alexander was being held and the best place to land, Melitta could not have missed the appalling reality of the vast camp, the purpose of the crematorium, or the dreadful stench hanging heavily in the air. Driven by personal desperation, she chose to close her mind to the horrific scale of the mass murder being committed and focus exclusively on the well-being of those she knew and loved. Touching down in a field, as close as she could to the far barracks where Alexander, Fey and the others had been signalling to her with bits of white cloth, she handed her papers to the guards. Then she waited, bracing herself to see the changes in her husband.
A few minutes later the gate to the privileged compound was unlocked and Alexander walked towards her. The handsome face she had so often carefully considered was tired and sallow. Alexander’s skin had sunk around his chin and cheekbones. He was ‘all eyes’ and shadow. To Melitta he seemed, at best, a poorly sculpted version of himself, unfinished, the layers not built up, every contour incorrect. Even his uniform looked wrong, hanging from his reduced frame and still torn at the shoulders and collar where his marks of rank had been ripped away. Then he smiled at her, bending his head forward characteristically – a habit developed from being so tall, not the mark of a man who had been diminished. He was still her Alexander, her ‘little snipe’, and she longed to give him books, cigarettes and some bottles of good wine along with the bed sheets and dry biscuits. Instead Melitta gave him news about Nina and their friends, and the progress of the war. Alexander told her about their desperate journey, and the dramatic removal of Clemens and Elisabeth. When, all too soon, he went back through the gate, the others caught a brief glimpse of Melitta in the distance. She waved to them, silently pledging her support. A moment later they heard her plane’s engines putter into life, the Storch circled once more over the woods, and she was gone.
Melitta knew she was in constant danger of being shot down by the Americans who now dominated the airspace over Germany, but this did not prevent her from flying over to Buchenwald and circling above the camp on eight separate occasions. Down below the prisoners nicknamed her the ‘Flying Angel’ and the ‘Angel of the Camp’, each visit giving them the vital hope that came with the knowledge they had not been forgotten.22 Alexander was the only one permitted to speak with his wife, and then only twice. ‘It was very secret,’ Mika wrote, and rather miraculous.23
After that first visit, Melitta refuelled at Weimar-Nohra, an airfield a few kilometres from the camp, before flying on to Würzburg, only to find that her and Alexander’s home had been obliterated. The RAF had firebombed Würzburg, like Dresden before it. Five thousand civilians had been killed, and the historic city left in ruins. Melitta and Alexander’s home had taken a direct hit. All Melitta’s art, saved since childhood, all her letters and photographs, all their crockery embossed with the Stauffenberg crest, Alexander’s entire library, so carefully collected over the years: all was lost. What had not been destroyed or burned immediately was looted by their desperate neighbours. ‘Everything … has been reduced to ashes,’ Klara wrote to their sister Lili. ‘Not even a pin or needle is left.’24 At least no one had been at home.
Melitta rescued a few items from the rubble but admitted to Nina that she actually felt relieved by the destruction. It meant she could now focus all her efforts on the prisoners. She quickly arranged for her remaining research papers to be transferred to Weimar-Nohra. ‘There was probably no lever that she did not use to help the prisoners,’ Nina remembered. ‘She employed her importance to the war effort and her personal charms (something which was not in accordance with her inherent, austere reserve) ruthlessly in order to obtain everything possible.’25 Secretly, Melitta also began to organize a refuge within walking distance of the camp, in the hope that the prisoners might be released when the inevitable defeat was accepted.
A couple of weeks later, she flew over to Sachsenhausen to collect Clemens and Elisabeth von Stauffenberg. Clemens’s heart was very weak, and Melitta had managed to negotiate permission to fly him home, thus preventing him from either dying while in Nazi custody, or falling into Russian hands. The stipulated condition was that she return Elisabeth, his wife, to the Sippenhaft group at Buchenwald en route. After another painfully brief exchange with Alexander at his barracks gate, Melitta flew on with her patient. Calling Elisabeth zu Guttenberg when she landed at Hof, she brought Clemens into the shelter of a wooden shack on the airfield. Elisabeth found Melitta sitting outside, exhausted, but enjoying the feel of the wind on her face. The first of Alexander’s relatives was free. Together they lifted Clemens to his feet. He could barely stand, and ‘looked as though he were dead’, but they managed to get him into a car.26 Melitta then turned to fly on. ‘God be with you always,’ she called. ‘God bless you, dearest Litta!’ Elisabeth yelled back.27 Melitta waved from the cockpit, and her plane lifted off.
