The shocking news of Melitta’s death reached Alexander four days later. With surprising sensitivity, one of the guards took him into a quiet corridor before informing him that Melitta had been shot down in aerial combat. It was clear that she had been heading towards him at Schönberg. When Alexander rejoined the other prisoners, ‘his face was ashen’, Fey recorded, and he seemed ‘dazed, as if in a trance’.1 She and his aunt Elisabeth sat with him as the reality of Melitta’s sudden death sank in. Alexander had already lost his twin, Berthold, and his younger brother, Claus. The rest of his family was either imprisoned or under house arrest, and his home had been destroyed. His brilliant and courageous wife had been the one person with a good chance of surviving the war. Instead she had been killed while flying to his aid. With so little information, Alexander could only wonder whether she had finally been shot down by an Allied or German attack, whether she was planning a rescue, and whether she had suffered in her final moments.
Unknown to her husband, Melitta was buried the following morning, 13 April 1945. Her body was still dressed in the dark-blue suit she had chosen to put on almost ten days before, and which she had slept in more than once since. The ribbon of the Iron Cross was still on her lapel. Her possessions, including her passport, Gestapo permissions and other documents, a photograph album, and 4,000 Reichsmarks, amounting to all her and Alexander’s savings withdrawn from their bank accounts, were given to the Straubing airbase commander’s personal secretary, Bertha Sötz, for safekeeping. Surprised not to receive any of the jewellery said to have been found with Melitta, Sötz made enquiries and received her rings by return. Any other jewellery had disappeared.
Initially, with no one to claim her body or mourn her passing, Melitta was to be buried in a mass grave with local air-raid casualties. Perhaps out of respect for her contribution as an aeronautical engineer, however, or as the holder of the Iron Cross, Sötz arranged a private burial in the town’s St Michael’s Cemetery. A company from the flying school dug the grave themselves, and then attended the interment in the presence of their officers.
Just three days after Melitta was shot down, the US 104th ‘Timberwolf’ Infantry Division reached Nordhausen, the town near the Bad Sachsa children’s home. Nazi-German resistance in the surrounding woods and hills was stubborn. There had been no further attempts to move the Stauffenberg children and their cousins during the confusion of the final weeks of the war, and now they found themselves on the front line. Allied fighters strafed not only the Wehrmacht vehicles in the woods surrounding their buildings, ‘but also the strawberry patch in our garden’, Berthold recalled.2 As the house was exposed, the children took refuge in the cellar where the tools were kept, partially under and along one side of the property. This room reached ground level where there was no hedge or fence, so they found they could watch the planes, ‘mostly American Mustangs or Lightnings – flying past and shooting’.3
Twelve hours later the children heard the sound of big guns, ‘a deep thundering noise’, as Berthold’s younger brother, Franz Ludwig, described it, and knew the American line was advancing.4 Soon they heard fighting nearby and the Wehrmacht soldiers stationed with them shouted that they were going to lose the war. Then, nothing. ‘Finally the door was pushed open,’ Franz Ludwig recalled, ‘and a small soldier came in with his gun ready, looking about, and someone said that there were only children here, and then a second soldier came in and they seemed satisfied. That was it.’5 The Germans had retreated and, after a thorough search, the site was occupied by American troops, staying in every house except the children’s own. The soldiers were ‘awfully nice, and they were all very young’, Franz Ludwig added.6 As well as playing games with the children, they brought them the first chocolate the younger ones had ever tasted, along with other sweets: ‘a luxury for us beyond description’.7
The newly appointed Mayor of Bad Sachsa came to the home to tell the children that they were officially free, and to register them as local residents a few days later. Standing on a table, he also made ‘a fiery speech’ about how proud they could be of their fathers.8 ‘The words washed over us,’ one of the cousins later wrote. For months they had been told that their parents were criminals, while their enemy had turned out to be the friendly American soldiers.9 Although two nurses were delegated to look after the children, they were now largely left to their own devices. They plundered the stores and roamed the woods searching, like children everywhere, for spent ammunition, Splitter (or shrapnel), and other ‘war booty’, but essentially life continued at Bad Sachsa much as before. They had no idea how to contact their families, and they seemed to be nobody’s priority.
The children had been abducted and detained, but they had never been held in a concentration camp. The Allies had received appalling reports for some time, ever since Soviet forces had reached Majdanek concentration camp in occupied Poland in July 1944. Later that summer, the remains of the camps at Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka were also overrun. Auschwitz had been liberated in January 1945, followed by Stutthof, Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück, at times just weeks after the Sippenhaft and other prominent prisoners had been transferred elsewhere. American forces reached Buchenwald in early April, followed by Dora-Mittelbau, Flossenbürg and Bergen-Belsen two weeks later.
Travelling with the Americans to liberate Belsen was the Scottish pilot, Eric Brown. Now a decorated British test pilot, Eric had been sent to Germany with a team of scientists in the last stages of the war to locate pioneering aviation technology such as supersonic wind tunnels, along with examples of jet and rocket aircraft. He was also to interrogate Germany’s top aeronautical designers, engineers and test pilots. His first lead was that two Luftwaffe pilots fleeing the Soviet advance had flown a pair of Messerschmitt Me 262s south towards Hanover. Eric was flown to Fassberg airfield, where he found the abandoned aircraft. He was ‘immediately struck’ by the ‘complexity’ and ‘sensitivity’ of the jet plane that both Melitta and Hanna had tested during development.10
The US Second Army that had captured Fassberg airfield was also detailed to take the camp at nearby Bergen-Belsen. Although it was not designed as an extermination camp, some 50,000 people had been killed or left to die at Belsen. Among them was Anne Frank, the Dutch teenager who had commented on Claus’s assassination attempt in her diary the summer before. She and her family had been betrayed and arrested just two weeks later. Anne died a few days after her sister, probably of typhus, just weeks before Belsen was liberated. Mass murder was still taking place just days before the Allies reached the camp. Another 13,000 former prisoners were too frail to survive the weeks that followed.
