Hitler's Heroine: Hanna Reitsch (25 page)

‘Hitler ended his life as a criminal against the world,’ but she is quick to add, ‘he did not begin it that way. At first his thoughts were only of how to make Germany healthy again, how to give his people a life free from economic insufficiencies and social maladjustments. To do this he gambled much, with a stake that no man has the right to jeopardise – the lives of his people. This was the first great wrong, his first great failure …’

Hanna cannot be defended for her blind faith in the Führer, nor for her apologies for him even after the full extent of the Nazis’ crimes were known. Hanna had believed in Hitler and could not now accept that she had been so utterly wrong. To do so would not only render the last six years worthless, but impart blame upon her, as on all Germans, for obeying and supporting so evil a man. In this view she was not alone; many Germans found themselves thinking along the same lines.

Hanna would defend Hitler to the very end. After his death, she found herself in the same room as Himmler once more. Determined to learn the truth, she asked him if he had really betrayed Hitler and contacted the Allies behind his back. ‘But, of course,’ Himmler answered with his ever jovial smile. Stunned, Hanna accused him of high treason. ‘High treason?’ Himmler laughed. ‘No! You’ll see, history will weigh it differently. Hitler wanted to continue the fight. He was mad with his pride and his honour. He wanted to shed more German blood when there was none left to flow. Hitler was insane. It should have been stopped long ago.’ What words from the commander of the Gestapo and SS! Hanna, still reeling from news of Hitler’s death and the dread of capitulation, let her temper get the better of her. ‘Insane? I came from him less than 36 hours ago. He died for the cause he believed in. He died bravely and filled with the honour you speak of, while you and Göring and the rest must now live as branded traitors and cowards.’ ‘I did as I did to save German blood, to rescue what was left of our country,’ Himmler said. Hanna retorted, ‘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!’

Despite her contradictions, the Americans felt Hanna was at least trying to help them and Germany, as well as slowly reconciling herself to the horrors of Nazism:

She claims that the only reason she remained alive is for the sake of the truth; 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. She believes that she is fulfilling much of this mission when she speaks to the interrogator. It is therefore felt that her remarks may be considered as her deepest efforts at sincerity and honesty. At the moment she is undergoing a severe mental struggle in an effort to reconcile her conception of ‘honor’ with her denunciation of Göring, of Himmler and of Hitler himself … it appears she is striving to exert a progressively more democratic influence over her countrymen.

Hanna was at least trying to make amends for her misguided past.

She was to remain under Allied scrutiny for five years. During that time her US interrogators tried to decide if she might be any use in an intelligence operation codenamed ‘Skylark’, tracking wanted Germans using Hanna either consciously or unconsciously, through her Luftwaffe contacts. They were also concerned that Hanna might be aiding wanted Germans to escape the country. Whether through good fortune or common sense, Hanna did nothing while under close surveillance by the Americans to make them think she was actively working to aid Nazis. In 1948 a sting was orchestrated to try and catch Hanna out as she was associating with old friends suspected of being involved in an escape organisation. Hanna was approached at her home in Hamburg by a German working for the Americans. He claimed he had once been with the SS and, along with seventeen others, had escaped from an internment camp where many SS men were held. He asked if Hanna could help him escape Germany, or at least to reach the American zone (they were currently in Hamburg, which was in the British zone). Hanna sobbed at hearing his story, but she answered firmly that she could not help him.

Suspicions of Hanna were not unfounded. In March 1947 she enquired about two former friends who were being held for trial at Nuremburg, accused of conducting medical experiments on concentration camp inmates, and even gave evidence to help one of them. A month later she wrote to Field Marshal Kesselring’s defence lawyer urging him to do everything in his power to prevent injustice as it might deeply affect the German people and build new hatred towards the Allies. Hanna’s assumption that her missive would spur the defence lawyer into greater effort probably points to her sense of self-importance.