By the end of March the Red Army had penetrated deep into East Prussia. The city of Danzig-Oliva, where Melitta’s parents, Michael and Margarete Schiller, lived, was under threat. Although most remaining telephone lines were reserved for military use, Melitta managed to call her parents, pledging to come and fly them out. But Michael, now eighty-four, could not be persuaded to leave his home, telling her that he ‘trusted in the humanity of the victors’, and Margarete would not leave without her husband.28 Although she was desperately worried, there was little Melitta could do.
There were now only fourteen children left at the Bad Sachsa children’s home, half of them Stauffenbergs, all living together in one villa. The home had been put under the auspices of military staff from a nearby base. At Easter the decision was taken to move these last children to Buchenwald.* Sent to pack their bags, they were told they were going to be reunited with their families at the camp. Ten-year-old Berthold had heard about concentration camps, ‘if only in whispered tones’, and knew enough to know he did not want to be sent to one.29
A few days later, the children were bundled into the back of a blacked-out Wehrmacht truck and driven to nearby Nordhausen, where they were to be put on a train for Buchenwald. As they reached the outskirts of the town, a siren howled. The truck pulled over, and the driver and two adults accompanying them threw themselves into a ditch beside the road. Sitting in complete darkness in the back of the truck, the children heard ‘a terrific humming, then suddenly a whistling, and then a deafening crack’.30 Some of them screamed, and a few of the younger ones began to cry. More bombs fell around them, and ‘then it was quiet again’.31 The air raid had destroyed the area around the station, and the station building itself had been reduced to rubble. ‘The Nazis had no option but to take us back,’ Berthold recalled, ‘much to our relief.’32
In late March, Melitta’s assistant pilot, Hubertus von Papen-Koeningen, had asked his commanding officer at Berlin-Gatow what action they should take in the event of enemy attack. ‘See that you get home safely,’ the general had answered, handing him three or four blank flying orders.33 On Wednesday 4 April, Hubertus and
Melitta decided that the moment had come. That morning she managed to telephone Nina, in Potsdam, telling her she had heard that the children were being transported away from Bad Sachsa, possibly to Buchenwald. She did not know that the Nordhausen aid raid had frustrated these plans, but promised to pass on more news once she had it. She also pledged to send Nina her heavy workers’ food supplement ration cards for April, which she posted that afternoon. Amazingly, they arrived a few days later.
As soon as it grew dark, Melitta and Hubertus prepared the Storch for its final mission. Melitta was wearing a pilot-blue military-style suit under her dark coat, and had fixed the ribbon of her Iron Cross to the lapel. She carried a case packed with food, her washbag and pyjamas, as well as her capacious handbag full of personal possessions, both of which she kept close to her as she climbed into the navigator’s seat. Hubertus was taking the first turn as pilot. He was hoping to rejoin his unit, but as yet did not know where they had been redeployed. The plan was to head first for Magdeburg-East, where the small pilot training school might have information, and then on to Weimar-Nohra and Buchenwald. Shortly before arriving at Magdeburg, however, the little Storch’s engine failed. Hubertus was trained in forced landings. He brought them down gently over a freshly ploughed field, but in the darkness they could not tell in which direction the ruts ran. On touching down, the Storch’s wheels caught in the furrows, flipping it onto its nose before it slowly toppled right over and came to rest belly-up, with both of them still strapped inside. ‘Countess, are you hurt?’ Hubertus asked after a moment. ‘No, not at all,’ Melitta replied, having automatically checked herself over.34 Slowly, they clambered out of the broken plane.