As a German speaker, Eric was called in to translate. Arriving by jeep, he found former prisoners, ‘silent, shuffling ghosts of men’, pacing the yards or standing staring at the ground.11 When he questioned them they were unable even to reply. Over 10,000 corpses lay between the barracks or in open graves. ‘Bodies were piled high. Two-thirds of them were women,’ Eric later testified. More ‘had been bulldozed into pits … the stench was indescribable’.12 Inside the huts, each built to house sixty people, on average he found 250 dying of typhus, dysentery and starvation. ‘I had known the Germans, I had been happy in Germany,’ he later wrote. ‘In the war I had made excuses for them, blamed the Nazis. There could be no excuses for this.’13 Eric then helped interrogate the camp commandants, including Josef Kramer and the twenty-three-year-old Irma Grese who refused to respond, but at one point ‘leapt to her feet and gave the Heil Hitler salute’.14 They, and almost two hundred other guards, were later court-martialled and hanged.
Eric then turned his attention back to locating and interviewing some of the engineers and pilots on his list, who included Wernher von Braun, Ernst Heinkel, Willy Messerchmitt, Focke-Wulf designer Kurt Tank, and Hanna Reitsch. His next lead came from overhearing some Germans in a Lübeck pub one evening. Rumour was that Hanna, that ‘fabulous creature’, as Eric described her, had ‘flown her Fieseler Storch on and off the roof of the German Air Ministry in the last days of the Third Reich’, and was now hiding in Bavaria.15
The rumours were only a slight exaggeration. Hanna and Greim had avoided Soviet anti-aircraft fire on their way out of central Berlin, landing safely at Rechlin at three the same morning. ‘Shivering, weary and oppressed’ in the cold night air, Hanna stamped her feet to get warm while Greim had a conference with the remaining operations staff at the airfield and ordered all available aircraft to the defence of the capital.16 From there they flew to Plön, close to the Danish border, to discover Himmler’s whereabouts from Admiral Dönitz. Because of Greim’s injury, Hanna was in the pilot’s seat of their Bücker Bestmann, the same type of plane that Melitta had been flying over to Schönberg on her own final mission. Like Melitta, Hanna ‘crept rather than flew’, staying as low as possible along the edges of woods and ‘almost brushing the hedges and fences as I passed over them’.17 After the skies proved too dangerous, she drove the last thirty miles, occasionally pulling over to avoid being strafed by Soviet fighters flying overhead.
Hanna and Greim were still travelling when they heard the radio announcements of Hitler’s death, and of the formation of a new German government under Admiral Dönitz. The Führer had died ‘a hero’s death’, Dönitz announced. In fact Hitler and his bride had committed suicide as the Red Army closed in on the Reich Chancellery. Hitler’s pilot, Hans Baur, and others ensured that their bodies were doused with petrol and burned. The dead Führer’s ‘untidy hair fluttered in the wind’, his chauffeur later recorded, while Eva’s dark-blue dress with white frills ‘moved in the wind until finally drenched by the fuel’.18 Other eyewitnesses reported the grisly detail that Eva’s body slowly bent into a sitting position in the intense flames, while Hitler’s shrivelled up in the blaze.
The next day, with the help of Dr Stumpfegger, Magda Goebbels had drugged her six children before they went to bed. Despite last-minute offers to escort the family out, she chose to kill each child in turn with cyanide while they slept. A few hours later, she and her husband left the bunker by the emergency exit leading onto the patch of earth and rubble that had once been the Chancellery garden. There they took their own lives. Their bodies were also burned. Hitler’s Party badge, which Hanna had admired on Magda’s dress in the bunker, was later recovered from her remains, rather melted round the edges. When the story emerged, Hanna would come to believe that the Russians would not have hurt the children she had visited in the bunker. ‘Their lives were wasted,’ she told a journalist, ‘they were innocents’.19
Bormann, Stumpfegger, Below and Baur were among those who finally chose to flee the bunker for the ‘confusion of cables, rubble and tram wires … ruins and bomb craters’ that now formed Berlin.20 Bormann and Stumpfegger bit their cyanide capsules when escape seemed impossible. Below was eventually arrested by the British, and held until 1948. Baur was captured by Russian troops, disappearing for a decade in Soviet detention.
When Hanna and Greim finally reached Plön, Dönitz was already at the helm. He greeted them with a speech on the pressing need to continue the fight against Bolshevism. No one remarked on the unspoken policy shift. Later Dönitz called a war council with the remaining ministers of the regime. When Greim spoke to Field Marshal Keitel about the best air tactics to support General Wenck’s long-awaited advance into Berlin, Keitel informed him that Wenck’s army had long since been destroyed. Capitulation was clearly imminent. Their only realistic goal was to contain the Soviet advance for as long as possible, allowing civilians to flee towards the Western Allies in the hope of better treatment.
Waiting outside the conference room, Hanna was shocked to see Himmler arrive. Later she recounted how she demanded to know whether he had indeed independently sued for peace. Himmler was happy to admit it. ‘You betrayed your Führer and your people in the very darkest hour?’ Hanna reeled. ‘Such a thing is high treason, Herr Reichsführer … Your place was in the bunker with Hitler.’21 Himmler reportedly laughed her off. ‘History will weigh it differently,’ he told her. ‘Hitler was insane. It should have been stopped long ago.’22 ‘He died for the cause he believed in,’ Hanna retorted. ‘He died bravely and filled with … honour.’23 When Himmler argued that his own actions had been ‘to save German blood, to rescue what was left of our country’, Hanna was dismissive.24 ‘You speak of German blood, Herr Reichsführer? You speak of it now? You should have thought of it years ago, before you became identified with the useless shedding of so much of it.’25 In the heat of anger more truth had slipped out than Hanna usually chose to voice, but a moment later their tête-à-tête was cut short by an aerial attack.* Hanna would not see Himmler again.†
Berlin officially surrendered on 2 May. The last Operation Valkyrie plotters still imprisoned in the capital had been taken out and shot in the rubble a week before. Now exhausted Soviet troops arrived to find a ruined city engulfed in the smoke from persistent fires. The water and sewerage systems were wrecked; there was no fuel, electricity, transport or communications, and little food. The conquering soldiers stole bicycles, watches, bread and blankets. Many fell asleep in the streets, others in the ruins. The next morning many of the women in Berlin were raped, some receiving food or protection in return, others simply beaten. Hanna and Greim now flew on to Königgrätz where Greim belatedly ordered all remaining troops to hold out against the Soviets for as long as possible. He was now too ill to continue himself, lapsing in and out of consciousness, and Hanna had him admitted to hospital. When he took off his wire-rimmed glasses, the frames left a deep impression in his skin. With the heavy furrows on his forehead and the thin-lipped crease of his mouth below, his once full face looked almost folded and ready to be put away.
