Hitler's Heroine: Hanna Reitsch (11 page)

Hanna happened to be attending a DFS outing on the Night of Broken Glass. She first realised that something was wrong when

I saw two old people being brought out of their house in their nightdresses. They were protesting and struggling and people were jeering at them. This was followed by a number of shop windows being broken. Then I saw some children coming noisily down the street, dragging behind them a Jewish hearse. They took it to the banks of the River Main, chopped it to bits with axes and then pushed it into the river.

Hanna simply didn’t understand what was happening. Her first thought was that it was a Communist uprising. Like most good Germans, she had been brought up with a healthy fear and distrust of Bolshevik activities, deeming their politics a dangerous mix of fervent rebellion and idealistic violence – in fact, she should have recognised that that these events were the works of ‘good Germans’.

Frightened and outraged, she shouted out to the people around her that they must call for the police. None of her companions moved. Hanna stared at them astonished. ‘How can you stand there and allow such things? It is a disgrace that German people should act in such a manner! The Führer would weep if he knew such things were being done in his name!’ Her companions looked upon her pityingly. Hanna was aghast that no one was as indignant as she. Worse, Hans Jacobs, who was leading the outing, forced her away and bundled her into a coach before a nasty-looking mob could snatch her for protesting. As the coaches drove away someone told Jacobs, ‘The synagogues are burning.’ No one seemed particularly concerned by this; some were even revelling quietly in the atmosphere of violence.

More than 100 DFS employees had gone on the outing, yet only a half-dozen showed any sign of distress at the scenes that night. Hanna was the most vocal by far. If nothing else, she hated persecution of any person and was not herself prejudiced against others. If she saw no wrong in Hitler, at least this was offset by the fact that she saw no wrong in a person just because someone said they were the wrong colour, religion or race. She had once been upbraided by Professor Georgii for speaking too openly in support of the Jews. Now she protested to Jacobs and he finally relented a little.

At Darmstadt Jacobs gathered together all the DFS employees. Hanna waited with anticipation to hear what he would say: he had promised her he would publically declare his outrage at the events of the night before. He stared out at his employees, knowing full well that many were Nazis and many had supported Kristallnacht. ‘I very much regret that we made our outing on this particular day,’ he said. Hanna waited for more, but it never came. For the first time in her life she was ashamed to be German.

Hanna was not alone in her disillusionment. The Lindberghs were back in Germany in 1938. With a whiff of war in the air, America was jittery. As before, Charles was asked to visit Germany and give his expert opinion on its air force. Charles and Anne were blissfully ignorant of any looming catastrophe, they saw nothing wrong or out of place in Berlin. Indeed, Anne began house-hunting as Charles fancied wintering in the city. Göring was equally pleased to have America’s flying hero back in his country. At a men-only dinner hosted at the American embassy, he presented Charles with the Service Cross of the German Eagle. Charles wore it happily enough, but when Anne saw it she felt it might cause her husband problems. She was not wrong, but before that storm could hit it was 9 November 1938 – Kristallnacht.

Charles was stunned by the scenes he saw. ‘My admiration for the Germans is constantly being dashed against some rock such as this,’ he cried. He removed his family to Paris for the winter, but whatever his consternation at the anti-Semitic aspects of National Socialism, his eternal fondness for German culture was to have an impact on his reputation at home. In particular, his rash decision to live in Berlin had been widely reported in America and now his home-grown fans hissed when he appeared onscreen in newsreel footage. Sponsorship was lost and Anne’s latest book, though well received by critics, was boycotted by Jewish booksellers. This was to make life difficult for the couple when they returned to America with the outbreak of war.

Charles was incredibly naïve when it came to politics, yet he also held strong, sometimes bigoted opinions. America’s golden boy was quickly losing his shine. Two weeks after the outbreak of war Charles delivered a speech opposing the entry of the United States into the conflict. It was a poor job of public speaking and antagonised even those who were on his side. Shortly after, he published an article in
Readers’ Digest
with dangerous racist overtones, implying the war was a threat to the white race. Anne also wrote on the subject of keeping the US out of the war, mostly reiterating her husband’s views. She would later regret being so blind to the real situation facing the world.

