Hitler's Heroine: Hanna Reitsch (26 page)

Hanna was eventually moved to more comfortable accommodations in a large house converted by the Americans into a holding centre for military and political leaders awaiting interrogation or trial. Hanna was the only woman there, surrounded by a constantly changing group of fifty or so high-ranking Nazi officials awaiting their fate. Some were destined to be executed, but others were more valuable as potential witnesses and informants. At last Hanna had a proper bedroom and people to talk with. She formed a close friendship with Schwerin von Krosigk, Hitler’s finance minister, with whom she could hold lengthy, cathartic conversations. Krosigk told her that Hitler had suffered a personality change brought on by the dangerous attentions of his personal doctors. This brought Hanna great relief, making her believe that her loyalty had not been entirely misplaced – she could blame the doctors rather than Hitler for the catastrophic defeat of Germany. Another great comfort was learning that her brother Kurt was still alive. She was not the sole Reitsch to survive the war.

The Americans now had a very comprehensive account from Hanna of her last days in the bunker and her opinion of Hitler and Nazism. They thought they could use this to their advantage and arranged a press conference where Hanna would repeat the many criticisms she had made of Hitler and his policies. To have a German making such statements, particularly one who was a well-known part of the regime, would greatly aid the Allies’ work within Germany. Things did not go to plan, however. Hanna was briefed before the conference by an obnoxious officer called Captain Cohn, who informed her that she must either denounce Hitler and become rich and famous, or defend him out of misplaced honour and loyalty and suffer for the rest of her life. Cohn was right about her options, but the way he presented them to Hanna ruffled her feathers. Infuriated at his bullying tactics, she stormed into the conference with her temper flared and the foolish obstinacy that always emerged when she was truly angry got the better of her. To ‘get back’ at Cohn she denied calling Hitler a criminal and said she had been willingly loyal to him and would be so again if she could go back in time. Cohn retrieved her after only a few questions, cursing her stupidity. Hanna was jubilant at her own defiance; as ever, she was completely blind to the wider consequences of her actions.

In the end her outburst didn’t matter. The articles published about Hanna’s experiences were based on her interrogation reports. When Hanna first saw the news pieces she was appalled. She denied having said much of what was written and was mortified that critics of Hitler would perceive her as more loyal than she really was, while supporters would consider her a traitor. Hanna had not expected the things she said during interrogation to be made public and it upset her deeply that her inner thoughts on the Nazi regime and her Führer were now available to everyone who read a newspaper. Hanna was always a private person and these reports seemed a violation of that privacy. Attempting to distance herself from such embarrassment, she convinced herself she had not said the things reported, or that she had been misunderstood. By this point, she had also lost her early good opinion of her captors. Her trust in them had been betrayed and she had been housed with fanatics prone to talking about the ‘good old days’. As Hanna always tended to absorb other people’s views rather than create her own, this influence had impacted on her memories of the last days of the war. Hanna would be even more furious when she saw what a young British writer had put in his bestselling book concerning her a few years later.

As Hanna Reitsch sat in the company of American interrogators, so the place that had come close to being her grave crumbled. The Führerbunker was never meant to be a permanent structure and with the diesel generators and pumping system shut down, it rapidly rotted in on itself. Groundwater seeped in, so by the time the Russians staged photo shoots in the bunker there was an inch of water on the floor. When Hugh Trevor-Roper visited the bunker as part of his research on Hitler’s final days, he found himself:

wading through the flooded passages and noisome, cell-like rooms … overwhelmed by a sense of terrible irony. An all-powerful tyrant, whose bullying oratory had electrified vast crowds at mass rallies, had passed his last weeks hiding underground in this squalid burrow, ranting to a dwindling entourage. As he fingered sodden, disintegrating papers that the Russians had unaccountably left undisturbed, Hugh identified the megalomaniac architectural plans that Hitler and Goebbels had studied together while overhead the Russian shells rained down constantly on their ruined capital …

