Hitler's Heroine: Hanna Reitsch (6 page)

Hanna came close to losing her wings again that day in 1933, both literally (for she had come close to crashing) and metaphorically. What would the new German regime make of the daring girl who had broken frontier regulations and crash-landed in Czechoslovakia? In fact, the authorities were ecstatic – Hanna had broken a new altitude record. Who cared about a silly border infringement? Once again, Hanna was mentioned on the radio and discussed in the national press. All this would naturally go to a young woman’s head and Hanna had always been one to crave attention and glory. Emy clucked around her daughter as she basked in the adulation of a fickle public. ‘Remember that false pride is a sin,’ Emy rebuked. Hanna was cross. Throughout her life she would find it difficult not to revel in her achievements, nor to avoid coming across as boastful when she was really only enthusiastic. If Emy was worried about her daughter’s pride, her father was worried about her education. It had become all too plain that medicine did not really appeal to Hanna. Herr Reitsch would not have worried so much if there was a prospect of his eldest daughter getting married, but there had been no boyfriend during her teenage years and the man she was closest to was the middle-aged and happily married Wolf Hirth. What had become of those handsome young men Wernher von Braun and Mathias Wieman whom his daughter had once spoken of? But Hanna was not interested in the burdens of love and marriage: all she thought about was flying. Boys were very far down her list of priorities.

Throughout her life, speculation followed Hanna concerning her personal relationships. Those who dabbled in such rumours included the British test pilot Eric Brown, who once met Hanna and maintained a postal acquaintance with her, despite war coming between them. He suggested that Hanna was in a relationship with Field Marshal Ritter von Greim in the last year of the war, this being the reason she flew with him to Hitler’s bunker. In reality, this seems as spurious as the suggestion (also made by Eric Brown) that Hanna committed suicide to join her lover von Greim some thirty years after his death. Brown was disillusioned with the aviatrix he once idolised and his later comments have to be taken with a good dose of salt.

Still, Hanna’s life seems rather devoid of the usual love tangles most people experience. Either she was incredibly clever at keeping her relationships secret or, more likely, she had so much on her plate trying to achieve her goals as a pilot that any relationship would have got in the way. Besides, Hanna would have hated any suggestion that she had consorted with someone to afford her a better place in the aviation world.

If lovers were missing in Hanna’s life, she did at least form strong bonds with a variety of men whom she came to respect and adore. Most of these men were older and Hanna thought of them as father figures, the first of these being Wolf Hirth (to some small extent Hitler too fell into this category, which was why Hanna felt a strong loyalty to him). Hanna’s relationship with her own father was difficult; he was a stern, strict man, not particularly loving, unlike her mother, to whom she was especially close. Herr Reitsch was aloof and though he took Hanna with him to visit patients, he was not a loving father, nor was he good at supporting and promoting Hanna’s dreams. In many ways Hanna lacked confidence and needed the constant praise and comfort of men such as Hirth to bolster her self-esteem. Her father could not give her that, so Hanna found replacements wherever she could, quite unconsciously. She even sometimes referred to them with the affectionate addition of ‘father’ to their name.

Hirth was also very taken with his star pupil – the girl he had once wanted to kick out of his gliding school. Only two years after she had started gliding, he invited Hanna to be an instructor. This was both a privilege and a nightmare for Hanna. How was this little slip of a girl (still only 21) supposed to teach male students, many of whom would be much older than her? ‘Men do not like being taught by a girl,’ Hanna said to herself. There was no point trying the usual teaching tactics of Hirth or van Husen. Instead Hanna acted as a comrade to her students, turning her lessons into discussion groups where they could run through good and bad flights, ways to improve and how to get through that all-important first A test. Hirth was dubious of her methods initially, but Hanna soon proved herself when her pupils excelled at gliding. She also earned their respect, which was extremely difficult: ‘… I managed to lull my pupils into forgetting that they were being instructed in the manly sport of gliding by a mere school-girl.’