Half an hour later they flagged down a passing military vehicle. Fortunate to find a lift so late, they hoped for a peaceful night at Magdeburg airfield. As they arrived, however, they were caught in an air raid. In the chaos Hubertus ran towards the silhouette of an anthill bunker, while Melitta found a narrow one-person shelter nearer by, cramming her bags in with her. They met at the airfield mess the next morning. There was no news of Hubertus’s unit but, making the most of their open flight permits, they picked up both breakfast and an unarmed Bücker Bü 181 Bestmann two-seater aerobatic monoplane to fly on to Weimar. As they were now travelling in daylight, they stayed low, mostly only twenty metres above the ground, and hugged every corner of the forests to stay out of sight of enemy patrols. In fact the Americans were only flying over once every few hours, and they arrived in the Weimar valley without incident. From there they flew straight on to Buchenwald, Melitta following the routes she had taken in the Storch.
Usually, when flying over the camp, she could see people assembled or walking in the privileged barrack’s yard, but this time there was no obvious movement. Flying lower, she saw with horror that the isolation compound was deserted. The main camp was still functioning in all its misery, but the Buchenwald crematorium had not been able to keep up with the death rate in these last weeks. There were growing piles of bodies stacked against some of the walls. All were stripped, and their skin had turned ‘a dirty grey-green’.35 Even from the air, Melitta could smell the ‘thick and hanging’ odour that clung to the camp.36 She did not know whether Alexander was among the dead, finally executed like his brothers, or whether he had been transported on again. Landing back at Weimar-Nohra, she put through an urgent call to the Buchenwald administration office. The camp commander was not there but a young secretary answered. The prominent prisoners had all been moved, she confirmed, but she was unwilling to say more. Thousands of the prisoners from the main camp were still due to be evacuated before American forces could reach them. It was clear that many were too weak to survive these forced marches, and those who faltered were to be shot. Few people were willing to discuss such matters.
While Melitta was desperately trying to find out more, Hubertus was outside with some ground staff, rolling the Bestmann under cover. A pair of American bombers, on their way to attack Weimar, saw the activity in the airfield and decided to target the hangars as they passed. Hubertus was retrieving Melitta’s bag and his own briefcase from the Bestmann, when he saw the two planes wheel round. They were Republic P-47 Thunderbolts, large single-engine fighter-bombers, with the American white star painted on their silver fuselage and one wing, and they were heavily armed. A second later the Thunderbolts dived, their Browning machine guns hammering at the Bestmann. The briefcase Hubertus was carrying was shot out of his hands and, with a deafening noise, bullets ricocheted off the stationary plane and around the inside of the hangar. In another moment the Americans had passed overhead. Pulling himself together, Hubertus ran for the relative safety of the airfield buildings as the pair of Thunderbolts started round for a second attack. Later that day he counted 137 bullet holes across the Bestmann’s tubular steel cabin and wooden fuselage: although it had not exploded or even caught fire, it was no longer airworthy. Incredibly, Hubertus himself was unscathed, although two bullets had hit his briefcase, one slicing through the handle, the other lodging in his cigarette tin inside, still carefully wrapped in his pyjamas.
After this close call with death, Hubertus found a new determination. Calling the Buchenwald administration office, he bluffed about his rank and told the secretary that he had urgent orders from Berlin, signed by Himmler himself, to be delivered to the camp commander. The secretary’s resistance crumbled, and among other things Hubertus learned that the prominent prisoners had been sent to Straubing, a small town just south of Regensburg, three days before.
It had been almost dark, three nights earlier, when three grey Wehrmacht military buses had pulled up outside Buchenwald. Marching into the isolation barracks, SS troops rounded up the first groups to be pushed on board. Alexander, Mika, Fey and the other Sippenhaft prisoners were among them. A last group would follow in the back of a small blacked-out truck, powered by a wood-burning stove. Himmler was selecting prominent prisoners for possible release as a sweetener when negotiating terms with the Western Allies. Like many senior Nazis, including Hanna’s friend Otto Skorzeny, he still believed that a reformed Germany, under new leadership, could join a Western anti-Bolshevik alliance against communist Russia. When it became clear this was hopelessly unrealistic, the prisoners’ stock began to fall. As one of them, Sigismund Payne Best, a British MI6 officer who had already spent four years in Sachsenhausen, later wrote, they knew that ‘at any moment an order might come for some or all of us to be gassed, shot or hung’.37
Alexander and the Sippenhaft group eventually arrived at Regensburg, eighty miles north of Munich, but the camp was too full to admit them. When one of the Stauffenbergs joked that friends in the neighbourhood had a castle and would be delighted to put them up, the guards lost their tempers. Eventually they were incarcerated on the second floor of the town’s prison. After devouring some bread and a thin vegetable soup, they called to each other through the grilles on the cell doors. Later they were joined by other prominent prisoners including Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor famous as a vocal critic of the Nazi regime who had set up the defiant German Dissenting Church. The next morning the cell doors were opened so the prisoners could wash, and ‘there was a great reunion in the corridors … introductions and exchanges’.38 To the astonished warders, it seemed like a reception for the crème of German society. Bonhoeffer, in particular, was able to give several of the Sippenhaft prisoners news of their relatives from his detention at Prinz Albrecht Strasse prison. Like many, he thought that they had probably now escaped the worst danger.