Temporarily grounded, Hanna and Greim discussed their possible future in a post-Nazi Germany, and decided they had none. They also cursed both Göring and Himmler for their weaknesses and ultimate lack of honour. At one point Greim confided he had associated doubts about Melitta. ‘It wasn’t just a suspicion of cooperating with Himmler,’ Hanna later wrote, ‘it is a fact that she was in contact with him.’26 Himmler had mentioned Melitta in the spring of 1945, prompting Greim to wonder whether she was involved in ‘espionage’.27 Hanna had long seen how Melitta avoided certain colleagues and criticized the regime to others. ‘The suspicion that Melitta was a spy was not viciously created by others,’ she asserted, ‘but tragically brought up by Melitta herself; for example by her way of avoiding me and harshly declining every well-intended offer of help from my side.’28 Hanna also felt that Melitta’s ‘racial burden’ made rumours that she ‘had a foot in both camps’ or was working ‘for the enemy’, more valid.29 The fact that Hanna and Greim spent time discussing this in the final days of the war is more telling about their preoccupations and resentments than Melitta’s connections and activities. There is no evidence that Melitta, whose sole concern by this point was the safety of her family, had been scheming with Himmler.
A few days later, news that capitulation was imminent spurred Greim on. With Hanna in attendance, on 8 May the injured field marshal was flown over the Alps to meet General Kesselring in Austria, to discuss last orders for the Luftwaffe. Kesselring was not in evidence. General Koller, chief of the Luftwaffe General Staff, was shocked by Greim’s appearance. Even with two crutches, two officers and Hanna accompanying him, he could hardly be extracted from his car. He was clearly in pain, Koller noted in his diary. His face was ‘saggy and almost yellow’.30 Koller organized a quick breakfast with strong coffee. The two officers waited outside the room, but Greim insisted that Hanna stay with him at all times. ‘It’s not easy to speak frankly with the chief of the Luftwaffe …’ Koller wrote plaintively, ‘and it’s made more difficult because I can’t get Hanna Reitsch out of the room. I want to but Greim won’t stand for it.’31
Greim and Hanna then recounted the story of their journey from the bunker. Both stressed the pain of not being allowed to die with their Führer. By now in tears, Hanna added that ‘she wanted to kneel at the altar of the Fatherland and pray’.32 ‘Altar?’ Koller queried, unsure of her meaning. ‘Bunker,’ Hanna replied.33 For Koller this was hysterical rubbish. In the published version of his diaries he claims to have told them that the bunker was ‘a monument to the betrayal of Germany’.34 When he proposed that Göring, who had done so much for Hanna, should be protected from the Soviets, Koller was again shocked by Hanna’s retort that Göring was a traitor who should be dealt with. Koller, who had been trying to arrange a meeting between Göring and the Americans, did not find this helpful. Both Greim and Hanna then told Koller that if he were captured, he should shoot himself. ‘You have to …’ Hanna made her case; ‘to be captured lacks honour.’35
That evening Greim received a telex informing him that the regime had signed an unconditional surrender and all hostilities were to cease, ‘effective immediately’.36 While most of the remaining senior leadership destroyed their paper records, Greim silently slipped his last orders into the pocket of his uniform jacket. His command was already at an end.
Two junior officers were now detailed to drive Greim and Hanna to the civilian hospital at Kitzbühel. Halfway there, Greim ordered the car to stop. His duties dispatched to the best of his abilities, he now planned to evade capture. In a meadow by the roadside, Hanna carefully helped him out of his uniform and into civilian clothes. It was a pathetic scene, and yet somehow also intimate. The last commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe was badly injured and exhausted but nevertheless on the run. Instead of an officer, he asked Hanna, the only woman present, to help him change his clothes. Greim then told the officers to shoot him as a deserter. Later, Koller wrote that ‘the situation for these young officers must have been extremely uncomfortable’.37 Eventually they persuaded Greim back into the car, and deposited him and Hanna at the hospital. Even now Greim refused ‘to take anyone with him, except Hanna Reitsch’, who remained by his side.38 He was still being treated when American troops entered the town and, as Hanna put it, ‘we saw the final collapse of all our hopes’.39
Amid ‘the chaos of defeat’, Hanna later said, she had drawn strength from the knowledge that her family were nearby, at the Schloss Leopoldskron just outside Salzburg.40 Now she asked for a pass to visit them. Instead, Koller reported that her parents, her sister and her sister’s three children had all been killed in the last bombing raid on Salzburg, in the very final days of the conflict. ‘She took it stoically,’ he noted.41 Afterwards she lit candles and propped up some photographs of her family in Greim’s room.