It was all going so well until the last day of the course. All but one of Hanna’s students had passed their C test successfully and had gone to a nearby airfield to experience their first towed flights. Hanna was left alone with her last pupil. There seemed no reason to Hanna why this young man should not pass his C test with ease: he had proved adept at gliding in his A and B tests and seemed calm and self-assured as he sat in the glider. He took off smoothly and soared in the air for a full two and a half minutes without issue. It was looking as though Hanna had successfully got all her pupils airborne as the student made his first turn according to the outline of the test. The turn was steep, but handled well. What happened next came completely out of the blue. The glider suddenly nose-dived and plunged with a horrendous crash into the ground.

Hanna couldn’t move at first. Then she began to run as fast as she could towards the glider. Her pupil was dead, of course. No one could survive such a fast crash in a flimsy glider. Instead of heading to the airfield to watch her students flying, Hanna made her way to the boy’s village, his house, where a poor old woman ran out crying, ‘Ach, Fraulein, I already know. My son! My son is no longer!’

As the woman wept she explained that her son had had a dream the night before of crashing during the test just as he entered the turn. She had begged him not to go that morning, but he had insisted. Hanna didn’t know what to make of all this. Was it premonition or under-confidence in the pupil manifesting as a nightmare? Had the memory of the dream sparked that awkward steep turn, or had the turn sparked memories of the dream and caused the fatal crash? Whatever the case, the accident shook Hanna’s confidence in herself, and for many months the horror of that final flight lingered in her mind, making teaching impossible.

3

T
HE
S
OARING
D
REAM

When Carl Oskar Ursinus sat on the hillside of Rhön and watched the eagles floating on the thermals in 1920 his mind was absorbed by one problem – the Treaty of Versailles. Ursinus had been obsessed with flying since the early 1900s when he began publishing a magazine on flying sports. During the First World War he had worked on the designs for the Gotha G.I biplane, which had served the German air corps well through the war years. When the war ended and the Allies had prohibited the building of powered aircraft in Germany, he was stricken. What were aviators to do now?

It was sitting on that slope, smoking his pipe, floppy hat on his head, that Ursinus turned his mind to gliding, a hitherto very neglected aspect of aviation. He recruited his friends and fellow engineers to the notion of turning Rhön, or, more specifically, the hillside of Wasserkuppe, into a gliding test ground. People donated money, time and sometimes their lives to the cause, but before many years glider pilots were making an annual pilgrimage to Wasserkuppe to test their planes and their skill. The first competitions were held as early as 1920 and Ursinus founded the RRG (Rhön-Rossitten Gesellschaft), the first gliding organisation in the world to be recognised officially. The RRG flourished throughout the 1920s. In 1924 Alexander Lippisch (later to work on the Me 163b, which Hanna would test) was recruited as head of its technical branch, a bold move by Ursinus that paid dividends. By the 1930s the Rhön soaring contests, still held at Wasserkuppe, were considered
the
place for pilots to prove their skills.

Hanna went in 1933, just as politics was sinking its dirty claws into the sport of gliding. Under National Socialism, the RRG simply could not exist. The various clubs were dismantled or absorbed under the new guise of the Hitler Youth. Though many glider enthusiasts failed to realise its significance at the time, this move would forever tarnish early German gliding with a distinct taint of Nazism.

As Hanna sat on the Wasserkuppe nervously awaiting her launch, the world of politics was distant from her mind. If she heard complaints from other flyers about the destruction of the RRG, it meant very little to her. All she was thinking about was flying and winning. It was not an auspicious time; Hanna’s mind was still churning over the death of her pupil and though she had one of Hirth’s Grunau Babys to fly, it was soon apparent that she was out-classed by the gliders around her. The first launch was a disaster. The Baby could not find an up-draught and Hanna landed in the valley while other gliders soared away. Her launch team came running down the slope, their disappointment plain. ‘That’s all right, it doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter a bit!’ Hanna told them with a forced smile as they hurried to dismantle Baby and get her back up the slope.

