“Stay alive, my Führer, it’s the will of every German!”
(Hanna Reitsch, German flying ace)
All Hitler’s generals were abandoning him. Hitler woke up in a bad mood. The Wehrmacht officers, the SS officers, he loathed them all. In his eyes they were incompetent at best, at worst they were traitors and cowards. The bunker was surrounded. Now it was the time for Tempelhof Airport to fall into Russian hands. All that remained was the runways in Gatow, in the south-west of the city. For how long would they hold out? The Russians had doubled their attacks. But a small two-seater aeroplane, a Fieseler-Storch, managed to land. Its pilot was the air force general Ritter von Greim. He travelled with Hanna Reitsch, his companion, twenty years his junior, who acted as his navigator. She had just celebrated her thirty-third birthday and didn’t want to miss the opportunity to see Hitler again for anything in the world. And as a plus, as a civilian German flying ace, she wasn’t afraid of slaloming between the shells of the Soviet anti-aircraft fire. Von Greim and Reitsch had been in Rechlin, a Nazi base 150 kilometres to the north, when, two days earlier, they had received a clear order from the Reich general staff: “Come to Berlin straight away! The Führer wants to see you.”
Having arrived in Gatow, von Greim interrogated the Nazi officers: why was he risking his life to come to Berlin? Secret defence, they told him. “But does the order still apply?” the general said irritably. “More than ever.” the officer replied. “Go to the bunker whatever the cost.”
Gatow Airport was only about thirty kilometres from the Führerbunker, but the routes were almost entirely blocked by enemy checks. The only way of reaching the Führer was by air. So they had to take off again in their little aeroplane. The pair did their best to dodge the Soviet shells that pierced the Berlin sky. After a few minutes, the hedgehopping plane was hit by machine-gun fire. “I’m wounded,” von Greim shouted, before fainting. A bullet had passed through the cabin and struck him in the foot. Hanna Reitsch, sitting behind him, reached over his shoulder and grabbed the joystick. She knew Berlin like the back of her hand, having flown over it many times. But she had never piloted a plane under fire from the most powerful artillery in the world. In Gatow, the Nazi officer had assured her that a makeshift runway had been cleared so that they could land near the bunker, beside the Brandenburg Gate. Hans Baur had seen to everything. The lampposts had been removed over several hundred metres to keep the plane from breaking its wings on landing. An ingenious idea. Reitsch just about managed to land in the middle of the street, but a little further away from the place Baur had prepared. The propeller was still turning when the Soviet soldiers arrived, but a Nazi vehicle arrived at great speed to pick up the pilot and her wounded companion.
They reached the bunker at about 6:00 pm, safe and almost sound. The first to welcome them was Magda Goebbels. In the middle of a fit of hysterics, she burst into tears when she saw them. Did she think they had come to take them all away? Von Greim paid no attention; he had regained consciousness but was bleeding copiously from his foot. He was immediately taken to a little operating theatre. Hitler soon joined him there. At last a man of courage, he rejoiced. The rest of the dialogue between von Greim and Hitler was reported by Hanna Reitsch to the American secret services in October 1945, after she was taken prisoner:
Hitler: Do you know why I asked you to come?
Von Greim: No, my Führer.
Hitler: Because Hermann Göring betrayed and abandoned me and the Fatherland. He made contact with the enemy behind my back. His action was a mark of cowardice. And contrary to my orders, he fled to Berchtesgaden. From there he sent me a disrespectful telegram. He said I had appointed him as my successor one day and that now, since I was no longer capable of ruling the Reich from Berlin, he was ready to do it from Berchtesgaden in my place. He concluded the telegram by saying that if he had had no reply from me by 9:30 pm [in Göring’s version it says 10:00 pm] on the date of the telegram, he would conclude that my reply was in the affirmative.
Hanna Reitsch, who admired the Führer without ever having been a member of the Nazi Party, described the scene as “dramatically poignant.” According to her, Hitler had tears in his eyes when he spoke of Göring’s betrayal. He seemed deeply hurt, almost like a child. Then, as so often, his mood switched in a flash. His eyes sprang back to life, a frown appeared on his brow and his lips pursed nervously. “An ultimatum!” he began shrieking like a lunatic. “An ultimatum!! I am spared nothing. No allegiance is respected, there is no honour, there are no disappointments I have not had, no betrayals that I have not experienced, and now this on top of everything. Nothing is left. Every wrong has been done to me!”
Von Greim and Reitsch didn’t dare to interrupt him. They were petrified by this outpouring of hatred from the man for whom they had just risked their lives.