Hanna would later learn that her family had been killed in quite different circumstances. Once the Third Reich had fallen, rumours began to circulate that displaced families within Germany would be returned to their home towns. Hirschberg was in the Soviet zone. Goebbels had long exploited stories of violence, rape and looting by the Red Army to support national solidarity in the face of invasion, but Willy Reitsch knew there was some truth behind the propaganda. As a doctor, when providing medical assistance in regions recaptured by the Wehrmacht he had seen the suffering caused by Soviet soldiers. He was terrified that such brutal treatment would be inflicted on those he loved. In time Hanna would come to see and describe her father’s motivations at this moment as ‘an overriding duty to preserve his own family’.42 Willy Reitsch had been traumatized by the presumed death of his only son, the loss of the war, the collapse of the regime he supported, and the fear of a brutal life and death under the communist enemy. In a terrible echo of Magda Goebbels’ extreme beliefs, to the controlling Willy Reitsch it somehow seemed best to kill all the women and children in his family himself.*
When a friend dropped by on 4 May, she was told the Reitsch family was unwell. The next day, the same caller saw a cart outside the Schloss Leopoldskron, its load covered with old blankets. Inside were the bodies of Willy and Emy Reitsch, their maid Anni, and Hanna’s sister Heidi with her three young children. Having failed to fatally poison his family, Willy Reitsch had shot them all before turning the gun on himself. In a final note to Hanna, he told his daughter she must find solace in the knowledge that they were all now safely with their Maker. Her father ‘had seen no alternative’, Hanna later wrote through the lens of self-preservation, ‘but to take upon himself the heaviest responsibility of all’.43
Eric Brown had now heard from his American colleagues that there was a ‘smallish, fair, petite’ woman in her mid-thirties hiding in an American hospital near Kitzbühel, who they believed might be Hanna Reitsch. Eric was asked to find and identify her. When he walked round the women’s ward, Hanna ‘immediately recognized’ him and started ‘feigning a heart attack’, he later reported.44 ‘You know, Hanna,’ he told her, ‘the game is up.’45 Negotiating the right to question her after the initial interviews, Eric handed Hanna over into American custody. When he was finally given access to her again, their conversation provided an extraordinary insight into her beliefs.
‘At first she was very suspicious,’ Eric wrote, but he reassured her that he wanted to talk about aircraft rather than politics, and ‘she began to talk freely’.46 He was fascinated by Hanna’s experiences with a wide range of German civil and military aircraft, including helicopters and the V-1 flying bomb. His priority, however, was to get her to talk about the Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet rocket fighter, a plane that he had developed ‘an overwhelming desire to fly as soon as possible’.47 ‘Although she was reluctant to admit this,’ he later wrote, it soon became evident that Hanna had never flown the plane under power, but only ‘to make production test flights from towed glides’.48*
It must have been a relief for Hanna to discuss aviation with someone who shared her passion. Once she began to talk, however, she quickly digressed. Eric could see that she was in ‘an emotional state’.49 She had not long since learned of her father’s ‘slaying of all the females in his household’, he bluntly recalled.50 He decided to let her talk on. In any case, ‘when she started talking you couldn’t stop her’, he said. ‘It was a cascade.’51 At one point Hanna ‘gushed out’ information about the key players in ‘ODESSA’, the affiliations of former SS officers who she was sure would eliminate anyone they believed had committed high treason against the Third Reich.52 She was more worried about having said too much to the Americans, she told Eric, than she was about being accused by them of cooperating with the regime. Eric was convinced she had many more contacts than she later chose to make clear; she never mentioned ODESSA again. She also ‘spoke of Udet dispassionately, without any sign of loyalty’, Eric felt, and then told him of her journey into Hitler’s bunker, ‘a saga of pure courage’.53 To Eric it was clear that Hanna’s ‘devotion for Hitler was total devotion’.54 ‘He represented the Germany that I love,’ she told him.55
Hanna also denied the Holocaust. When Eric told her that he had been at the liberation of Belsen, and had seen the starving inmates and piles of the dead for himself, ‘she pooh-poohed all this. She didn’t believe it … She didn’t want to believe any of it.’56 Such denial was painful for them both, but Eric found that ‘nothing could convince her that the Holocaust took place’.57 Hanna was, he concluded, a ‘fanatical aviator, fervent German nationalist and ardent Nazi’.58 Above all, he later wrote, ‘the fanaticism she displayed in her attitude to Hitler, made my blood run cold’.59
Hanna was now placed under house arrest in her family’s old rooms at the Schloss Leopoldskron. At first Captain Robert Work, the sympathetic head of the US Air Force Intelligence Unit, and his colleagues, simply helped her sort through her family’s possessions. She saved only some of her mother’s poetry, family photographs and letters.* She was also allowed to cycle over to their graves. Once, on learning that her and Melitta’s former colleague, Professor Georgii, was being held just across the German border, she made an illicit trip over to visit him. Not long after, she was moved for interrogation. Before she left, Hanna’s occasional wartime secretary, Gretl Böss, managed to visit her. During their half-hour alone together, the two women exchanged watches so that Hanna’s, a gift from Udet years earlier, would be kept safe. With it, Hanna also secretly handed over her cyanide capsule.
Hanna was then transferred to another well-appointed villa, where she was gently questioned by Work. She ‘carefully weighs the “honor” aspects of every remark’, he commented. ‘The use of the word amounts practically to a fetish complex … and is almost an incongruous embodiment of her entire philosophy. Her constant repetition of the word is in no manner as obvious to her as it is to the interrogator, nor is the meaning the same.’60 For Hanna, ‘honour’ had become the overriding virtue that exonerated any lapse of judgement, however serious, but at the same time it was reduced to a simple code of loyalty. Ironically, this was a code she had often chosen to defy during the war when it suited her, but which she now embraced to rescue her conscience.
Work also recorded that Hanna still ‘held the Führer in high esteem’.61 Shocked by her impressions in the bunker, she reasoned that Hitler must have suffered a personality disorder in his last months, as a result of medicines prescribed by his doctors. ‘Hitler ended his life as a criminal against the world,’ she told Work. ‘But he did not begin it that way.’62 Hanna had not lost her faith in the early ideals of her Führer. Nor did she condemn the Nazi regime’s fundamental racism. All she conceded was that Hitler had proved a poor soldier and statesman. ‘Strangely enough,’ Work noted, ‘she does not appear to hold him personally responsible.’63 Instead she argued that ‘a great part of the fault lies with those who led him, lured him, criminally misdirected him, and informed him falsely’.64 Ultimately, Hanna argued, Hitler’s unchallenged power turned him from ‘an idealistically motivated benefactor to a grasping, scheming despot’.65 In her analysis, it was essentially the system, and the advisers, who were at fault.
