On April 26, 1945, a German aircraft threaded through Soviet anti-aircraft fire and touched down on a crated avenue beside the Brandenburg Gate. The general at the controls had been wounded. The woman seated behind him reached over his shoulder, seized the stick, and brought the plane down safely. She walked into the Führerbunker and stayed for three days while Berlin collapsed around her.
Thirty-two years later, she was photographed at a US Air Force base wearing a diamond swastika brooch that Hitler had given her. That woman was Hanna Reitsch, one of the most celebrated pilots of the Nazi era and one of its most unrepentant true believers. In February 1938, Berliners packed the Deutschlandhalle to watch a helicopter fly indoors for the first time in history. The pilot, 25 years old and under five feet tall, hovered the Focke-Achgelis Fa 61 between the rafters of the exhibition hall during three weeks of nightly demonstrations at the International Automobile Show.
Reitsch had been flying for six years by then. Born on March 29, 1912, in Hirschberg, Silesia—now Jelenia Góra, Poland—she was the daughter of an ophthalmologist who wanted her to study medicine. She agreed, planning to become a flying missionary doctor in Africa. In 1933, she left medical school at the invitation of glider pioneer Wolf Hirth.
By the following year, on a research expedition to Argentina, she had become the first woman in the world to earn the silver C gliding badge and had already broken the women’s gliding endurance record. Her rise was rapid. In 1935, she became a test pilot at the Deutsche Forschungsanstalt für Segelflug. Two years later, Generaloberst Ernst Udet awarded her the title of Flugkapitän, the first woman ever to hold the rank, and posted her to the Luftwaffe testing center at Rechlin-Lärz.
Reitsch was photogenic, articulate, and entirely fearless in the cockpit. The regime put her image to work through newsreels, magazines, and recruitment material throughout the late 1930s. She never joined the Nazi Party, but she became central to the public face of the new Luftwaffe. She tested the Junkers Ju 87 Stuka and the Dornier Do 17.
On March 28, 1941, Hitler personally awarded her the Iron Cross second class. By 1942, she was flying the regime’s most experimental designs, including the rocket-propelled Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet, an aircraft she once described as thundering through the skies sitting on a cannonball. Her only powered flight in it came in May. There would never be another.
On October 30, 1942, on her fifth glide test flight in an Me 163B, the takeoff dolly failed to release. She tried positive and negative G forces, but nothing worked. The aircraft came down at roughly 240 km/h. She lost control on the final turn and crashed.
Her skull fractured in multiple places, her nose was crushed, and her jaw was driven out of alignment. Before losing consciousness, she insisted on writing her flight report. Five months later, she walked out of the hospital. Hitler awarded her the Iron Cross first class, one of only three German women to receive it during the war.
The decoration was almost never given to civilians and almost never given to women. It confirmed something she already believed about herself: that her flying mattered to the regime, and that the regime mattered to Germany. From that point on, the line between the two would disappear. In February 1943, weeks after the surrender at Stalingrad, she accepted an invitation from Generaloberst Robert Ritter von Greim to tour the Eastern Front.
For three weeks, she flew between Luftwaffe units in a Fieseler Storch, raising morale at a moment when morale was beginning to matter more than equipment. Greim, a World War I ace and one of Germany’s most respected airmen, became a close personal friend. Their relationship would shape the last two years of her life. On February 28, 1944, Reitsch was summoned to Berchtesgaden to receive a personal commendation.
She used the audience to propose something else. Germany, she told Hitler, needed a unit of pilots prepared to die in their aircraft, flying manned versions of the V-1 flying bomb directly into Allied warships and bridges. Hitler was unenthusiastic, but she pressed. The result was the SS Selbstopferkommando Leonidas, formed under the command of SS-Obersturmführer Otto Skorzeny.
Reitsch was the first to volunteer. The aircraft was the Fieseler Fi 103R Reichenberg, a manned V-1 with a cockpit grafted onto the fuselage. Six of its seven test pilots were killed or seriously injured before she flew it successfully. Her experience landing the Me 163 at extreme stall speeds let her bring the Reichenberg down at over 200 km/h where everyone before her had failed.
The Luftwaffe High Command resisted the program. Hitler eventually agreed to its formation but never authorized an operational mission. The unit was disbanded in 1945 having flown no combat sorties. Her loyalty extended beyond aviation.
She held private discussions with Heinrich Himmler and described him afterwards as intelligent and rational. In October 1944, test pilot Peter Riedel showed her a booklet documenting the concentration camps. She refused to believe it, telling him it was Allied propaganda, and took the matter to Himmler personally. By her own later account, Himmler told her the truth would be the rope by which the regime would hang if Germany lost the war.
