Hitler's Heroine: Hanna Reitsch (21 page)

On the airfield thirty or forty fighter planes were running their engines, preparing to escort the valiant general and his stowaway. The noise was deafening, but it gave Hanna hope. It was the largest contingent of Luftwaffe aeroplanes she had seen in a long time. Von Greim climbed into his passenger seat, unaware of Hanna’s presence until a little voice called out to him. ‘Kapitän, where are you?’ he said. Hanna just had time to tell him before the engines roared and the aircraft rumbled down the runway, each bump forcing a metal strut painfully into Hanna’s back or side. The flight would take an estimated thirty minutes. Hanna could just see the luminous dial of her watch and counted off each minute, knowing that at any second a Russian fighter might spot them and attack. The air over Berlin was swarming with Russian planes. It was remarkable, in some regards, that they were spotted only when they were just short of Berlin. Hanna knew nothing of what was happening outside, but when the Fw 190 pitched forward and dived, screaming, into a headlong plunge, she feared the worst – they had to have been hit and she was about to endure a fiery death. The sheer force of the dive was agonising: still pinned in her coffin, Hanna was plunging head-first at colossal speed, squeezing her eyes shut, awaiting the explosion that would either kill her quickly or leave her to suffer an agonising death. Pain sparked through her head, if she was lucky she might fall unconscious …

Without warning the Fw 190 started to level off. The blood stopped pounding in Hanna’s head. The crash had been averted. She only later learned the terrifying dive had been a deliberate move to avoid a Russian fighter. Gatow emerged through the smoke and fog of dying Berlin. There were no more attacks. No fiery deaths. Hanna’s plane landed and she was tugged out of her hiding place with a great deal of relief. General von Greim made a dash for the nearest air-raid shelter and asked for a telephone at once. It was somewhat remarkable that almost until the last moment Hitler’s bunker retained a working telephone line. Even so, placing a call wasn’t easy. With shells bursting overhead von Greim finally reached Colonel von Below, Hitler’s Luftwaffe adjutant. Hanna listened uneasily as von Greim tried to get information from the colonel. Was he still wanted at the bunker? Yes, come at once! But what was all this about, why did Hitler have him flying a suicide mission? Below could not say, he just repeated that von Greim must come at all costs.

There was nothing for it but to make the last dash for the Reich Chancellery. Below explained that most of Berlin was under Russian control; in fact, the bunker was almost surrounded and places to land were few and far between. However, it was still possible to land near the Brandenburg Gate. Hitler’s pilot Hans Baur had been there recently to survey the possibility of transforming the avenue beyond the gate into a runway. Perhaps von Greim could land there? While he was still wanted, von Greim could not conceive of disobeying his orders. He and Hanna prepared to fly again, only to learn that the plane they had intended to take had just been destroyed by artillery fire. There was one last Fieseler Storch remaining. At 6 p.m. von Greim took position in the pilot’s seat and Hanna sat behind him. They had agreed that he would fly and she navigate, as Hanna had never flown under fire before. Just in case, Hanna checked that it was possible for her to reach around von Greim and take the controls in an emergency. It would not be necessary, she told herself, but at least she knew she could if the worst happened.

The take-off was smooth. Von Greim kept low and hoped the rapidly dimming light would mask their approach. Russian planes, after all, could not be everywhere at once. They made it to the treetops of Grünewald without incident and then, like wasps swarming near a picnic, fighter planes emerged on all sides. Bang! Something swooped up from the trees. Hanna looked down at tanks and men with machine guns, all aiming at the Storch. All Hell broke loose: bullets and shells flew at them from the ground and the sky. It seemed for an instant as though the whole might of the Russian army was focused on this one tiny plane. Gun muzzles flared, tanks thundered, fighters zipped overhead. A yellow explosion flashed over the engine. ‘I’m hit!’ Von Greim slumped backwards. An armour-piercing bullet had smashed through the fuselage and mangled his foot. In moments he was unconscious.