Hanna would later provide a damning condemnation of Göring and his ‘morphine-sickened egotism’, as well as considerable information on her aviation test work.66 Her declarations that ‘the people must know what sort of criminal Göring was, a criminal against Germany and a criminal against the world’, led Work to hope she might become an ambassador for reconciliation in post-war Germany.67 She had, after all, never become a member of the Nazi Party. As a result he treated her with kid gloves, leading Eric Brown to comment that ‘she made a fool out of him’.68 In fact Hanna’s criticisms remained focused on Göring for misusing the Luftwaffe and deceiving Hitler. She did not express any wider disillusion with the regime. ‘Every life lost on either side … is, in her opinion, to be unquestionably chalked up against Göring,’ Work closed his report incredulously.69 Even ‘Hitler’s crime, was that he did not possess the necessary insight to realize the incompetency of Göring.’70
Above all, however, the Americans wanted Hanna to provide confirmation of Hitler’s death. Soviet intelligence had found the charred remains of his body within days of taking Berlin. Stalin was not convinced, however, and stories began to circulate that the Führer had managed a last-minute escape. Hanna dismissed the suggestion contemptuously. She believed he had been too ill to live long anyhow. ‘Hitler is dead!’ she told Work. ‘He had no reason to live, and the tragedy was that he knew it well.’71 Although Hanna refused to provide a report on this, Work believed she answered his questions ‘with a sincere and conscientious effort to be truthful and exact’.72 His interrogation report on the matter would later join the supporting documents at the Nuremberg war crimes trials.*
Greim was officially arrested on 22 May. If it was a moment to take stock, his position was not heartening. His foot had never fully healed and his health was wrecked. His air force was destroyed, his country in ruins and his cause discredited. Two days later he bit on the cyanide capsule given to him by Hitler. He was dead within minutes.
Hanna believed that Greim took his life to avoid having to testify at the Nuremberg trials against Göring, the man who had blocked his career, and who he held responsible for the destruction of the Luftwaffe.* ‘I am sure that Greim was not able to reconcile his honour as a soldier with giving the information he would have had to give regarding the despicable traits and blunderings of Göring,’ she told Work.73 Further motivation might have come from the fear he might be selected for a prisoner exchange with the Russians, and face torture and execution.
Greim and Hanna had planned a joint suicide when Hitler had given them their lethal cyanide capsules. Once they had left the bunker, however, Hanna feared that taking their lives together might imply a romantic relationship, besmirching the honour of both. Hanna’s Austrian cousin, Helmut Heuberger, believed they had a ‘friendship based on deep love, in my opinion the greatest love. But it was never physically consummated.’74 Greim was married, and it is possible that his and Hanna’s sense of honour might have either restrained them, or provided a convenient excuse. Either way, their esteem for each other was certainly absolute. ‘Our gratitude, respect and loyalty to him know no boundaries,’ Hanna later wrote to a friend. ‘His whole being and personality had earned our reverence.’75 Hanna was not with Greim when he chose to end his life, but neither was she surprised by his decision. With almost everyone she cared for gone, she was only waiting a decent interval, she told herself, to avoid the scandal of an apparent suicide pact.
A few days later, still in American custody, Hanna allowed herself to be driven to Greim’s grave, in the same Salzburg cemetery where her family was buried. In the car, her escorting officers showed her photographs from Dachau concentration camp. Hanna’s immediate response was not recorded. If she thought again of Peter Riedel’s Majdanek leaflet, the labour camps at Peenemünde or Eric’s testimony from Belsen, or if she questioned her own complicity with the regime responsible for such crimes, she did not publicly admit it. Later she again claimed not to believe in such atrocities. She then paid her last respects at the grave of the man she had most admired in life. It was a privilege denied many millions of others under the regime they had both supported so fervently to the end.
While in the Salzburg cemetery, Hanna recognized another woman at the gravesides. Leni Riefenstahl was the film director who had become Hitler’s most famous chronicler of the Third Reich. Hanna had first met her at the Berlin Olympics in 1936 when Riefenstahl was making her remarkable film about the games. They had shared a growing status as Nazi female celebrities ever since. When Riefenstahl came over, Hanna took some crumpled papers from her pocket and pressed them into her hands. ‘Read this letter,’ she said. ‘It may be taken away from me, and then no one but me will know what it says.’76 It was one of the Goebbels’ last letters from the bunker. Hanna was now determined to ensure that these made the historical record. Riefenstahl then asked whether Hanna, who she described as a ‘small, frail woman’, had really intended to be a suicide pilot.77 Hanna proudly confirmed it. She then reported Hitler’s objection to the operation as being that ‘every person who risks his life in the battle for his Fatherland must have the chance for survival, even if it is small’.78 Hanna was still defending her Führer’s ideals. She could not accept that he and the regime had betrayed the German people, any more than that they had been responsible for war crimes.
Looking at Greim’s final resting place, and talking with Riefenstahl about their country and the decisions and reputation of the regime, Hanna came to a decision. As she hugged Riefenstahl goodbye, she decided she would not, after all, take her own life. She had always believed herself to be part of a solution, a force for good. Now she decided she would give herself once more to Germany, to help restore some national dignity and pride in the weeks, months, even years after defeat. Hanna now told her US interrogators that she planned ‘to tell the truth about Göring, “the shallow showman”; to tell the truth about Hitler, “the criminal incompetent”; and to tell the German people the truth about the dangers of the form of government that the Third Reich gave them’.79 But Hanna was either incapable of telling the truth, even to herself, or she was cynically lying. When the Americans organized a press conference for her to publicly repeat her denunciation of Hitler’s military and strategic leadership, she instead defiantly asserted that she had willingly supported him, and claimed she would do the same again.