The most significant part of Hanna’s intelligence was her knowledge of the last few days in the bunker. A great number of the key witnesses to Hitler’s end had either committed suicide, been shot escaping or been captured by the Russians. The Russians had been first on the scene. The SS had tried to burn the interior of the bunker, but without thinking an SS man had switched off the ventilation system – after all it was not needed now – and this had starved the fire before it could do any great damage. Water had then flooded in and the Russians waded through the strange subterranean lair picking up discarded documents and taking an avid interest in the blood-stained sofa where Hitler had shot himself. By the time the British and Americans arrived, the Russians were firmly in charge. They had captured several eyewitnesses, including Hans Baur and Heinz Linge, and were interrogating them in their own brutal fashion. Baur had seen the bodies burning. Linge had seen the corpses of Hitler and Eva being removed. Their testimony, repeated over and over, implied firmly that Hitler was dead. But far away in Moscow, Stalin was not impressed. Locked away in his stubborn paranoia he nursed the idea that Hitler had escaped his fate. Even when charred remains were discovered in the spot Hitler was said to have burned, Stalin remained unimpressed. Over the next few months the Russians would muddy the issue of Hitler’s death or survival by producing endless scenarios and ‘evidence’ both for and against. More than once they issued photographs of ‘Hitler’s corpse’ which were fakes and fuelled the conspiracy theory that Hitler had had a ‘double’ slain to confuse the Allies and enable him to escape.

If he had escaped, it would have been by plane. Any other method would have been virtually impossible in the last days of Berlin. There were two candidates for pilot of that plane: Hans Baur and Hanna Reitsch. The Americans questioned Hanna closely about the possibility that she flew Hitler out of Berlin and this led to one of the main myths concerning Hanna – that she was Hitler’s pilot. Because of this erroneous conjecture, it became commonly assumed that she had often flown the Führer to various destinations. Hanna struggled to understand this assumption; to her it was perfectly plain that she had never flown Hitler. It only required a slight knowledge of the Führer to appreciate that she would never have been his pilot. Hitler only trusted a couple of pilots to fly him who he had known for over a decade (indeed, Hans Baur insisted he was the only pilot Hitler trusted). As long as Baur was in the bunker, Hitler would not have considered flying with anyone else.

Adolf Hitler had an overpowering fear of flying, not unnatural in the early days of aviation, when getting airborne was never 100 per cent safe. In 1920, during the Kapp Putsch (an attempted coup to overthrow the Weimar Republic led by Wolfgang Kapp and Walther von Lüttwitz), Hitler had flown with Ritter von Greim from Munich to Berlin. Critical business had pressed Hitler to travel at speed and to risk a flight in a military plane. The experience lingered with the future Führer; bundled into a biplane with open cockpits, flying through rough weather with limited visibility and buffeted about until he was sick, the journey had not enamoured him with air travel. Matters were not improved when von Greim made a forced landing in territory under the rebels’ control. By the time Hitler arrived in Berlin the putsch had been crushed and he bitterly stormed that he would have been better off staying at home.

Several years later, in 1932, Hitler overcame his fear of flying just enough to accept the services of pilot Hans Baur. Baur was a flying veteran of the First World War and nearly 40 when he became Hitler’s private pilot. Typically Aryan in his looks, he was a thick set, stocky man, with a receding hairline and a face and neck that seemed to merge into one bulky block on his shoulders. A party member and an honorary SS man, he was as tough as they came and very little fazed him. His loyalty to Hitler turned into friendship and the Führer was best man at his wedding to his second wife in 1936. Hitler liked Baur’s practical, no-nonsense nature. Baur was not a sycophant and spoke plainly to the Führer. In many regards he could be viewed as a male equivalent of Hanna Reitsch, who also saw no reason to sugar coat facts for her leader. Or perhaps that is just the nature of pilots?

From 1932 Hitler flew with Baur on all but one occasion. In that instance Baur was in Moscow, having escorted Ribbentrop to the Russian capital. Hitler wanted to be in Berlin when Ribbentrop returned, so took a chance with another pilot. He hated the experience so much he later told Baur, ‘I thought I was going to die on that return flight without you.’ There is a suggestion that Hitler had a second regular pilot, but Baur is adamant in his memoirs that this was never the case. Even if it was, this second candidate was not Hanna.