They knew nothing about the “betrayal.” Von Greim was a Luftwaffe general and, as such, depended directly on the “traitor” Göring, who remained the all-powerful German Aviation Minister until 23 April. “I immediately had Göring arrested for treason to the Reich,” Hitler continued calmly. “I stripped him of all his functions and drummed him out of all our organisations. That was why I summoned you to me.”
Von Greim sat up painfully in his makeshift bed, his foot causing him terrible pain. He concealed a rictus of pain.
“I hereby appoint you Göring’s successor as Oberbefehlshaber [commander-in-chief] of the Luftwaffe.”
So that was why Hitler had asked von Greim to come to the bunker! Such an appointment could have been made perfectly well at a distance. But Hitler had absolutely no idea about the situation outside his shelter, and he was still utterly unconcerned about the lives of his compatriots, even when they were the last generals still loyal to him.
Now that the announcement had been made officially, von Greim had nothing to do but head back towards Rechlin. Not a moment to lose, the Führer told him. And the wound in his foot? An unfortunate incident, but one that was endurable in wartime! “Go away and lead the counter-offensive from the air,” Hitler ordered. Except that the sky over Berlin was now Russian-speaking. Making an emergency landing on a bombed street was one thing, taking off again quite another. Hitler couldn’t have cared less. His orders were more important than reality on the ground. So Rechlin airbase had sent its best pilots, its very last, to bring the brand-new head of the Luftwaffe to Berlin. One by one, the German planes were being shot down by the Russians. Von Greim and Reitsch would have to extend their stay in the bunker. A prospect that enchanted them, since the prospect of dying by their Führer’s side seemed like the ultimate privilege.
Later that evening, Hitler summoned the young woman pilot. She was the same age as Eva Braun, but very different in character. Hanna Reitsch liked nothing more than adventure and risk and the excitement that went with them. A test pilot for the Luftwaffe, she was used in the regime’s propaganda to illustrate the valour and courage of the Third Reich. As a result she was the only woman in the Nazi empire to receive the Iron Cross, the country’s highest military decoration, and from the hands of Hitler himself. That was at a different time, when Nazi Germany terrified the whole of Europe and defeated all opposing armies one by one. In those days Hitler had subjugated men and women with his vengeful words. It was said that his eyes penetrated you like a blade of the finest steel. On 26 April, did Hanna Reitsch recognise the man who had charmed her so? The man, or rather the ghost in front of her–was it really Hitler? Here is what she said to the American secret services about that conversation: “In a very small voice, he said to me, ‘Hanna, you are one of those who will die with me. Each of us has a capsule of poison like this one.’ He gave me a little bottle.” For the intrepid pilot it was the coup de grâce. She slumped on a chair and burst into tears. For the first time she realised that the situation was desperate. “My Führer, why are you staying?” she asked him. “Why are you depriving Germany of your life? When the newspapers announced that you were going to stay in Berlin until the end, the people were petrified with horror. ‘The Führer must live, so that Germany can live,’ that’s what the people said. Stay alive, my Führer, it’s the will of every German!”
How did Hitler react to such a declaration of love, such an act of devotion? There were no witnesses to the scene, and only Hanna Reitsch related it. Did she want to present Hitler as a man of good sense, a head of state concerned about the future of his people, a humanist? Certainly. She attributed sympathetic words to him, words that no other member of his intimate circle had ever reported on other occasions. But let us go on experiencing that episode in Hanna Reitsch’s version.
With great calm and profundity, the Nazi dictator told the young woman that he could not escape his destiny, that he had chosen to stay in Berlin the better to defend the three million or so Berliners trapped by the Soviet attacks. “By staying, I thought all the troops of the country would follow my example and come to the aid of the city. I hoped they would make superhuman efforts to save me and thus save my three million compatriots.” Hitler sacrificing himself for the good of his people? Until now he had never cared about the fate of the Berliners. Quite the contrary. Though his advisers had begged him to leave his bunker to take refuge in the Bavarian Alps, thus sparing Berlin a long destructive siege, he had always refused.
Traudl Junge, one of the Führer’s personal secretaries still present in the bunker, remembered Hanna Reitsch being fascinated by Hitler. “She must have been one of those who adored Hitler unconditionally, without reservations. […] She sparkled with her fanatical, obsessive readiness to die for the Führer and his ideals.”*
Hanna Reitsch incapable of the slightest objectivity where Hitler was concerned? What is certain is that she left the Führer with a capsule of poison in her hand and went back to see von Greim with his wounded foot. She told him the war had been lost.
* Traudl Junge, Until the Final Hour: Hitler’s Last Secretary, trans. Anthea Bell, Hachette, 2012.