Alexander’s elderly mother, Karoline von Stauffenberg, had spent the last months of the war under house arrest at the family schloss in Lautlingen. French forces arrived in mid-April and, after some desultory fighting, the town surrendered. As the unofficial head of the local community, Karoline received the French commanding officer in her little dressing room, between the sink and a table. At his request, she agreed to a small clinic being installed at the house, and the Red Cross flag was raised above the roof. When more French troops arrived, shops were looted and there were reports of rapes, Karoline provided refuge for the terrified villagers. She was also required to host a large number of evacuated Gestapo families.
In early June, Karoline’s sister, Alexandrine, the children’s great-aunt and a former Red Cross nurse, persuaded the French military commander to lend her his official car with French number plates and a precious tank of petrol. She then drove over three hundred miles through two Allied zones to Bad Sachsa, the last place where Melitta had reported the children were being held. When she arrived, on 11 June, she found the home empty. It was only when she reached the last villa that she heard young voices. All fifteen of the missing children were there. They ‘cheered and surrounded their [aunt] immediately’, Konstanze later wrote.80
Bad Sachsa would soon be transferred to Soviet control. ‘The Russians were the key word for terror,’ Franz Ludwig recalled. ‘They were a menace … a cause of absolute fright.’81 The irrepressible Alexandrine quickly stowed Berthold, Heimeran and Franz Ludwig in the French car, and organized a bus, powered by methanol, to follow behind with the other children. A few hours after they left, the Soviets moved into Bad Sachsa, prohibiting any further movement.
Driving back, Alexandrine passed the notorious Dora labour camp and the Mittelbau factory where the V-2 rockets were assembled by prisoners forced into slave labour. Berthold would never forget the entrance to the underground works so close to where he had been living, where so many had died for the Nazi vengeance-weapon programme. Alexandrine then told the boys about the actions taken by their father, uncle, other family and friends. Berthold and Heimeran already had a vague idea, but for Franz Ludwig it was ‘quite astounding’.82 All the children were also astonished by the devastation of their country. This was not a Germany they could recognize. The following day, against all the odds, the children of Hitler’s most famous would-be assassin arrived safely home, thanks to two aunts: one a determined elderly veteran of the Red Cross, the other a courageous part-Jewish holder of the Iron Cross.
A few months earlier, after the news of Melitta’s death had reached Alexander in April, the Sippenhaft prisoners had been moved on again, eventually arriving at the gates, watchtowers and high-tension wire fences of Dachau. Here the men were lined up against the wall of a brick building to be drafted into the Volkssturm, the people’s militia created in the last months of the war for civil defence. Several of the women cried as the men were taken away. It was obvious that such weak people could not form an effective fighting force and they feared they would simply be executed.
By the time Dachau was evacuated ten days later, the Sippenhaft prisoners had been reunited. Together they watched column after column of prisoners marching out of the gates in their wooden clogs. Some were too weak to walk and collapsed onto their hands and knees. If they did not get up when the guards shouted at them, they were shot through the back of the neck. The prisoners were then herded onto buses and driven in convoy across the Alps into Italy. Their SS guards had orders to shoot them should there be any risk of their falling into Allied hands.
Eventually they arrived in the southern Tyrol, where a delicate ceasefire had been negotiated. Here some of the prisoners managed to make contact with a few senior Wehrmacht officers, who sent a company of soldiers to disarm their SS guards and claim responsibility for them. ‘At times it was not quite clear who was planning to shoot whom,’ one of the prisoners later wrote. ‘Would the SS shoot the prisoners, would the soldiers shoot the SS, or would the Italian partisans, who were beginning to appear along the ridges and hillsides, shoot the whole lot of us?’83 A week later the first American troops arrived, and the SS disappeared in the night.* ‘Within a short time the entire place was crawling with jeeps and young American soldiers in their clean uniforms,’ and the prisoners were handed over.84 It was 4 May. Their liquidation, they discovered, had been set for 29 April, and the last, oddly shaped vehicle in their convoy had been a mobile gas chamber, able to poison passengers with the carbon monoxide from its own exhaust fumes.
The Americans had little idea who it was they had saved, but they understood they were VIP prisoners of the Nazis, and ‘showered us with cigarettes and chocolates and … hundreds of tins of good American food’, Fey wrote.85 ‘We couldn’t quite join in the victorious mood of our foreign friends and the American soldiers,’ Anna-Louise Hofacker, another of the group, later recalled. ‘At the same time we were free, and on the side of the defeated.’86 Driven first to Verona in the bright May sunshine, they were then flown to Naples before being transferred to the Hotel Paradiso in Capri. Here they were kept under guard for over a month while their stories were verified.
Walking round Capri together, Fey felt that she and Alexander at last found ‘a kind of inner peace’.87 Towards the end of their enforced stay, Alexander suggested they visit the small chapel. As he sat playing the organ, Fey found she could not stop her tears. She knew that she would soon be rejoining her husband, and she still hoped to find her sons, but ‘the thought of leaving Alex, who was in many ways so helpless and who had lost so much, made me immensely sad’, she wrote.88 Fey later confided to a close friend that theirs had been a ‘love affair’, and Alexander had hoped to marry her.89 When he said farewell, he gave her a last poem: ‘You are mine, I shout it to the winds,’ he had written.90*
Alexander and Mika eventually arrived in Lautlingen the day after the Stauffenberg children returned, astounding everyone by pulling up in ‘a great Mercedes car’ loaned to them by the cardinal of Munich.91 Mika and her children were overwhelmed to be together again, and Alexander was deeply moved to see all his nephews and nieces. With him he brought the shocking news of Melitta’s death. The children now grieved for their ‘shot-down aviator aunt’, as well as for their fathers, uncles and great-uncle Nüx, all executed by the Nazis.92 It was only when they were at their peaceful Lautlingen home again that the reality of what had happened sank in. Perhaps worst of all for Berthold, Heimeran, Franz Ludwig and Valerie, there was still no news of their mother.