Baur was in the bunker with Hitler throughout the last days of the Third Reich. There would have been no call for Hitler to leave with Hanna when his pet pilot was ready and waiting to leave at any moment. In fact, Baur remained in the bunker until the end; he glimpsed the cremation of his master before he made a desperate attempt to escape Berlin, only to fall into the hands of the Russians. For ten years he was at their mercy, for much of the time being forced to tell and retell over and over the story of those last days in the bunker. Though Baur was certain Hitler was dead (he had spoken with those who had burned the body), the Russians were concerned that he still lived and tortured Baur to try and get him to recant and say that Hitler had escaped.

Ten years of Russian captivity did little to soften Baur’s feelings towards the Allies but hardened his belief in and loyalty to the Führer. When he was finally repatriated in 1955 he set about writing his memoirs, giving a frank account of life as Hitler’s pilot and, though not explicitly justifying the worst atrocities, firmly made it plain he was still a National Socialist. Ironically, Baur never received the same level of condemnation as Hanna, though his memoirs were in some regards far closer to Nazi propaganda than anything Hanna wrote. He presented Hitler as a very ordinary man, told how nice he could be and worked as hard to spin a good story out of the Nazi mess as Goebbels would have done. Yet Hanna was the one who was vilified, not the man who had spent most of the 1930s and 1940s piloting Hitler and regarded him as a friend who had been failed by history.

Hanna was potentially a good candidate for inspiring co-operation with the Allies in post-war Germany. She had never been a member of the Nazi Party and now honestly declared to her interrogators that so much of what Hitler had done was foolish and wrong. There were some who thought she could be very useful, but before they could implement her ideas Hanna was moved by CIC to a prison in Salzburg. This was a far cry from the cosy chats she had previously enjoyed with interrogators; her cell was small and sparse, her guards pushed her around and there was none of the friendliness she had previously known. Hanna could only be glad her parents were not alive to see her treated in this manner. In the long hours of loneliness she scratched on the walls of her cell with her nails some of the verses her beloved mother had composed and sent to her. It soon became clear that the Americans were still obsessed with the idea that Hanna had helped Hitler escape the bunker.

Eric Brown, now working for British intelligence, managed to get an interview with Hanna during this period. He had been briefed to ask her about technical matters concerning the Me 163. Hanna was in a dreadful state when he found her: ‘She was an emotional wreck … and poured out more than she intended.’ Brown had grown resentful towards his one-time heroine over the course of the war; her brief association with Hitler was enough to confirm in his mind that she was a ‘fanatical Nazi’. This is clearly inaccurate. Hanna never joined the Nazi Party, nor was she politically motivated during the war. She supported Hitler because he was the German leader and to act against him would have made her a traitor to Germany. It was that ‘honour’ again. Eric Brown was very bitter about the aviatrix he had admired all those years ago at the Olympics, and his opinion of her was therefore highly biased. In contrast, Hanna’s American interrogators, who had made no prior judgements on her, were convinced that she was opposed to Nazism. Unfortunately, Eric Brown’s opinion is often taken as gospel without an understanding of his deep resentment and disappointment. In later years, Hanna would avoid him and this only enhanced his bitterness. Meanwhile, another British agent, Hugh Trevor-Roper, was investigating the exact circumstances of Hitler’s last days in the bunker in order to prove that he really had died. Political tensions, worsened by the Russians’ games, were making it essential that rumours of Hitler’s survival were laid to rest. Trevor-Roper tried to get access to Hanna as a key witness, but was prevented by the Americans and had to make do with the interrogation reports they had compiled. This was later to cause Hanna some consternation.

Hanna was once more invited to America. At a reunion with Wernher von Braun, orchestrated by the Americans, attempts were made to get her to leave Germany. Hanna was more resolved than ever to stay and try to help her beleaguered country. She refused the offer and was shuffled between prisons, finally arriving at Oberursel in November. Hanna was indignant, feeling that she was being treated like a top Nazi criminal just because she had refused to sell out to the Americans. She couldn’t fathom why she was so resented simply for being a loyal German. She could not see how she could have behaved differently.