Charles railed on. Göring would have enjoyed the speech presented at Iowa in 1941 when Charles was a key spokesperson for the America First movement, an organisation determined to keep the US neutral. Charles ranted to his audience that it was the British, Roosevelt’s administration and Jewish activists who were pushing for America to go to war. Anne, listening at home on the radio, cringed to herself. Though Charles saw nothing racist in his speech, his views were interpreted by others as being at best anti-Semitic and at worst pure Nazi dogma. The Lindberghs were no longer the stars of America; they were finally granted their one wish of privacy, for no one wanted to know them any more. Even Charles’ mother found it hard to swallow his views, so against her own were they.

The Lindberghs had been absorbed into the Nazi movement as blindly as so many Germans. As, indeed, Hanna herself was. They failed to see the harm or notice the dark undercurrents rippling through German society. No wonder Hanna was elated to meet Charles and receive his praise. After all, he was Göring’s favourite non-German flyer and an American who shared many of the views she did. And, just like Hanna, he suffered after the war for his incredible naïvety and unhealthy opinions.

The retribution meted out to the Jews during Kristallnacht had been horrendous. In Breslau Jewish shops had been systematically destroyed, their windows broken, their wares smashed and trampled. Glass littered the streets and the New Synagogue was ablaze, orange flames flicking up to the sky. The local firemen were standing by and watching, confining their efforts to preventing nearby non-Jewish houses from catching alight. No attempt was made to save the synagogue. When the fury died down, nearly 2,500 Jews had vanished, arrested by the SA, SS or Gestapo. One synagogue was burned to the ground, while two others had been demolished; around 500 Jewish shops and three dozen Jewish-owned businesses had been vandalised to the extent that some would never operate again.

The Nazi paper
Schlesische Tageszeitung
proclaimed ‘Breslau gets even with the Jews. Their synagogues are nothing but heaps of rubble.’ Unease filtered among the more liberal members of the population as they looked upon the scenes of destruction; some were even moved to angry outbursts – but only in the privacy of their own homes. Ulrich Frodien, a staunch member of the Hitler Youth and loyal follower of Hitler who would, like Hanna, become disillusioned with Germany, later remembered that his father was outraged by the attacks after Kristallnacht, ‘But like everyone else, he did nothing, he remained a Party member and only clenched his fist in his pocket.’ It was not only Jews who feared the Nazi forces; non-Jews too were afraid to speak out against the violence. It was easier to slip away, pretend it was not happening and hope someone else would do something.

Hanna did stand up, however, along with Jacobs, and they both came very close to disaster for having a conscience. An employee at DFS was nephew to the head of the Nazi administration in the area. He denounced Hanna and Jacobs and they found themselves summoned before a committee of local Nazi officials. Neither would retract their outraged statements over Kristallnacht, nor their support for Jews. Fortunately for them both, they were too invaluable to be removed from Darmstadt and they were released. It is often forgotten by Hanna’s detractors, who focus on her days in the bunker, that she stood up for the Jews at a time when it could have landed her in very serious, even fatal, danger.

She had supported Joachim Küttner when he was banned from gliding in 1937 due to his Jewish ancestry and had even helped him to find work abroad as an instructor. Unfortunately, she naïvely believed that Hitler shared her opinions on the Jews and that he must have been horrified by the events of 9 November. She was greatly relieved to learn from an uncle that Hitler had been furious over Kristallnacht and blamed it on Goebbels.

With hindsight, this seems completely implausible, but the German people were drowning in a sea of misinformation and propaganda. They were isolated from the truth, being spoon-fed biased information that shaped their opinions and views. Only in recent years, with the release of such documents as POW interrogation files, has it become clear just how controlled perception was. Many ordinary Germans held a view of Hitler as an almost saintly figure who had saved them, but had then been used and betrayed by such men as Göring, Himmler and Goebbels. Even those who believed in the Nazi Party and hated the Jews found it impossible to contemplate how any government could condone their mass slaughter. Even today our opinions of politicians are largely governed by the media, which are influenced by spin doctors who put a good light on anything bad a politician has done. In Germany this was merely taken to the extreme, helped by the lack of a free press.

In any case, Hanna could not accept that her Führer, the man to whom she had declared undying loyalty, was nothing more than a crook and a bully. It was easier to believe he was misguided than to think she had given her honourable devotion to someone completely unworthy.