Not wanting to risk another encounter with American fighter planes, Melitta and Hubertus stayed at Weimar until dusk. The airfield staff had told Hubertus that his unit was at Marienbad, about halfway to Straubing, so he and Melitta agreed to fly that far together.* As it grew dark they liberated an old Siebel Si 204, with a full tank, from the training school. This was a small transport plane with space for eight passengers, originally designed for civilian use but eventually produced for the Luftwaffe. By the time they had it ready, quite a crowd had gathered to watch. The last officers from the school and the women from the weather station were anxious not to be left behind. Terrified by brutal stories emerging from the Soviet advance, and immersed in the racism of the time, the women pleaded, ‘The Americans are coming; there are blacks among them and they’ll rape us!’39
Half an hour later the Siebel took off with about a dozen passengers, their luggage crammed into its tail. Hubertus was again in the pilot’s seat, with Melitta navigating beside him. The wind forced them to take off westwards, towards the American front. With so much weight, however, the tail dragged ominously as they taxied out. They only made it over the airfield’s perimeter fence when Hubertus pressed his feet up against the control column to maximize his leverage, while Melitta furiously worked the elevator trim-wheel between their seats.
Once in the air they circled round to head south-east, flying as low as they dared in the overloaded Siebel. As night wore on, they reached the Bohemian Forest with its hundreds of single-track rail lines and small streams twisting through the trees: one of the most difficult landscapes to navigate without radio. As their fuel began to run low, they recognized the city of Pilsen on the far side of the forest. Hubertus fired up some red flares, requesting permission for an emergency landing, but was answered by more red flares from below, refusing them. All of Germany was on high alert, and without radio contact the airfield was nervous that theirs was an enemy plane. After a few tense moments and the deployment of several more flares, permission was given, the landing strip lit up, and the Siebel touched down. To celebrate their safe arrival Melitta and the female passengers shared a bottle of sparkling wine before the women slipped away. Then she let herself grab a few hours of much-needed sleep.
Melitta woke feeling anxious. Time was passing, nerves were fraying; it was now 6 April and she had still not found Alexander. She could not imagine what value he might still hold for the Nazis at this point in the war and increasingly feared that he was more likely to be quietly executed than released. By eight in the morning she and Hubertus had swapped their Siebel passenger plane for another Bücker Bü 181 Bestmann. Melitta liked this small, responsive aircraft with its good field of vision, which could fly very low, even ‘along every street, close to the ground’, Hubertus felt, letting them navigate by railway signs while staying as hidden as possible. If they were seen by enemy fighters, the Bestmann was slow but, being designed for aerobatics, it could spiral tightly down into any forested area, fly and corner low, and only reappear again when the enemy had sped past.40
They flew first to Marienbad, where Hubertus was to stay. The flight took at most an hour and a half, and passed without incident. In no mood for dawdling, Melitta quickly secured a signed and stamped flight order from the airfield to go on to Straubing. This document records, rather wonderfully, that the same Bücker Bestmann was to be made officially available to Melitta’s Technical Academy, ‘for a special operation, important to the war effort’.41 This unspecified ‘operation’ was in fact a visit to the imprisoned family of the most famous assassin in the Third Reich, and possibly the rescue of Alexander. Melitta was finally looking ahead to the restoration of peace and the rule of law in Germany, freedom for her family, and fulfilling careers for herself and her husband. She just had to keep him alive for a few more weeks, possibly just days, bringing him food and courage and perhaps a way out, while making it clear to the camp guards that these prisoners were valued and under observation, until their surrender documents were signed.