Hanna reached around him and grabbed the control stick. Somehow she weaved and dodged as best she could despite more and more bullets hitting the Storch. She noticed in horror that both wing engines were leaking petrol, dark fuel running down them and dripping away. The plane should have been doomed but somehow it struggled on. Hanna kept tight hold of the controls and her own panic. Von Greim opened his eyes once or twice, reached convulsively for the control stick, then sank back into oblivion. Had she not been there he would have crashed and never learned of the fate Hitler had in store for him. Ahead was a radio tower, just visible through thick swirls of acrid smoke. The ground fire dwindled as they came back into German-held territory. Those weeks of running routes through Berlin now served a purpose. There were no landmarks to navigate by, and it would be far too dangerous to search around for one, but Hanna knew the exact position of that Ack-Ack tower that had guided her so well, and using her current position she knew exactly how to find it and turn off for the Brandenburg Gate. Von Greim could not have reached the Führerbunker without Hanna; that was why she went to Berlin. Not to court Hitler one last time. Not to beg to die with him. She went as a simple act of friendship towards von Greim.

Hans Baur was supervising the conversion of the avenue at Brandenburger Tor into a landing strip when he heard the wailing of an engine. Glancing up he spotted a Fieseler Storch just above the buildings. The plane was looking for somewhere to land under heavy bombardment from the Russians. Finally it appeared to land some distance from the airstrip Baur was hastily trying to construct. He climbed into his car and headed for the spot he thought the plane had landed, but when he arrived its occupants had vanished. Two soldiers informed him a general and a woman had left the plane and driven off at once in a car. The general had been wounded. Baur had witnessed the arrival in Berlin of Hanna Reitsch, but he was more interested in von Greim, whom he remembered from the First World War and found in the bunker being pieced back together by Dr Stumpfegger. The general had arrived to learn his fate. Hanna’s decision to join him would prove one of the most significant of her life.

The Führerbunker has developed a mythical aura all of its own since the details of the last days of Hitler were first revealed to the public in the 1950s. It has baffled people why Hitler chose to stay in Berlin when it was clearly lost and he was in very real danger of falling into Russian hands at any moment. From a practical perspective it was illogical. It would have been better to continue commanding his forces from somewhere else, such as Prague, where there was still a strong SS force. However, abandoning Berlin to the Allies would, in itself, be the end for Hitler. To run away seemed cowardice and only a delay of the inevitable.

By 1945 Hitler had become morose and depressive for much of the time. While he had occasional mad moments of inspiration and optimism, far more often he was contemplating death, both his and the figurative death of Germany. He was also angry and paranoid, convinced the German population had betrayed him and that if he must fall then he would do so with as much destruction of the country he ruled as possible. In the end Hitler was an insane despot, far removed from reality and without the energy or strength to leave Berlin. Hanna recognised this, even if it was only after the war that she admitted as much to herself and her interrogators.

From an ideological perspective, staying in Berlin made even clearer sense. Like a captain going down with his ship, Hitler would stand staunchly in his capital until the very end. In those last heady, confused days Nazi fever raged through the occupants of the bunker, making a future without Hitler seem impossible. Cut off from the world, detached from reality, they drifted into dreamy contemplation of a heroic, sacrificial death as in the ancient legends upon which Hitler sometimes modelled his regime. Propaganda demanded that Hitler remain to the end if there was to be any hope of a revival of National Socialism post-war. Goebbels realised this. As perhaps the only intellectual left in the bunker, he saw an irony in a last stand at Berlin, as well as comparisons with the ancient history he relished. Hitler would be like a Roman emperor throwing in his lot with his people. What he would not be like was the Kaiser, who ran away in shame at the end of the First World War. Goebbels, above all, was influential in persuading Hitler to stay in Berlin.

If there was to be a last stand, however, there had to be a suitable location for it. As early as 1935 construction had begun on a reinforced cellar beneath the Diplomat’s Hall of the Old Reich Chancellery to act as an air-raid shelter. This would ultimately develop into the Vorbunker or Front Bunker, where essential staff had their quarters and where Hitler’s personal kitchen was situated. The Vorbunker covered 6,000 square feet, but the useable area within the interior was significantly smaller, much of the space being taken up by the thick 18in walls which divided the bunker into cramped, narrow rooms along a central corridor that was used as a dining room. By the time Hanna arrived, Frau Goebbels and her children had taken over a suite of rooms in the Vorbunker, opposite those reserved for Hitler’s personal police.

