Hitler's Heroine: Hanna Reitsch (13 page)

In the background, tests on the fender continued. Hanna’s role was taken by a young pilot called Lettmaier who flew the redesigned Dornier on its last few test flights and concluded the experimental stage. Jacobs presented his design to the Luftwaffe. They looked on sceptically. Only one person showed an interest: Ritter von Greim, who recognised the fender’s potential to save lives. He and a number of his staff had watched early tests and had seen Hanna’s successes. Von Greim asked that all planes fitted with the fender be transferred to his command. It was a small ray of light in Hanna’s dark world when letters arrived from pilots who had used the adapted planes and had their lives saved by the fender.

For three months Hanna rested, the hours slipping by endlessly. Her mother wrote daily and provided news on the Reitsch family. Kurt was now married and in the German navy. He had survived the sinking of his ship during the Nazi invasion of Narvik, Norway, in early 1940. Heidi had recently had twins, a boy and a girl, to complement her elder son, who was now 3. There was much to be grateful for, Emy wrote in letters that varied from prose to verse, reminding her elder daughter to keep strong and hold tight to her patriotism. The senior Reitschs had aged dramatically in the last few years. Emy had gone grey and wore her hair tied back in a bun. Her face was lined with years of worry. Herr Reitsch looked even worse: a frail figure worn thin by the passing of time. His heavy brow shadowed his eyes, he hunched slightly as he moved, there seemed a heavy burden upon him. Emy ignored her husband’s decay; she must buoy him up as she buoyed Hanna up. Somehow she kept the despondent threads of the family together, clutching her children as close as she could and dreading each day the news that either Hanna or Kurt (or perhaps both) had perished.

Through those long dark months Hanna thought of God. Her faith, childlike as it was, remained strong and rigid. She thought of Hitler and knew she must remain loyal and continue her work for the sake of Germany. She thought of the many pilots whose lives would be saved by the innovations of men like Jacobs, and longed to get well again. Finally the day came when she was removed from isolation. Her body was weak from so long lying down, her heart had been permanently damaged, but she was too eager to get back in the air to worry. Hanna returned to Rechlin and picked up where she had left off.

Operational flights with Jacobs’ fender had shown that while it offered good protection, it was rather heavy, and if a plane lost an engine the weight of the fender would become too much. The boxy construction, serving somewhat as a sturdy, protective fence ahead of the plane, needed to be modified. Jacobs tried another idea – a razor-sharp strip of steel attached to the leading edge of the wings and designed to cut through a cable. Unlike the fender, which had mainly acted to protect the airscrew and guide the cable clear of the plane, the new design would leave the airscrew exposed, but would cut the balloon cable; thus taking the balloon out of action. There were pros and cons to the new design, not least because testing the cutting power of the steel razors meant constantly losing balloons. As soon as a cable was cut the balloon floated away and could only be retrieved with extreme difficulty. Testing was therefore both costly and time consuming as balloons had to be regularly deployed. To make life somewhat simpler, the tests were moved to the balloon-testing station at Saarow.

An unforeseen difficulty arose, however. When the balloons were cut loose during the tests they were naturally taken by the wind, dragging their heavy cables. On blustery days this sometimes meant they towed their cables into overhead electric wires, causing endless damage. ‘We must have cost the State a fortune,’ Hanna mused as she watched another balloon wander into a power line. In desperation, fighters were deployed to shoot down the balloon once it had been released, or sometimes the pressure release valves were closed so that the balloon would explode when it reached a certain height. Neither method was entirely successful and both meant more lost balloons. Still, the tests continued and word spread to the Luftwaffe of the new design.

One breezy day Ernst Udet touched down at Saarow. He was on his way to a conference with Hitler and wanted to see the balloon cutters in action. He had arrived just as Hanna was about to fly another test; he was even more delighted when he learned exactly who was flying the plane. He joined the balloon crew to watch. It could not have been a worse day to visit. Hanna was about to test her plane on a particularly difficult cable. The cable and balloon were genuine British made. The balloon had drifted across the ocean from England and been captured as an ideal means of testing Jacobs’ cutter. On inspection, it was realised that the cable was not quite the same as the ones the Germans had been using for tests. Though only 5.6mm in diameter, the cable was made of five or six strands of steel thread, each much thicker and tougher than the ones Hanna normally used. To make matters worse, the balloon had been captured with only a short length of cable. It could not be flown at the usual height, instead Hanna would have to come at it quite low, far too low to enable her to bail out. To compound the difficulties, a stiff wind was blowing and the balloon had been anchored in a wood to try and stop it being blown about. Hanna had to skim over treetops and aim for a balloon that was turning in the wind.