The next launch was no better, nor the next or the one after. In fact, over every day of the Rhön contest Hanna did no better than a short belly flop into the valley, much to the amusement of onlookers. Hanna ignored the mockery as best she could, but was despondent to see so many of her fellow gliders making it into the air without a problem. Among them was Wolf Hirth flying his new glider
Moazagotl
and doing very well against his closest rival Peter Riedel. Another who was proving himself on his first outing was Heini Dittmar flying
Kondor
, which he had built himself. Both Riedel and Dittmar would come to be very well known to Hanna.

There seemed no rhyme or reason to the failure of Baby. Hanna blamed the out-of-date machine for her bad luck, despite another Grunau Baby achieving a flight of 60 miles. It was all very embarrassing and made worse by the malicious humour of the male contestants. At the prize-giving ceremony Hanna was given a meat mincer and set of kitchen scales as a booby prize, sending the unpleasant message that women should stay at home in the kitchen (in fact, the prize had been quite innocently donated by a manufacturer of kitchen goods and had caused the judges some consternation until they alighted on the idea of awarding it to Hanna).

Not everyone was so intent on ridiculing Hanna. Oskar Ursinus gave a speech in which he referred to Hanna’s refusal to give up despite her constant defeats. ‘In soaring it is not success but the spirit which counts,’ he reminded his audience. Even better, however, was the response of meteorologist and ‘Professor of Soaring’ Walter Georgii. Georgii was organising a trip to South America to study thermals and had already recruited Wolf Hirth, Reidel and Dittmar. Now he wanted Hanna too. He liked her spirit and determination in the face of defeat and thought she would be a good addition to his team. There was only one problem: Hanna would have to raise 3,000 marks if she wanted to go with him.

Hanna was too excited about the possibility of travelling to South America to allow the opportunity to slip away just because of money. As it happened, she had recently been contacted by the German film company Ufa to act as a stunt-double in a gliding movie. Heini Dittmar and Wolf Hirth had already accepted similar offers and though she had originally turned down the invitation, she now accepted – as long as Ufa gave her the 3,000 marks she desperately needed. Ufa paid without hesitation. Hanna was surprised, but she shouldn’t have been. Ufa had begun its dubious movie making in 1917, producing propaganda and public service films. It was inextricably linked with the government that had founded it and, as such, its movies were never simply pure entertainment. During the 1920s Ufa was known for its large range of silent movies, often thought provoking and very popular internationally, rivalling Hollywood. One of its most famous directors was Fritz Lang, the genius behind the celebrated silent movie
Metropolis
. However, Lang was a Jew and at the rise of Nazism he left Ufa and Germany behind for America, not long before Hanna took her first steps into the movies.

Ufa came under Nazi control in 1933. That same year new laws were instigated banning the employment of artists of Jewish descent. Ufa became a compliant producer of propaganda movies under the crow-like gaze of Goebbels. Hitler paid visits to his pet studio, and movies were created to promote Nazi imagery and inspire young people. This bias was far from hidden – blatant was more like it! The studio began making movies that lionised the Hitler Youth movement and broadcast propaganda in cinemas. The film Hanna had been engaged for was no different; the plot of
Rivalen der Luft
(
Rivals of the Air
) focused on two young flyers, Karl and Christine, who both wanted to earn their gliding licence. Christine reminded Hanna very much of herself: headstrong, determined, small and eager to fly. It would not be far-fetched to imagine that the Nazi propaganda department was modelling the character on the newest aviatrix who was taking Germany by storm and proving what Aryan aviation could do. Christine and Karl are taken under the wing of gliding instructor Willi Frahm, who is soon infatuated with the young female flyer. However, Karl is also in love with Christine and a rivalry soon develops, leading up to the dramatic thunderstorm scene. During a competition at Rhön Christine (who has been forbidden to fly, and so takes off secretly) is engulfed in a storm cloud (a moment that reminded Hanna distinctly of her own experience) and Frahm flies to her rescue, nobly giving up his chance to win the contest. The climax of the story sees Christine crash-landing and realising she has fallen in love with Frahm, who wraps her in his arms. Meanwhile, Karl goes on to win the competition, apparently oblivious to his lover’s fate. A win-win situation for all?