Hubertus sat beside Melitta in the cockpit as she taxied into position, ready for take-off. As they said their farewells and wished each other luck, she suddenly reached into her handbag and passed him the first thing she found, a glass jar of honey. Hubertus was deeply touched. He knew the gift must have been meant for Alexander, but he may have missed the subtle humour it contained. Melitta’s name meant ‘honey-sweet’. She was, symbolically, bringing herself to her husband. There could hardly have been a better metaphor for her life-restoring goodness; it was just the sort of clever gift a classicist and poet would appreciate. Carefully clutching the jar, Hubertus climbed down from the Bestmann. He now wished he could travel on with Melitta, giving her the benefit of another pair of eyes on the sky, but he would have been taking up the precious second seat in her plane. Instead, he watched as she pulled up into the sky, waggling her wings in the fighter-style salute. All being well, by lunchtime or mid-afternoon she would be reunited with Alexander.
But Alexander was no longer at Straubing, or even in close-by Regensburg prison. While Melitta had been securing the onward use of the Bestmann in Marienbad, he and his fellow prisoners had been bussed to an empty school at Schönberg, a pretty village in the Bavarian forest. Here they were locked into classrooms – but the rooms were bright, with fine views down the mountain valley, and there were real beds set in rows, with coloured covers. Their spirits raised, the prisoners started talking again, even laughing. The men turned their backs while the women washed in a small basin. Some wrote their name above their chosen bed. A few managed to make contact with sympathetic villagers, with the result that some hours later a bowl of steaming potatoes arrived; the next day there were eggs, and a potato salad. None of them knew that they were now en route to Dachau concentration camp, about ten miles north of Munich. Orders for their ‘liquidation’ had finally arrived.
From Straubing, Melitta flew to Regensburg, where she discovered that she had missed her husband by just a few hours. Increasingly frantic, with single-minded determination she managed to secure a Gestapo permit authorizing her to contact the commander at Schönberg the following day. ‘Countess Schenk came here today and was referred to the leader of the detachment in Schönberg,’ this document records. ‘There is no objection to her intended visit to her husband.’42 She spent the night at the Regensburg-Neutraubling airfield, snatching what little sleep she could near the hangar.
The next morning, a Sunday, dawned clear and bright. At Schönberg, Pastor Bonhoeffer was leading a service in one of the classrooms. Suddenly a detachment of soldiers interrupted and, ignoring the protests of the others, bundled Bonhoeffer out, to be taken to the camp at Flossenbürg.* Here he would be given a perfunctory and humiliating trial, and sentenced to death by hanging along with Wilhelm Canaris, some men associated with the Valkyrie plot, and other enemies of the regime. The rest of the prisoners were now guarded by members of the Gestapo execution unit that travelled between concentration camps, ‘liquidating’ those prisoners of no further value to the regime, ‘like a pest officer engaged in the extermination of rats’, Sigismund Payne Best observed.43 Clearly they had not been forgotten by the state, any more than by Melitta.