6

G
IANTS
OF
W
AR

Hitler had designs on gliding for war purposes. At the outbreak of war Hanna found herself testing the DFS 230 glider (originally designed in 1933 for taking meteorological surveys or carrying post) as a potential troop carrier. Shortly afterwards a glider unit was formed and the first potential glider-based operation was imagined.

It has been suggested that Hanna was indirectly responsible for the glider attack on the Belgium fort of Eben Emael, which was the beginning of the ‘silent raids’. Eben Emael had been hewn out of solid rock during the construction of the Albert Canal. The canal formed a natural moat on the northern side; the rest of the hexagonal fort was protected by 5ft-thick reinforced concrete walls and roofs, all camouflaged to appear as a grassy field with armed cannon cupolas dotting the landscape. Each of these cupolas had six 120mm cannons and could revolve 360° to attack invaders within a 12-mile radius. A further eighteen 75mm guns were placed in cupolas and casements guarding the approach across the River Meuse and the Albert Canal. Pillboxes, ditches, trenches, barbed wire, machine guns, minefields and anti-tank traps had been placed on the sides not facing the canal to deter attackers on foot. Anti-aircraft batteries, searchlights and sound-ranging equipment scanned the skies to keep bombers at bay. The Belgians had done everything they could think of during the construction of the fort between 1932 and 1935 to make it impregnable and, at first glance, it certainly seemed to be the ultimate obstacle in the path of the Nazi invasion of France.

Late in 1939 Hitler was in Berlin poring over maps of Belgium and constantly being reminded of the impenetrable monstrosity of concrete and cannon that was Eben Emael. A thought had stuck in his mind, something a small female pilot had pointed out to him at a flying competition in 1935. With her eager smile Hanna had motioned to the glider she had flown and commented to Hitler that it was the perfect way to fly noiselessly. An innocent enough remark, until fed into the mind of a dictator. Hitler had summoned the commanding general of Fliegerdivision 7, Kurt Student, to prepare a plan to send in a glider squadron to strike at Eben Emael – a silent invasion that would elude all its defences.

On 10 May 1940, in the early hours of the morning, eleven gliders were loaded with high-powered explosive devices and readied for launch. Lieutenant Rudolf Witzig was in charge of the eighty-five-man team, known as Force Granite, that would storm Eben Emael and disarm its defences ahead of the real invasion force. Inside each glider paratroopers were armed with grenades, submachine guns and the explosive they would have to place and detonate once inside the fort. At 3.25 a.m. they were in the air, but, as Hanna could have told the unfortunate paratroopers, flying in a glider was a very different experience from flying in a powered plane. The gliders were buffeted back and forth, and in the dark confined space the men fought down nausea and fear. There was apprehension among them; few believed they were coming home again.

Problems soon arose. The towrope for Witzig’s glider snapped when another plane flew too close. A second tow-plane pilot either mistook the location or lost his nerve and released his glider too early. Out of eleven gliders, only nine were released at the spot that was intended. With no means of communication between tow-plane and glider, the situation was complicated by misunderstandings and errors. To compound the problem, the struggling tow-planes had failed to reach the assigned height of 8,500ft. In desperation, some tow-plane pilots decided to hang on until they were deeper in Belgium territory and ended up under fire.

Despite this, the gliders were on course for their target. Flying silently, completely missed by the anti-aircraft guns, the gliders landed on the roof of Eben Emael without resistance and to the amazement of the Belgium defenders. The paratroopers were shooting as they jumped from the planes, quickly overwhelming the machine-gun posts and defenders who failed to respond fast enough to the strange silent, bat-like creatures that landed before them. Engineers ran to the cupolas and set their explosives and within minutes the cannons and their crews were blasted to smithereens. Huge holes were blown in the 5ft reinforced concrete, not always enough to penetrate the roof of the fort, but adequate to shake the underground foundations, send shrapnel flying and terrify the defenders. The Belgians’ feeble attempts to save their fort were without success. The silent and unexpected attack had shaken them too deeply. As a last resort the garrison sealed itself in the underground maze of tunnels that made up Eben Emael. Prisoners in their own fort. By the time the German armies arrived, Eben Emael was truly defeated. The glider team was proudly marching about on the surface, now comfortably in control while the Belgium defenders cowered below ground. With the reinforcement of the Wehrmacht, the garrison had little choice but to surrender. The impregnable fortress had been penetrated by eleven gliders and the power of a surprise attack. The Belgians could thank Hanna Reitsch for giving Hitler the idea.