Nina was alive, but since July she had been stranded in a small town in Bavaria, near the Czech border. It was another month before she managed to reach Lautlingen. She walked up to the house dressed entirely in black, still with her battered hatbox but now also carrying her young baby, Konstanze, in her arms. She ‘still possessed much of her exotic charm’, a cousin wrote, but not surprisingly after the shocking death of Claus, her long months of imprisonment and lonely childbirth, ‘she looked worn and far older than her years’.93 Karoline was astonished that the Gestapo had not murdered her son’s wife. Nina’s survival was due not only to her potential value as a prisoner, but also to Melitta’s support, her own impressive resilience, and luck.
In early April a rather reluctant military policeman had been detailed to collect Nina and her baby from hospital and transfer them to Schönberg, to join the other Sippenhaft prisoners. Because they were travelling together, people often mistook them for a married couple: a misapprehension that both guard and prisoner ‘denied vociferously’.94 Endlessly changing trains, Nina was appalled to see what had become of her country. Cars labelled ‘Flying Court Martial’ were parked at the stations. Dead bodies hung from trees in courtyards, with placards below labelling them as deserters.95 Eventually she refused to go on. Writing her guard ‘a testimonial to the effect that he had done his duty to the end’, she found herself and her child willingly abandoned in a village near Hof.96 Shortly afterwards the Americans arrived and, by chance, Nina had become the first of the prisoners to be officially liberated, if with no means of contacting her family. For a few weeks she stayed with friends, using Melitta’s ration cards and regaining her strength while she nursed her baby. One evening a pair of drunken American soldiers forced their way into her building, threatening to shoot her. In the end one showed her photographs of his family, before they both fell asleep.
Only after Germany’s official capitulation did Nina judge it safe to travel again. She went first to Buchenwald, searching for her four older children. American forces had liberated the camp on 11 April, following a revolt by prisoners who had stormed the watchtowers, seizing control earlier on the same day. Some 28,000 prisoners had already been forced to march further into Germany, a third of them dying from exhaustion or being shot arbitrarily en route. Yet over 21,000 people had still been incarcerated at the camp. ‘Buchenwald was like a bled out wound,’ Elisabeth zu Guttenberg wrote after also searching for the Sippenhaft prisoners there.97 She and Nina had missed each other by a few hours, both learning only that their families had been moved before liberation, and that there were no records as to where.
Nina returned to Lautlingen with little hope, except to find a quiet sanctuary where she might care for Konstanze. Instead she was met by her three sons, Berthold, Heimeran and Franz Ludwig, and her young daughter Valerie. Karoline and Mika were also at the schloss, and Alexander had come and left again, searching for information about Melitta’s last days. The terrible confirmation of her death hit Nina hard, but she had known the silence from her sister-in-law did not bode well. Melitta had always been in touch, brought material support, news and comfort, or sent food coupons. Her absence had been palpable. Yet ‘feelings were a luxury that nearly no one allowed themselves …’ Nina’s last child, Konstanze, later wrote. ‘It was more important to think about the necessities after the war.’98 The courageous Nina mustered her strength and threw herself into the work of looking after five children, reclaiming her property, and securing an income in post-war Germany. For her, as for so many of the family survivors, the priority was her children, ‘a new generation in whom lives the hope of the future’.99
Hanna was still in American custody when the surviving Stauffenbergs were reunited. She was now being detained in a series of prisons by the American Counter Intelligence Corps. Forgetting her acceptance of political arrests, imprisonments and executions under the Nazi regime, Hanna considered this move an outrage. Even her journey by jeep to the first prison, ‘over atrocious roads’, as she put it, fed her resentment.100 As Eric Brown saw it, she had grown accustomed to large rooms and fine meals during her earlier ‘soft-hearted’ treatment by the US Air Force Intelligence Unit.101 Internment, by contrast, was hard, and conditions basic.
Sitting on her straw mattress, Hanna felt the cold October air blow in through the barred window of her cell. ‘The degradation of captivity’, she felt, ‘living between narrow walls through a monotony of days, gazing longingly to where, high above my head, a patch of blue sky could be glimpsed’, was a feeling that Melitta might have recognized.102 Whereas Melitta had learnt of the execution of her family while in detention, however, Hanna was tormented by the murder and suicide of hers. In a sense they were both victims of the same regime, but Hanna could still not accept the truth that would have put her on the wrong side of history. Instead she complained that her guards were unnecessarily antagonistic, and that the Americans had deliberately employed Jewish staff to make life more difficult for the Germans in their custody. Entirely self-centred, ‘I tried to live on,’ she wrote bitterly, ‘enduring the vicissitudes of a High Criminal Person. My offence? I was a German, well-known as an air-woman and as one who cherished an ardent love of her country and had done her duty to the last.’103
In October, Hanna was transferred to the first of the two internment camps where she would spend the end of 1945 and most of the next year. Camp King near Oberursel, north-west of Frankfurt, for a while contained many of America’s most important Nazi prisoners including Göring, Dönitz, Keitel and Kesselring. During the day prisoners could mix freely, and lectures, literary evenings and singing were organized, but it was cold, there was limited food and blankets, and Hanna could only see a process of ‘torment and degradation’.104 The only woman among the leaders awaiting trial, she was soon particularly close to Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk, the regime’s former finance minister. Having enjoyed long conversations ‘about everything’, she told him she could ‘feel your thoughts steadily in me, stronger than any words’.105 When she learnt that her brother Kurt had survived the war, she proudly wrote to him that for many months she had been ‘sitting behind barbed wire, surrounded by the most worthy German men, leaders in so many fields. The enemy have no idea what riches they are giving me.’106 ‘How are you bearing all those terrible things that have happened to our Fatherland, and us personally?’ she went on to ask, before expressing her concern that the ‘degrading and false reports’ of the final days of the regime, stemming from her interrogation, might have caused him ‘shame or anger’ or tarnished the honour of their family.107 ‘We are delivered into the hands of the enemy’, she wrote, and ‘are at their mercy and at that of all their dirty methods’.108