Reitsch chose to believe she had been told the truth. By April 1945, the regime was hours from the end. On April 23, Hitler dismissed Hermann Göring as commander of the Luftwaffe over a telegram from Berchtesgaden that Hitler read as an attempt to seize power. Within hours, Greim was summoned from southern Germany to Berlin to take Göring’s place.
Reitsch, who had said her goodbyes to her family at Schloss Leopoldskron in Salzburg on the evening of April 25, insisted on flying with him. The route into Berlin took them through some of the most dangerous airspace in Europe. From Munich, they were flown north to Rechlin, then west to Gatow airfield in Berlin, with Reitsch riding in the tail compartment through an emergency opening. A fighter escort of roughly 40 aircraft covered the run.
Several were shot down. The aircraft carrying Reitsch and Greim landed intact. For the final leg into central Berlin, Greim took the controls of a Fieseler Fi 156 Storch. Reitsch had already surveyed the route with Hitler’s personal pilot Hans Baur, who had identified the Charlottenburger Chaussee, the broad east-west avenue running through the Tiergarten, as an emergency airstrip.
They lifted off from Gatow in the late afternoon. Soviet anti-aircraft fire caught them on the approach. A round shattered Greim’s right foot, and he passed out at the controls. Reitsch reached over his shoulder, took the stick, and put the Storch down on the avenue, roughly 400 meters from the Brandenburg Gate.
They reached the Führerbunker that evening. Hitler promoted Greim to Generalfeldmarschall, the last German officer ever raised to the rank, and gave him command of a Luftwaffe that scarcely existed. Then he pressed a vial of cyanide into Reitsch’s hand, with another for Greim. By her own account, she accepted it without hesitation, prepared to die in the bunker if ordered.
They stayed for roughly three days. Reitsch later described Hitler as a man whose personality had completely disintegrated. She played with the Goebbels children in the corridors and pleaded to remain. Hitler refused, ordered Greim to leave Berlin and ensure that Himmler was punished for his attempt to negotiate with the Allies, and sent them out into the city.
Late on April 28, they took off in an Arado Ar 96 trainer from the same improvised airstrip, climbing through fire from the Soviet 3rd Shock Army. They reached Karl Dönitz at Plön. They carried two things out of the bunker: a poison capsule from Hitler’s hand, and a loyalty that no defeat would shake. On May 4, 1945, Reitsch was found at a hospital near Kitzbühel, Austria.
British test pilot Eric Brown, who had known her before the war, identified her and handed her into American custody. Days earlier, on the night of May 3, Reitsch’s father had killed her mother, her sister Heidi, and Heidi’s three children at the family’s wartime refuge in Salzburg, rather than face Soviet repatriation, then turned the weapon on himself. Reitsch was held and interrogated for roughly 18 months. A US Air Force Intelligence Report compiled on October 8, 1945, contains the lines that have followed her name ever since.
Asked about being ordered out of the bunker, she said it was the blackest day when she could not die at her Führer’s side. She described the bunker as “the altar of the fatherland. ”
In 1947, denazification authorities classified her as “not affected,” citing her lack of formal party membership, and released her. She moved to Frankfurt, returned to gliding, and in 1951 published her memoir, Fliegen, Mein Leben.
The English edition, The Sky My Kingdom, followed in 1955. She finished third at the 1952 World Gliding Championships in Spain. In 1959, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru invited her to establish a gliding center in New Delhi. In 1961, President John F.
Kennedy received her at the White House. From 1962 to 1966, she lived in Ghana, founding the first national gliding school at Afienya for Kwame Nkrumah. Surviving letters between Reitsch and Nkrumah are intimate in tone. The arrangement ended when Nkrumah was deposed in February 1966.
Her later life produced one irony after another. In the 1970s, she became an ambassador for the German section of Amnesty International. She tactfully avoided the 1972 Munich Olympics and never publicly commented on the murder of 11 Israeli athletes. At Edwards Air Force Base in California around 1977, observers recorded her wearing a diamond-set brooch with a swastika at its center, Hitler’s gift, which she said she would wear for the rest of her life, though displaying it was illegal in Germany.
Her last interview with American photojournalist Ron Leckner in 1978 ended any remaining ambiguity. “I’m not ashamed to say I believed in National Socialism,” she told him. “Many Germans feel guilty about the war, but they don’t explain the real guilt we share, that we lost. ”
In August 1979, she wrote to Eric Brown: “It began in the bunker, there it shall end.
” Within weeks, she was dead. A heart attack claimed her in Frankfurt on August 24, 1979, at age 67. No autopsy was performed.
The cyanide capsule Hitler had pressed into her hand 34 years earlier was never accounted for.