She was in the air again by seven. About twenty minutes later she was hedge-hopping between the Danube River and a nearby road, navigating south towards Schönberg by the Straubing–Passau railway line. Down below, in the village of Strasskirchen, a wounded serviceman on hospital leave was standing at the door of his house, waiting for his wife to return from church. Intrigued by the sight of Melitta’s plane flying at a height of just ten metres, an unusual sight on a Sunday morning, he stayed to watch a while. A few seconds later, an American fighter roared along in the same direction. Lieutenant Thomas A. Norboune of the US Air Force 15th Squadron reconnaissance unit, then tasked with sweeping railway lines for trains, was also following the Straubing–Passau line. Mistaking Melitta’s unarmed Bücker Bü 181 Bestmann for a Focke-Wulf Fw 190 fighter, and unwilling to miss such an unexpected opportunity, he quickly ‘fired two salvos of about five to eight shots’.44†
A retired railway foreman was dressing at his window, when he saw the same encounter. Melitta was flying ‘in a very leisurely and peaceful manner’, he reported, when ‘suddenly, one or two Me 109s [sic] thundered over and shot at the slow-flying machine. A few seconds later, the slow-flying aircraft turned left a bit, and then spun into a field.’45 There was no sound of an explosion, and no smoke. The railwayman grabbed his bicycle and pedalled over towards the site, joined en route by a French POW who had been working in some nearby fields.*
These two men were the first to arrive at the scene. To their great surprise, they saw a smartly dressed woman in her early forties sitting in the pilot’s seat. Judging by her successful emergency crash-landing, the lack of obvious major wounds and her level of composure, the railwayman did not consider her condition to be critical. ‘She just said, “please help me”,’ he reported.46 Offering reassurances, he and the Frenchman freed Melitta from the wreckage and laid her on the ground. One of her legs seemed to be broken, and her other foot was lying, ‘unnaturally twisted’, to one side.47 As they gently pulled her out, several items fell from her bag including chocolate, some tinned food, and her passport. Inside it read, ‘Countess Schenk von Stauffenberg, Flugkapitän’.48
Leaving Melitta in the care of the French forced labourer, the railwayman cycled off to fetch a local doctor. He was pleased to notice some people from the neighbouring village were already walking over, and by the time he returned with the doctor, the local military had taken control of the site. Since Melitta was being tended to by a Luftwaffe doctor, the local men were dismissed. They watched her being lifted into an ambulance, and saw it drive off towards Straubing. The crash site remained under military guard.
Within a few hours of her emergency crash landing, Melitta was dead. The certificate issued by the medical superintendent of Straubing airbase gave the cause of death as a fracture at the base of her skull. Whether she died consciously fighting for life or fading more gently in the fields and the back of the ambulance is unrecorded. She was certainly weakened by blood loss. Further injuries listed include a ‘severing of the left thigh, fracture of the right ankle, left forearm, and minor head injuries’.49 It seemed that Melitta had been directly hit by the American fire, before her forced landing. That she managed to control her descent at all is testament to her great personal determination and skill as a pilot.
At around ten that morning, the surgeon of Straubing hospital visited his workplace, having heard about Melitta’s plane being shot down. There he watched as ‘a female corpse in pilot’s uniform was brought in by the Straubing ambulance crew’.50 For a moment he could clearly see Melitta’s face, which was unmarked. Her ‘eyes were half open’, he noted, and ‘the facial features not distorted, but peaceful and serious, the mouth closed’.51
In just three more weeks, the war would be over. Against the incredible odds created by Nazi Germany, this official ‘half-blood’, female former prisoner, highly paid and decorated Luftwaffe engineer, test pilot and secret enemy of the regime, had been only hours away from achieving her final ambition. A few miles further south Alexander was comforting Fey as they were pushed back onto the military buses, talking with his fellow prisoners about their likely fate, wondering whether his extraordinary wife would find him again, and lifting his face to watch the clouds scud across the clear blue April sky.
_____________________________
* 27 January 1945 was the same day that Hitler’s Wolf’s Lair in East Prussia fell into the hands of the Soviet army, and that Auschwitz concentration camp was liberated.
* Anni von Lerchenfeld’s body was buried at a nearby estate belonging to Melitta’s family, almost certainly at the suggestion of Alexander.
* The staff came from the top-secret Unit 00400, headquarters of the V-weapons programme. Bad Sachsa was close to the notorious Mittelbau underground rocket factory that produced V-2s after the bombing of Peenemünde.
* Marienbad is now the town of Mariánské Lázně in the Czech Republic.
* Dietrich Bonhoeffer first wrote his name in his volume of Plutarch, and left it with the other prisoners. It was returned to his family after his execution.
† Lieutenant Norboune later reported his aerial victory in the region of Regensburg at 7.40 a.m., 8 April 1945. The Focke-Wulf 190 has a similar airframe and rudder shape to a Bücker Bü 181 Bestmann, especially when seen from behind, hence his mistake. Norboune was later killed while serving in Korea.
* Coincidentally, Melitta was only fifty miles from the site where Franz Amsinck had crashed the year before.