Had Udet not been there, the test would have surely been cancelled, but he was present and he was eager. Hanna climbed into her plane with a last look at the balloon. Her heart sank as she saw that it had not turned into the wind as expected (with its nose pointing in the direction the wind was blowing from), but was sitting side-on, so that the full force of the weather was hitting it broadside. The drag on the cable must have been enormous and there was a real risk that it might break loose. If only Udet had not come! Hanna took to the sky and quickly saw that the balloon was dragging its cable at an angle, the steel rope was slanting over the tops of the trees. It was not a good position to try and cut it, in fact it was fraught with difficulties. But the test-crew had given the all-clear, so perhaps, reasoned Hanna, such conditions were commonly encountered on active duty and must be tested for.

Hanna flew close to the cable. There was a strange sound, metal under tension. With a loud whipping noise, the balloon cable snapped. Fragments of steel thread flicked into the air and caught Hanna’s airscrew. Metal splinters shot through the cabin as Hanna frantically ducked and covered her head. The cable had taken off the lower edge of two propeller blades on the starboard side and now the engine was racing uncontrollably. Hanna reacted instinctively, switched off the damaged engine and engaged the electric motor in a desperate attempt to halt the propeller in a neutral position where it could no longer turn by autorotation. She had to hurry; the starboard engine was in real danger of breaking loose from its mountings. If it did so, Hanna would crash. Too low to bail out, she would die in the impact.

From the ground the test-crew looked on in horror as the cable sheared and snapped, and debris flew through the air. The sound of an engine racing filled the sky. As Hanna vanished from sight Udet waited for the seemingly inevitable crash and plume of smoke. For several moments everyone waited for the explosion. When nothing happened, Udet turned and raced from the balloon crew: ‘Ready my plane!’ He flew over the treetops and followed Hanna’s usual route back to her take-off site, his eyes primed all the while to see the twisted, burning carcass of a plane on the ground. There was no sign of anything until he reached the nearby airfield. There was the Dornier, sitting on the ground looking as if nothing had happened and a pale Hanna Reitsch climbing out. Udet landed and almost ran to her. ‘You look as shaken as I feel,’ he said. Hanna gave him a wan smile.

Udet flew on to see Hitler when his nerves had recovered, very relieved not to have to tell the Führer his favourite test pilot had died in a crash. In fact, he had a very different story to tell, one that would delight Hitler as it demonstrated the courage and resourcefulness of the German people. Hanna Reitsch had defied the odds yet again and for this she would receive the Iron Cross, Second Class – the first woman ever to do so.

Hanna had long-ago realised her leaders were not the great men she had dreamed of, but her staunch honour and patriotism would not allow her to admit it in public. She had briefly met Hitler when she was made a Flugkapitän and he had left a dismal impression upon her. She confessed to a friend that he was so huge a disappointment that she locked herself in her room and cried for three days – was this the man she was fighting for? Hitler had appeared in a crumpled suit, looking dishevelled and small. He sounded uncultured when he spoke and, to Hanna’s unparalleled horror, picked his nose. She was torn between her disapproval and the knowledge that to forsake her patriotism was to be a traitor to her country; worse, to be a traitor to her parents.

For three days these emotions warred within her, until finally her iron-willed loyalty to Germany won out. Hitler was not the man she had believed in, not the man she had turned into a hero in her mind, so she would have to ignore that impossible fact. She would not disgrace her honour by diminishing the Führer to others, she would not disgrace her family. Nor would she admit that she, or her beloved mother, had been wrong about the Führer. Hanna stuffed the notion away and to all intents and purposes appeared to her friends to be overly loyal and unquestioning of the Führer. In many regards it was the only way to retain her sense of patriotism; if she let her mind wander to that figure who had stood before her in a crumpled suit, then awful questions loomed in her mind as to why she was flying for her country.

If Hanna was reluctantly revising her image of Hitler, she was far less concerned about who knew of her distaste for Göring. On 27 March 1941 Hanna stepped into Göring’s lavishly decorated Berlin home to receive a special version of the Gold Medal for Military Flying with Brilliance. Göring liked to imagine himself a connoisseur of art and antiquities. All his homes were stuffed full of paintings, sculptures and ceramics, many notoriously ‘stolen’, others bought with his ill-gotten gains. As early as 1941 he was using his position as head of the Luftwaffe to pursue his cultural interests rather than pay attention to Germany’s Air Force. Hanna was a simple girl at heart and the brash interiors of Göring’s home were not about to impress her. Nor was the man himself.