By 1947 the observation towers and concrete exit bunker were in ruins. In 1949 an attempt was made to destroy the bunker completely, but its construction proved effective against explosives (Hitler would have been pleased!) and the demolition remained incomplete. Soil was heaped onto the remains and raked over, and for decades a mound remained to mark the last headquarters of Hitler. Finally, in the 1980s the site was reclaimed for the use of living Germans. The mound was destroyed, the holes in the ground filled in, the last remains of the observation towers removed and a road and apartment block built on top. Ironically, even the Führerbunker would outlast Hanna Reitsch. She was very ill when she was finally released from American custody. Her legs had become severely swollen and her lips always had a bluish tinge, suggesting poor circulation. It is likely that this was a consequence of her battle with scarlet fever; the damage to her heart was finally showing itself. Hanna was allowed a sort of freedom, while constantly watched by the Americans. Over the next several months her initial rapport with her early interrogators, and thus respect for the Allies, faltered and finally failed. The publication of Hugh Trevor-Roper’s
The Last Days of Hitler
was the final straw.

British intelligence officer Huge Trevor-Roper was prowling the British sector of Germany in 1945 when he stumbled upon Dick White, the then chief of the British Counter-Intelligence Bureau. Over a lengthy drinking session the conversation drifted to Hitler’s bunker. Dick White was adamant that without a detailed analysis of the last days of the Führer all manner of myths and lies would percolate about what had happened in April. ‘No one has yet made any systematic study of the evidence, or even found any evidence, and we are going to have all kinds of difficulty unless something is done,’ White told Trevor-Roper, his eyes almost popping from his head. ‘Already the Germans are saying that the old boy’s alive, and the journalists are encouraging them, and the Russians are accusing us of concealing Eva Braun.’

Trevor-Roper took the hint. He set out to write a definitive report on those final days in the bunker, interviewing those witnesses who were alive and accessible to the British, including Albert Speer, Hitler’s former architect. Hanna Reitsch was not available to him in person, but he gained access to her American interrogation files. Over the next few weeks he drafted a report based on what he had learned and submitted it to Dick White and others in November 1945. White was pleased by the scope of the work, but he wanted to disseminate the real story of Hitler’s death further than a few desks in MI5 – he felt it important that the British, American, German and Russian publics knew the truth as well. The latter would be difficult as for many years Russia refused to allow the sale of the book. (Stalin had decreed that Hitler was alive and no one argued with Stalin, even if he was wrong!)
The Last Days of Hitler
was published in 1947, not without some hesitancy from the head of the Secret Intelligence Service. It was widely acclaimed and a commercial success, though not everyone was happy. Maurice Bowra wrote to Evelyn Waugh, not without a hint of jealousy, ‘Trevor-Roper is a fearful man, short-sighted, with dripping eyes, shows off all the time, sucks up to me, boasts, is far from poor owing to his awful book, on every page of which there is a howler.’

It was natural that Trevor-Roper’s book would cause controversy; there were plenty of people who would criticise his findings and who adamantly believed that Hitler lived. The Jesuits were not impressed with comments made in the first edition that Goebbels was once the prize-pupil of a Jesuit seminary and comparisons of his propaganda methods to Jesuit teaching. This was one of the few instances of Trevor-Roper failing to back up his evidence and making a blunder. He corrected it in later editions, remarking, ‘The Jesuits still furiously rumble in dark, and hitherto unknown, organs issuing from Dublin and the less rational quarters of Liverpool. The noise of their anathemas reaches me not unpleasantly through the Press-cutting Agencies.’

The Jesuits had a general complaint, but Hanna’s was a direct one. Trevor-Roper had used the statements she had made to the Americans to flesh out her arrival in the bunker with von Greim, painting a vivid picture of a sycophantic young woman begging to die alongside her master. Hanna was furious; not least because she now claimed that some of the things said about Hitler, in her own testimony, were inaccurate and wrong. She had not said such things, she complained, even though they were in black and white in her interrogation file. Heartbroken and embarrassed to see her own words of the Führer now repeated nationally and internationally, she protested to Trevor-Roper, demanding he make changes and threatening legal action if he didn’t. Trevor-Roper conceded slightly, toning down his paragraphs on Hanna, though explaining it was all based on her own evidence in the American interrogation reports. Hanna was still mortified. She had publically denigrated her own hero. Her sense of honour and fear of what others would think mingled with her shame. The interrogation reports, in her mind, had been for the Americans alone. She had never thought they would be used in such a manner and to undermine the man she had served so loyally.

