Hanna Reitsch: Hitler's Female Test Pilot

On August 24, 1979, Hanna Reitsch, German aviator and test pilot, died at the age of 67. She was known for her bravery (she was awarded the Iron Cross first class) and flying skills. An excerpt from the article:

"The last leg of their trip to the Führerbunker in devastated Berlin was made in a little Fieseler Fi-156C Storch (stork), with Greim at the controls and Reitsch crouched behind him. Flying through a hail of Soviet anti-aircraft fire, the plane was hit in the engine and fuel tank. An armor-piercing bullet smashed Greim’s right foot, and he passed out. Reitsch managed to successfully land the Fieseler on the boulevard before the Brandenburg Gate, and they both made it to Hitler’s bunker, where they stayed for two days. Ordered by Hitler to flee Berlin in the final hours of the Russian assault on the city, Greim and Reitsch escaped in an aircraft hidden near the bunker.

On the morning of May 9, Reitsch delivered Greim to a hospital at Kitzbühel. Based upon information provided by a British officer, she was taken into custody by the Americans that same afternoon. After extended incarceration and interrogation by intelligence personnel — in part because she had been rumored to have flown Hitler to freedom — Reitsch was exonerated of guilt from war crimes. She was finally released from prison after 15 months.

During her time behind bars, Reitsch discovered that her parents had committed suicide rather than be taken prisoner by the Russians. Greim, too, on learning that the Americans were going to turn him over to the Russians, killed himself in Salzburg on May 24, 1945. His last words before swallowing potassium cyanide were reportedly, ‘I am the head of the Luftwaffe, but I have no Luftwaffe.’

For some years after the war, the Allies forbade Germans from participating in gliding. Reitsch eventually began lecturing in Europe, but she was banned from flying in competitions in England until 1954. In 1959 she represented Germany on a trip to deliver a glider to Delhi, where she became friends with Indira Gandhi. She opened a gliding school in Ghana in 1962, and also revisited the United States, where she met Igor Sikorsky and Neil Armstrong.

Throughout the remainder of her life, Reitsch remained a controversial figure, tainted by her ties — both real and suppositious — to the dead Führer and his henchmen. The circumstances surrounding her 1945 sojourn in Hitler’s Berlin bunker especially haunted her. In a postscript to a new edition of her memoirs, published shortly before her death from a heart attack in 1979, she wrote that’so-called eyewitness reports ignore the fact that I had been picked for this mission because I was a pilot and trusted friend [of Greim’s], and instead call me `Hitler’s girl-friend’….I can only assume that the inventor of these accounts did not realize what the consequences would be for my life. Ever since then I have been accused of many things in connection with the Third Reich.’

During WWII, Hanna Reitsch devoted her energy and skill to what she considered to be German nationalism as distinct from Nazism, believing she owed her allegiance to Germany, not to Hitler. But above all, throughout her life, she remained passionately committed to aviation, especially gliding. She set more than 40 records during her lifetime, many of them in gliders. She wrote, ‘Powered flight is certainly a magnificent triumph over nature, but gliding is a victory of the soul in which one gradually becomes one with nature.’"