Overweight, decorated with glittering baubles and surrounded by his generals, when Hanna entered his room he completely ignored her and looked over her head. Udet let the embarrassing moment drift on too long, then smiled apologetically and murmured that
this
was Hanna Reitsch. Göring looked at her with undisguised amazement: ‘What!’ He moved towards Hanna, hands on his hips as he stood enormous before her. ‘Is this supposed to be our famous “Flugkapitän”? Where’s the rest of her? How can this little person manage to fly at all?’ Hanna bristled, she was sensitive about her height, something her fellow pilots had picked on from her earliest days of gliding. She glared at Göring. ‘Do you have to look like that to fly?’ She swept a hand at Göring’s huge girth, her hot temper overcoming restraint. As she said it, she knew it was a mistake. So often her words, spoken too quickly, had dropped Hanna into trouble. But this surely had to be the worst time of all for her restraint to fail her. Hanna inwardly cringed, but fortunately Göring took the remark as a joke. He and his generals laughed. After all, who would take the words of this little girl seriously?

Swaddled in a grey uniform, overly ornate with medals and gold braid, insignia blazing on every spare patch of cloth, the obese and gormless-looking Hermann Göring was far too easily parodied as the incompetent leader of the Luftwaffe. His history and road to success had been marked by luck, though he would rather think of it as fate. Born in 1893, as an awkward and rather inane young man he had flown across the battlefields of the First World War, indulging his love for hunting, be his prey animal or man. His minor successes belied the grandiose claims later made by the medals on his uniform. He finished the war with a score of twenty-two kills, far behind his comrade and rival Ernst Udet.

Göring’s skill as a fighter pilot was questionable, but a lucky chance landed him in the position of leader of Jagdgeschwader 1, originally led by the flying ace Baron Manfred von Richthofen. Richthofen’s death had passed the leadership to Wilhelm Reinhard. Shortly afterwards, Reinhard and Göring went to test a new fighter plane. Göring flew the craft successfully, but when Reinhard tried the same, the aircraft broke up and he was killed. Five days later Göring was promoted to the leader of JG 1. Unfortunately, it was now 1918, and within months of his promotion Göring was having to retreat with his squadron, finally deliberately destroying their aeroplanes so they would not fall into enemy hands. Göring came away from the war with the strong impression that it had not been the skill of the Allies that had defeated Germany, but betrayal within the German Empire, particularly by Jews, Marxists and republicans.

Göring had had a brief taste of power, which he had savoured for all it was worth. Arrogant and dogmatic, he had not found favour with his men, but what did that matter? He had been in command, they had had to do as he said, and any glory they attained eventually came to him as their commander. Göring had found his place, only to lose it. Now his one goal was to seek out that sort of power again. Falling in with Hitler was natural enough. The Nazi movement offered the glory, authority and fame Göring craved (not to mention satisfying the blood lust). He became leader of the SA, but again it was a short-lived dose of power; he was badly wounded during the Munich putsch and fled the country to recover. Ending up reliant on painkillers, he was considered by many as a trumped-up drug addict with an over-inflated ego who had somehow become one of Hitler’s closest associates.

Göring returned to Germany in 1927 and set about reinstating himself as a prominent Nazi. Whatever his failings (and there were many), his family background and reputation as an ace of the First World War (albeit one of the lower-ranking aces) made him indispensable to the struggling Adolf Hitler, who needed influential people to fuel and empower his cause. Göring was a ticket to meeting the best people, he opened doors that would otherwise have stayed closed to an upstart army corporal, and before long Hitler was winning over high-ranking officers and industrialists. After Hitler came to power in 1933, Göring was the golden boy of the regime, controlling the slowly expanding Luftwaffe, which he claimed would be the key to success in future conflicts. The 1930s were a heady time, when Göring made big promises without having to deliver on them. He showed off his planes and his pilots and basked in the friendship Hitler bestowed on him and the wealth, power and luxuries such friendship brought. By 1938 Göring had been promoted six times and now held the rank of generalfeldmarschall; he was President of Prussia and the Ministries of Aviation, Economics, Forestry and Hunting, and Minister of the Interior for Prussia, through which position he gained control of the Prussian political police and was able to found the Gestapo.