After the bombing raids on Berlin of 1943–44 Hitler grew increasingly paranoid about the strength of the Vorbunker and ordered the design and construction of another deeper, stronger, thicker bunker. This would ultimately come to be known as the Führerbunker. Construction began in April 1944. According to Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect, the specifications were a ‘ceiling 3.5 meters thick and sides 3.5–4 meters thick’ situated in a pit ‘10 meters deep’. In total, the new bunker covered 3,350 square feet, its interior being marginally larger than the Vorbunker’s, though the overall building was much smaller. Workmen created a connecting staircase between the Vorbunker and the Führerbunker. All the steel doors were gas proof and a ventilation tower stuck up from the ground to provide inhabitants with relatively fresh air. The rooms were around 30ft beneath ground, their ceilings supported by angled steel girders and covered with steel mesh and then granite slabs to explode bombs before they could penetrate the bunker. Again there was a central passage divided by a wall into a conference room and a general sitting area. To one side were Hitler and Eva Braun’s rooms and a map room sometimes also used for conferences, though its size made it inconvenient for large groups. On the opposite side were rooms for Martin Bormann, Goebbels and Dr Stumpfegger, along with the telephone exchange. At the back of the bunker was a common latrine and the heavy-duty diesel generator.

When Hitler moved into the bunker in March 1945 work was barely completed: the plaster on the walls was still wet and teething problems with the ventilation and pumping systems made life underground uncomfortable. The marshy soil near the Reich Chancellery made the bunkers damp, the Vorbunker occasionally flooded and water constantly leaked into the generator room, which had to be mopped three times a day. With so many people in close, stuffy quarters tempers became frayed, there was a constant smell of human body odour as hot and bothered staff and soldiers bustled about the confined environment. There were limited facilities for washing and when the common latrine blocked up the smell became even worse, nauseating at times. Residents would risk a break outside during a bombing raid just to get some fresh air. The diesel generators were a constant nuisance: noisy and reeking of diesel fumes, they drove residents insane. Hitler would demand them switched off during conferences, but this only resulted in making the acrid air of the bunker grow staler and stuffier until his guests complained of headaches. One SS captain described the bunker as like being in ‘a cement submarine, or buried alive in a charnel house … Towards the end when the drainage packed in, it was as pleasant as working in a public urinal.’

The bunkers did not exist in isolation. Beneath the Reich Chancellery was a vast network of underground cellars linked in places to form a long bunker. So big were some of the passageways that lorries were able to drive down into them from the surface. In better days those lorries had carried coke to fuel the many furnaces in the Chancellery; now, as the Russians pounded the city, they carried in the wounded and the homeless. A hospital was set up in one area, and other cellars swarmed with refugees, largely women and children. So in March and April 1945 a regular underground hive of people formed beneath Berlin. The last necessity of the bunker was its phone line, one of the few ways Hitler could keep in touch with the outside world and continue to command. It was also a link to reality, sorely missing in most aspects of Hitler’s life. Down in his bunker, cocooned from the worst, Hitler could believe all would come right, that this was just a blip in his great plan. As news of betrayals and further defeats trickled in to him, it now became apparent his war was lost.

On 25 April Hitler received a telegram from Göring informing him that the latter had opened negotiations with the Americans. Hitler’s anger polluted the atmosphere of the bunker and he raved over Göring’s betrayal – how could he? It was treason! Hitler furiously sent a message back informing Göring that he could be executed for his cowardly turncoat behaviour. Hitler ordered him to give up all his offices and appointments within the next twenty-four hours. Cowed, Göring quickly relinquished his authority and left Hitler facing the tough task of appointing his successor. His tormented mind settled on a man he felt worthy of fulfilling Göring’s role, a man who would not betray him in this final battle. General Colonel Ritter von Greim had remained on the Eastern Front to the last, had been a loyal servant to the Führer. Now he would become the overall commander of the Luftwaffe. So great was the honour that Hitler insisted on presenting it in person – thus von Greim was set on the path for a disastrous flight across Berlin, which in the end would prove utterly pointless.