She felt increasingly persecuted and slandered, treated like a criminal or portrayed as a sycophantic Nazi. Poor naïve Hanna still failed to understand the mind games of politics, or how her honesty about her thoughts, feelings and actions during the war might be used against her. A cannier person would have held their tongue or even accepted the American offer. Hanna didn’t and her life was a misery. There were all sorts of rumours flying about her – she was allegedly driving huge American cars, she was sleeping with American officers, and she had had affairs with nearly every high-ranked Nazi – all malicious and hurtful. Hanna felt very alone. Throughout her life she had made few close friendships, instead relying on her family for emotional support. Without them, she had no one to turn to and her mind kept wandering to the suicide capsule she still had in her possession.

A Catholic priest saved her. A friend of the Heuberger family, Father Freidel Volkmar, found Hanna in tears one day and extracted a convoluted confession. ‘You must stick it out,’ he persuaded her. ‘Walk through the streets with your head high, even when other people are pointing their finger at you. With God you are stronger than all of them together.’ Volkmar became Hanna’s new father figure and with his support she was able to survive the onslaught of rumours and half-truths against her. He was a much-needed ally when Hanna faced her denazification hearing. Volkmar contacted her old friends and requested favourable letters that could be read out at the hearing. One came from Joachim Küttner; as a half-Jew who had been persecuted by the Nazis, his testimony on Hanna’s behalf was very significant.

Volkmar also put her in touch with Lotte Schiffler, a Catholic who was working to rehabilitate refugees and who, during the war, had been part of the resistance against Hitler. Schiffler wondered how she would get on with the woman people had called Hitler’s heroine, they clearly had very different views and had worked against each other in the war. Hanna, however, surprised her. ‘There was a tiny girl, small, dainty, with clear searching eyes. I felt immediately protective. She had suffered so much. I was determined that nothing more must be allowed to happen to that child!’ Hanna was 35! But her size and strange innocence often made her seem younger and inspired protective feelings in others. A similar change of opinion occurred when Hanna was introduced to Yvonne Pagniez, a member of the French Resistance who had spent time in, and escaped from, the notorious Ravensbrück concentration camp. Pagniez had, naturally, heard of Hanna and expected to meet an ardent, arrogant Nazi. ‘My astonishment was boundless when I saw before me not the Valkyrie I had imagined, but a tiny person who looked so modest, whose body seemed so frail, and who smiled hesitantly at me as she wiped away her tears.’ They became friends.

Hanna was locked into a depression brought on by the trauma and tragedy of the last few years. Her health was not at its best and Schiffler felt a project might ease some of her mental anguish. She suggested Hanna write an autobiography. Entranced by the idea, which would offer the opportunity to counteract the lies circulating about her, Hanna went into seclusion to work on the book. She showed the first draft to her old gliding friend Mathias Wieman. He told her it was too personal and only people who knew her would be able to understand the idealism she expressed in her text. She would have to rewrite it. Hanna changed her style and spoke into a microphone rather than write down her words, allowing Schiffler to do the typing.

Her first book,
Flying is my Life
, was published in 1951. Its reception was mixed. Five bookshops in Frankfurt initially stocked the book and then withdrew it because of anonymous threatening letters. Hanna, illogically, blamed the Americans, as she blamed them for all that had gone wrong in her life since 1945. Despite problems, the book sold well enough to earn Hanna some money. She was in financial difficulties now her test pilot days were over and the book helped to tide her over. Her life was now in tatters; there was no more flying in Germany so she devoted her time to helping others, volunteering for charities that watched over refugees. It was exhausting work and provided an outlet for Hanna’s energy, but she still dreamed of flying and she couldn’t quite give up the hope that one day she might be up in the sky once again.