Alexander spent the late summer and early autumn of 1945 trying to find Melitta’s family. After the official surrender, Klara had cycled over a hundred miles to Würzburg, where she found the ruins of Alexander and Melitta’s home. Neighbours told her that her sister had visited after the bombing, and gave her the address at Lautlingen. It was through mutual friends that she later received ‘the unexpected and devastating news’ of Melitta’s death.109 She soon had more dreadful news. Facing the Soviet advance towards Danzig, Melitta’s elderly father, Michael Schiller, had decided, unlike Willy Reitsch, to stay in his home and confront the Soviet soldiers. He died some weeks later, in circumstances that have never become clear. His daughter Lili believed he met his end either in a shelter, or in the cellar of their old house, and was buried ‘somewhere in the garden’.110 Ill and exhausted, Melitta’s mother Margarete had then headed west with thousands of other refugees, hoping to reach Lili at Neumünster. The last trace of her to reach her family was a letter entrusted to a fellow traveller: she must have died somewhere on the road.*
Having spoken with Klara, Alexander returned to Straubing, where Melitta had been shot down. He had no doubt that his wife had been flying towards Schönberg to find him, and he hoped to find anyone who had witnessed her last moments. American records were not available, and several witnesses thought the aggressor had been a German Messerschmitt Me 109. Rumours had also spread that, having survived the crash, Melitta had been denied life-saving medical treatment. As a result, many in the family held the Luftwaffe responsible for her death. Melitta’s sister Jutta found it hard to accept that an American plane would have strayed so close to an aerodrome ‘bristling with anti-aircraft armaments’.111 ‘The possibility cannot be excluded that German anti-aircraft weapons had fired under the mistaken belief that a supposed enemy of the people was involved,’ she argued.112 Others went further. Clemens’s son believed Melitta was ‘most likely’ shot down ‘by a German who knew who was in the plane’.113 Nina agreed that, as ‘there was no warning of enemy aircraft in the area’, it was certainly possible that Melitta, ‘who was an embarrassment, was shot down’ deliberately.114
Other speculation had developed around Melitta’s last intentions. The wounded serviceman who had witnessed her crash had heard that she ‘was removing important files belonging to the resistance movement’.115 More likely, given that she was carrying her passport and a large sum of money, Jutta felt she was undertaking a ‘bold rescue attempt … planned long ago’, to bring Alexander and his family across the border into neutral Switzerland.116
Needing answers, Alexander sought out Bertha Sötz, the airbase secretary who had arranged Melitta’s funeral. The Gestapo had ordered Melitta’s personal possessions to be sent to their head office in Berlin. Instead Sötz had kept them, and she now handed Alexander Melitta’s money, passport, Gestapo permits, photograph album and other effects. For a while he sat quietly holding Melitta’s wedding ring; nothing could be more familiar and yet seem more out of place.
Alexander later wrote that he was forced to conclude Melitta was shot down by the Allies. ‘She was trying to find me,’ he added, ‘and would have tried to escape with me to Switzerland.’ Whether this had been Melitta’s intention can never be known. What is clear is that it demanded enormous courage to fly a slow, unarmed Luftwaffe Bücker Bü 181 Bestmann on a private mercy mission above territory under regular attack in April 1945, and Melitta’s sacrifice, as Karoline later wrote, was evidence of ‘her deep commitment to the family’.117
After months of work, Alexander eventually arranged for Melitta’s body to be exhumed for return to Lautlingen. He then formally identified her remains. Her face was largely unchanged and perfectly recognizable, the children later overheard him telling their mother, Nina. Melitta was not an incorruptible saint or martyr, but she had been buried quickly and her body preserved naturally in the very dry grave. Only her nose had disintegrated; her beautiful profile lost.
That autumn, Melitta’s coffin was placed on a trailer hitched to a pre-war Hansa 1100 sedan car, owned by the son of the Lautlingen grocer, and driven back for reburial. On 8 September 1945, there was a small service at the local Catholic church, organized in sympathy although Melitta was a Protestant. Few people attended. In the autumn of 1945 there was still no postal service to send news, and travel permits were required even for short distances. As a result it was only Alexander and his closest surviving family: Karoline, Alexandrine, Nina, Mika and the children, who witnessed the mortal remains of Countess Melitta Schiller-Stauffenberg being laid to rest in the family vault.
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* Himmler had recently ordered the execution of all concentration camp inmates too sick to march away from the front line, but neither he nor Hanna was thinking of prisoners when they talked of the shedding of German blood.
† Himmler was captured on 21 May. Two days later he bit his cyanide capsule, dying within fifteen minutes.
* Willy Reitsch was one of thousands of civilians from eastern Germany making the same choice.
* Full of self-confidence, Eric took up a Komet not long after this. Accelerating rapidly to 450 mph, he felt as though he were ‘in charge of a runaway train’. Once he had touched back down safely, he and the ground crew went for a celebratory stiff drink. See Eric Brown, Wings on My Sleeve (2007), p. 112.
* By contrast, when Göring was captured on 9 May, he reportedly had sixteen matching suitcases with him.
* Hanna later denied the accounts published from her testimony, claiming she had never authorized or signed her interrogation reports. In fact it was not standard practice for such reports to be signed or approved by their subjects.
* Göring would also later kill himself with cyanide, just hours before he was due to be hanged on 15 October 1946.
* Some of the SS guards were reportedly later ambushed by partisans, and hanged.
* Fey was eventually reunited with her Italian husband and sons, all of whom had survived the war. They settled together in Italy, where she later wrote her memoirs.
* Margarete Schiller’s body was never found, and she was officially declared dead in 1962.